German Sokrates: Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss

Abstract GERMAN SOKRATES: HEIDEGGER, ARENDT, STRAUSS by Rodrigo Chacón This dissertation traces the genesis of three conceptions of political philosophizing in the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss. I draw on recently published works to shed light on their respective turns to ‘political philosophy’ as responses to the crisis of the Weimar Republic. I argue that the philosophical, theological, and political dimensions of the crisis led to a rediscovery of Socratic philosophizing. Heidegger rediscovered the Socratic project of a ‘philosophy of human affairs’ in his early lectures on Aristotle, which Strauss and Arendt attended in 1922 and 1924/25 respectively. Heidegger’s project was to refound philosophy on its existential basis by redirecting the ‘care’ of philosophy away from attempts to secure universal and binding knowledge to the self-illumination of life in its historical ‘facticity’. In an unprecedented effort to understand the phenomena to which Plato and Aristotle referred, Heidegger showed that philosophy grows out of a world of common practical concerns, opinions, and passions. He thus inadvertently refounded philosophy as ‘political philosophy’ and made possible the projects of Arendt and Strauss.

Strauss was particularly affected by Heidegger’s confrontation with the problem of ethics or of providing a rational answer to the question concerning the right or the good way of life. Strauss understood this problem Socratically as the question of the necessity and possibility of a techne politike or political science. I argue that Strauss’s work as a whole responds to this question. Like Heidegger, Strauss was aware of the fact that a rational justification of one’s way of life— especially when it is shared with a political community—may be impossible. Beyond this, it may be unnecessary—if faith or divine revelation are sufficient for achieving human perfection. Drawing on Arendt’s Denktagebuch and her dissertation on Augustine, I argue that her project emerged from a similar ‘theological-political predicament’: whether or not we should be completely at home in this world is the guiding question of Arendt’s oeuvre. This question grew out of Arendt’s condition as a Jew born and raised in Germany and her discovery of neo-orthodox ‘dialectical theology’. Thus read, the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss appears in a fresh light. It becomes the source of a conception of neo-Socratic political philosophy.

GERMAN SOKRATES: HEIDEGGER, ARENDT, STRAUSS

by

Rodrigo Chacón

September 2009

Submitted to the New School for Social Research of the New School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Dissertation Committee: Dr. James E. Miller Dr. David Plotke Dr. Richard J. Bernstein Dr. Andreas Kalyvas

UMI Number: 3396646

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

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© Rodrigo Chacón 2009

Acknowledgments

I discovered the work of Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger almost fifteen years ago in Mexico City in the lectures of professor Eric Herrán. I wish to thank him at the outset for introducing me to political philosophy in such an excellent and rare way. My graduate studies were made possible by the support of the FulbrightGarcía Robles scholarship fund, the McArthur-Ford-Hewlett Foundation, and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. I owe it to these institutions that my greatest debts are moral—particularly to Mexico and the United States of America—and not financial. Professor Steven B. Smith suggested to me several years ago that a good dissertation was waiting to be written comparing Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and Strauss’s Natural Right and History. I am grateful for this and other cues, and for his encouragement over the years. I learned much about Socratic dialogue and friendship from my students at Eugene Lang College and the TU-Dresden. I thank Rafael Khatchaturian in particular for helping me edit and improve the manuscript. At various moments friends provided support when I was losing my way—and listened patiently when I was too excited to keep my findings to myself. Gracias de todo corazón a Paula Ramírez, Fernanda Ezeta, Melissa

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Amezcua, Carolina Gallegos-Anda y Oi Yen Lam. Thank you, Kang Chen, for sharing your intelligence and passion for the most important things, and for your careful comments which saved me from more than one embarrassment. Santiago Chacón, Lupita Vizcarra, Alejandro Rodiles, and Paola Karam provided a home and loving friendship, and I wish to thank them as well. Mario Chacón read everything I sent him. I never imagined that reading a PhD dissertation could help transform filiality into friendship. I owe it to Kaicho T. Nakamura and the Sangha at state street to have pointed to what words cannot express about the essence of ethics. Professors Claudia Baracchi and Yirmiahu Yovel rekindled my love of philosophy every time I saw them lecture. I thank Richard J. Bernstein for his trust, for his honest critique, and for his example of committed scholarship. I thank Andreas Kalyvas for preventing me from becoming complacent with my ideas. Thanks, finally and most especially, to my mentors David Plotke and Jim Miller.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION The Problem of a Political Philosophy, Or Why Socrates?

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I. Why Arendt and Strauss? II. What is Socratic Political Philosophy? Some Preliminaries III. Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER ONE The Young Heidegger’s Political Philosophy (1922-1924) I.

“Wie Du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben”?: Heidegger’s Turn From Theology to Philosophy to Political Philosophy (1911-1922) II. Who is the True Philosophos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha, 1-2 (1922) III. Who is the True Politikos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric (1924) IV. Heidegger’s Two Conceptions of Political Philosophy V. Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER TWO Descending the Magic Mountain to Begin a Socratic Ascent: Leo Strauss in Weimar (1929-1931) I. “Ethos anthropoi daimon”?: Strauss Becoming Strauss II. Political Science, Political Liberalism and Political Theology in the Dwindling Days of Weimar III. Götterdämmerung: the Davos Disputation Between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer IV. Descending From Davos—What Did Leo Strauss Do? V. Concluding Remarks

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7 14 35

38 43

52 61 73 94

102

108 113 123 128 156

CHAPTER THREE Hannah Arendt in Weimar: Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament? (1928-1929) I. The ‘Theological-Political Predicament’ II. Philosophy and Theology: “for me they belonged together” III. Liberal Theology: The Religion of Culture IV. Dialectical Theology: Destroying the Gods of this World V. Arendt in Marburg: Between Bultmann and Heidegger VI. Love in Augustine VII. Arendt’s Theological-Political Predicament VIII. Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER FOUR Strauss’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1931-1936) I.

Maimonides in Weimar and his Critique of Heidegger: Strauss’s “Cohen and Maimonides” (1931) II. Hobbesheidegger is Heideggerhobbes: Strauss’s Studies in Hobbesian Political Philosophy (1931-1936) III. Strauss’s Second Sailing (1935/36) IV. Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER FIVE Arendt’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1950-1958) I. Political Philosophy in Arendt’s Denktagebuch II. Arendtian (Anti-)metaphysics III. The Ethical-Political Implications of Arendtian (Anti-) metaphysics IV. Arendt’s Critique of Platonic Political Science V. Political Philosophy: Out of the Sources of Socrates and Heidegger? VI. Concluding Remarks

160

164 169 172 181 188 196 201 216

219 221 248 294 305

311 313 316 325 332 358 380

CONCLUSION

386

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION The Problem of a Political Philosophy, Or Why Socrates? [M]odern philosophy, brought to its end, appears to me to lead to the point where Socrates begins. Leo Strauss to Gerhard Krüger [T]he West never really had a proper political philosophy. Hannah Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld

This dissertation can be read as an exploration of the claim that “modern philosophy, brought to its end … leads to the point where Socrates begins.” 1 The dissertation seeks to bring to light the consequences of this thesis, which implies that the future of philosophizing is not ‘the end of philosophy’, and particularly of humanism, but a rediscovery of the ‘philosophy of the human things’ pioneered by Socrates. As a study of the history of ideas, this work seeks to deepen our understanding of the common experiential and philosophical grounds that gave rise to three of the most powerful currents of contemporary political and philosophical thought. To this end, it traces the genesis of the work of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss as three thinkers who at the beginning of the twentieth century turned to classical ‘political philosophy’ as a 1

Letter of December 12, 1932 from Leo Strauss to Gerhard Krüger. In Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und Zugehörige Schriften – Briefe, edited by Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2001), 415. (Hereafter, GS3.)

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response to the crises of the Weimar Republic. Given the nature of those crises— political, theological, and philosophical—‘Socratic’ philosophizing proved to be the best response. I explore this convergence on Socrates, first of all, to make possible a dialogue—itself leading to reciprocal illumination—between three philosophical radicals with rival views of the role of religion and politics in the life of the mind and the life of the citizen. The systematic aim of the dissertation is to develop a concept of neo-Socratic political philosophy from the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss. The structure of the dissertation is chronological, both for simplicity’s sake and for the sake of understanding the genesis of neo-Socratic political philosophizing without prejudging its content. I shall therefore refrain in these introductory remarks from justifying my attempt to read Heidegger as a ‘Socratic’ who turned to classical ‘political philosophy’, and to further suggest that Arendt and Strauss were, so to speak, twin disciples of the same master forming an alliance for the future of ‘Socrates’. Instead, I shall introduce the general problem of the dissertation—viz., the necessity and possibility of Socratic political philosophy in our time—by referring to the puzzle that gives rise to it. To judge from the views of the most authoritative philosophers, the twentieth century seems to have been the first to recognize the importance of evaluating the legacy of Socrates to know what we are doing. For Nietzsche Socrates was “the most questionable phenomenon of antiquity,” the first “theoretical man” who brought to the world the “profound delusion … that

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thought … reaches down into the deepest abysses of Being, and is capable not simply of understanding existence, but of correcting it.”2 Socrates is the “origin and prototype of the theoretical optimist,” “the first, who guided by the instinct of science” “made existence comprehensible and thus justified.”3 Channeling “the instinctive lust for life” towards science, Socrates diverted humanity from a path that would have led to “universal wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples,” had “the whole incalculable sum of energy used up for this world tendency [of science] been used not in the service of knowledge but for practical, i.e., egoistic aims of individuals and peoples.” Socrates is “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history.” 4 But “[t]he time of Socratic man has gone.”5 For Martin Heidegger Socrates was “the purest thinker of the West.”6 Though, as we shall see, this unique reference to Socrates does not exhaust the meaning that Socratism had for Heidegger, it suffices to convey the same kind of ambivalence that one also finds in Nietzsche. Socrates is the prototype of

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, in Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 1 (Munich: DTV, 1999), 90, 98-99. 3

Ibid., 100, 99.

4

Ibid., 100

5

Ibid., 132. Needless to say, these are not Nietzsche’s last words on Socrates, but they suffice to introduce the ‘problem of Socrates’ as Nietzsche understood it. 6

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 17. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Part I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978 [1971]), 174 (Arendt notes that this is “the only point in his work where [Heidegger] speaks directly of Socrates”).

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‘thinking’—indeed, the sole exemplar of thinking in its ‘purity’—and yet, for all practical purposes, this thinking is no different from Plato’s or, at any rate, Heidegger does not distinguish between Socratic and Platonic thought. Plato, in turn, appears throughout Heidegger’s writings as a thinker possessed by precisely the “metaphysical delusion” denounced by Nietzsche that thought is capable of securing, orienting, and even correcting existence. Such a delusion is the germ of a technical interpretation of thinking that has led to the extreme homelessness and inhumanity of contemporary civilization.7 Nietzsche and Heidegger seem to have been the first great thinkers to place the center of gravity of Western civilization in Socrates. And yet, for all their sagacity and depth, or perhaps because of it, they failed to address the problem inherent in the surface of his teaching—namely, not ‘metaphysics’, not— as Heidegger would have it—‘what is a thing?’, but ‘politics’, or the fact that Socrates became “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history” because he was “the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it in cities.”8

7

M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, revised and expanded ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 217-265. See esp. 218 (technical thinking), 233-34 (humanism “does not set the humanitas of man high enough”), 242-43 (homelessness as “the destiny of the world”). For a reading of Heidegger as the thinker of a post-Socratic and posthumanistic age in which Socrates stands for the turn toward man and thus towards humanism see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 8

Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, V, 4, 10: “Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it in cities, and even to introduce it into homes and compel it to enquire about life and standards and good and ill.” On this motif, see J. Kerschensteiner, “Socrates philosophiam devocavit a caelo,” in W. Suerbaum and F. Maier (eds.), Festschrift für Franz Egermann zu seinem 80. Geburtstag… (Munich, 1985), 41-56.

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Socrates is said to have been the founder of political philosophy.9 But one looks in vain in the writings of those who knew him for a reference to ‘political philosophy’. This may be the problem inherent in the surface of his teaching: that ‘political philosophy’ is necessary to understand what we are doing but that it may be an impossible undertaking—at least in the way that Socrates originally intended it. What follows in this introduction is a closer examination of this problem that begins from the surface. I introduce the problem with a preliminary and mainly biographical approach to the Socratic commonalities between Arendt and Strauss. I suggest that the possibilities of thought developed in their work are best understood comparatively. The reason for this is simply a matter of fate that led two German-Jews born and raised in Germany to Heidegger and thence to Socratic ‘political philosophy’. I then turn to the problem of political philosophy

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The locus classicus is Cicero Tusc. Disp. V. 10. For the reception of Socrates as “moralis philosophiae auctor” in antiquity, more generally, see Hermann Diels, Doxographie graeci (Berlin: Berolini G. Reimeri, 1879), index s.v. Socrates. For the reception of Socrates in Islam, see Ilai Alon, Socrates in Mediaeval Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1991). For his reception in Christianity, see Jean L. de Balzac, Le Socrate Chrétien (Paris: H. Gautier, 1894). Among modern thinkers, the view that Socrates originated “civil science” was upheld notably by Hobbes. See his preface to De Cive. Cf. also Kant’s remark that “[t]he most important epoch of Greek philosophy finally began with Socrates. It was he who gave an entirely new practical direction to the philosophic spirit and to all speculation.” I. Kant, Logic, trans. R. S. Harman and W. Schwartz (Indianapolis and New York, 1974), 34. Cited in Richard L. Velkley, Being after Rousseau (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 4: “On Kant’s Socratism,” 65. For a comprehensive bibliography on Socrates, see Andreas Patzer, Bibliographia Socratica. Die wissenschaftliche Literatur über Sokrates von den Anfängen bis auf die neueste Zeit in systematisch-chronologischer Anordnung (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1985). See also Olof Gigon, Sokrates: sein Bild in Dichtung und Geschichte (Berne: Francke, 1979). For an alternative account of the history of moral philosophy as beginning with Pythagoras, see J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Epilogue: “Pythagoras, Socrates, and Kant: Understanding the History of Moral Philosophy.” Cf. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 120.

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as it is commonly understood, namely, as, at core, a problem of the relation between philosophy and politics. By specifying the traditional origins of our philosophical and political vocabularies, which, I shall argue, still determine how Arendt and Strauss are read, I seek to begin to explain why a critique of the tradition of political philosophy as made possible by the thought of Heidegger is necessary, and why, if consistently followed it necessarily leads back to the point where Socrates begins.

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Why Arendt and Strauss?

Political philosophy (according to the traditional account) originated in Socrates as a praxis lacking a concept. Socrates seems to have spent his whole mature life reflecting on ‘the human things’ or ‘the political things’—whether in themselves or as a clue to ‘all things’—without ever calling what he did political philosophy. The same can be said of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Like Socrates, they believed that the one thing needful for our time is a philosophy of human affairs, and like Socrates they devoted their mature lives to an examination of the human or political things. Like her Athenian predecessor, Arendt did not call what she did political philosophy. As for Strauss, he made ‘political philosophy’ the object of a Socratic quest which, just as Socratically, yielded no final answer. In spite of this, both became—willingly or not—founders of two of the most powerful schools of contemporary political thought. What may first come to mind when these thinkers are mentioned is that their aims were exactly opposite. The aim of Arendt’s work as a whole may be said to be the rehabilitation of the active political life, the vita activa, from the neglect to which it has been subjected by a philosophical tradition that has typically seen the contemplative life as the only one truly worth living, as well as from the modern privatization of life—the modern turning inward or subjectivization of life—which has made us blind to the inherent dignity of the

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life of action. Without such a rehabilitation, without the life of action, which is the sine qua non for the constitution of a world as a common world, Arendt would argue, the right to have rights, that is, the right to live in a world that could become our home, could never be made a reality. Strauss’s aim, by contrast, can be said to have been the rehabilitation of philosophical contemplation as the highest life and indeed as the essential means—paradoxical as this may sound—to keep the political life in motion. That is, his aim, one could argue, was to affirm the freedom of the mind to raise the one question that matters, viz., the question concerning the right life, or the question, How should I live?, not only by defending the life of free insight from the subjection to any authority (political, religious, moral or even philosophic) but by proving the superiority of such a life. Further differences become apparent when one considers some basic facts about their lives. Strauss (1899-1973) grew up in the small rural town of Kirchhain, Hessen in what he characterized as a “conservative, even orthodox Jewish home,”10 and seems to have been affected his whole life by the necessity of becoming an atheist in order to become a philosopher.11 Arendt (1906-1975), by contrast, grew up in cosmopolitan Königsberg, in a non-religious family of

10

See Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss,” in Kenneth Hart Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 459-460. (Hereafter JPCM.) On Strauss’s youth see Michael Zank’s Introduction to his edited volume of Strauss’s early writings: Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921-1932) (New York: SUNY Press, 2002). 11

See Christian Wiese (ed.), Hans Jonas. Erinnerungen (Frankfurt, a. M.: Insel Verlag, 2003), 9394.

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German-Jewish progressives.12 Strauss took an early interest in religion and politics; specifically, in political Zionism and in the dialogues of Plato.13 Arendt took an early interest in German philosophy—in the philosophy of Kant.14 In his youth Strauss became an anti-revolutionary conservative, and, according to Hans Jonas’ memoirs, an early supporter of Mussolini.15 Arendt was the daughter of a fervent admirer of Rosa Luxembourg and would later become engaged to a communist Spartacist (Heinrich Blücher). Both Arendt and Strauss were driven into politics, we may say, by a combination of world-history and their Jewish origins, yet their valorization of the political life (at least in their later years) was altogether different. Strauss, who was politically active in his youth, came to see political life—according to one of his students—as but a potentially tyrannical expression of self-love.16 Arendt, who was uninterested in politics at first—very much like other intellectuals she would then rebuke17—vowed in the early 1930s

12

On Arendt’s youth see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 5-41. 13

“A Giving of Accounts,” in Green (ed.), JPCM, 458, 460.

14

“A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 8.

15

Jonas, Erinnerungen, 262: “[I]mmerhin war Strauss frühzeitig Mussolini-Anhänger gewesen, als dieser noch nicht antisemitisch war.” 16

See Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 22: 58-84, (September-December, 1968): 281-328, 308. 17

Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Portrait of a Period,” The Menorah Journal, XXXI (Fall 1943): 307-14. (Review of Stephan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography.) Reprinted in Ron H. Feldman, Hannah Arendt: The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (NY: Grove Press, 1978), 112-125.

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“never again [to] get involved in any kind of intellectual business”18 and became politically active for twenty years, expressing soon thereafter in 1958 that an inactive life that was not engaged with the ‘public things’, was as good as “dead to the world.”19 Not coincidentally, the work of Strauss and Arendt found resonance in rather different intellectual circles as they emigrated to the United States (respectively in 1938 and 1941). Arendt’s work found an early audience among a circle of highly influential Berkeley political theorists, including Norman Jacobson, John Schaar, Sheldon Wolin, and Hannah Pitkin. These theorists read Arendt as engaged in their own quest to rescue “the political” from behaviorism and from the “unpolitical” political theories of thinkers such as Michael Oakeshott or John Rawls. These theorists, they argued, either viewed politics with hostility or saw it as merely instrumental (i.e., as a means for attaining order and stability) and thus failed to value and to understand the political as the creative potentiality of an egalitarian demos.20 Strauss, on the other hand, became the founder of a school of thought whose leading representatives—at least in the public mind—have been cultural conservatives and aristocratic liberals.21 18

Hannah Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” 11: “I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak. But not among others. And I never forgot that…” 19

Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1958], 1998), 176.

20

See Emily Hauptmann, “A Local History of ‘The Political’,” Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 1, February 2004: 34-60. 21

Yet it would be a mistake to characterize all ‘Straussians’ as conservatives. As Steven Smith points out, “Even recently, a distinguished student of Strauss [William Galston] served as a

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And yet, all of these differences are part of a broader context of equally striking coincidences. Arendt and Strauss both belonged to the same generation which still experienced the relatively peaceful and hopeful nineteenth century. They were both part of the same intellectual milieu, first around Martin Heidegger and his circle of students at the universities of Freiburg and Marburg and later among the Zionist youth in Berlin where they had common acquaintances such as Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. Their way of thinking was shaped and would later develop in dialogue with members of the same philosophical community (to which belonged Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, as well as their students: Günther Stern, Jacob Klein, Gerhard Krüger, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others). They were both émigrés who became American citizens, and they both became professors of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research and at the University of Chicago. Even though they seem to have known each other personally from their Berlin years22 and even though they also coincided at the University of Chicago,23 Arendt and Strauss prominent member of the first Clinton administration.” Also, it must be mentioned that there were among Strauss’s students some, most notably Seth Benardete and Stanley Rosen, who became among the most highly respected classicists and philosophers of our time, whose work does not directly address political questions. On the relation of Straussianism to political conservatism, see Steven Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3-4. 22

According to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “Strauss … met with Arendt at the Prussian State Library and made an effort to court her. When she criticized his conservative political views and dismissed his suit, he became bitterly angry. The bitterness lasted for decades, growing worse when the two joined the same American faculty at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. Strauss was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged his assessment of National Socialism: she had pointed out the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him.” Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 98. 23

Arendt taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967; Strauss from 1949 to 1968.

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were not on friendly terms with each other and did not discuss each other’s views—at least not openly.24 Then again, it is hard to think of two political thinkers as united as they were in the view that Heidegger is the most important thinker of our time.

24

Even though Arendt disliked Strauss, she had a very high opinion of him as a scholar. Responding to Karl Jaspers’ query in 1954 concerning “Leo Strauss … an orthodox Jew of strong rational powers?”, Arendt responds: “Leo Strauss is professor of political philosophy in Chicago, highly respected. Wrote a good book about Hobbes (as well as one about Spinoza). Now another about natural law. He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don’t like him.” Several years later, in 1963, the year she joined the University of Chicago where Strauss had been named (in 1960) Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and in the midst of what Arendt called the “Eichmann affair” she writes to Jaspers from Chicago: “The Eichmann affair continues on its merry way … I spoke on the campus here, with very good success … The only person here on campus who is agitating against me is Leo Strauss, and he would have done it in any case.” See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, Edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 241, 244, 535. Arendt had good reasons to believe that Strauss would have agitated ‘in any case’. In 1956, after returning from Chicago where she delivered the lectures that would result in The Human Condition, she reports to Kurt Blumenfeld that even though, “people were at first quite perplexed [verblüfft] about a new ‘approach’ [one must bear in mind that Strauss himself in 1949 and Eric Voegelin in 1951 had given their own programmatic Walgreen Lectures presenting their approach to political philosophizing], they then became after all quite satisfied.” Again, however, it was Strauss who had reacted critically to her approach (“Inzwischen bin ich aus Chicago (wo mich Leo Strauss schönstens geschnitten hat) wieder zurück…”). This notwithstanding, Arendt contined to express her appreciation of Strauss’s scholarship. In 1956 she writes: “He is very useful in this land, whatever one may otherwise think about him. He has learned something and teaches the youth to read. That then some of them come to the ‘insight’ that one can find everything, but then really everything, in Aristotle, that is not exactly a catastrophe that the world will not survive. Most human beings have by far more absurd views.” See Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling (eds.), Hannah Arendt, Kurt Blumenfeld, “In Keinem Besitz Verwurzelt” (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), 141, 149-50. Arendt also regularly assigned Strauss’s works in her courses, and considered his work, together with that of Voegelin and Alexandre Kojève, as among the only existing attempts to do political philosophy. In a course she taught at the New School in 1969, under the title, “Philosophy and Politics: What is Political Philosophy?,” she thus suggests that “So far as political philosophy still exists it is being taught by traditionalists—Voegelin, a Platonist, Strauss, an Aristotelian, and Kojève, a Hegelian. Each of them believes that tradition is valid…and that the main problems are being solved.” See Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Courses---New School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.---“Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?” lectures and seminar---1969, 24420.

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What is Socratic Political Philosophy? Some Preliminaries

Why were Arendt and Strauss so lastingly affected by Heidegger—a thinker who, as Strauss once put it, “was philosophically the counterpart to what Hitler was politically”?25 And what drove them to Socrates? To begin to see this, one must consider the origins of two problems that became central to their work: the relation between philosophy and politics and the possibility of a philosophy of human affairs. We begin by noting a central difficulty. The way the western tradition has understood the meaning of philosophy and politics—or, more generally, of (philosophical) theory and (political) praxis—has been a function of their relation, and that relation, it seems, has always remained a puzzle.26

25

Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College in Honor of Jacob Klein,” in JCPM, 450. 26

According to Nicholas Lobkowicz, the author of perhaps the most thorough analysis of the concepts of theory and praxis in Western thought: “…contrary to all appearances, when taken in the strict sense there never was an account of theory and praxis, in any event not of their relation to one another. There were discussions of various types of praxis and various sorts of theory; there were discussions of the relation between theory and production, between theory and history, and between theory and experience. But the real problem, which the famous passage in the Nicomachean Ethics poses, has never really been genuinely discussed: namely, is it possible to develop a theory relevant to praxis which actually is a theory and which is actually relevant just to praxis and not to every other possible thing?” “Origins: On the History of Theory and Praxis,” in Terence Ball (ed.) Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 25. (For Lobkowicz’s larger treatment of the problem of theory and praxis see his Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).) For similar arguments, see Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und Aristoteles,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 76, 1968-1969, 264-314, 268; Franco Volpi, “The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and neo-Aristotelianism,” in Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (eds.), Action and

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The main difficulty seems to be the following. As an activity that takes place within a political society, philosophy must confront the problem of its own definition and justification within the totality of social practices. In justifying and defining itself philosophy indirectly or negatively defines the meaning of political life. This was done with such effectiveness by the founders of the philosophical tradition—mainly Plato and Aristotle, who first used and defined the term ‘philosophy’—that our understanding of ‘philosophizing’ and ‘politicizing’, both before that founding moment and after it, has been, strictly speaking, derivative: before that founding moment because the pre-history of the ‘Socratic school’27 was largely written by that school itself, and after that moment because—as we shall see—from very early on western thought began to understand itself in terms of categories borrowed from the classic thinkers, and in particular in terms of a distinction between theory and praxis and ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ lives that did not exist—at least in those terms—for the founding thinkers.28

Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 18. Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Basel: Schwabe, 1963), 11. 27

I use this term to refer to what Gadamer calls the ‘Wirkungseinheit Socrates-Plato-Aristotle’, even though strictly speaking there was no such thing as a ‘Socratic school’ and Socrates’ teachings had a broader impact that cannot be reduced to the work of Plato and Aristotle. On the Socratic movement generally, see, e.g., Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). (Arendt refers to “the political philosophy of the Socratic school,” for example, in “What is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 116, 120.) 28

Of this achievement it has been argued that it set the terms of what the western tradition has deemed to be both (philosophically) thinkable and (politically) doable. Consider, on the one hand, Martin Heidegger’s argument that “the fate of philosophy proper in the west” was decided by an arbitrary interpretation that named what Aristotle understood to be the core of philosophy or the “first philosophy,” ‘metaphysics’. This is a term, Heidegger argues, that not only Aristotle does not use, but that could never have meant for him the “turn[ing] away from the physika” towards

14

Given this difficulty, that is, given the fact that one cannot speak of the meaning of philosophy and politics and their relation without posing a question to thinkers for whom this question did not exist in the terms we use, we shall limit our discussion, first, to recalling the temporal origins of our philosophical and political vocabularies and, second, to specifying on this basis why it is necessary to return again to the question of the possibility of a ‘political philosophy’.

‘Politics’ and ‘Praxis’ Our political vocabulary dates back to the rise of democracy in the fifth century B.C. Terms such as politeia—the constitution or the regime broadly speaking— politeuma—a closely related idea—and politeuesthai—being politically active— were coined during the years in which the citizen body began to assume control

“knowledge of the suprasensous” implied by the Latin sense of ‘meta’, namely: beyond the physical, or “the place and the order of those beings which lie behind and above other beings.” Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1929/30], 1995), 39, 40, 43. Consider, on the other hand, the argument, whose most extreme manifestation is perhaps found in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, that the fact that the core of philosophy began to be understood as ‘meta-physics’—and that such metaphysical thought began to rule over politics, nay, obliterated all genuinely political thought—was not simply the fault of the first interpreters of Plato and Aristotle but of Plato’s and Aristotle’s own ‘politics of philosophy’: that is, of their own political attempts to define what it means to think philosophically and what it means to act politically. Thus, according to Castoriadis, the defeat of the Athenian democracy (in 404) which gives rise to the philosophy of Plato “fixed the course of political philosophy for twenty five centuries.” Or as he puts it more explicitly, “Profoundly hating the democratic universe and its arborescences (‘sophistry’, rhetoric, political activity, even poetry) [Plato] constructs—by strokes of historical falsification, rhetoric, sophistry, theatrical scenes, and demagogy—a false image of it that was later to have weighty historical effects: when referring to Plato, one still talks about ‘Greek political thought’, whereas he is the total negation thereof … Greek political thought is to be sought, rather, in democratic political creation, and that creation ends basically in 404 (or 399).” See Castoradis’ lectures of 1982-83 edited as Ce Qui Fait La Grèce. 1, D'Homère à Héraclite: Séminaires 1982-1983 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 286 (Plato “fixed the course of political philosophy for twenty five centuries”), and his course On Plato's Statesman, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xxii.

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over the affairs of the polis.29 The idea of human praxis, referring more generally—at least in one of its meanings—to human activity as guided by deliberation (in the political, ethical-individual, or economic domains), began to be used terminologically by Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.). Thus, it is notably absent from the work of Thucydides’ (ca. 460 - 395 B.C.) who was one of the first thinkers to try to account for the laws governing human action, and it was also left largely unexplored as such by Plato (424 - 348 B.C.).30 Finally, the notion of a political life, or bios politikos, as part of a general discussion concerning the best way of life (viz., whether it is political, philosophical or something else) also dates back to the Socratic school and to Plato in particular.31 It must further be noted that this discussion did not refer to the more general difference between bios praktikos and bios theoretikos (let alone ‘active’ versus ‘contemplative’ lives), which are distinctions that became relevant—and apparently only began to make sense—for post-Aristotelian thought.32

29

See Christian Meier, “Politeia,” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2007), Vol. 7, 1034-1036. (Hereafter HWPh.) The terms ta politka (politics) and e politike (‘the political’) which are substantivized forms of the adjective politikos, itself derived from polites, also date back to that period. Meier, “Politik,” in Ibid., 1038. 30

Günther Bien, “Praxis, Praktisch,” in HWPh, Vol. 7., 1277.

31

See Werner Jaeger, “On the Origin and Cycle of the Philosophic Ideal of Life,” in his Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, trans. Richard Robinson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, second ed., 1948), 426-461. 32

Günther Bien, “Praxis, Praktisch,” in HWPh, Vol. 7., 1282.

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‘Philosophy’ and ‘theory’ As for our philosophical vocabulary, though it also began to be developed in the fifth century Periclean age, it was only completed or consolidated after the demise of the Athenian democracy in 404. The verbal and adjectival forms ‘to philosophize’ and ‘philosophical’ appeared towards the end of the fifth century, while the noun ‘philosophy’ only emerged around the 380s, that is, after the trial of Socrates in 399.33 Finally, theoria only began to be used as a technical term of philosophical knowledge by Plato, and the adjective ‘theoretical’ was not used before Aristotle.34

‘Philosophizing’ and ‘politicizing’ Herodotus (c. 490 B.C. - 420 B.C.) refers to the Athenian lawgiver Solon (c. 638 558 B.C.) as someone who ‘philosophized’ and ‘theorized’,35 and, insofar as his quest was for ‘the invisible measure’ of human affairs—namely, justice—he

33

W. Halbfass, “Philosophie,” in HWPh, Vol. 7, 573. (The earliest reputed ‘philosophers’ from Ionia referred to their investigations as istorie (=inquiry). Pythagoras (c. 582-500 B.C.) is reputedly the first thinker who called himself a ‘philosopher’ and was also known in antiquity as such, yet that was a Platonic myth as the term did not exist during his lifetime. Ibid. See also Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15. 34

G. König and H. Pulte, “Theorie,” in HWPh, Vol. 10, 1128-1129. Cf. Plato, Statesman, 258 e 3 (“divide all science into two arts, calling the one practical, and the other purely intellectual [gnostiken]”) and 259 d (where practical science is characterized as “manual”). 35

Herodotus, Histories, I, 30. “My Athenian guest, the rumor of your wisdom [sophie] and your travels has reached us. We hear that since you have a taste for wisdom [philosopheon], you have visited many lands because of your desire to see [theories eineken].”

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could be seen as the first to both philosophize and ‘politicize’, or as the first to philosophize about the (political) order of human life.36 Yet again, though, quite obviously, the fact of living together in community and the act of thinking existed prior to the emergence of self-consciously ‘political’ living together and ‘philosophical’ thinking, there seems to have been no reason for the existence of ‘political philosophy’ or of an ‘art’ or ‘techne’ of politics during the predemocratic times of Solon because there was no need for general political education.

‘Political science’ The term ‘political science’ appeared in the second half of the fifth century.37 Athens’ successes in the Persian Wars (490 - 479) and the coming Peloponnesian 36

The first political articulation of the idea of ‘measure’ (and of the related notions of moderation and temperance) dates to Solon. K. Mainzer, “Mass,” HWPh, Vol. 5, 508. According to Solon, “What is most difficult is to perceive the invisible measure, which nevertheless alone has the limits of all things.” Fragment D 16. In Solon, Dichtungen (Munich: Heimeran), 1945, 46f. 37

Initially by linking together the adjective politike to techne, episteme, or dunamis. Meier, “Politik,” in HWPh, Vol. 7, 1038. See, e.g., Plato, Protagoras, 319 a (“You appear to be talking about the art of citizenship [πολιτικὴν τέχνην], and to be promising to make men good citizens”); Gorgias, 521 d (“I am one of the few Athenians, not to say the only one, to undertake the true political art [πολιτικὴ τέχνη]”); Euthydemus, 291 c (“We had the idea that the stateman’s art [ἡ πολιτικὴ] and the kingly art [ἡ βασιλικὴ τέχνη] were the same”); Charmides, 170 b; Statesman, 259 c, 275 c-d, 303 e (“all that is different and alien and incompatible has now been eliminated by us from the science of statesmanship [πολιτικῆς ἐπιστήµης]”); Plato, Laws, 650 b (“the knowledge of the natures and the habits of souls”; “the art whose business is to take care of souls”). On the meaning of a political ‘art’ or science, see A.W.H. Adkins, “Arete, techne, Democracy and Sophists: Protagoras 316-328d,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 93 (1973): 3-12; A.M. Bayonas, “L’art politique d'après Protagoras,” Revue philosophique 157 (1967): 43-58; David Roochnik, “Socrates’ Use of the Techne-Analogy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986): 295-310; Reinhart Maurer, “Der Zusammenhang von Technik und Gerechtigkeit und seine metaphysische Grundlegung in Platons Politeia,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 (1975): 259-84; and Charles Griswold, “Politike Episteme in Plato’s Statesman,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy III, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). According to Griswold, “in the Platonic dialogues only two characters claim to possess the true episteme or

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war (431 - 404) made the question of the right order of living together an urgent one. The thinkers associated with the Sophist movement seem to have been the first political scientists, insofar as they began to apply their purported wisdom to the world of human experience and specifically to the experience of living in community. From what is preserved of their writings, and from the (admittedly biased) records of Plato and others, we find in the work of some of the most notable Sophists, such as Protagoras, Callicles and Thrasymachus, a political science that raises such questions as the origins of the political community, the basis of the ‘social contract’, and the nature of justice and political equality.38 It is only at this point in western history, it seems, that one can begin to speak of a self-conscious relation between systematic thought (and/or knowledge or wisdom in general) and political practice.39

techne of politics: Socrates (Gorg. 221d), and Protagoras (Prot., 319a)” (162, n.4). Cf. Plato, Apology, 20 b-c where Socrates claims not to understand anything concerning “knowledge of that kind of excellence, that of a man and a citizen.” And yet, “perhaps I really am wise in [a sort of wisdom],” which is “perhaps human wisdom” (20d). 38

Protagoras (c. 490-420 BC) was born in Abdera and put on trial by the democracy somewhere around the year 411. He supported Pericles around the years 450 to 444, under whose approval he drafted laws for the colony of Thuroi (founded in 443 in southern Italy). Of Callicles, we only know through Plato’s dialogue Gorgias and an occasional reference in Aristotle. He is often seen therefore as a fictitious character. Still, his views exercised considerable influence on thinkers of the stature of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Thrasymachus (c. 459-400 BC) was born in Chalcedon in the Bosphorus. He appeared in Aristophanes’ “Diataleis” in 427 and was well-known in Athens at that time as a Sophist. His conversation with Socrates in the Republic can be fixed to the year 413. Little else is known about his life. His epitaph names ‘Sophistry’ as his profession (he techne sophie). 39

On this point and more generally on the Greek ‘discovery of the political’ see Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in its Golden Age (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 14-15, as well as Ernst Vollrath, Was ist das Politische?: Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner Wahrnehmung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 24.

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In pondering the origins of ‘political philosophy’, the following question arises. What kind of ‘thought’ was the political thought of the Sophists? Was it ‘philosophical’, ‘scientific’, or ‘technical’? And wherein did its interest in political practice lie? These are questions that have been disputed ever since the meaning of philosophy itself became a question, most notably with Plato in his dialogue on the Sophist. On one extreme, it can be argued that the thinking of the Sophists was concerned with almost everything except for wisdom for its own sake. Sophistic thinking from this perspective is the expression of the liberation of the will from the traditional order of goods and values that had constrained the free shaping of individual and collective lives.40 On the opposite extreme, it could be said that the Sophists were really no different from Socrates, insofar as they were concerned with ‘the human things’ but also with ‘all things’41 and insofar as their quest was—arguably, just like Socrates’—not (or at least not only) cynically ‘technical’ (e.g., overcoming a geometrician in debate without knowing anything about geometry), but ‘emancipatory’ (e.g., showing that ‘justice’ really means the advantage of the stronger). Thus, there seems to be no safe way of distinguishing the relation between ‘wisdom’ (sophia) and practice (especially political practice) in the work of the ‘Sophists’, on the one hand, and of the ‘philosophers’ on the

40

Ralf Elm, “Ethos, Vernunft und Freiheit. Zum Zusammenhang von praktischer und theoretischer Lebensform in der klassischen griechischen Philosophie,” in R. Elm (ed.), Vernunft und Freiheit in der Kultur Europas: Ursprünge, Wandel, Herausforderungen (Freiburg: K. Alber, 2006), 20, 23. 41

Thus, for instance, Gorgias could write a treatise “On What is Not, or On Nature.”

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other.42 This must be taken into consideration in order to establish the precise sense in which it can be said that Socrates (and not the Sophists) originated ‘political philosophy’ or the ‘philosophy of the human things’.

‘Philosophy of the human things’ I: Socrates The traditional view is that Socrates was the first philosopher to make ‘human affairs’ the center of philosophical attention.43 More particularly, it can be said— inaccurately but not altogether misleadingly—that it was Socrates who first attempted a ‘theory of praxis’ or who first made human praxis a matter—and perhaps the matter—of philosophical investigation by famously affirming—here, at least, in sharp contrast to the Sophists—that virtue is knowledge or that sound ‘praxis’ is intimately linked, or indeed may be nothing other than sound ‘theory’. To explain what this means it is necessary to provide at least an outline of the

42

That is to say, one cannot possibly understand the different (‘sophistical’ versus ‘philosophical’) origins of political thought in terms of such categories as “traditional theory” –allegedly concerned with ontology and driven by an ultimately religious interest typically ascribed to Plato and Aristotle—, “empirical-analytic” theory driven by “technical” interests (which would correspond to the sophists); “historical-hermeneutic” theory with “practical cognitive” interests—namely, with the “preservation and expansion of the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual understanding”— and “critical theory” with an “emancipatory cognitive interest” achieved through self-reflection. The Sophists just as much as ‘philosophers’ like Socrates, one could say, pursued all of these types of theorizing for ‘practical’, ‘technical’, ‘theoretical’, ‘emancipatory’ reasons. (Whereby the point is not: ‘they did; why can we not do this? But: ‘has it ever been possible to dissociate ontology and ethics, metaphysics and morals, thinking and ‘building’/‘edifying’, ‘science’ and ‘weltanschauung’ and so on? And what do we miss—precisely by way of possibilities of ‘emancipation’—when we fail to raise these questions?). For the (contrary) view that the distinctions are sound and also necessary see Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 301-317. 43

See note 9 above.

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Socratic way of questioning, and in particular of what is known as the ‘Socratic turn’.44 At least in Plato’s account, Socrates underwent a conversion, or perhaps a series of conversions, as he learned his unique art of philosophical investigation. Socrates is said to have turned away from natural philosophy to political philosophy, whereby it is of the essence of the latter that it begins (and in a way ends) with the investigation of human opinions. The story of this turn is told in the Phaedo. In a very abbreviated form, and just to mention the beginning and end of the story, it is this:

When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science, for I thought it splendid to know the causes of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes and why it exists. … [Until] finally I became convinced that I have no natural aptitude at all for

44

On this, see more generally, Catherine Zuckert, “The Socratic Turn,” History of Political Thought 25, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 189-219. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 30 ff. (Brague refers to the “Socratic revolution” (30) pointing also to the origins of this designation the early twentieth century (232).) Jacob, Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 73 ff. J. Klein, “Aristotle: An Introduction,” in Joseph Cropsey (ed.), Ancients and Moderns; Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 178 f. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983), part III, chapter 1, “The Retraction of the Socratic Turning,” especially, 250. Christopher Bruell, “On the Original Meaning of Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Lovers,” in Thomas Pangle (ed.), The Roots of Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987): 91-110. Stuart Umphrey, “Why Politiké Philosophia,” in Man and World 17: 431-452. Stanley Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Chapter 2: “Socrates’ Hypothesis,” 46-95. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, trans. Robert M. Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 65-83.

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that kind of investigation … So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of things by means of words [logoi].45

Socrates tells the story of his youthful passion for the study of nature and subsequent turn to the human world during the last day of his life. In another late dialogue, Theaetetus, Plato elucidates what it means to be a philosopher and in particular to study “human affairs.”46 In perhaps the most famous passage Socrates explains that being a philosopher means “never condescending to what lies near at hand” and refers to Thales as “an instance”:

[T]hey say Thales was studying the stars…and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him because, she said, he was wild to know about what was up in the sky 45

Plato, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato. Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 96a7-8, 99 e: “ἔδοξε δή µοι χρῆναι εἰς τοὺς λόγους καταφυγόντα ἐν ἐκείνοις σκοπεῖν τῶν ὄντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν.” 46

According to Xenophon, “conversation [with Socrates] did not turn on the nature of things as a whole, as was the case with most of the others….With him, conversation was always about human affairs [περὶ τῶν ἀνθρωπείων].” Memorabilia, I 1, 11 and I 1, 16; see also I.1, 9; 12-13; 15-16. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987 b 1-3 (“Socrates was engaged in the study of ethical matters [τὰ ἠθικὰ], but not at all in the study of nature as a whole, yet in ethical matters he sought the universal and was the first to fix his thought on definitions”); Parts of Animals, 642 a28-30 (“In Socrates’ time, [the preoccupation with verbal definitions] increased, while one ceased to seek that which concerned nature (ta peri phuseos), so that those who philosophized deviated toward useful virtue, that is, politics.” According to Brague, “[i]t is through this passage that Arabic-language authors learned of the ‘Socratic revolution’.” The Wisdom, 232 n. 8.) See also Phaedrus, 229 e. (“landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that”); Apology, 20 d 5 ff. (where Socrates refers to his reputation to wisdom as lying in “human wisdom [ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία], perhaps” as distinguished from a wisdom that is “more than human”); cf. Apology, 26 b and Republic vii 517 d (which suggest otherwise). Further evidence of the Socratic ‘turn’ may be found in Aristophanes’ Clouds, and Socrates’ depiction there as indeed interested in physics—of the young Socrates, that is, whose evolution (towards the study of human affairs) he described during the last day of his life in the Phaedo. On this peculiarity of Socratic philosophizing and its originality see Richard Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 18. See also, Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 246-48, and 621 f. (n. 10).

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but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet. The same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy. It really is true that the philosopher fails to see his next-door neighbor; he not only doesn’t notice what he is doing; he scarcely knows whether he is a man or some other kind of creature. The question he asks is, What is Man? What actions and passions properly belong to human nature and distinguish it from all other beings? This is what he wants to know and concerns himself to investigate.47

Here we see the relation (and the movement) between ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ that characterizes the Socratic way. (Again, the use of Aristotelian terms is inaccurate, but inevitable at this point.) Socrates says that his investigation is primarily of human words (or opinions, logoi)—and what could be ‘nearer at hand’ than that? Yet the instance of the philosopher “in the highest sense” remains Thales, in Plato’s account, a stargazer—the ‘theoretician’ par excellence. The philosopher asks about human praxis: “What is Man? What actions and passions properly belong to human nature and distinguish it from all other beings?,” and yet he “doesn’t notice what he is doing” and “scarcely knows whether he is a man or some other kind of creature.” Socrates, like Thales, is a ‘theoretician’, yet in contrast to Thales and the rest of his predecessors, his theory is (in Aristotelian language) a theory of praxis (viz., of the “actions and passions [that] properly belong to human nature”).48 47

Plato, Theaetetus, 174a1-2; a3-b5.

48

Here I draw on Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).

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What does a ‘theory of praxis’ do? Ultimately, as we have seen, it may be said to show that ‘ethics is an optics’, or that somehow theory and praxis are interdependent or may even be the same thing. But primarily, without necessarily reaching such a conclusion, a ‘theory of praxis’ may simply be said to raise the question of the nature of ‘true’ praxis and of ‘true’ theory. Simply put, to raise the question of true praxis means to raise the question of the good, that is: truly human actions and passions are supposed to make us ‘good’ and this goodness is supposed to lead to happiness or eudaimonia.49 As for raising the question of true theory it means, similarly, to ask whether we can truly know what a thing is without first knowing what good it is. To see why this may be the case it is necessary to take a closer look at the ‘Socratic turn’. The main reason why Socrates turned from an investigation of nature to an investigation of human opinions is the following. The so-called ‘natural philosophers’—to whose aims and methods presumably the young Socrates subscribed—sought “to know the causes of things, and why a thing is and is created or destroyed” (Phaedo, 96a ff.) on the basis of universal substances such as breath or air or fire or blood or of fundamental principles such as ‘mind’ or ‘intelligence’ (Anaxagoras).50 However, Socrates argues, they all failed at the point when it came to explaining the reason why it is good that things are as they are.

49

See, e.g., Plato, Charmides, 174 a ff.

50

See Zuckert, “The Socratic Turn,” 192.

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Socrates’ account begins with the claim that his own actions, and specifically the fact that he was spending the last day of his life philosophizing in prison and not somewhere else as a fugitive, could not be explained by any ‘material’ causes—we would perhaps say today, by the chemical composition of his brain in that particular day—but only by the fact that he thought it good to be doing so. However, the question remains: Why make the good the criterion not just of sound human science but of all science? The reason (as we will see more clearly in the next chapter) is that we are related to reality in a practical way and thus, insofar as every action aims at some good, in a way that is guided by some opinion concerning the good. Hence our primary access to reality is through the opinions we have of it and so through speech. Indeed, thought itself, Plato would argue, is a form of reasonable speech.51 Any theory, however abstract, is ultimately a human articulation of the world—an opinion, a ‘hypothesis’ or logos—of the world as encountered in everyday practice.52 Thus, in order to place

51

“Are not thinking and reasonable speech the same, except that the former, which takes place inside as a voiceless dialogue of the soul with itself is called by us thinking?” (Plato, Sophist, 263E). 52

Admittedly, this can hardly be said to be the case of modern mathematical science or physics— from non-Euclidean geometry to ‘string’ theory. However, of ancient science it can generally be said that it is a perfection and not a modification of our pre-scientific, ‘natural’ understanding of the world. (I return to this in chapter four.) See Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (New York: Dover Publications, 1968). Klein argues that mathematics for the Greeks “serves as a model for all teachable and learnable knowledge” (61). “[O]bjects of mathematics fulfill the conditions set by the Greeks for objects of knowledge”— namely, “they are not objects of the senses (aistheta), but only objects of thought (nonta)” (10). In the paradigmatic Platonic case objects of sense are understood “as an image of (Abbild) something ‘other’, since the examining soul is compelled to sup-pose, i.e., to make to underlie, this ‘other’ which is precisely the noeton in question” (72). For example, geometers “draw certain figures and exhibit their properties; yet they do not intend the drawn figure itself but that which is imaged in this figure, e.g., the rectangle which is, in its purity, accessible only to thinking.” Similarly, logisticians see “odd” and “even” in countable objects, but their thinking aims “not at these

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any theory on a sound basis its origins in human opinions (which express our practical encounter with the world) must be investigated. Specifically, the question must be raised whether our theories are anything other than reproductions of what we ‘believe anyway’. For Aristotle—who, in this respect, follows the Socratic ‘program’—this meant to question, for example, with respect to Thales’ claim that water is the universal primary substance, whether this does not simply restate the Homeric notion that Ocean and Thetys are the parents of creation.53 For us, we may say, it would mean to question whether our understanding of the world in terms of ‘quarks’ and ‘neutrinos’ does not uncritically presuppose that string theory—or indeed any other version of modern mathematical science—is the highest form of science, if by ‘highest’ we mean the

particular objects but at the ‘pure’ numbers or the eide, which are ‘supposed’ in thinking and imaged in the objects.” This way of thinking matters through to understand their foundations— what was known as the activity of the dianoia—is not confined to geometry or logistics “but obviously has an essential, perhaps the essential, part in all human activity and self-orientation.” And yet—and this is the key point—“[w]e must not overlook the fact that the procedure by ‘hypothesis’ [the sup-position of a noeton to be grasped in thought] is not a specifically ‘scientific’ method but is that original attitude of human reflection prior to all science which is revealed directly in speech as it exhibits and judges things” (73). This implies that that which is knowable in the highest sense (viz., objects of a purely noetic character such as mathematical objects), is “in fact always to some degree already known” (50). “Greek scientific arithmetic and logistic are founded on a ‘natural’ attitude to everything countable as we meet it in daily life. This closeness to its ‘natural’ basis is never betrayed in ancient science” (63). 53

Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.3. 983b27. See Joachim Ritter, “Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristoteles,” in Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 29. This is emphatically not to deny that such ‘myths’ as arise from our pre-scientific awareness of the world may just as well ‘hit the truth’ in other cases—indeed in perhaps the most important ones. See, specially, Metaphysics, 1074 b1 ff. where Aristotle claims that the ancients’ view that the “first substances” are “gods” was in fact “divinely spoken.”

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science that makes less arbitrary presuppositions and hence allows the most immediate access to the ‘things themselves’.54

‘Philosophy of human things’ II: Aristotle Socrates philosophized about “the human things” to “examine in them the truth of realities,” and in that sense his study of ‘the political’ may have been but a means of access to ‘the metaphysical’, or put differently: the ‘political things’ may have been the clue to what really concerned him as a philosopher, namely, ‘all things’.55 Aristotle, by contrast, is typically considered to have been the first thinker to make the political things, and more systematically, human praxis, the subject of an independent and self-enclosed science—of what he called the “philosophy of human affairs.”56 54

For different ways of addressing this problem, see Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics, I-II,” 293; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 68-69; Alfred N. Whitehead, “The British Association at Newcastle. Section A. Mathematical and Physical Science,” Nature 98, (September 28, 1916): 8081: “science is rooted in … the whole apparatus of common-sense thought. That is the datum from which it starts, and to which it must recur … You may polish up common sense, you may contradict it in detail, you may surprise it. But ultimately your whole task is to satisfy it.” (Cited in Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, 2 vols. edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 590.) 55

For the argument that Socrates, contrary to Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics, 987 b1, may not have neglected the study of nature (even in his later years), see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II, 45; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.6.1. Cf. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 249. It must be noted that in the Phaedo itself, Socrates resorts back to cosmology and myth (Ibid., 250-51). Cf. Plato, Laws, 803 b 4-6: “Of course, the affairs of human beings [anthropon pragmata] are not worthy of great seriousness; yet it is necessary to be serious about them.” 56

Nicomachean Ethics, 1181 b15 (“ἡ περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπεια φιλοσοφία”). See, for instance, HansGeorg Gadamer, “Die Begründung der Praktischen Philosophie,” in Gadamer, ed. and trans. Nikomachische Ethik VI (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998). Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (NY: Continuum, 1989), 312 (“By circumscribing the intellectualism of Socrates and Plato in his inquiry into the good, Aristotle became the founder of ethics as a

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This view is based on Aristotle’s famous distinctions between theoretical and practical wisdom; between the political and the philosophical lives; and between a theoretical philosophy, which deals with what happens necessarily, and a “philosophy of human affairs,” which deals with what happens only “for the most part.”57 Departing (at least on the surface) from the interconnection of right seeing and right acting that is presupposed in Socrates’ negative judgment of Pericles, Aristotle’s famous example contrasted the wisdoms, dispositions, and scientific concerns of ‘natural philosophers’ such as Thales and Anaxagoras with those of a statesman like Pericles. Thales and Anaxagoras, Aristotle suggested,

discipline independent of metaphysics.”); 21: (“Practical knowledge, phronesis, is another kind of knowledge.”) Compare various other views that differ concerning the reasons that lie behind Aristotle’s attempt to develop an independent ‘philosophy of human affairs’ but that nevertheless agree that this was in fact his true aim (namely, to argue for the autonomy of the practical): Franco Volpi, “The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and neo-Aristotelianism,” in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, 6. J. Ritter, “‘Politik’ und ‘Ethik’ in der praktischen Philosophie des Aristoteles,” in Metaphysik und Politik, 106-132, especially, 124-125. Stuart Umphrey, “Why Politike Philosophia,” 435, 441; Richard Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics, 77-81. Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem,” 313. Since no one, it seems, would disagree that Aristotle sought to emphasize the heterogeneity of the practical and the theoretical, perhaps the question is whether he did this merely exoterically or not. In other words, the problem is that he clearly and openly says both things: perhaps most clearly that theory is a form of praxis (in Politics 1325 b18). That the question needs to be rethought from its grounds will be the argument of the next chapter. 57

More exactly, Aristotle characterized the theoretical and the practical as different manifestations of human rationality, as different moral and intellectual dispositions, and as different sciences dealing with different regions of being. R. Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics, 13. See, e.g., Aristotle, On the Soul, 432 b25 ff.: “mind as speculative never thinks what is practicable.” What originates movement is rather “appetite [orexis] and practical thought [dianoia praktike]” (433 a15 ff.). Here the distinction between different manifestations of human rationality is clear. That “mind as speculative never thinks what is practicable,” however, seems to be contradicted by several passages, such as, e.g., Met. 982 b4 ff. which suggests that theoretical science “is the one which knows that for the sake of which each thing must be done, and this is the good in each case, and, in general, the highest good in the whole of nature.” For an analysis of this question, see Scott M. Dehart, “The Convergence of Praxis and Theoria in Aristotle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33: 1 January 1995: 7-27. For an analysis referring to the broader debate on the Aristotelian distinction between theory and praxis in the literature see Walter A. Brogan, “Gadamer’s Praise of Theory: Aristotle’s Friend and the Reciprocity Between Theory and Practice,” Research in Phenomenology, 32 (2002): 141-155.

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are wise (sophos) but not prudent (phronimos); they are not after human goods because they do not regard man as the highest thing in the world; and their science is not of things that can be achieved by human action but of things that cannot be other than they are.

This is why it is said that men like Anaxagoras and Thales have theoretical but not practical wisdom: when we see that they do not know what is advantageous to them, we admit that they know extraordinary, wonderful, difficult, and superhuman things, but call their knowledge useless because the good they are seeking is not human.58

What was Aristotle’s intention in developing an allegedly independent “philosophy of human affairs”? This is a much contested and complicated issue which cannot be fully addressed here. It will have to suffice to say the following. When Aristotle at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics says that his aim (there and in the Politics) is to complete “as far as possible” the “philosophy relating to human affairs”59 he may be said to be doing several things. One hypothesis is that Aristotle’s aim was to complete the task that Plato, for whatever reason, neglected in his own examinations of (political) life most notably by analyzing more than a hundred-and-fifty constitutions in order to systematize a ‘political theory’. This raises the question whether in turn this was meant, so to speak, for theory’s sake, that is, to make ‘a better theory’ which could accordingly 58

Arisotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1999), VI, 1141 b4-8. 59

NE, 10.1181b12-15.

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be ‘applied’ in a ‘technical’ way for the preservation of political regimes be they tyrannical or democratic, or whether this science was to serve the pedagogicalethical purpose of educating future legislators and was thus strictly speaking a ‘practical’ rather than ‘poietical’ (technological) science.60 Under the first assumption, the (Socratic-Platonic) unity of the questions, ‘What is it?’ and, ‘What good is it?’ would be severed while under the second it would be preserved. Under both assumptions the (Socratic-Platonic) view that sound theory and sound practice are ultimately the same would be abandoned, that is, the view that one becomes happy and good and ‘wise’ at the same time. Another hypothesis is that the “philosophy of human affairs” comprising ethics and politics is meant to complete the Socratic-Platonic program according to which encountering phenomena in their disclosure “is always a matter of ethos”;61 or, in other words, that the means of access to both ‘the human things’ and ‘all things’ is through the science Aristotle calls politike and which comprises ethics. ‘Political science’ is accordingly either a prelude to the study of ‘all things’—the science known as ‘the first philosophy’ or ‘metaphysics’—or it is itself ‘the first philosophy’. In any case, under this hypothesis, the rhetorical-political intention behind Aristotle’s demarcation between the practical and the theoretical becomes central: it is the popular or exoteric message that says that politics and philosophy, praxis and theory belong to different worlds—whereas, we could say, 60

Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und Aristoteles,” 280. 61

Claudia Baracchi, “The Nature of Reason and the Sublimity of First Philosophy: Toward a Reconfiguration of Aristotelian Interpretation,” Epoché, Volume 7, Number 2, 2003, 224.

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every true philosopher knows that ethics/politics is the all-encompassing; that it is both the access to what is human and to what reaches beyond it.

‘Political philosophy’? The notion of a “philosophy of human affairs” appears only once in Aristotle’s writings.62 The same holds for the phrase “political philosophy.”63 Another term that is often used to characterize Aristotle’s achievement, “practical philosophy,” does not appear in the corpus. “Ethics” is similarly absent.64 A final hypothesis must be considered as to why the founders of ‘political philosophy’ in fact pioneered the philosophy of human affairs but almost never used the terms we used to describe it: they may have seen the task of a philosophy of human affairs—in the fundamental sense of a theory of human praxis—as extremely difficult, if not indeed impossible. Yet again, what is perhaps most characteristic about the work of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is its attention to political reality—for both political and philosophical reasons. This is a consequence of the close interrelation (or even identity) between thinking, dialogue, speech, and praxis. Indeed, the most fundamental premise of Socratic thinking seems to be that we only know what we

62

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 10.1181 b12-15. Cf. Richard Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics, 78. 63

The sole occurrence is Politics III, 12, 1282 b23.

64

Hellmut Flashar (ed.), Die Philosophie der Antike, Vol. 3 (Stuttart: Schwabe, 1983), 336. Aristotle refers to ta ethika (Pol. 1261 a 31) and ethike theoria (Anal. post., 89 b9) but ‘ethics’ as a philosophical discipline is for him politike (Nic. Ethics, 1094 b 11).

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are thinking if we know what we are talking about—for instance, when we refer to such phenomena as acting or doing or willing or thinking itself. We only know these phenomena, however, if we look closely at what we are doing. Insofar as we are political beings, this requires that the focus of philosophical attention be political affairs.

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Concluding remarks

Perhaps no other twentieth century thinkers devoted as much time and attention to the question of the necessity and possibility of political philosophy as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Arendt and Strauss also stand unique for their attraction to Socrates for that reason, that is, for the fact that he has traditionally been considered to be the first political philosopher. These introductory remarks have served the purpose of beginning to explain the problem of the necessity and possibility of ‘Socratic’ political philosophy as it arises from the term ‘political philosophy’ itself. I have argued that to understand the necessity and possibility of political philosophy—and, to the extent that this was the question for Arendt and Strauss, the core of their projects—one must step behind the traditional Aristotelian distinctions and definitions of what concerns ‘politics’—e.g., ‘human affairs’ or ‘praxis’ generally—and ‘philosophy’—e.g., wisdom regarding what by nature ‘cannot be other than it is’ or ‘theoria’. These traditional distinctions and definitions, which still define the way we think, must be brought down or dismantled because of their unquestioned premises. These premises are, for instance, that ways of life— ‘active’ versus ‘contemplative’, ‘practical’ versus ‘theoretical’—can be meaningfully distinguished and even ranked in such terms (not to speak of such cruder terms as ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’); that political theory and philosophy deal with different regions of being or modes of discourse, e.g.,

34

with the ‘political, not metaphysical’; that there exists a ‘practical philosophy’ that is sufficient for orienting human praxis; or, indeed, as Strauss himself suggests, that “[t]he meaning of political philosophy and its meaningful character is as evident today as it always has been since the time when political philosophy came to light in Athens.”65 Such traditional distinctions and definitions (or characterizations) are generally inadequate when they are taken to be the true legacy of classical thought and, in particular, when they are used as a lens to understand the work of Arendt or Strauss.66 More importantly, they are inadequate, as I shall try to show in the chapters that follow, because they do not correspond—or indeed because they bar access—to the phenomena, for instance, to the way (theoretical) insight actually relates to praxis or to the sense in which ‘the political’ is ‘the metaphysical’. Attention to the historical and intellectual origins of the traditional vocabulary of ‘political philosophy’ gives rise to questions such as the following. What are the aims of a ‘philosophy of human affairs’ as allegedly pioneered by 65

Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?,” in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 10. 66

Perhaps the most common understanding of the political philosophizing of Arendt and Strauss is that they stood for opposite traditions. According to this view, Leo Strauss represents the tradition from Plato to Pascal according to which, in Ronald Beiner’s words, “what makes the philosopher a political philosopher … is first and foremost the concern for his own survival.”66 See Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue,” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 2. (May, 1990): 238-254, 248. Hannah Arendt, to the contrary, “represents but the latest expression of […] [that other tradition] running from Machiavelli to Heidegger,” which “celebrates ancient practice at the same time that it denigrates ancient theory” (239). Thus Beiner argues that “on the decisive question” of philosophy and politics “Arendt assumes a position … that is as radically antithetical to Strauss’s as any can be” (247). From this perspective Strauss is said to be fundamentally a Platonist, while Arendt is said to be at bottom a Kantian (at least, as concerns the question of the relation between philosophy and politics).

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Socrates? Is its aim to develop a ‘theory’ of human—and specifically, ‘political’—affairs to be applied in practice, say, as technical knowledge used for sustaining political regimes? Or is its aim, more simply and fundamentally, to ‘say what is’ or to ‘save the phenomena’ of what is more knowable and obvious to us, viz., human life as political life, such that a ‘political philosophy’ would be as self-evidently necessary to understanding human life as a ‘botany of plants’ is to understanding plants? Under that assumption, would the aim of political philosophy be to understand political life as it is, or would it be concerned with political life in its possible perfection? If such a perfection is not naturally determined (as we could say it is in the case of plants), would not political philosophy be the only properly ‘meta-physical’ study (in the sense of what considers possibilities ‘beyond nature’)? In other words, in this chapter I have suggested that ‘political philosophy’ may not have yet begun or that we may not be fully conscious of its import and potential. This import and potential was illustrated by the Nietzschean and Heideggerian references to Socrates as ‘the single turning point and vortex of socalled world history’ and as ‘the purest thinker of the West’. Granted that definitional problems (such as the inadequacy of referring to classical ‘political philosophy’) and reference to authorities (such as Nietzsche and Heidegger) are insufficient to argue for a rediscovery of the ‘philosophy of the human things’ pioneered by Socrates, the chapters that follow will point to the substantive arguments and historical reasons that make such a rediscovery necessary.

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CHAPTER ONE The Young Heidegger’s Political Philosophy (1922-1924)

Heidegger may have been the twentieth century’s greatest master of the art of reading. Yet the uniqueness of his hermeneutical approach also marked its limits. Thus, he famously argued that one had to understand Plato first of all as Aristotle understood him.1 One of the consequences of this way of proceeding, it seems, is that in reading the classics backwards—at least initially—he failed (and perhaps also neglected) to see the political context in which classical (PlatonicAristotelian) thought developed. As a result, there is a glaring lacunae, or, to use a more accurate Heideggerian term, a ‘missing’ or Versäumnis in Heidegger’s thought whose name is Socrates.2

1

“[T]he later ones always understand their predecessors better than the predecessors understood themselves […] What Aristotle said is what Plato placed at his disposal, only it is said more radically and developed more scientifically […] [B]ecause Aristotle was not followed by anyone greater, we are forced to leap into his own philosophical world in order to gain an orientation.” Indeed, “[t]here is no scientific understanding, i.e., historiographical return to Plato, without passage through Aristotle,” Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, [1924/25] 1997), 8, 131. See also Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, GA 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1924] 2002), 140. 2

For an analysis of Heidegger’s understanding of Socrates see Francisco Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006), 426-442.

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Yet beginning with Aristotle, in whose texts Heidegger dwelled for years before even beginning to think of Being and Time,3 meant necessarily to confront a thinker for whom, as we have seen, the “philosophy of human affairs” may have represented the unnamed (or only once named) core of philosophy; and insofar as the “philosophy of human affairs” is a Socratic program it meant implicitly to discover Socrates. This, at any rate, I shall argue, is the effect Heidegger had on both Arendt and Strauss: whether they ever saw Heidegger as a German Sokrates or not, it was Heidegger who for them, and arguably for twentieth century thought, ‘brought philosophy down from the heavens to the people in the city’ thus making Socratic ‘political philosophy’ thinkable again. The literature dealing with the influence of Heidegger on Arendt and Strauss is extensive.4 Yet the most hermeneutically sound approach to understanding this 3

See Theodore J. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 4

Recent studies of Arendt and Heidegger include: Andreas Großmann, “Rhetorik und Politik: Zu einer unausgetragenen Kontroverse zwischen Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger,” Philosophsiches Jahrbuch 115 (2008): 314-327; Jussi Backman, “Für das Wohnen denken. Heidegger, Arendt und die praktische Bessinung,” in Alfred Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2007). Peg Birmingham, “Heidegger and Arendt: The Birth of Political Action and Speech,” in François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (eds.), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 191-202. Jacques Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres à Heidegger”; “Performativité et grécomanie?,” in Sillages phénoménologiques: Auditeurs et lecteurs de Heidegger (Bruxelles; Paris: Editions Ousia, 2002). Theodore Kisiel, “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt,” in Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005); “Rhetoric, Politics, Romance. Arendt and Heidegger, 1924-26,” in James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray (eds.), Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death (New York: Continuum, 2002), 94-109. For earlier statements (from the 1990s), see Etienne Tassin, Le trésor perdu: Hannah Arendt: l'intelligence de l'action politique (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1999). J. Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997); “Bios politikos and bios theoretikos in the Phenomenology of Hannah Arendt,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4 (1996): 215-232. Dana Villa, “The Anxiety of Influence: On Arendt’s Relationship to Heidegger,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton

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influence has not been followed, that is, simply to read Heidegger from the start up to the moment—and especially at the moment—when Arendt and Strauss encountered him. This only began to become possible in a serious way in 1989 when the most concise statement of Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle—the

University Press, 1996). Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996). Richard J. Bernstein, “Provocation and Appropriation: Hannah Arendt’s Response to Martin Heidegger,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 4, no. 2 (October, 1997): 153-171. Margaret Canovan, “Socrates Or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, 1990: 135-165; Sergio Belardinelli, “Martin Heidegger und Hannah Arendts Begriff von ‘Welt’ und ‘Praxis’, in Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (eds.), Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990): 128-141. For studies written in the 1980s and 70s see Lewis P. and Sandra K. Hinchman. “In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” The Review of Politics 46, no. 2 (Apr., 1984): 183-211. Martin Jay, “The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981). James E. Miller, “The Pathos of Novelty: Hannah Arendt’s Image of Freedom in the Modern World,” in Melvin A. Hill (ed.), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (N.Y.: St. Martin’s, 1979), 177-208. Ernst Vollrath, “Politik undMetaphysik. Zum Politischen Denken Hannah Arendts,” Zeitschrift Für Politik XVIII, no. 3 (1971). For the relation between Heidegger and Strauss, see: Catherine Zuckert, “Leo Strauss: Jewish, Yes, but Heideggerian?” in Samuel Fleischacker (ed.), Heidegger's Jewish followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Lévinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 2008): 83-105; Richard L. Velkley, “On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss’s Natural Right and History as Response to Heidegger,” The Review of Politics 70, 2008: 245-259. Arthur M. Melzer, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism,” The American Political Science Review 100, no. 2 (May, 2006). David K. O’Connor, “Leo Strauss’s Aristotle and Martin Heidegger’s Politics,” in Aristide Tessitore (ed.), Aristotle and Modern Politics: The Persistence of Political Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Stanley Rosen, “Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Philosophy,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, 2000. Steven B. Smith, “Destruktion Or Recovery?: Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger,” The Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (December, 1997): 345-377. Laurence Berns, “Heidegger and Strauss: Temporality, Religion and Political Philosophy,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 27, no. 2 (Winter, 1999): 99-104; “The Prescientific World and Historicism: Some Reflections on Strauss, Heidegger, and Husserl,” in Alan Udoff (ed.), Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1991). Horst Mewes, “Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger: Greek Antiquity and the Meaning of Modernity,” in Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss : German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Luc Ferry, Rights: The New Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Hwa Yol Jung, “Heidegger and Strauss,” Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 17 (September, 1987): 205-218. James F. Ward, “Political Philosophy & History: The Links between Strauss & Heidegger,” Polity 20, no. 2 (Winter, 1987): 273-295.

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1922 ‘Natorp Report’—was recovered.5 This was soon followed, in 1992, by the publication of the 1924/25 reading of Plato’s Sophist.6 Yet that made the picture far from complete. Indeed, what seems to have been the most important lecture of the time for both Arendt and Strauss, the 1924 lecture on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, was only published in 2002,7 while the course that Strauss attended, the Summer Semester of 1922 interpretation concerned mainly with Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha, only became public in 2005.8 There are no studies to date on the impact

5

First published in English as Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation.” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992. 6

M. Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes, GA 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992).

7

Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. GA 18. Despite the fact that Strauss only seems to have audited the 1922 Summer Semester course, we know that the publication of the 1924 lecture on the Rhetoric, in particular, was possible in part thanks to the notes taken by Strauss’s closest friend, Jacob Klein. (See the epilogue to Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 409 f.) That Strauss knew this lecture is corroborated by his students. Stanley Rosen recalls that “…my own teacher Leo Strauss…spoke of a seminar on Aristotle’s Rhetoric that contained an ontology of the human passions.” “Phronesis Or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger,” in Riccardo Pozzo (ed.), The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 11. See also Harvey C. Mansfield’s remarks concerning Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotle’s Physics in Peter Kielmansegg et. als. (eds.), Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World War II, 170. Arendt met Heidegger in the Winter Semester of 1924/25 and was therefore not present in the SS 1924 Rhetoric course. There is also no evidence that she had access to the transcript of that course. The case that the Heidegger of SS 1924 is nevertheless the most proximate to Arendt’s phenomenology of the political has been made by Theodore Kisiel on the assumption that Heidegger’s mentoring of Arendt must have gone far beyond the official university courses. (See his “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt.”) I agree with Kisiel, but I shall develop my case beginning with the hypothesis that Arendt—like Strauss, Jonas, Gadamer, and other students—thought largely against the Heidegger of Being and Time by going back to an earlier Heidegger. For evidence that Arendt at least knew of SS 1924 lecture see her “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Ursula Ludz (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2004), 153-54. (We shall return to this.) 8

M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1922] 2005).

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those lectures had on Arendt and Strauss.9 A central aim of this dissertation is to fill that gap.

9

Cf., however, the analyses that point in that direction (though only with respect to Arendt) in Theodore Kisiel, “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt,” as well as Daniel M. Gross, “Introduction. Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology,” in Gross and Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 10-11.

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“Wie Du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben?” Heidegger’s Turn From Theology to Philosophy to Political Philosophy (1911-1922) As is now well known, Heidegger began his philosophic career as a neoScholastic apologist of Catholicism, and only became who he was by turning against himself, or by what he called an eigen-Destruktion (self-Destruktion).10 Yet, as he himself conceded and as the term Destruktion suggests—not destruction but dismantling or ‘taking down’—his turn against his earlier self was a turn against old answers but not against the old or originary questions.11 As Heidegger put it in one of his most telling autobiographical remarks: “Without this theological origin I would never have arrived on the path of thinking.”12

10

Heidegger refers to his “self-destruktion” [Eigendestruktion] in a letter to Löwith written on October 9, 1920. Cited in Otto Pöggeler, “Heideggers Luther-Lektüre im Freiburger Theologenkonvikt,” in Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens. Heidegger-Jahrbuch. Vol. 1 (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2004), 192. 11

The Freiburg professor Julius Ebbinghaus remarks in a letter to Heidegger that he “vividly remembers that you once, in our early Freiburg days…said to me that the field in which you would think of philosophical production at all would be the field of religious questions.” November 22, 1950 cited in Ibid., 195. 12

Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. GA 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1959] 1985), 96. Cited in Holger Zaborowski, “‘Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.’ Anmerkungen zur religösen und theologischen Dimension des Denkweges Martin Heideggers bis 1919,” in Denker, et. als. (eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, 123. The publication of Heidegger’s early lectures has made it possible for scholars to bridge a gap of more than a decade of silence between Heidegger’s 1916 qualifying dissertation on Duns Scotus which still fell in the orbit of neo-Scholastic thought and his existentialist masterwork, Being and Time (1927). See Theodore J. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).

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From theo-logy to ‘logic’ (1909-1915) Heidegger’s call to scholarship as a vocation was originally a call to neoScholastic theology. During his two years as a seminarian (1909-1911) and during his early studies of philosophy and the natural sciences (1912-1915), Heidegger looked for an answer to the questions concerning how to live and think and what is the structure of reality in religious faith and in theory—both conceived as complementary means of access to the eternal truths of Christianity. Specifically, Heidegger first understood philosophy as apology: philosophy’s mission was to defend the “basic truths of Christianity” from the trends of modern life and thought as manifested in its “unchecked autonomism,” immanentism, and biologistic naturalism. Philosophy was to be a “mirror of the eternal” and as such the preserver of the “treasure of truths” of the church. 13 Gradually, however, Heidegger’s efforts to preserve the “transcendent value of life”14 and the transcendent sense of reality (or the reality of ideality,

13

See Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics,” Der Akademiker 3, No. 5 [March, 1911]: 66-67, in Theodore Kisiel, and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 15 (“basic truths of Christianity”). Review of Fr. W. Förster, Authority and Freedom: Observations on the Cultural Problem of the Church, Der Akademiker 2, [May 1910]: 109-10, in Ibid., 13 (“unchecked autonomatism”). “On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics,” in Ibid., 14-15 (“treasure of truths”). “A strict, ice-cold logic is inimical to the refined feelings of the modern soul. ‘Thinking’ can no longer allow itself to be confined within the unshakeable eternal limits of fundamental logical positions. There we have it already. To strictly logical thought…to each truly presuppositionless scientific work, there belongs a certain base of ethical power, the art of getting hold of oneself and externalizing oneself. It is indeed already a banality: today worldviews are cut to fit ‘life’, instead of viceversa.” Ibid. 14

“The ground-destroying rage for the new, the crazed leaping over the deeper spiritual content of life and art, the sense of modern life oriented toward continually self-cancelling momentary stimulations…are moments which point toward a decadence, toward a pathetic revolt against the health and the transcendent value of life.” Heidegger, “Abraham a Sankta Clara,” GA 13 ([1910]

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notably in the realm of logic) became less apologetic and more philosophic. That is, Heidegger ceased to conceive theory as a way of sustaining religious faith and instead began to see it as a placeholder for a transcendental realm of validity.15 This shift occurred under the influence of two strands of thought which, like neoScholasticism but from an a-theological perspective, were also responding to the naturalist tendencies of the time—Heinrich Rickert’s brand of neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s understanding of philosophy as ‘rigorous science’.16 Common to these two forms of transcendental philosophizing was the attempt to limit the growing dominance of the natural sciences by establishing the irreducibility of logic to the spatiotemporal reality of the physical and psychical worlds.17 1983), cited in Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 209-210. 15

See “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” in Frühe Schriften. GA 1 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1912] 1972), 24. “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy,” in Kisiel and Sheehan (eds.), Becoming Heidegger, 20-29. 16

Rickert was Heidegger’s mentor at Freiburg from 1911 to 1916. Heidegger’s qualifying dissertation is dedicated to him. See M. Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. In Frühe Schriften. GA 1 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1916] 1972). For Heidegger’s complicated relation to Rickert and Neo-Kantianism more generally, see Michael Steinmann, “Der frühe Heidegger und sein Verhältnis zum Neukantianismus,” in Denker, et. als. (eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, 259-293. Husserl arrived in Freiburg in 1916. Heidegger and Husserl began to develop a very close relationship the following year. In 1919 Heidegger (by then a Privatdozent) became Husserl’s assistant; his task was to be the development of a phenomenology of religion. See Hans-Helmuth Gander, “Phänomenologie im Übergang: zu Heideggers Auseinandersetzung mit Husserl,” in Ibid., 296. 17

Specifically, Heidegger stressed the “irreducible atemporal validity of sense and value,” that is, of that realm of reality of which one must say not that it ‘exists’ or that ‘it is’ but that es gilt, it validates, it has validity. Validity, Heidegger argued, is the “transcendental condition of knowing” beings: “I know and can only know about reality in and through what has validity.” Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, 166, 23. Quoted in John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 69. Thus, for instance, “The being-yellow of the bookcover always validates, but never exists,” and what makes the statement ‘the bookcover is yellow’ true is not, or not primarily, the psychical (spatiotemporal) activity of judging the bookcover to be yellow but the intentional determination of the book-as-yellow which is then ‘fulfilled’ by the sensible book itself. Die Kategorien, GA1, 170, as cited in Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 68-69. Thus,

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This scientific impulse notwithstanding, Heidegger’s philosophical quest throughout these years remained driven by a religious call. As he put it in 1915, his “scientific lifework was in the service of making Scholastic thought more readily available for the spiritual struggle for the future of the Christian-Catholic ideal of life.”18

From ‘theo-logics’ to ‘history and life’ (1916-1922) Soon, however, this relation between theology and ‘scientific lifework’ would be inverted. Heidegger began to undertake a scientific/philosophical interrogation of religious life and thought which would eventually lead him to see in religious faith the “mortal enemy” of philosophy.19 The nature of this transformation, which set the direction of Heidegger’s unique philosophical undertaking, is well captured by a letter he wrote in 1919 to the theologian Engelbert Krebs. There Heidegger writes that “over the last two years I have struggled for a basic clarification of my philosophical position.” Specifically, “[e]pistemological insights that extend to the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of

“Insofar as knowledge is sought and gained of them, all regions of reality are able to be encountered through nonsensuous valid forms of sense” (GA 1, 277-287; cited in Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 71. See also, 65, 60.) 18

Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (München: C. Hanser Verlag, 1994), 63. 19

See the 1927 lecture “Phenomenology and Theology,” in M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39-62. “…faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy…Faith is so absolutely the mortal enemy that philosophy does not even begin to want in any way to do battle with it” (53).

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Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me—but not Christianity and metaphysics, which, however, [I now understand] in a new sense.”20 The key to this transformation was Heidegger’s discovery of historicity, or of the fact that, as he put it in 1916, “living mind and spirit is as nature historical mind and spirit.”21 Taking seriously that “all sense and meaning originate in man and his history”22 meant for Heidegger that one must reject the ‘sense and meaning’ of any supratemporal and universalistic claim, or of any claim that is based on experiences that have somehow become historically unavailable. Heidegger’s thinking after World War I would thus be characterized by an explicitly anti-theoretical (and indeed ‘anti-philosophical’) impulse directed against the supratemporal and universalistic pretensions of both theology and philosophy.23 Christianity, or generally the quest for an authentically spiritual life 20

See “Letter to Engelbert Krebs on His Philosophical Conversion,” in Van Buren and Sheehan (eds.), Becoming Heidegger, 96. 21

Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. GA 1 [1916], 407 [check].

22

In Dilthey’s words quoted in Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland, 169.

23

See e.g., Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. GA 60 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1918/19] 1995), 13 (“keine Theorien!”), 16 (“Theoretisierung…hat…aus der Philosophie zu verschwinden.”) For Heidegger’s stance against the “Generalherrschaft des Theoretischen” or “General domination of the theoretical,” see Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie und Transzendentale Wertphilosophie. GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1919] 1987), 84-94 (here, 87). “It is my conviction that philosophy is at an end. We stand before completely new tasks that have nothing to do with traditional philosophy.” Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, [1923-24]1994), 1. This must also be understood in historical context. In 1914 the Roman congregation had named Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth century interpreter and systematizer of Aristotle, the only valid source of doctrinal authority within the church. Heidegger’s strange (comical, visceral) reaction is recorded in a letter to Krebs of 19 July, 1914. The brains of these people, says Heidegger, might as well have been removed and replaced by “italienischen Salat.” See Johannes Schaber, “Martin Heideggers ‘Herkunft’ im Spiegel der Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte des 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Denker, et. als. (eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, 166.

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as the measure for a human life, and metaphysics, or the quest for understanding ‘what is on the whole’, remained Heidegger’s guiding questions—this, however, “in a new sense.” Henceforth, Heidegger would start from the assumption that any possible account of a religious or spiritual life and any possible account of the whole of being must first grasp temporality as the defining dimension of human existence. Thus quite suddenly and radically, Heidegger’s thought turned against its earlier focus on the a-temporal being of logical propositions as accessible through philosophical theory towards the temporal and finite being of man as lived and expressed in Christian religious thought. Led by his study of the great antisystematizers and destroyers of theological Aristotelianism, especially Luther and Kierkegaard, Heidegger found in the spirit of early Christianity captured in the writings of Paul, the “deepest historical paradigm of the world of inner experience,” or as he also put it, of “live[d] temporality as such.”24 Living temporality as such means knowing oneself to be part of a community that ‘has become’ and that anxiously and wakefully waits for a transforming event, viz., the second coming of Christ. As Heidegger explained in 1918/19, this is a waiting which is “radically different from any other

24 Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20). GA 58 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1919/20] 1993), 61. Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. GA, 60 [1918/19], 80. In the Winter Semester course of 1919-20 Heidegger referred to Christianity as a “great revolution against ancient science, against Aristotle above all”—a revolution “shifting the centre of gravity of factical life and the lifeworld into the selfworld and the world of inward experience.” Cited in Van Buren, The Young Heidegger,168.

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expectation.”25 It is different in that the parousia is certain to happen, but its time and content cannot be predetermined. Hence what is decisive is how the Christian’s life is constituted by that sense of temporality. In this regard, Heidegger would put particular emphasis on the revelatory potentialities of the expected moment (the kairos) or ‘Augen-blick’, literally meaning—as Kierkegaard already had noted—a ‘blink or glance of the eye’, an eye-opening moment in which one becomes aware of one’s situation.26 Heidegger’s discovery of lived historicity in early Christianity was essential for the development of his thought. However, the paradigm of early Christianity remained, after all, a remote reference that could hardly speak to what Heidegger came to see as “the decisive problem,” namely (contemporary) “history and life.” Thus Heidegger’s project became nothing less than a refounding of philosophy against what he called the “tyranny of the theoretical,” not for the sake of the “primacy of the practical” but “because the theoretical itself points to the pre-theoretical.”27 25

Heidegger, Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens [1918/19], 102.

26

Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 193. “But your are not in the darkness for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of the light and children of the day; we belong not to the night and the darkness. So then let us not sleep like the others, but rather remain wakeful, watchful, and sober” (I Thess. 5: 4-8). Cf. Mark, I, 15. For a reading of Heidegger’s thought from the 1920s to his post-Kehre works taking the notion of the ‘Augenblick’ as leitmotif—specifically as the point of convergence of theory and praxis—see William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). 27

Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 1. Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem. GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1919] 1987), 59. See also 87 (against the “Generalherrschaft des Theoretischen”). For the critique of the primacy of the practical see 138, 143: “die Lehre vom Primat der praktischen Vernunft […ist] die Fundierung des theoretischen, wissenchaftlichen Denkens im praktischen Glauben und Willen zur Wahrheit…” the aim is to bring together thinking and willing; 145: “Die Philosophie hat…die Bestimmung,

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The question, in other words, became for Heidegger, how to begin to philosophize, and specifically, how to begin to philosophize about life—how to understand life. Against the “tyranny of the theoretical,” this means: against the traditional priority accorded to the objectifying gaze of theoretical seeing as the means par excellence of encountering the world. But also against the “primacy of the practical” or the alternative to this which claims that it is not through thoughts aiming at objects that we discover the world but through the activity of conferring meaning to the world through the construction of worldviews that guide our (practical) willing and acting in it.28 Thus, beyond the primacy of the theoretical and the practical, Heidegger’s quest was for what Franco Volpi calls “that strange modification of life” that makes it possible to see life from within life itself, that is, to see life without theoretically standing outside it but yet removed enough to think and be able to say something about life.29 In the last chapter we suggested that this ‘strange modification’ was pioneered by Socrates, and that from it resulted the project of what can variously—though always anachronistically and hence never quite accurately—be called ‘practical philosophy’ or ‘theory of praxis’ or ‘political philosophy’. Strauss met Heidegger at the moment when Heidegger became a ‘political ‘das Gesamtbewusstsein von den höchsten Werten des Menschelebens zu sein’”; 146; 153: “Entsprechend den drei Formen von in sich absolute Geltung beanspruchenden Beurteilungen gibt es drei philosophische Grundwissenschaften: Logik, Ethik, Aesthetik.” 28

See, e.g., Heinrich Rickert, “Vom Begriff der Philosophie,” Logos 1 (1910/11), 13, 2, 6. E. Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Quentin Lauer (ed.), Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71. 29

Franco Volpi, “Heidegger und der Neoaristotelismus,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles, 222.

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philosopher’ in this sense. The occasion was the first of a series of phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle which Heidegger presented in the summer of 1922.

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Who is the True Philosophos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha, 1-2 (SS 1922) As the recently published transcript of Heidegger’s summer semester of 1922 lecture shows,30 what Strauss and Karl Löwith (to name but the most famous of this early generation of Heidegger’s students) encountered was something deceptively simple: a sentence by sentence in-class translation of three or four pages of a classic text that would take most of the semester.31 Not even a commentary on how philosophy first arose according to Aristotle; just slow reading, sentence by sentence. When during that summer Heidegger finally finished reading and translating into ordinary German the opening of the Metaphysics and began to interpret it, he explained that Aristotle’s goal there was “the determination of true understanding (sophia); its how-being in its how-becoming” (53).

30 Heidegger,

Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62. The lecture course lasted from the first week of May to 28 July 1922. See the Epilogue in Ibid., 422. 31

The best-known auditors of the lecture are mentioned in the epilogue to GA 62, 422. That “Herr Strauss aus Kirchhein” was present and deeply impressed is testified in a letter from Paul Natorp to Husserl of October 30, 1922. See Karl Schuhmann (ed.), Edmund Husserl. Briefwechsel, Band V: Die Neukantianer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 161. Cited in GA62, 422. Natorp was professor at Marburg where Strauss was a student. Heidegger would apply for a position in Marburg a few months later sending to Natorp what is known as the ‘Natorp report’ referred to earlier. What Gadamer called his “elektrischer Schlag” upon discovering Heidegger was experienced thanks to this report which Natorp showed him. See “Erinnerungen an Heidegger’s Anfänge,” (1986) in Hans Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990), Vol. 10, 4 (“Die Lektüre dieses Manuskripts berührte mich wie ein elektrischer Schlag.”). Heidegger began teaching at Marburg in the Winter of 1923.

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Through his reading of the beginning of the Metaphysics Heidegger sought to point to the following problem. Wisdom (sophia) for Aristotle is an eminently—and in almost any conceivable sense—‘practical’ matter—except for the fact that Aristotle explicitly calls it “theoretical.” Heidegger’s task in the course thus became to understand Aristotle’s originary conception of the theoretical and the practical as it emerged from the ancient Greek experience of the world, and to show that theory was not understood as passive contemplation but as praxis in the highest sense—indeed as the highest praxis. Wherein, then, does the practicality of theory reside for Aristotle? And why does it nevertheless become ‘theoretical’?

The practicality of theory In his courses of the early 1920s and up to Being and Time (1927) Heidegger repeatedly returned to the beginning of the Metaphysics.32 This locus classicus mattered for Heidegger, not because, as Hegel for instance would have it, it is the authoritative account of the history of philosophy in ancient Greece— culminating, moreover, in the Hegelian view that philosophy is speculative science33—but quite opposite to this, because in it the concept of philosophy is

32

On this see William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory. 33

For Hegel the definitive history of Greek philosophy was written by Aristotle, whose thinking represents the culmination of the effort begun by the first philosophers. See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 166167. Cf. Joachim Ritter, “Aristoteles und die Vorsokratiker,” Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 34.

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found through a phenomenological account of the way the philosophizing human being lives in philosophy.34 Most immediately indicative of this is the fact that Aristotle characterizes the increasing degrees of understanding leading to wisdom as a ‘more’ of (our everyday) ‘seeing’ (mallista eidenai). Thus the opening line, “All men by nature desire to know” (pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei) says more literally that all men by nature desire to see (eidenai). So too the difference between he who masters an art and he who lives by experience is that the craftsman ‘sees more’: “…we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge)” (Met. A1, 981a24-b6): literally, on “eidenai mallon” or “seeing more” in Heidegger’s translation (25). Again: “Hence we think that the masterworkers in each craft are more honorable and know in a truer sense [mallon eidenai]”: Heidegger translates: “the master worker sees more … than the manual worker.” Finally, referring to the highest degree of wisdom: “the knowledge of everything must necessarily belong to him who in the highest degree [mallista (einai)] possesses knowledge of the universal…” (982a23): literally, to him who ‘sees most’. Heidegger’s central point here is that in determining the meaning of philosophy Aristotle “goes along with the factical tendencies of interpretation of

34

See Walter Bröcker, Aristoteles (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1964), 9.

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factical life” (78). The “‘seeing’ understanding” [hinsehende Verstehen] is “a How of going about and a How of life [ein Wie des Umgehens und ein Wie des Lebens]” (85). “Sophia is the malista of the … illumination that emerges from and is bound to life [das malista der bestimmt herkünftigen und lebenverflochtenen Erhellung]” (79). Finally: “the expression ‘to understand’ [Verstehen] … grows out of the sphere from which every ‘looking at’ [Hinsehen] grows: from [the sphere] of [everyday] going about [Umgehen], for example, ‘one understands one’s craft’” (307). Thus, there would seem to be nothing ‘theoretical’ about wisdom, if, by theoretical we mean ‘abstract’ or belonging to a sphere that need not have any relation whatsoever with ‘actual practice’ (as in: ‘that may be true in theory but it does not hold in practice’).35 And yet even though wisdom has nothing to do with abstraction, it is nevertheless characterized by Aristotle as theoretical (982b9)— indeed, as we shall see, as ‘theological’.

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A comparison with Kant at this point will prove illuminating. In “On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice” Kant illustrates his own understanding of the relation between theory and practice by reference to an example drawn from modern warfare. Kant says: if artillery fails to hit the target and it is said ‘that may be finely thought out in theory but it doesn’t hold in practice’; this cannot be held against theory’s abstraction but exactly to the opposite: the theory is not theoretical enough. To the mathematical theory of flying bombshells must be added that of air resistance. Aristotle, it seems, could not possibly have said that a theory is ‘not theoretical enough’ because, at least in the account given in the beginning of the Metaphysics, experience is an essential step towards science, and more specifically, art or techne functions as an essential mediation between praxis and theory. See, for instance, Met., 981a12-b3, beginning as follows: “Experience [empeiria] does not seem to differ from art where something is to be done; in fact, we observe that men of experience succeed more than men who have the theory [logon echonton] but have no experience.” For a closer look at the comparison between Aristotle and Kant see Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und Aristoteles,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 76, 1968-1969, specially, 264-268. The references to Kant are from Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 279-280.

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What, then, did Aristotle have in mind when he used the word ‘theoretical’ for the first recorded time in western history? Heidegger insists that the term must be understood as arising from the self-illumination of life in its everyday going about the world. This applies even (and especially) for that other classical statement of the Metaphysics where philosophy is described as “a science which investigates [or theorizes: theorei] being as being and what belongs essentially to it” (1003a21 f.). As Heidegger would repeatedly stress in what became perhaps his central interpretive point during those years, the terms used by Aristotle to refer to being, “Ta onta— ousia—on,” derive from the common term used to refer to ‘stock’, or the availability of, say, grain: “Hausstand” (96). In the Greek understanding of being, “[o]usia means … die Habe, den Hausstand. What is thereby meant is the proximate world of [everyday] concerns…” Hence the term must be understood “from the Greek tendency towards the illumination of one’s own life” (308). Heidegger corroborates his interpretation by reference to other key terms—to take but one: Aristotle famously says that it is “because of their wondering that men began to philosophize and do so now. First, they wondered at the difficulties close at hand; then, advancing little by little, they discussed difficulties also about greater matters…” (982b9ff.) Again, this ‘stopping by’ to wonder at ‘difficulties close at hand’ when one is literally ‘without a way’

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(aporos or ‘unwegsam’ in Heidegger’s translation) expresses the movement of everyday life out of which philosophizing arises (95-96).36 In short, then, there is nothing ‘abstract’ about philosophizing and nothing ‘metaphysical’ about it—to refer to another post-Aristotelian term used to refer to the core of Aristotle’s philosophy—if by ‘meta-physical’ is meant a “turn[ing] away from the physika” towards “knowledge of the suprasensous,” or towards knowledge of “those beings that lie behind and above other beings.”37 The question, however, remains: how is it that western thought still came to understand philosophy precisely as ‘metaphysics’ or as ‘speculation’ or otherworldly ‘contemplation’ or (in modernity) as hypothesis construction, thus making its province anything but life as it is lived—indeed, as it is (always already) politically lived, as Arendt and Strauss and Heidegger (at least in 1924) would argue?

The divinity of theory and the problem of ethics The theory-praxis relation had a very specific Greek meaning, Heidegger argued. The Greek understanding of theory and praxis is that theory is but an extension and intensification of praxis. It is “the highest praxis” (111) such that for the

36

On this point, see also Grundbegriffe, GA 18, 159-162 (“Das porein hat zum Ziel das euporein, das “in-der-rechten-Weise-Durchkommen’ zu dem, wonach gefragt ist.” ) Plato's Sophist, 88 (Aporia “characterizes the peculiar intermediate position of Dasein itself over and against the world. It characterizes a peculiar being underway of Dasein: in a certain sense knowing beings and yet not getting through.”) 37

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39, 40, 43.

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Greeks “the true bios praktikos is the bios theoretikos” (309). This conception has its roots in a particular understanding of the movement of life. Theoria is “the How of life in which its movement, its Being comes purely to its own … in true understanding the true movement of life comes into the open” (97). The wonder of theoria is accordingly “no standing still, but an … intensification of the movement of care” (308; cf. 95). Following its own movement, however, the care of theoria advances “little by little” beyond wonder at the surrounding world to confront the world (95). The care of dealings becomes directed solely to what is lasting; factical life turns to a different way of dealing with its world: the world is there differently, or rather it “looks at all like this or that for the first time” (66; cf. 317). The “theoretical” becomes a “new way of factical life” (317)—viz. a life of leisure—which is careless (112 n. 3; 115, n. 2) and which no longer observes the life in which it is (389). These are the origins of the separation of the theoretical from the practical that extends all the way to Kant and our own time (309). And it is at this point that Heidegger’s recovery of Aristotle turns into Destruktion. Heidegger traced philosophy’s disregard of life—of its own meaning as a way rather than a completion of life—to a particular understanding of the divine. The seeing of theoria is the highest and most ‘divine’ praxis because it most purely resembles

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the eternal movement of the divine.38 According to Heidegger, the pure seeing of divine theoria is the fundamental experience in which life and the world are ‘there’ for the Greeks (251). Because being is understood from the standpoint of theoria, and that means from the experience of completed or finished movement, accidental being—“precisely the being other from everything else, the Being of what is precisely now so for this factical going-about” (251-52)—is treated by the Greeks as close to nonbeing: of such being there can be no science. Philosophy thus reveals itself in the end not as a way of life but as an escape from it (37, 316-17). Indeed, in its privileging of theoria as the completion of the movement of life (110), philosophy covers over the fact that life in its ‘factical’ historical ‘there’ is open-ended possibility that can never be completed (cf. 113). More generally, the regard of theoria for the permanent means that it never has eyes for life as it is lived, for the destiny of man, for natality and mortality (269 f.). Instead, from the standpoint of theoria human life starts to be seen as one more thing in the world that can be completed and thus produced in some ideal form. Human life begins to speak “the language of the world”: instead of speaking “for itself on the basis of its very own factical possibilities,” it begins to refer to the “‘nature’ of the human being’, or to ‘human Dasein in a desired perfection and heavenly naturalness.”39 It begins to speak of ethical questions

38

M. Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der Hermeneutischen Situation),” in Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62, 389. 39

Ibid., pp. 358, 363, 367, 356.

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from the perspective of a science of objects. It begins to assume that a techne politike as the quest for ‘the common good’ is possible and necessary.40 Heidegger’s project henceforth became to conceive of an alternative genesis of theoria. Beyond the ‘natural’ genesis described by Aristotle, Heidegger would propose an ‘existential’ genesis.41 Beyond, or prior, to the bifurcation of the practical and the theoretical, Heidegger would show that the theoretical points to the pre-theoretical, to life as it is lived. In Heidegger’s lectures of the summer of 1924 his phenomenology turned to life as it is lived politically.42

40

Cf. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, GA 18, 79.

41

See Sein und Zeit and, generally, McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory. 42

In both the lectures of the summer of 1924, recently published as Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (2002), and of the winter of 1925/25 which was published in 1992 as Plato’s Sophist. Concerning the latter, Stanley Rosen has written that “I can say without hesitation that the analysis of the Sophist is entirely superior to any subsequent Heideggerian interpretation of Plato known to me.” The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 317. According to Theodore Kisiel, SS 1924 is one of Heidegger’s “greatest courses, breaking ground not merely in Greek philosophy but also for his entire path of thought.” The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 283.

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Who is the True Politikos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric (SS 1924) “No philosophy will be offered here, not even history of philosophy”—thus Heidegger introduced his reading of Aristotle of the summer semester of 1924. Heidegger’s lecture, Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, ran from May 1st to July 31st.43 Several young philosophers whose thinking would be decisively shaped by Heidegger’s lectures were present—among them, Walter Bröcker, Jacob Klein, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith. As the stenographical notes made by Bröcker and preserved in the archives of Herbert Marcuse until their publication in 2002 show, Heidegger went on to note that “If philology means: the passion to know what is spoken, then that which we will do here is philology” (4). “About Aristotle, his philosophy, and his development, you can find everything in the book of the classical philologist Jaeger … When it comes to the personality of 43

This lecture has received considerable attention in the literature. See Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric. William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos (N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2006), ch. 3, 77-95. Jacques Taminiaux, “Le bios politikos dans l’enseignement de Marbourg,” in Taminiaux, Sillages Phénoménologiques. Stuart Elden, “Reading Logos as Speech: Heidegger, Aristotle and Rhetorical Politics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2005. Robert Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles. Theodore Kisiel, “Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger’s Protopractical Ontology 1923–25: The French Occupy the Ruhr,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8, no. 2 (07, 2000): 185-208. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 276-308; Paul Christopher Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998); “The Uses and Abuses of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: The Lecture Course, Summer, 1924,” in Babette E. Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995). Friederike Rese, “Praxis and Logos in Aristotle. On the Meaning of Reason and Speech for Human Life and Action,” in Epoche 9/2 (2005); Charlotta Weigelt, The Logic of Life. Heidegger’s Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of Logos (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2002). Allen Scult, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric as Ontology: A Heideggerian Reading,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1999. See also the bibliography on the general theme of Heidegger and rhetoric in Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, op. cit.

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a philosopher only this is of interest: he was born then and then, he worked and he died” (4-5).44 Heidegger described the objective of the course as learning from Aristotle what it means to pursue science as a way of “speaking with the world.” Through an analysis of the meaning of some of the basic concepts of Aristotelian philosophizing, such as “[l]ife, movement, knowledge, truth,” Heidegger proposed simply to see what Aristotle is talking about when he is talking about these things: “which things are meant in these concepts, how these things are experienced, what they refer to…” This attempt at grasping what conceptuality (Begrifflichkeit) means, in turn, is meant to grow into “insight and familiarity with the requirements and possibilities of scientific investigation,” (333) which, says Heidegger, is not (as Weber would have it) a vocation but “the possibility of the existence of man,” the possibility namely “[for existence] to stand exclusively on its own, to make do without belief, without religion and the like” (6).

44

Jaeger’s groundbreaking developmental approach to reading Aristotle had just appeared. See W. Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, trans. Richard Robinson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, second ed., [1923] 1948). For Gadamer, at least, Jaeger’s book made it clear that one could not “trust in the results in philosophical research without any critical resources of one’s own. Philosophical and philological questions cannot be posed independently of each other.” Heidegger polemizes against Jaeger in the lecture and yet he is one of the few resources he does use to illuminate Aristotle (whereas “no philosophical authorities whatsoever are admitted as interpretive aids.”) See Mark Michalski, “Hermeneutic Phenomenology as Philology,” in Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 68 (my emphasis). (Gadamer’s view is quoted from Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie (Tubingen: Mohr, 1999), 139.) On the relation between Jaeger and Heidegger in a later stage of their career, see Frank H. W. Edler, “Heidegger and Werner Jaeger on the Eve of 1933: A Possible Rapprochement?” Research in Phenomenology 27, (1997): 122-149. For the context of the lecture it should also be considered what Aristotle stood for in the Marburg Mecca of Neo-Kantianism. At least in Heidegger’s view, Professor Hermann Cohen (the father of Neo-Kantianism) “saw Aristotle as a pharmacist, merely pasting labels on what exists.” As for Professor Natorp, he “understood philosophy to be Plato and Kant.” See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Restricted Conception of Rhetoric,” in Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 166.

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The central premise of the lecture may be said to be that thinking (through concepts) requires a ground or a soil, that is, that concepts cannot, as it were, fall from the sky, but rather must express some experience. Heidegger’s term for this is Bodenständigkeit, meaning literally ground- or soil-‘standingness’. Heidegger takes Aristotle to be the first truly bodenständig thinker, and indeed, it would seem, the only such thinker so far: previous to him, Plato did not have this capacity (26, 37), and the same can be said of that possibility of contemporary thought (the reference is here to Husserl) which should presumably be closest to ‘the things themselves’, but which still seeks to find ‘essences’ without clarifying what essence is (40).45 The aim, however, is not to learn to use and apply Aristotelian concepts, but for students to learn “to have a true and correct and serious relation to the matters of their respective sciences”; or differently put, “to do what Aristotle did in the place and the context of his research with your own research, namely to see and determine the matter in the same originality and genuineness” (15). Specifically, Heidegger argued that genuine, that is, bodenständig conceptuality, and with it genuine science, arise not from seeing or from theorizing but from the decision “radically to speak with the world” (40).46

45

See Heidegger’s critique of Plato in this regard in the lecture on the Sophist of the following term (1924/25), especially p. 59. 46

Cf., 18: “Die in den Grundbegriffen gemeinte Begrifflichkeit ist sachgebende Grunderfahrung, kein theoretisches Erfassen der Dinge.”

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Being More or Less Political: Politics, Book I ‘Speaking with the world’ through logos, Heidegger argues, is “the fundamental determination of the Being of man as such” from which the Greek definition of man as zoon logon echon must be understood (18). This is not only a philosophical definition but the expression of the ancient Greek’s understanding of man as “a living being that [as living being] possesses speech,” or as a living being for whom “being-in-the-world is determined in its grounds by speech,” by a “speaking with, about, of [the world]” (18).47 Heidegger refers to the opening books of the Politics as in 1922 he had referred to the opening of the Metaphysics. Whereas two years before the aim was to find the concept of philosophy as it grows out of everyday life, the aim now, we can say, is to find the concept of the political through a phenomenological account of life as it is lived politically.48 Aristotle’s famous argument to the effect that “man is by nature a political animal” reads as follows:

[M]an is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in 47

Cf. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research [1923-24], 13: “The Greek lived in a special way in the language and was lived by it and he was conscious of this. The ability to address and discuss what was encountered (world and self), something that does not need to be philosophy, he characterizes as being a human being: logon echein, to have language.” Speaking is not emitting a sound but pointing towards something that shows itself through speech: “The true function of logos is apophainesthai, ‘briging-a-matter-to-sight’” (17). Logos brings to light a being in its being. It brings to light “the ousia as the ‘Being’ of an essent [der ousia als des ‘Seins’ des Seienden]” (21). 48

More exactly—and as we will see in what follows—one would have to say that both the determination of ‘the political’ and ‘the philosophical’ as (naturally related) human possibilities are at stake in this course.

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other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.49

As in the discussion of theory in the Metaphysics, Heidegger’s emphasis in his reading of the Politics is on being political as a possibility. ‘Being philosophical’ in the Metaphysics, as we saw, is neither a matter of being ‘cultivated’ nor a matter of nature understood as something that necessarily ‘happens’ to us. Similarly, in ‘man is by nature [phusei] a political animal’, “Phusis is not to be taken in the modern sense of ‘nature’ standing against ‘culture’ … phusei on is a being that from itself, on the grounds of its own possibilities, is what it is. In the being of man lies the fundamental possibility [Grundmöglichkeit] of being-in-thepolis” (45-46). Later in the course Heidegger would make this point more explicit: “…zoon politikon. That means: man is a living being that can be phusei in the way (or manner) of the polis [in der Weise der polis], i.e., this special [ausgezeichnet] way of being-with-one-another is not something that simply occurs to human beings [was an den Menschen herangebracht ist], but the possibility of Being. For the Greeks man is truly man insofar as he lives in the 49

Aristotle, Politics, trans. Jonathan Barnes. In Stephen Everson (ed.), Aristotle. The Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1253a10-16.

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polis [Sofern der Mensch in der polis lebt, ist er für den Griechen eigentlich Mensch]” (my emphasis, 56). Thus, just as in the case of theoretical seeing “all men by nature strive to see” such that there is a latent disposition towards it which may lead to increasing degrees of seeing culminating in wisdom, so here being-in-the-polis or being political is a distinct possibility of being-with-one-another which can be ‘more’ or less actualized—for indeed as Aristotle says: “man is [Heidegger adds: “merely”] more of a political animal than bees” (politikon mallon, Pol. 1253a7-8) (50).50 But what does it mean to be more or less ‘political’? And more fundamentally, what exactly is the ‘function’ of logos as the grounds of our political animality?51 To what phenomenon does ‘logos’ co-respond? Is not logos, as the root of ‘logic’, the articulation of the discourse of reason—the philosophical discourse par excellence? Or does it rather correspond to ‘mere’ speech, to the articulation of that which ‘seems to me’ to be the case—arguably the political discourse par excellence?

‘To see is to listen’: Rhetoric, I.11 Heidegger’s emphasis is on what he takes to be the more originary (‘eigentlich’) meaning of logos as speech: as mentioned earlier, zoon logon echon means that 50

“Der Mensch ist nur mallon zoon politikon als z. B. die Biene” (50). (The connection between theorein and sharing of logos is made later at 64: there is authentic and inauthentic theorizing and being-political.) 51

As Claudia Baracchi points out logos is an essentially untranslatable term ranging in meaning from ‘word’, ‘saying’, ‘speech’ to ‘reason’ or ‘logical structure’. Claudia Baracchi, Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.

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man is a living being for whom “being-in-the-world is determined in its grounds by speech,” by a “speaking with, about, of [the world]” (18). This means first of all that the “fundamental character of the Dasein of man” is “being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein]. And in particular not beingwith one-another in the sense of being-put-beside-one-another, but in the sense of speaking-with-one-another by way of a sharing-with, contradicting, engagingwith [Mitteilung, Widerlegung, Auseinandersetzung]” (47). More fundamentally, it means that neither animals nor human beings have the world ‘there’ as a set of objects or of ‘matters of fact’, as a ‘reality’ or actuality (Wirklichkeit) of which they then become aware or which they then cognize. Rather the world is ‘there’, first of all, as a common world—both for animals, who through sounds intimate pleasure and pain to one another, and for men, who through the power of speech share with, contradict, and polemize regarding expedient and inexpedient, just and unjust—and, secondly, as a world that either ‘pains’ us or ‘lifts us up’, that is, that ‘atunes’ us in particular ways which we then directly ‘speak into’ the character of the world (47-48). In this sense, that the world is a common world means much more than the fact that ‘Dasein is Mit-sein’: it means that speech—what we say to one another—conditions what we perceive, nay, that “listening [to speech] is the true aisthesis [perception]” (104).52

52

We note in passing that this is a most remarkable claim to make for a thinker who is said to have been blind to political realities owing to a ‘metaphysical’ and ‘Platonic’ bias. In “Le bios politikos dans l’enseignement de Marbourg” Jacques Taminiaux argues in reference to this lecture in particular that it is hard to believe that such a penetrating reader as Heidegger could have missed Aristotle’s characterization of the essence of the human as zoon politikon (50). On the basis of what we have seen so far, however, one can say that it is hard to believe that someone who has

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This becomes clear, Heidegger argues, in Aristotle’s explication of the pleasant (hedone) and the painful (luperon) in the Rhetoric as particular ways of being in the world, of finding oneself (well or ill) in the world, and especially as creative of particular dispositions towards the world (such that we then apprehend it accordingly):

We may lay it down that pleasure is a movement, a movement by which the soul as a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being; and that pain is the opposite. If this is what pleasure is, it is clear that the pleasant is what tends to produce [poietikon] this condition [diathesis] while that which tends to destroy it, or to cause the soul to be brought into the opposite state, is painful [luperon] (Rhetoric, 1369b34-1370a3).

otherwise done so much to improve our understanding of Heidegger’s early work and of his relation to Arendt in particular could say this. Consider, more particularly, Taminiaux’s thesis in The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker according to which Heidegger’s ‘world’ “in what is most properly existential about it could no longer be a common one because it is being revealed only by the encounter with nothingness experienced through anxiety by a radically isolated existing being.” This world “could in no way be a habitat since the being-in-the-world called Dasein is in the end unheimlich, without a dwelling.” There is finally in such a world “no other individuation than being-toward-death” (34). However much these conclusions may be supported by Heidegger’s Being and Time, they can hardly be derived from Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle. This point is decisive for an adequate understanding of the influence of Heidegger on Arendt and Strauss, as well as on other students like Gadamer and Jonas. Strauss and Arendt both expressed the view that what attracted them to Heidegger at the time was not his own philosophy—he could hardly be said to have had one then—but his capacity to bring the classic thinkers, and particularly Aristotle, “to life and light.” See Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 462, as well as Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty”: “it is not Heidegger’s philosophy (whose very existence can legitimately be called into question…) but rather Heidegger’s thinking that has had such a decisive influence on the century’s intellectual physignomy’ (in Ludz (ed.), Letters, 19251975. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, 152.) (On the differences between the Heidegger of 1924 and the Heidegger of Being and Time see William McNeill, The Time of Life, 79; Gross, “Introduction. Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology,” in Heidegger and Rhetoric, 5 (“hermeneutics subsume rhetoric after 1924”), 13.

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Thus, in indicating pain or pleasure that approaches, animals (to begin with) put each other at once into particular states of being—in the case of pleasure into the normal, or more literally translated, natural, state of being—such that (and here Heidegger adds a part that is missing from the English translation) “thereby apprehension occurs [so, dass, dabei vernommen wird].” This means, according to Heidegger, that pleasure and pain are not simply psychological states or ways of feeling, but ways of being attuned to the world—Heidegger refers to a certain ‘lightness of being’ in the case of pleasure or conversely to its ‘oppressiveness’ in the case of pain—that in turn give to the things of the world a particular timbre, tone or ‘feel’. This also implies that the rational (logos as traditionally rendered) and the emotional (or particular ‘states of attunement’) cannot simply be divorced from each other.

The limits of philo-logy: ‘the philosophers are the real Sophists’ Heidegger sharpened the problem of the possibility of conceptuality or of bodenständig thinking by referring his students to the context in which scientific thinking first arose. This was a context, says Heidegger, that was characterized by a passion for speech in all its forms: indeed, the Greeks were “in a way in love with logos” (262). This fact and specifically the meaning of the notion that for the Greeks man is a being that speaks can only be rendered approximately by saying what would correspond to modern man: “at the most: man is a living being that reads the newspaper” (108). What Heidegger wants to point to thereby is the

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power that conversation and talk and rhetoric had in shaping the convictions of human beings concerning their living together. “The Greeks existed in talk (in der Rede). The Rhetor is the one that has the actual power over Dasein: Rhetorike peithous demiourgos [rhetoric is a producer of persuasion].”53 Now, there is a danger to this, says Heidegger: living in and through speech makes for the possibility of an ever new disclosure of things through language, but just as much it may lead to being caught up in significations that bar access to the things themselves. This process of ‘falling’ to the world in which one lives “became for the Greeks through speech itself the fundamental danger of their existence” (108). The proof of this state of things “is the existence of sophistry. In sophistry this formidable possibility of speaking is realized. Protagoras’ statement: ton etto logon kreitto poiein54 – discussing with a geometrician about geometry even when one does not understand a thing about geometry [means] to lead a conversation in such a way that I overcome the other without knowledge of the matter [Sachkenntnis].” Heidegger is thus led to conclude that “sophistry is the proof for the fact that the Greeks had ‘fallen’ to that speech that Nietzsche once called ‘die sprechbarste aller Sprachen’ [the most ‘speakable’ of all languages]” (108-109); that “in the fourth century the Greeks had completely been subjected to the reign of speech” (109).

53

Plato, Gorgias, 453a2.

54

Aristotle, Rhetoric B24, 1402 a 23.

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Thus the problem of a truly bodenständig conceptuality (of speaking to the phenomena themselves) runs deeper because, insofar as logos is both disclosing and concealing, speaking to the phenomena presupposes a quite extreme capacity to begin from logos as our most immediate access to reality while being able nevertheless to refine (and in effect redefine) such logos in a way that it enables us to perceive the essence of things. As Heidegger puts it, the challenge for philosophy was “to bring back [or to recover, zurückholen] speech from conversation and idle talk to bring speech to that point that Aristotle can say: logos is logos ousias, “‘speaking about the subject matter, what it is’” (109).55 Science or philosophy becomes at this point in Heidegger’s account the capacity to transcend the opinions of one’s time not by dismissing them but exactly by taking them seriously. We may say in other words that it is the capacity to think para-doxically in the literal sense of contrary to prevalent opinion and yet (doxically) beginning and never quite transcending the realm of opinion, but only seeing further along with it. “Aristotle stood in the most extreme opposition [Gegenstellung] to that which was alive around him, what stood before him in the concrete world … In the time of Plato and Aristotle existence was so loaded with babble that it took all the efforts of both men to realize the possibility of science” (109). What is decisive here, says Heidegger, is that they did not pick up a new possibility of existence from just anywhere, “say from India,” but rather “from

55

“Sprechen über die Sache, was sie ist.” The reference is to Metaphysics, 1017 b22 (“The essence, whose formula is a definition, is also said to be the substance of each thing.”)

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Greek life itself: they took seriously the possibilities of speaking. That is the origins of logic, the doctrine of logos” (109). The efforts of both sophists and philosophers, Heidegger suggests, consist in taking seriously and making real the possibilities of speech. Both, in a way, begin from the ubiquitous reality of rhetoric. Sophistry and philosophy are thus intimately related.56 And yet, Heidegger argues in a highly provocative and suggestive statement: it is “the philosophers [who] are the true Sophists [die Philosophen sind die rechten Sophisten]” (136). To make this case Heidegger proceeds by analyzing the relationship of logos as speaking-with-one-another as set forth in the Rhetoric with both science and politics. Or more exactly, he proposes to deepen our understanding of the possibilities of man as logon echon as they become manifest in both science—speaking in the sense of theoretical seeing (Betrachtung)—and political life—speaking in the sense of reflexive deliberation (Überlegen).57 To these two possibilities of existence, I shall argue in what follows, correspond two possible conceptions of political philosophy.

56

This is because “philosophers are supposed to know the limits of knowledge, like the true sophists” (136). Cf. Gross, “Introduction. Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology,” in Gross and Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 12. 57

With respect to ‘philosophy’ consider, 123: “Wie steht der logos als horismos, die wissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung im Dasein des Menschen? Dafür ist die Rhetorik Leitfaden…” As regards ‘politics’, 139: “Das Miteinandersprechen ist demnach der Leitfaden für die Aufdeckung des Grundphänomens der Entdecktheit des Daseins selbst als Sein-in-einer-welt. Als konkreten Leitfaden nehmen wir die Rhetorik, sofern sie nichts anderes ist als die Auslegung des Daseins hinsichtlich der Grundmöglichkeit des Miteinandersprechens.”

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Heidegger’s Two Conceptions of Political Philosophy

We shall begin by referring to what seems to be the answer to Heidegger’s central problem in the lecture—the problem of bodenständig conceptuality. As we will see, it is most significant—even though it may lead one to think of the old Strauss’s verdict on Heidegger: ‘a phenomenal intellect resting on a soul of Kitsch’—that in the end, in the summer of 1924, it was all a matter of passion. It is the passions so memorably dissected by Aristotle in the Rhetoric but also (crucially for Heidegger) by Augustine, Thomas, and Luther, and, among the moderns (now crucially for Strauss’s critique of Heidegger as we shall see) by Hobbes, that constitute, says Heidegger, “the ground upon which language grows and into which expressions return…”58 Including now the context and the consequences of this central statement, it reads as follows:

In so far as the pathe are not the annex of psychological events, but compose instead the ground upon which language grows and into which expressions return, the pathe provide the fundamental possibilities in which Dasein finds itself and orients itself. This basic Being-oriented, the illumination of Being’s being in the world, is no knowledge, but is instead a finding-oneself [Sichbefinden] variously determined, depending upon the 58

See Heidegger’s genealogy of the theological and philosophical concern with the pathe at 177178. (See also Sein und Zeit, 139 n.1 and 190 n.1). Heidegger fails to include Hobbes in this genealogy, even though he is the subject of the Dilthey study he cites, viz. W. Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, in G. Misch (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2. (Leipzig, Berlin, 1914), 416 ff.

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ways Being can be there. Given first among these characteristic ways of finding-oneself and being-in-the-world, is the possibility of speaking about things stripped of the appearance with which they are most closely associated. Thus we are presented with the possibility of coming to a particular matter-of-fact that, in a certain sense, returns to the way the world is seen as prefigured by the pathe (262-63).59

Heidegger, as we have seen, argues that the way in which the world is seen is predetermined by the pathe. Now, these are not simply (or not only) natural occurrences but rather ways of being attuned to the world brought about (or literally created) by our sharing of logoi—that is, by a common discourse that makes manifest the things of the world as expedient or inexpedient, just or unjust, right and wrong and so on. This may be illustrated simply by recalling that our pleasures are greater when they are illicit. Or to refer to Aristotle’s example: because bodily pleasures alone are familiar, men think there are no others— whereby what is important is that this familiarity is due to the ‘heritage of the word’,60 or in other words, it is determined by the way hedone is spoken about. In this sense, we may say, logos (and with it nomos) is king.61

59

I follow here Daniel Gross’s translation in his “Introduction,” to Gross and Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 38. Cf. Gadamer’s comment on this claim in an interview with Ansgar Kemman: “In this context what is the meaning of characterizing pathe as ‘ground’ and ‘fundamental possibilities’?” Gadamer: “That is the distrust of speaking. So speaking is not first!” See “Heidegger as Rhetor: Hans-Georg Gadamer Interviewed by Ansgar Kemman,” in Gross and Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 47-65. 60

Kleronomia onomatos, translated by Heidegger as Erbschaft des Wortes (Nic. Ethics, 1153b33).

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Incidentally, we see that thanks to Aristotle’s insight into the way (shared) speech—literally, in Aristotle’s terms—produces (embodied) states of being attuned to the world ‘such that thereby apprehension occurs’, the idea that theory is a matter of ‘abstraction’ or of passive contemplation

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One way in which Heidegger takes this further—far further; indeed, one is tempted to say, too far—is this: the very question of Being was (rightly) raised— and (wrongly) answered—by the ancients beginning with Parmenides ultimately because of a moral prejudice; specifically, because of a particular kind of fear (and a corresponding understanding of pleasure). First, Heidegger establishes the sense in which logos is king. This means:

Particular logoi, once spoken, can become so dominant—particularly in times when scientific investigation is young and lively—that they can make the beings that they refer to inaccessible for a long time. Such was the dominance of the logos of Parmenides that ‘being is one’, en to on. This logos was at the same time a positive stimulus to raise the question of Being in the true sense [im eigentlichen Sinne] and to solve it as far as Greek possibilities went (277).

Now, as Heidegger notes, Aristotle had already intimated the ‘passion’ that lay behind this understanding of being. The ancients—this time Aristotle’s ancients, the “natural philosophers”—failed to grasp the nature of movement because of “fear that [the sun and the stars and the whole heaven] may sometime stand still” (Met., 1050 b23). The revolution in thought that Heidegger found in Aristotle—a finding which in turn revolutionized twentieth-century thought—was his (Aristotle’s) correction of the (ancient) ancients: in a nutshell, if one understands becomes more and more incredible. And indeed: so does the idea that correct ‘seeing’ could ‘occur’ independently of particular ways of being disposed to the world and in that sense of particular ethical dispositions (as Heidegger will stress in a part of the lecture that cannot be further discussed here. See 209 ff.).

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the nature of movement correctly, one can say that not-being is in a certain way (namely when a thing is not in actuality but in potentiality). And, as Heidegger did, one can take this very far and claim that we only truly understand the world and who we are by virtue precisely of that which is ‘present in its absentiality’—a profound insight that can be reduced for purposes of illustration to the Heraclitean claim that ‘nature loves to hide’ such that we only understand nature—and thus in a sense ‘all things’: Being itself—in its “play of emergence in selfconcealment.”62 And yet, Heidegger argued, this discovery of Aristotle was limited. Indeed, Aristotle’s own understanding of theoria as the highest life expressed the very same fear: “the fear of the suddenly-disappearing-out-of-sight [of the cosmos] presupposes a clinging to the meaning of Being as always-present. This sense of Being is thus implicit in every discussion of the ancients … The fear that the world could disappear is eradicated by making oneself familiar with the world. What is threatening about Dasein is thereby put aside. Therefore the true [eigentliche] possibility is the diagoge, that ‘dwelling’ [Aufenthalt] in the pure contemplation of the world to which nothing can happen; the diagoge is an hedone” (289-90).63

62

Heidegger, Heraklit (Seminars from 1943/44), GA 55 (1987), 17. Cited in Rosen, The Question of Being, xiv. Cf. Grundbegriffe, GA18, 311. For the argument that the sole unifying “matter” of Heidegger’s thought as a whole is contained in his interpretation of Aristotle’s kinesis/dynamis see Thomas Sheehan, “On Movement and the Destruction of Ontology,” The Monist 64/4 (1981): 536537. 63

The reference is here to book X of Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a26.

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We note here once again the Destruktion or ‘taking down’ of divine theoria as the highest possibility of existence. Pure and unmoved contemplation is not the ground of logos. Rather it is passion. We also note the closeness of Heidegger’s thinking to a certain Christian theology according to which without passion the Word of God would remain a dead letter.64 This passion is a form of wakeful and anxious expectation which, according to Heidegger, remained foreign and inaccessible to the Greeks: “The Greek does not come at all to see in this hic et nunc the authentic ‘there’ [of existence]” (223). He sees things according to the ‘look’ or appearance with which they are most closely associated. “Insofar as [he] sees the house … [he] sees it not isolated, not in this and that moment, during this time of the day, under this lighting, inhabited by such and such…” Rather, he sees, “this being-there [Daseiende] as one sees it in averageness [Durchschnittlichkeit] as house, as one lives there in everydayness and [he] sees […it] in the averageness of the present going-about with this being” (223). Thus a further crucial consequence to be noted here is that the possibility of

64

As Luther put it: “Dialectica docet, Rhetorica movet.” See Klaus Dockhorn, “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer 1980, 160180, 164. Dockhorn traces the genealogy of Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutics back to Luther’s Affektenlehre as it was taken over by a certain stream of the Enlightenment. “It is now clear that in the Enlightenment, next to the stream of rationalism, flows an equally strong stream of irrationalism which flows through the channels of rhetoric.” Dockhorn refers to Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Burke, Lessing, Winckelman, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller (among others) who “believed that sure and reliable knowledge of the human person in his sociality and of his social affects is truer than all metaphysics” (162). This notion of “social and affective knowledge”—the sensus communis—in turn is central to the Reformation (162). Indeed, it is what “the reformers envisioned when they sought to replace scholastic philosophy by rhetoric as the means of education” (161).

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attaining the truth becomes a matter of destiny, of achieving the right (passionate) relation to things.65 These considerations allow us to understand a key point in the statement cited at the beginning of this section. Heidegger suggests that among the “characteristic ways of finding-oneself and being-in-the-world, is the possibility of speaking about things stripped of the appearance with which they are most closely associated. Thus we are presented with the possibility of coming to a particular matter-of-fact that, in a certain sense, returns to the way the world is seen as prefigured by the pathe” (my emphasis, 262-63). Contrary to what we commonly understand as science—viz. objectivity attained through detached observation—Heidegger is arguing here that matter-of-factness or objectivity (Sachlichkeit) depends on seeing the world as it is “prefigured by the pathe.” Only then can we speak of things as they are “stripped of the[ir] appearance,” that is, of the ‘look’ or the ‘idea’ (eidos), “with which they are most closely associated.” This raises intricate questions, for instance, concerning the relation between philosophy and belief. Indeed, it would seem that for Heidegger Kant’s question, ‘What can I know?’ is inseparable from the question, ‘How do I feel

65

“Wissenschaft ist eine Angelegenheit des rechten Verhältnisses zu den Sachen. Das kann nicht erzwungen werden, sondern ist etwas, das höchstens hinsichtlich der Vorbereitungen von uns abhängt, im Grunde aber eine Sache des Schicksals ist, inwieweit diejenigen kommen und da sind, die dieses Grundverhältnis lebending machen” (240). See also 274 (one must be resolved [entschlossen] to do science).

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about this?’66 (and how I feel about something, in turn, is closely connected to what I believe, or how I am ‘resolved’ towards something).67 And if philosophy cannot transcend Stimmung (or feeling)—let alone opinion—we may legitimately wonder: What remains of it and of the quest for truth? This is the predicament that results from Heidegger’s critique of ancient theoria—that it seems to destroy its possibility altogether. We must recall, however, that Heidegger’s early project was not to dethrone theory in order to affirm the primacy of praxis or to proclaim in some other way ‘the end of philosophy’. Rather, it was to provide an alternative, ‘existential’ genesis of philosophy as it grows out of pre-theoretical experience. As SS 1924 makes clear, our pre-theoretical experience of the world is essentially political. What, then, would it mean to found philosophy anew on a ‘political’ foundation?

Political Philosophy I First it would mean to make our common (political) being-together the focus of philosophical attention. Heidegger says nothing else in what is perhaps his bestknown definition of philosophy as “universal phenomenological ontology, taking

66

Cf. Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument, 18.

67

Cf. Sein und Zeit, 136: “Existentially-ontologically there is not the slightest justification for suppressing the ‘evidence’ of the feeling in which one finds oneself by measuring it against the demonstrative certainty in theoretical cognition of the pure ‘present on hand’.”

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its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein…”68 This understanding of philosophy has been interpreted as a relapse to Platonic metaphysics taking its departure from a death-driven, solipsistic (hence anti-political) phenomenology of authentic existence.69 Reading Heidegger from the start, however, results in a rather different appreciation: “universal phenomenological ontology, taking its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein” is the residue of a broader project that can be described as an anti-Platonic and anti-metaphysical phenomenology of human existence as political existence. To see this one must consider the meaning of hermeneutics in Heidegger. Hermeneutics is not an art or technique of understanding but the “interpretive laying out [Auslegung] of facticity” or the act of “facticity’s own interpretive laying out of itself.”70 Philosophy’s taking its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein thus means essentially that it begins from the self-interpretation of Dasein. Now, for reasons that are not clear (at least to me), what hermeneutics was meant to do in 1927 was done in 1924 by rhetoric. Like hermeneutics, rhetoric’s true or proper meaning for Heidegger is not that of an art or technique but “the laying out [Auslegung] of concrete Dasein, the hermeneutics of Dasein itself” (110). Crucially, however, the “concrete Dasein” of rhetoric is essentially political. This is clear from Heidegger’s definitions of rhetoric as “the laying out of the Dasein

68

Sein und Zeit, 34.

69

See, e.g., Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, 34.

70

Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, GA, 63 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1923] 1988), 14.

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of man with respect to the fundamental possibility of speaking-with-each-other” (103) or, as he puts it in Being and Time (referring to Aristotle’s Rhetoric specifically), as the “first systematic hermeneutics of the everydayness of beingtogether.”71 In what sense, then, does ‘rhetoric’ (the laying out of collective existence) fulfill the function later assigned to ‘hermeneutics’ (the laying out of Dasein’s individual existence)? It can be said that in 1924 philosophy takes its departure from rhetoric insofar as rhetoric provides the most fundamental and general account of the way truth ‘happens’.72 The simplest way of elucidating this is to say that, whereas in 1927 the disclosure of the totality of beings is primarily the province of Dasein’s Angst-ridden existence, in 1924 the paths to being-in-truth are more explicitly manifold. As Heidegger points out in recapitulating the goal of the 1924 lectures, the “fundamental phenomenon we seek to approximate is aletheuien,” that is, “a way of being-in-the-world so that one has [the world] there uncovered, as it is” (119). This is a quest that is conceived in explicitly antitheoretical (and in that sense anti-Platonic) terms insofar as the phenomenon to be approximated is an “alethes that is not disclosed through theorein but instead

71

Cf. also Sein und Zeit, 39 (rhetoric as “the basic ontological interpretation of affective life”); 138 (“die erste systematische Hermeneutik der Alltäglichkeit des Miteinanderseins”). 72

See Robert Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles, 169. Rhetoric is what best exposes what life is as “a plenum of capacities and actions.” See Nancy S. Struever, “Alltäglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program,” in Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 106.

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makes visible the true [das Wahre] in the verisimile” (das Wahrscheinliche, literally: the ‘true shining’; the probable; the apparent).73 How does the laying out of existence undertaken in rhetoric make visible the true in the apparent? Heidegger’s analysis of the Aristotelian understanding of opinion (doxa) provides a clue to understanding this. The world, Heidegger argues, reveals itself to us in and through common opinions. “The koinonia, our ‘being-with-one-another’, is … a sharing of certain doxai” (263). That is, the world is revealed to us—it is ‘there’ for us as disclosed—insofar as we live in doxa (149). Indeed, doxa reveals ‘authentic’ being-with-one-another in the world. Heidegger argues that this is what Plato missed insofar as he could not yet see in the phenomenon of doxa an orientation to truth. Being directed towards truth is constitutive of doxa and that is why the possibility of falsity (pseudos) also belongs to it.74 Doxa, then, is not what we ordinarily mean by opinion, specially when we talk of ‘considered opinion’. For it is not the result of deliberation, nor is it part of a process of searching for the truth (136). It is rather to already stand for something; to say ‘yes’ to something non-reflectively (136-37). Doxa is a “goingalong with how the world shows itself”; it expresses “trust in its proximate aspect” (150). Such is for instance the doxa of Thales “that the proper arche of Being is ‘water’” (150). As a way of taking a stance for something, the who behind a doxa is essential to it. Whereas who I am does not contribute to the truth 73

On Aristotle’s capacity to see what Plato did not see, viz., the disclosive capacity of nontheoretical speech consider 140, 137, as well as Heidegger’s statements the following semester in Plato’s Sophist, 138, 234. 74

137 (Heidegger refers to Nicomachean Ethics, 1142b11). See also 140.

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of a valid statement, it is decisive for a doxa. This is so because the matter at hand cannot speak for itself; it is concealed; I merely have a view of it (eine Ansicht). In doxa, however, it is not only the thing itself that speaks for itself (insofar as it has been uncovered) but the person or persons who do this (150). Rhetoric as the hermeneutics of our everyday living together thus points to the way the true is made visible in political existence in the following ways. What is considered true is not (at least not primarily) the result of deliberation among considered opinions aimed at valid propositions, but neither is it a matter of merely expressing received opinions. Instead the true is what is made visible in engaged (passionate/affirmative) speech, without which our common existence would be ruled by apathy and unexamined belief.75 As a passionate affirmation of belief that is nonetheless open to the possibility that the matter could also be otherwise, doxa is the grounds of critical—we could say, agonistic—engagement. “Doxa is the way in which the world of being-together is there [for us]. Through it is brought into being-together the possibility of a being-against-one-another” (138). Crucially, however, and in contrast to the spirit that dominates sophistic speech, the ethical disposition of the speaker is decisive for the persuasiveness of doxa. Who I am is essential to the authoritativeness of my position. Here Heidegger’s norm seems to be Aristotle’s aletheutikos (or truthful man). Indeed, whereas sophistic is devoted to absolute, definite conviction (115), rhetorical speech in the Aristotelian sense remains open to all the possibilities of

75

Gross, “Introduction,” 31.

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persuasion—while nevertheless passionately standing for something. This median position embodied by the aletheutikos is characterized by Heidegger as a “giving oneself as one is and as one thinks” (264).76 Ethics and politics thus belong together (127). This becomes clear in Heidegger’s discussion of the Aristotelian meaning of political science. The techne that makes the agathon of human being as beingtogether (Miteinandersein) expressly apparent is “the techne, the methodos, that is related to being as zoon politikon.” This is the politike. Politike is a “knowing oneself about in the being of man that is determined as being-together” (68). To understand the good for man (anthropinon agathon) we must understand the fundamental determination of man as political, and concretely his disposition (or bearing) [sichhalten] in the world; this disposition is his ethos. Thus “politics conceived as knowledge [or knowing about: Auskenntnis] concerning the being of man in his authenticity [eigentlichkeit] … is ethics. Ethics as a part of politics is a misunderstanding. Aristotle says explicitly: … “this investigation … is an investigation that moves towards developing [ausbilden] the knowledge

76

Cf., however, 147 (ethics seems to be at stake only in choice [proairesis] leading to action rather than in the previous deliberative stage). For a critique of Heidegger along these lines see Smith, “The Uses and Abuses of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: The Lecture Course, Summer, 1924,” in Babette E. Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought. For an analysis more favorable to Heidegger in this regard see Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles.

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[Auskenntnis] concerning the Being of man in his authenticity” (68-69).77 In other words, politics is an ethics that aims at the good for man. What is that good? Aristotle does not determine the content of the agathon (73), but rather suggests that it must be found by beginning “with the known,” and specifically with what is “known to us” (NE, 1095b2). Aristotle characterizes his method as “an investigation of the logoi” and proposes that “[i]t is not unreasonable that men should derive their concept of the good and of happiness from the lives which they lead...” (NE, 1095b13ff.). This means that he lets “Dasein speak about itself,” specifically about the right bios or “life disposition” (Lebenshaltung) or “way of life” (Lebensweg) (74). Beyond that, Aristotle suggests that the good for humans is happiness resulting from actions that can most properly be said to be ends in themselves (78; NE, 1098 b21). The good is a telos or more exactly a teleion (79; NE, 1097a33). Yet, contrary to the common understanding of an Aristotelian political science, the ends of human life or of the political community are not a matter of the realization of “man-as-he-could-be-ifhe-realized-his-essential-nature.”78 Rather, according to Heidegger, the meaning of telos in Aristotle is simply the “extreme” or the “limit” that beings may reach when they exhaust their possibilities (such that for example a thief and a physician may be equally ‘good’ in realizing their possibilities (82)).

77

This is Heidegger’s translation of NE, 1094 b11: “our investigation is in a sense the study of politics.” (Note Heidegger’s identification of political life with authenticity.) 78

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 52.

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Political Philosophy II There is a second sense in which Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in this lecture can be said to be essentially political. The central problem of the lecture, as we have seen, is to investigate the ground or soil from which science (or Wissenschaft or the theoretical disposition generally) developed. For this Aristotle’s rhetoric—the original hermeneutics of everyday living together which is also a compendium of early Greek beliefs (45)—serves as a guide (Leitfaden). Thus conceived, rhetoric lays out or lays bare the way the common world is displayed in a pre-theoretical way through speech (139). It makes manifest, in other words, one way in which truth (conceived as the disclosure of being) ‘happens’. And yet, as the example of Thales suggests—that is, of the thinker who developed the first theoretical ontology out of the doxa that being is water—the disclosing capacity of pre-theoretical speech for Heidegger is broader. Indeed, human beings hold opinions concerning human things, such as right or wrong, just and unjust, expedient or inexpedient, but also concerning ‘all things’. And any theoretical proposition concerning ‘all things’ (or the nature of being generally) is ultimately an expression of the way being appears to our finite, mortal, and embodied existence—or, in other words, it is ultimately an expression of doxa.79

79

Cf. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 23: “Even Aristotelian truth in science may not be…altogether independent of human theories and conceptions.”

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Heidegger’s quest in SS 1924 can be said to be for that way of being-inthe-world (with its attendant doxai) from which science—most generally conceived as the discourse of reason (logos)—developed. More specifically, the goal is to understand how scientific conceptuality grew out of ordinary speech; how this was at all possible as a unique occurrence in human history; and what are the limitations of that particular understanding of science that nevertheless— Heidegger would argue—laid the foundations for the way we think even today (for instance, when we speak of the ‘nature’ of the human being, or of truth as opposed to opinion, or of being and time as opposites).80 One of the most important questions that arises in this connection concerns the type of speech that, according to Heidegger, serves as the best guide for understanding the emergence of classical philosophy. In the previous chapter we referred to Socrates as the first thinker to direct the wonder of philosophy to human affairs in order precisely to find in human opinions (“logoi”)— particularly, in political discussions concerning right and wrong, just and unjust, noble and base—the key to understanding “the truth of things” (Phaedo, 99 e3). 80

“It is perhaps no exaggeration to state that something like three-quarters of all existing scientific and philosophic terminology is either determined by Aristotle’s Latinized vocabulary or can be traced back to it.” Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in R. Williamson and E. Zuckermann (eds.), The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 179. This lecture of Klein’s can be read as a commentary (and response) to SS 1924. The lecture in fact begins by invoking the way Heidegger opened the course: “Many, many years ago, I attended a series of lectures on Aristotle’s philosophy. The lecturer began his exposition as follows: ‘As regards Aristotle himself, as regards the circumstances and the course of his life, suffice it to say Aristotle was born, spent his life in philosophizing, and died” (171). This statement—and at least the theme of the lecture—was well-known to Arendt: “Heidegger himself—according to a welldocumented anecdote—once expressed this becoming-one [of passion and thinking] in one succinct sentence, when, at the beginning of a lecture on Aristotle … he said: ‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died’.” Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Ludz (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, 153-54.

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Socrates is thus famously said to have undertaken a ‘turn’ from ‘physiology’ or ‘natural science’ to the investigation of “human affairs.”81 Most commentators then suggest that this way of approaching ‘all things’ through ‘human things’ was abandoned by Aristotle insofar as he began to separate ‘ethics’ from ‘metaphysics’.82 By considering Heidegger’s position on this question we shall be able to specify more clearly the sense in which his approach to philosophy may be said to be political. Heidegger’s answer is ambiguous. On the one hand he clearly follows the approach that we have characterized as Socratic. This insofar as he holds that an adequate account of a thing—i.e., one that makes it appear in its true light—must begin from the way that thing is spoken about (the logos) which “is very often identical with [its] eidos [or ‘look’ or ‘shape’]” (212).83 This holds true for both

81

Xenophon, Memorabilia, I 1, 11 and I 1, 16; see also I.1, 9; 12-13; 15-16. Cf. Apology, 26 b, Republic, vii 517d. Phaedrus, 229 e5ff. 82

Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, 234 (see also 19, 56). Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 312; Franco Volpi, “The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelianism,” in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, 6. Joachim Ritter, “‘Politik’ und ‘Ethik’ in der praktischen Philosophie des Aristoteles,” in Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 106-132, especially, 124-125. Stuart Umphrey, “Why Politike Philosophia,” 435, 441; Richard Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 77-81. Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und Aristoteles,” 313. See also Richard McKeon, introduction to The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), xxvi. 83

204: “Der erste logos gibt das eigentliche eidos her, das, was er eigentlich ist”; 205: “Derjenige ist der rechte physikos, der das Haus so anspricht, dass er es anspricht auf das Aussehen…” (both of these statements are in reference to Aristotle’s De Anima, 403 b2); 207: “Wichtig ist, dass Aristoteles die Grundbestimmung eines Lebenden nicht gewinnt aus physiologischen Betrachtungen”; 212: “Die Frage, woraus das Seiende sich bestimmt, die Frage, in welcher Hinsicht das Seiende zuerst zu nehmen ist, wird entschieden durch den Rückgang auf den logos”… “logos sehr oft identisch mit eidos” (these statements are in reference to Parts of

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‘human things’ and ‘material things’—indeed, Heidegger seeks to overcome this division underlying the distinction between ‘human sciences’ and ‘natural sciences’. Thus for instance, to the question concerning the proper account of a house—whether it is ‘physical’ (e.g., ‘stones, bricks, and timber’) or ‘humanistic’ (e.g., ‘a shelter against destruction by wind, rain, and heat’) Heidegger, following Aristotle, answers as follows. “He is the true physikos [providing a true account of the house] that speaks to the look of the house” in a way that transcends the materialistic and humanistic explanations: “A house appears in wood, stone and brick, so as to produce the necessary protection and shelter; it is a ‘being-built’ carried out in light of a shelter being there” (205).84 The same principle holds for human (or other living) things. As Heidegger notes, “what is important is that Aristotle does not arrive at the fundamental determination of a living thing out of physiological observations. The eidos of the pathe is a way of comporting oneself vis-à-vis other human beings, a being-in-the-world” (207). Thus for instance the psycho-somatic affectation of fear can only be brought to light on consideration of the fact that “in the absence of any external cause of terror we find ourselves

Animals, 639 b14); 228: “Es kommt darauf an zu zeigen, dass, wenn über die Natur geforscht wird, sie primär nach ihrem Aussehen befragt werden muss.” It is important to note that in this lecture Heidegger emphasizes the difference between Aristotle’s understanding of eidos and idea and Plato’s understanding: “Idea bespeaks nothing else than ‘look’ [Aussehen] (front against Plato)” (229). Cf. Parts of Animals, 640 b28. On the meaning of eidos see also 33; and Introduction to Phenomenological Research: “eidos is the look, that is to say, for the Greeks, a manner of distinguishing itself equivalent to ‘so it is’. What is spoken as such is also characteristically designated as logos and for Aristotle logos and eidos can be substituted for one another. Eidos is the existing entity in the way it looks. In German we say ‘that is how you look’ [so siehst Du aus] in the sense of ‘that is who you are’ [so bist Du]” (18). 84

The references are to Aristotle, De Anima, 403 b4 sqq.

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experiencing the feelings of a man in terror.”85 (No physical or physiological but only a phenomenological explanation can see this.) It would seem, then, that the way a thing appears to us and the way it is spoken about are sufficient grounds to at least start an investigation, if not indeed to provide its fundamental principles. This, at any rate, was Aristotle’s way of proceeding in what were arguably his most important investigations, both ‘physical’ (or ‘metaphysical’) and ‘ethical/political.’86 Thus, to the fundamental question of the Physics concerning what is to count as a being of nature, Aristotle responds: that which anyone can see, viz., that to be in nature is to be in motion. (The question then becomes, what is motion or kinesis?)87 The same applies for the most fundamental of principles—the principle of non-contradiction: no other proof is necessary (or exists) beyond the fact that this is the way people behave (viz., we are not indifferent between ‘a’ and ‘not a’, thus we do not walk straight into a well but around it).88 Most importantly, however, the culminating goal of every human endeavor or the highest human finality is the good—and this is

85

De Anima, 403 a 23 sq.

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Cf. Topics 101a37-b4; Posterior Analytics, 71a1-2, 71b27-33; 72b19-25: “knowledge of immediate premises is indemonstrable.” Metaphysics 984 a18 sqq. (metaphysics as “the science of wisdom” is “necessitated and guided by…the things themselves (auto to pragma (984a18) or phenomena (986b31).” Cited in Baracchi, Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy, 37. See also Aristotle, Met. 1074 b1-14 (it has been “divinely spoken” that the “first substances are gods”); 1072 a29 (the good that moves (the god, the best) “we desire because it seems, rather than it seems because we desire”). 87

“We…must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion—which is indeed made plain by induction” (Physics, 185 a14-16). See Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 225. 88

Metaphysics, 1008 b17-18. (See also 1006 a1-12.)

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because, we could say in Socratic terms, “[i]t is not said of the good things, as it is of the beautiful and the just things, that they are so only by convention.”89 And yet Heidegger is reluctant to follow Aristotle up to the point in which his (that is, Aristotle’s) fidelity to Socrates’ concern with the good becomes obvious. Heidegger follows Aristotle and—in a rare explicit reference—Socrates this far: there must be a correspondence between ethos (how one bears oneself in life) and logos (in the general sense of what one talks or philosophizes about).90 Heidegger expresses this concordance in his reading of the Aristotelian statement according to which “acts are called just and self-controlled when they are the kind of acts which a just or self-controlled man would perform; but the just and selfcontrolled man is not he who performs these acts, but he who also performs them

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Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18. See Plato, Republic, 505 d. For Aristotle’s argument that the highest human finality is the good see Nic. Ethics 1094 a3 (“the good has been beautifully declared to be that at which all things aim.”); Metaphysics 982 b4ff. (knowing the good is not only the task of ethical-political science but of first philosophy; concretely, the “highest good in nature” is understood as “that for the sake of which each thing must be done.”) See also Met. 994 b9-17 (those who introduce an infinite regress are “eliminating the good”). This way of reading Aristotle which stresses the continuity between the Stagirite and his master—and, more specifically, his master’s master—is perhaps most closely associated with the work of Gadamer. See his The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), specially 128: “as the creator of physics, Aristotle … fulfils the demand made by Plato’s Socrates, that is, that we understand the world starting with the experience of the good.” That Aristotle’s work not only is continuous in the most fundamental respects with the work of Plato but seeks to complete Socrates’ ‘program’ was a particularly innovative claim to make in the 1920s and 30s when Gadamer, Klein, and Strauss began to respond to Heidegger. Most philosophical and philological authorities then emphasized the break between Plato and Aristotle (e.g., Jaeger, Natorp and Cohen). Gadamer’s reading remains a minority position, and yet it must be recalled that it receives powerful (almost unanimous) support from the thought of antiquity. As Carol Poster notes “In the 15,000 extant pages of the Greek Commentaries on Aristotle, the fundamental unity of Plato and Aristotle is almost universally acknowledged.” Carol Poster, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric Against Rhetoric: Unitarian Reading and Esoteric Hermeneutics,” American Journal of Philology 118 (1997), 219-249, 221. 90

For the correspondence between ethos and logos in Plato’s Socrates see e.g., Laws 653a-c; Republic, 619c-d.

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in the way just and self-controlled men do” (NE 1105b5-8). This, Heidegger says, is “a strike [Hieb] against the Sophists and the majority of men who believe that one can bring about anything for ethical action through talk about [Unterhalten über] ethical conflicts or through moralizing” (184). Aristotle goes on to say along similar lines that “without performing […good acts] nobody would even be on the way to becoming good. Yet most men do not perform such acts, but by taking refuge in argument [logon91] they think that they are engaged in philosophy and that they will become good in this way” (1105b12 sqq.). This statement has been read as a critique of Socrates, who in the Phaedo refers to his turn to the human things in exactly those terms, viz., as a “taking refuge in logoi” (Phaedo 99e).92 Heidegger does not see it this way. Rather he reads Aristotle as defending “the Socratic method” insofar as Aristotle stands for a “sharp opposition [Gegenüberstellung] between ethical discourse [des legein über ethische Probleme] and proper philosophizing” (184). This holds true, says Heidegger, provided that we assume that Aristotle understood Socrates correctly, “and one could hardly dispute this” [und das wird man ihm wohl nicht bestreiten können] (184).93

91

Heidegger translates: Geschwätz (chatter) (184).

92

This critique would be directed against the Socratic claim that virtue is knowledge and the overestimation of the action-guiding potential of knowledge it implies. Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 50. 93

For a different reading, see Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” 431 (Gonzales points to Heidegger’s translation of logos as ‘chatter’ (Geschwätz) and to his insistence “both that the Socratic method is the target here and that Aristotle has correctly understood Socrates.”)

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Heidegger claims, then, that understanding Socrates correctly means to set apart ethical discourse from proper philosophizing—while still being concerned in a fundamental way with the question of man’s proper ethos. In other words, Heidegger follows Aristotle as long as his ethical-political philosophizing can be understood as arising from a phenomenology of political existence that does not see the good as the primary intention of every human pursuit. Heidegger makes this clear in a later statement in the lecture which refers specifically to the Socratic turn to the study of political affairs.

Socrates advanced the task of treating the things themselves, and yet during this period the zetein peri physeos [inquiry into nature] slackened. As people turned to the politike, the physei onta [natural beings] receded into the background. This turn was not the result of a simple omission [Versäumnis], as if the human sciences were simply studied more than the natural sciences. Rather it was a fundamental oversight: The concepts of Being-in-the-polis also have their foundation in the concepts of nature. Aristotle saw this and shifted the weight of his work initially to the investigation of physis as Being. He thereby established the foundations for an investigation of Being as such (240-241; my emphasis).94

94

Heidegger’s commentary refers to Parts of Animals 642 a 28 sqq.

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Concluding remarks

In this chapter I analyzed two lectures that shed light on Heidegger as a political philosopher. These lectures left indelible marks on a number of thinkers who developed approaches to practical or political philosophy, such as Gadamer, Marcuse, Arendt, and Strauss, as well as on scholars of the classics—among them, notably, on Jacob Klein, who first convinced Strauss of the possibility of a return to ancient philosophy and whose work has had a similarly important impact in America. The first lecture of the summer of 1922 famously convinced Strauss that Heidegger was the most important thinker of his time. Thus, according to a welldocumented anecdote, returning from one of Heidegger’s lectures he visited Franz Rosenzweig and said to him that “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber … was an orphan child.”95 Back home in Marburg, he made similar claims to Gadamer and Paul Natorp.96 Soon thereafter, Natorp chose Heidegger as Nicolai Hartman’s successor in Marburg; Gadamer became his disciple; and Rosenzweig became

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Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 461.

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For Gadamer’s recollection see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’ Jugendschrift,” in Günther Neumann (ed.), Martin Heidegger. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 83.

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convinced that he and Heidegger were heralds of a ‘New Thinking’ that would revolutionize all of western philosophy.97 The second lecture of the summer of 1924 constituted the peak of Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle. As his final attempt to produce a book on the Stagirite, it is his most thorough analysis of Aristotelian philosophy. It is also unique in Heidegger’s oeuvre as his only sustained engagement with Aristotle’s practical philosophy (i.e., his Politics, Ethics, and Rhetoric). Never again, it seems, would Heidegger agree with a Socratic-Platonic thinker to such an extent as to claim that “it is worth nothing to say something new; it is only worth saying that which the ancients already knew.” Like SS 1922, SS 1924 acquired quasi-mythical status among Heidegger’s students (including Arendt and Strauss) as the occasion in which Heidegger not only developed an “ontology of the passions”98 but expressed “in one succinct sentence” the “becoming-one [of passion and thinking],” when “at the beginning of a lecture on Aristotle ... he said: ‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died’.”99 Despite their importance, these lectures have played a very minor role in shaping our understanding of Heidegger. This is probably the case because the lectures remained unpublished until recently, but it is also due to the habit of 97

See Franz Rosenzweig, “Transposed Fronts,” in Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig. Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 146152. 98

See S. Rosen, “Phronesis Or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger,” in Riccardo Pozzo (ed.), The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy, 11. 99

H. Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Ludz (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, 153-54. J. Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in R. Williamson and E. Zuckermann (eds.), The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein, 171.

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reading Heidegger’s work in the light of Being and Time, and—when it comes to understanding his politics—in light of his 1933 Rectoral Address. This approach has been misleading in two ways. First, it has led to the view that Heidegger’s work is at its core affected by a “Platonic bias”—a bias which in turn allegedly affects Strauss and against which Arendt allegedly responds. The thesis of a Platonic bias in Heidegger’s thought may be true as a psychological insight pointing to the philosopher’s déformation professionelle, and it may even be the case that in the late 1920s (and later) Heidegger resorted to Plato to address the crisis of the time.100 But there was nothing Platonic whatsoever in Heidegger’s lectures up to (at least) 1924. Indeed, perhaps the most recurring theme in the early lectures from 1921 to 1924 is the critique of philosophical theoria, and the quest for a way of thinking that grows out of—and never quite transcends—pretheoretical experience.101 All of Western thought from Plato to Husserl—with the partial exception of Aristotle—Heidegger argued, is deficient precisely insofar as it has lost its rootedness in the ‘soil’ of pre-theoretical experience. Moreover, a Platonic approach was anathema to someone who ‘arrived on the path of thought’ thanks to his reading of such thinkers as Luther or Augustine or Kierkegaard, and

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Compare the similar language of Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” with, for instance, Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Republic in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 166. 101

Granted that this may be a mistaken characterization of what is truly Platonic, it is nevertheless the way the term is typically understood—viz., as the philosophy of transcendence par excellence, from the bodily, the sensuous, the manifold and hence also from the life of the people.

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who was deeply influenced by the revival of the rhetorical tradition undertaken by the Historical School—specially by Dilthey.102 The second reason why beginning from Being and Time is misleading is simple: like Gadamer and Klein, Strauss and Arendt made it clear that what was most important about Heidegger was not his philosophy—“whose very existence may be put into question”103 —but his recovery of classical thought. Hence Strauss would claim that “Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle was an achievement with which I cannot compare any other intellectual phenomenon which has emerged in Germany after the war.”104 The peak of Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle—and, generally, of his recovery of Socratic-Platonic thought—occurred in 1922-1924/5 and not later. Anticipating the response of Arendt and Strauss (and also of Gadamer), I have argued that what is unique in these lectures is Heidegger’s un-self-conscious Socratism. Heidegger brought philosophy ‘down from the heavens to the people in the city’. That is, he redirected the philosophical quest from theory aimed at knowledge that is universal, teachable and binding—e.g., the search for a transcendental realm of validity or for ‘worldviews’ that guide our willing and 102

It must also be taken into account in this connection that (very much in opposition to Heidegger), Plato (also contrary to Aristotle) only refers to pathos and pathema when he wants to underline the pathological (in the sense of sickly) nature of the affects of the soul. See Giulia Sissa, “Pathos,” art. in Barbara Cassin (ed)., Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 902. 103

Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 151.

104

Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115-139, here 134-135.

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acting in neo-Kantianism, or for a science that will make possible a life “regulated by pure rational norms” in Husserl—to the “self-illumination of life,” or to letting life speak “for itself on the basis of its very own factical possibilities.” More specifically, I suggested that Heidegger was a Socratic insofar as he was an antischolastic Aristotelian who took Aristotle’s most important works to be those that “preserved the basis of Socrates’ and Plato’s inquiry [in] the world of common sense,”105 notably the Physics and the Rhetoric. Heidegger was a German Sokrates in that the only ‘Being’ that interested him was the Being that Dasein always already somehow grasps. In other words, for him, as for Socrates it seems, “the question of being is in itself, correctly understood, the question of man.”106 I referred to two possible conceptions of Socratic political philosophy. The first conception provides a phenomenology of authentic existence—or, literally, of truthful existence (assuming that Heidegger’s model is Aristotle’s aletheutikos)—in and through political life. For the Greeks “man is truly man [Mensch] insofar as he lives in the polis.”107 This is not something that simply happens to us (viz., that we depend on others and are therefore ‘political’), but is rather an ontological condition insofar as our “being-in-the-world” is “determined in its grounds by speech” “in the sense of speaking-with-one-another by way of a

105

Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation, Vol. 18, No. 1, Fall 1990, 7. 106

Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, GA 26 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1928] 1990), 20-21. 107

Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 56.

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sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-with.”108 Such a phenomenology, however, is not merely descriptive. Rather it leads to a particular understanding of philosophy. In this understanding the world is there for us as a common world which opens up according to particular ways of speaking, which in turn express ways of being attuned to the world. Truth is therefore not primordially disclosed through true or false assertions (pace Aristotle), and neither is it approximated by (rationally) considered opinions. Instead it is contained in doxai, that is, in ‘opinions’ or—perhaps better rendered—in ‘beliefs’ that express the way the world ‘seems to me’, and thus it is also contained in particular (ethical) dispositions or ways of bearing oneself in the world. (Any scientific proposition, Heidegger would insist, is in the last instance an expression of a more primordial attunement to the world.) This first conception of neo-Socratic thought directs the attention of philosophy to political life in various ways. Foremost among them is the fact that political life—where we share speeches (doxai or logoi)—becomes the site in which the disclosure of beings—including who we are—occurs. Ethics becomes unthinkable apart from politics thus conceived both insofar as ethics bespeaks a way of bearing oneself vis-à-vis others—of standing for the way the world ‘appears to me’ while being open to the fact that things could also be otherwise— and insofar as it bespeaks a way of dwelling in the world. Indeed from a Heideggerian perspective our humanity seems to depend completely on a proper

108

Ibid., 47.

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dwelling—what he calls Bodenständigkeit—that makes it possible for us to “speak with the world,” meaning to ‘save the phenomena’ or ‘to make things appear in their true light’.109 Political life also acquires normative significance insofar as the way we speak about something—particularly when what is at stake is who we are and when that ‘who’ is taken seriously (meaning that our opinions are ‘reputable’)—would seem to be sufficient for establishing principles for action. All of this makes of the political sphere a revolutionary sphere in the literal sense—namely, insofar as it is the site where beings are disclosed, where our humanity (through a proper dwelling) is at stake, and where new principles are discovered. The second meaning of Heideggerian neo-Socratism would be this. The political sphere acquires philosophical significance not because in it we can make visible the true in what is most apparent—or what shines most—but because political opinions (in the sense of public, shared opinions) are the starting point of any investigation into being qua being. The premise must again be made explicit as it is foreign to our way of thinking. It is that “our speech, even our unguarded colloquial way of speaking, may reveal to the attentive listener the hidden articulations of the language of things.”110 The ‘proof’ must likewise be

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At a minimum, such a dwelling would require a mother tongue. Heidegger would later refer to poetry, custom, history, and state—among other things pertaining to a Völkish existence. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 33. 110

Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” 177. To explain how this comes about—and whether this remains since Plato the best account of the way being and thinking are connected—would amount to explaining Plato’s ‘theory’ of the ideas or forms, and proving that it is superior to (for instance)

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repeated—namely the revelatory capacity of Aristotelian fundamental concepts— such as energeia, kinesis, ousia, telos, dunamis, pathos, arche—that have made it possible for us to know what we are doing.111 And yet, it is here that Heidegger’s approach can no longer be considered neo-Socratic in our sense, for it is not clear that the type of speech that most primordially refers to ‘the things themselves’ is public speech, and that such speech expresses (in the last instance) an orientation to the good. Hence Heidegger’s claim that “[t]he concepts of Being-in-the-polis also have their foundation in the concepts of nature” and his claim that Socrates’ turn to the politike “was a fundamental oversight.” Perhaps, indeed, it was not Socrates but the pre-Socratic poet-philosophers of nature that discovered the way to speak to the essence of things. This would be the greatest challenge to Socratic political philosophy.

Kant’s understanding of the mediation between being and thinking. It hardly needs to be said that that is beyond the scope of this work (and of my competence). The strongest case I know of for the continuing validity and superiority of Platonism (over Kantianism, post-modernism or contemporary science) has been made by Stanley Rosen, particularly in The Question of Being, esp. 46-95. Rosen’s defense of Platonism is an attempt to reverse Heidegger’s thesis that the Platonic idea is the reification of Being. As the appendix of the book begins to show, however, Rosen would (in my view) have been forced to qualify his critique of Heidegger had he studied the 1924 lecture analyzed in this chapter. For in SS 1924 Heidegger makes precisely Rosen’s case that the idea (understood as the ‘look’ of a thing, which is “very often identical” with the way a thing is spoken about) is “the accessibility of Being.” Compare note 86 above and Rosen, The Question, 79; see also the Appendix, 317-322 where Rosen admits that “Heidegger, despite the criticism I have recorded, is much closer to the Platonic text in 1924 [in the lecture on the Sophist of 1924/25] than he was ever to be again” (321). Had he been more attentive to the continuity between Plato and Aristotle, I would argue, Heidegger would have seen that the Aristotelian account of the ‘ideas’ he favors in 1924 is the Socratic-Platonic account he would later denounce as metaphysics. 111

To the extent that we understand these concepts, or perhaps to the extent that we act humanely?

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CHAPTER TWO Descending the Magic Mountain to Begin a Socratic Ascent: Leo Strauss in Weimar

One year after the end of the Second World War a Jewish-German émigré who had arrived in America at the beginning of the war prophesied the success of his teaching with a strange mixture of hopelessness and confidence. In one of his first writings on the subject of ‘political philosophy’, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” a critique of John Wild’s Plato’s Theory of Man,1 Leo Strauss claimed that “It is safe to predict that the movement which [Wild’s] book may be said to launch in this country will become increasingly influential and weighty as the years go by.”2 Upon reading Strauss’s text, his friend Karl Löwith characterized it as “a true masterpiece,” except for one sentence which “I would have left out.” Referring to Strauss’s prediction, Löwith claimed that, “That is very un-safe [to predict], for how could Mr. Wild ever begin a movement and how can you yourself believe that in the USA of all places the return to antiquity could become a serious striving or a fashion?”3

1

John Wild, Plato’s Theory of Man: An Introduction to the Realistic Philosophy of Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1946). 2

Leo Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13, no. 3, September, 1946, 326. 3

See Löwith’s letter to Strauss of August 14, 1946, in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und Zugehörige Schriften – Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2001), 659. (Hereafter, GS.)

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At that time, in 1946, Strauss was a lecturer at the New School for Social Research who found “life here in this land upsettingly difficult for people like me,” who had to “fight for the simplest working conditions,” and who considered sending his writings to Switzerland due to the difficulty of finding a publisher in America. He nevertheless disagreed with Löwith: “Assume however for a minute that I knew of 2 or 3 people concerned with the restoration of classical philosophy whose work will appear within the next 10 years and who understand something about the matter. Then the thesis which Wild accidentally supports for the first time publicly in America [viz., that a return to classical philosophy is possible] would acquire a greater influence and greater weight than it has at the moment.”4 Strauss, of course, was one of those 2 or 3 people whose reinterpretation of classical philosophy would appear in the next 10 years. Four years later, in 1949, he was appointed Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Little more than a decade after that, he had managed to divide American political theory into ‘Straussian’ and ‘Wolinian’ camps.5 By 1996—twenty-three years after his death in 1973—he had become, according to Time magazine, “one of the most influential men in American politics.”6 4

Strauss to Löwith, August 15, 1946, in GS3, 660-61.

5

See Benjamin R. Barber, “The Politics of Political Science: ‘Value-Free’ Theory and the WolinStrauss Dust-Up of 1963,” The American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (Nov., 2006). 6

“Perhaps one of the most influential men in American politics is the late Leo Strauss, the German émigré political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s. His distrust of moral relativism, his deep skepticism about the benefits of the Enlightenment and his concern that the unchecked authority of reason would sabotage the cultural traditions that sustained civilization were absorbed by a generation of students and disciples. Some of them, including Irving Kristol and William Bennett, eventually became leading neoconservatives, the

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Strauss rose to prominence by creating a school of ‘political philosophy’7—a term which he did more than anyone to popularize by writing more than a dozen books or articles bearing the term in their title.8 That school has since had a deep public impact especially in the United States, both as a way of doing philosophy (or human sciences generally) and as a way of doing politics. As a way of doing philosophy, Strauss’s ideas led to the formation of schools of thought in several fields of study—from the study of the classics (Seth Benardete, Stanley Rosen, Christopher Bruell, Allan Bloom); to medieval philosophy

group that brought to American conservatism a measure of the intellectual legitimacy it had lacked for decades. Kristol’s son William, the Weekly Standard editor and publisher and G.O.P. strategist, is another self-described Straussian.” Richard Lacayo and Ratu Kamlani, “You’ve Read about Who’s Influential, but Who has the Power?” Time 147, no. 25 (06/17, 1996): 80. 7

According to Heinrich Meier, the editor of Strauss’s Collected Writings and the leading European interpreter of Strauss’s work, the founding of a school upon his appointment at the University of Chicago in 1949 was “the sole political act of consequence that Strauss brought himself to launch.” Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xvii-xx. Strauss’s efforts to found a school are documented in his correspondence. Newly arrived at the University of Chicago, Strauss reports on the situation to his friend Jacob Klein as follows: “One could say much about the situation here. The U of Ch would be a great opportunity, if it were not at the same time just as great an encumbrance…The power of [Robert Maynard] Hutchins shows itself always in statu evanescendi: he appoints, and from that moment on the appointee does what he wants, not what Hutchins wants. Thus one cannot change anything through ‘politics’, but only in the class rooms. There more and more I must develop a ‘political theory’, with which I appear to have success among the students (≠ with myself). I must read more contemporary literature as is good and agreeable to me, and I had to leave completely behind all the interesting things that I had begun (Rousseau and Lucretius above all).” (See GS3, 597.) 8

Strauss used the term ‘political philosophy’ in the title of both his first and his last books published in English—Hobbes’ Political Philosophy (1936) and Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (posthumously published in 1983)—in nine essays written between 1945 and 1971, as well as in the collection of essays, What is Political Philosophy? (1959). (Strauss wrote the following essays on ‘political philosophy’: “On Classical Political Philosophy” (1945), “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy” (1946), “Political Philosophy and History” (1949),“On the Spirit of Hobbes’ Political Philosophy” (1950), “On the Basis of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy” (1954), “What is Political Philosophy?” (1964), “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy” (1959), “The Crisis of Political Philosophy” (1964), and “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” (1969).) See Meier, The TheologicalPolitical Problem, xii.

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(Mushin Mahdi, Rémi Brague, Ralph Lerner); to early modern political thought (Pierre Manent, Victor Gourevitch), German idealism (Richard L. Velkley, Steven B. Smith), and American politics (Walter Berns, Martin Diamond, Harry Jaffa).9 As a way of doing politics, Strauss’s attempt “to foster the politically gifted and the gentlemen”10 among his students has had an equally striking impact—even though, quite naturally for a thinker who very rarely took a public stance on the political issues of his time,11 the nature of that impact (as against the fact that it exists) is hard to specify.12

9

See Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 29-30. For a full account of Straussian studies in America see Ibid., chapter six, “The Emergence of the Straussian Study of America,” 197-228, and Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), chapter four, “Strauss’s Legacy in Political Science,” 89-117. As Pangle points out, to measure the imact of ‘Straussianism’ one would also have to consider that his ‘negative’ influence has been just as important as is evident in the work of the leading American pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty, whose life’s work, as he himself concedes, has been devoted to spelling out his disillusionment with the ‘Straussian’ Platonism he encountered in his youth at the University of Chicago. See Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (Lodong: Penguin, 1999), 8, 16. Cf. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy, 130. 10

Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, xviii.

11

For an exception see Strauss’s “Letter to the Editor: The State of Israel”—a 1957 letter to the editor of the National Review—in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 413-414. (Hereafter JPCM.) 12

That followers of Strauss use Strauss’s ideas to shape public opinion in powerful ways and occupy positions in government where these ideas could—and very likely have had—an impact in policy-making is widely documented. However, whether this is what Strauss intended, and whether one can legitimately translate Strauss’s philosophical views into a worldview from which in turn a political program could be derived is far more difficult to determine. For an account of the political impact of Straussianism see Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, L’Amérique Messianique: Les guerres des néo-conservateurs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), chapter 8: “La compagnie des neo-conservateurs.” Consider also the attribution of specific foreign policy positions to Strauss’s ideas by a highly knowledgeable scholar of Strauss (Steven Lenzner) and a Straussian public intellectual (Bill Kristol): “[Aristotle’s] concept of regime, properly understood, is one that avoids the unhealthy extremes of utopian universalism and insular nationalism.

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The political impact of Straussianism led some scholars beginning in the 1980s to question the relation between Strauss’s philosophy and his politics. Critics of Strauss questioned both his status as a serious scholar and his bona fides as a friend of liberal democracy—and the relation between the two.13 A second wave of critique began during the run up to the war in Iraq as sectarians, journalists, and scholars, all sought—more or less implausibly—to link neoconservative policies to Strauss’s teachings.14 A third wave has now been generated as scholars have begun to pay closer attention to Strauss’s early political views, and specifically to his “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” leanings.15

President Bush’s advocacy of ‘regime change’ – which avoids the pitfalls of a wishful global universalism on the one hand and a fatalistic cultural determinism on the other – is a not altogether unworthy product of Strauss’s rehabilitation of the notion of regime.” William Kristol and Steven Lenzner, “What was Leo Strauss up to?,” The Public Interest, Fall 2003. 13

Among the most important statements of this first wave of critique of Strauss’s ‘politics of philosophy’ are Miles Burnyeat, “The Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985, 30-36; Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); and Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a rather different perspective on the relation between philosophy and politics in Strauss’s thought, see Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 14

See, for example, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss,” Executive Intelligence Review, March 21, 2003. James Atlas, “Leo-Cons; A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” New York Times, May 4, 2003. Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2003. Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 15

See Strauss’s letter to Karl Löwith of May 19, 1933, in GS3, 625. “Just because the new rightwing Germany does not tolerate us, it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial—is it possible, in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and sickening appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme, to protest against the repulsive monster [i.e., Hitler].” Scott Horton drew attention to this letter in a 2006 blog which itself generated hundreds of responses. http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html. The debate has been taken up in panels held at the 2007 and 2008 APSA meetings.

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For those concerned with understanding the possibilities and limits of political philosophy in our time, these three waves have had at least one positive result: they have forced us to confront the fundamental question that Strauss never really answered: Why ‘political philosophy’? And indeed: What is ‘political philosophy’? In this chapter I argue that to begin to answer these questions it is necessary to revisit the Weimar debate within which Strauss’s thinking developed, and, specifically, to study it afresh in light of the recent publication of his correspondence (beginning in 1930); of the totality of his writings up to 1938; and, above all, of the lectures which shaped his understanding of Heidegger (from 1922 and 1924)—for, as Strauss put it towards the end of his life, “nothing affected us as profoundly in the years in which our minds took their lasting directions as the thought of Heidegger.”16

16

Strauss and Klein, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College in Honor of Jacob Klein,” in JCPM, 450.

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“Ethos anthropoi daimon?”: Strauss’s Becoming Strauss (1899-1933)

To understand the reasons that led Strauss to his lifelong quest for a political science or philosophy, it is necessary to begin by recalling the basic facts of his youth. These facts we gather mainly from Strauss’s autobiographical writings. Strauss was “brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home somewhere in a rural district of Germany... [where] [t]he ‘ceremonial’ laws were rather strictly observed, but [where] there was little Jewish knowledge.”17 From a very early age Strauss became aware of the Jewish predicament as his family assisted persecuted Jews from Russia.18 Strauss entered the Gymnasium Philippinum in Marburg in Easter of 1912.19 There “[he] became exposed to the message of German Humanism” and “[f]urtively … read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche” (460). “Without being aware of it,” as Strauss recalls, “[he] had moved rather far away from [his] Jewish home, without any rebellion.” At the age of 17 Strauss was then “converted to Zionism—to simple, straightforward political Zionism” (460).20 At about that age Strauss began his university studies 17

In what follows I refer mainly to Strauss’s remarks delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland in 1970, published as “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss” in JPCM, 457-466, here 459-460. (Henceforth cited in the text in parentheses.) 18

Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews?” in JPCM, 312-13.

19

Strauss, “Lebenslauf,” [1922] in GS2, 298.

20

Strauss joined was the “Jüdischer Wanderbund Blau-Weiss” which was conceived in 1907 as a counterpart to the German nationalist and anti-modernist Wandervogel movement. “Countering the Protestant Germanism of the Wandervogel with a corresponding ‘German Jewish’ orientation,

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but was almost immediately conscripted by the German Army where he served as an interpreter in the Belgian occupation until December of 1918.21 Upon completing his military service, Strauss joined the university of Marburg. There he began to study the western philosophical tradition under the neo-Kantians Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp. Strauss attended courses on Plato’s theory of ideas, Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, and the history of modern German philosophy, while also concentrating on classical philology under the guidance of Karl Reinhardt and Eduard Fraenkel.22 Sensing that the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism was “in a state of disintegration” after the death of its founder Hermann Cohen (in 1918) (460), Strauss decided to pursue his doctorate at the university of Hamburg with a notable disciple of Cohen, Ernst Cassirer. Strauss completed his dissertation on The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in 1921 at the age of 22.23 The decisive encounters that shaped Strauss’s life and thought occurred soon thereafter. Blau-Weiss provided a haven for the assimilated and alienated Jewish youths who enjoyed the sense of belonging provided by the uniforms and pins and who thrived on the ritual marching through the streets, returning the German ‘Heil!’ with a self-assured Jewish ‘Shalom!’.” Michael Zank, “Introduction” to M. Zank (ed.), Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921-1932) (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 4. On Strauss’s early political Zionism see also Heinrich Meier, Preface to Leo Strauss, GS1: xv-xx. (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl reports that Heinrich Blücher, Hannah Arendt’s husband—a communist and a Gentile—was also for a time, strangely, a member of BlauWeiss. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 127.) 21

Strauss, “Lebenslauf,” in GS2, 298.

22

Eugene Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2006), 15-16. 23

L. Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis, in GS2, 237293.

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After receiving his Ph.D. Strauss went to Freiburg (in 1922) “in order to see and hear Husserl” (460). However, “I did not derive great benefit [from him],” probably, as he recalled, because he was “not mature enough” and because “[m]y predominant interest was in theology” (461). Yet, “[o]ne of the unknown young men in Husserl’s entourage was Heidegger” (461). Of the first occasion in which he “understood something” of what Heidegger was saying at the time—viz., “when he interpreted the beginning of [Aristotle’s] Metaphysics”—Strauss recalled that it led him to say to Franz Rosenzweig, whom he visited on his way home, that “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child” (461). In 1923 Strauss was recruited by Rosenzweig to teach at the Free Jewish House of Learning in Frankfurt. It was also around this time that Strauss began to intervene publicly in the Zionist debate of the time as a freelance writer for the Zionist press.24 During these years (especially from 1923 to 1925), Strauss became an intellectual leader of the young Zionist movement. Though he largely stayed away from questions of practical politics or strategy–Strauss was critical of most programs and was concerned above all with examining their premises and implications—he seems nevertheless to have met on more than one occasion with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionists, to discuss the different

24

See, for instance, L. Strauss, “Antwort auf das Prinzipielle Wort der Frankfurter,” in Jüdische Rundschau 28, n° 9 (1923): 45 (reprinted in GS2, 299-307); “Anmerkung zur Diskussion über ‘Zionismus und Antisemitismus’,” Jüdische Rundschau 28, nos. 83/84 (1923): 50l (in GS2, 311315); “Das Heilige,” Der Jude 7 (1923): 240-242 (GS2, 307-311); “Der Zionismus bei Max Nordau,” der Jude 7 (1923), 10/10, 657-60 (GS2, 315-323).

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possibilities open to the movement.25 According to Eugene Shepppard, he also elaborated a strategy in 1923 to advance legislation that would facilitate the inculcation of a Jewish national consciousness for Jewish students in Hessen schools.26 One of the articles Strauss wrote for the Der Jude (a periodical edited by Martin Buber) on “Cohens Analysis of Spinoza’s Bible Science” (1924) brought him to the attention of Julius Guttmann who was the head of the Berlin-based Academy for the Science of Judaism. Strauss thus secured a position as a research fellow in Jewish philosophy in the Academy where he worked from 1925 to 1932. There, under Guttmann’s commission, Strauss wrote his first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1930),27 while also contributing to the Academy’s Jubilee edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s works. It was also during these years in Berlin that Strauss met Alexandre Kojève and Gershom Scholem, as well as their common acquaintances, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt.28 In 1932 Strauss managed to leave Germany for Paris thanks to a Rockefeller fellowship won through the support of Carl Schmitt.29 In Paris (where

25

Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in JPCM, 319.

26

Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, 34.

27

Leo Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat, in GS1, 1-363. 28

For Benjamin’s (rather positive) opinion of Strauss, see Gershom Scholem (ed.), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 347, 349. 29

See the letter from Strauss to Carl Schmitt of 10 July 1933, in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127. (As

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he lived from 1932 to 1934), Strauss was part of an intellectual community that included Alexandre Koyré and Kojève (students of Husserl and Jaspers respectively); the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain; the Arabists Louis Massignon, Paul Kraus, and Shlomo Pines; as well as other members of what Strauss called the “German-Jewish intellectual proletariat” (presumably meaning Hannah Arendt and her company).30 It was also while in Paris that he learned of Heidegger’s decision to align himself with the Nazis.31

we will see Strauss had captured Schmitt’s attention through the research he conducted on Hobbes in the context of his study of Biblical criticism for his book on Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.) 30

See Strauss’s letter to Löwith of May 19, 1933: “…the entire German-Jewish intellectual proletariat is assembled here. It’s terrible – I’d rather just run back to Germany” (GS3, 624). (This was, of course, after the Nazi rise to power.) That Strauss hardly ever mentions Arendt in his correspondence of the time, or indeed in all of his correspondence, even though they were part of the same circle of friends, seems to be due to Arendt’s general dislike of Strauss and her harsh opinion of him as a German nationalist, who, on top of that, moving to France had become a French nationalist. Cf. Klein’s letter to Strauss of July 6, 1933 in GS3, 466 on the rumors circulating in Berlin spread in part by Hannah Arendt and “Dr. Stern” (Günther Stern, Arendt’s first husband) that “Herr Dr. Leo Strauss has become a French nationalist after he had previously been a German nationalist.” In fact, it is true that Strauss had written to Schmitt that same month that he had been “somewhat occupied” with the work of Charles Maurras, the cofounder of the Action Française (a nationalist Catholic group which had rallied against the Dreyfusards and which was hostile to aliens generally but particularly to Jews). See Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of July 10, 1933 in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 127. How far the animosity between these groups went is perhaps shown by Strauss’s worry that France is out of the question as a possibility for continuing his exile, “as a consequence of the fact that I count here as a ‘Nazi’.” Letter to Gerhard Krüger of December 3, 1933 (in GS3, 435). 31

A letter from his friend Jacob Klein dated April 22, 1933 informed Strauss of Heidegger’s treatment of his Jewish colleagues and students—and especially of his mentor Husserl—as well as of his ascent to the rectorship (GS3, 463-64). Strauss’s correspondence responding to this is sparse. We do know, however, that he read Heidegger’s Rectoral Address, which had been sent to him by Karl Löwith together with Karl Barth’s “Theological Existence Today!” and that he responded struck by the contrast between Barth’s “Christian critique of the events [and] H.’s [Heidegger’s] un-critical submission to them” (Paris, September 5, 1933, in GS3, 636).

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Political Science, Political Liberalism and Political Theology in the Dwindling Days of Weimar (1928-1933)

We break off at this point in order to begin to trace Strauss’s turn to political science, which by 1933 had been for the most part completed. In 1928/29 Strauss wrote his last Zionist publications32 and began to intervene in the broader philosophical-political debate of the time. It was then that his thinking underwent what he would later call a “change in orientation”33 from political Zionism to political science, or, as Michael Zank puts it, from the question, ‘How are the people to live now?’ to the question, ‘What is the right way of life as such?’34 Indeed, as the Weimar Republic began to collapse, Strauss began to raise the question that arguably became his life’s work: whether political science is “possible and necessary.”35 By this Strauss meant first of all to raise the problem

32

See “Die Zukunft einer Illusion” (1928) and “Zur Ideologie des politischen Zionismus,” (1929), in GS1, 431-448. 33

Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 173.

34

See Zank, “Introduction,” 17-19.

35

See, e.g., Strauss’s letter to Krüger, October 15, 1931, in GS3, 394 (on “the necessity and possibility of natural right”); cf. “Preface to a planned book on Hobbes” (1931), in GS3, 210-211, as well as Strauss’s letter to Krüger, November 17, 1932 in GS3, 404; Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933/34), in GS3, 274 (on the “possibility and necessity of a political science, of a human order of human life”); Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft (1935), in GS3, 156 (on Hobbes’ taking for granted “that political science is at all possible and necessary”); see also 173. “On Classical Political Philosophy” (1945) in What is Political Philosophy?, 78-79 (on the tradition of political philosophy taking for granted “the necessity and possibility of political philosophy”; cf. 89 on classical political philosophy’s problematization of its theoretical basis); “What is Political Philosophy?” (1954), in WPP, 17 (on the “very possibility” of political philosophy becoming questionable in our time). Consider especially the note Strauss wrote on “8-11-46”: “I herewith

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whether the question of the right order of society can be answered by unassisted human reason, that is, whether “an immanent rational foundation of one’s way of life is possible,” or whether this is a question that societies (and individuals) cannot ultimately answer autonomously.36 Today these questions seem rather odd because we tend to take for granted the triumph of what Strauss would call ‘the global alliance of liberal democracy and capitalism’. Yet this triumph, of course, was anything but decided at the time—and may be neither actual nor decided today. It must therefore, and quite obviously, be recalled that already in 1930 Germany was living under emergency dictatorial rule and that very soon the question of the right order of society would no longer be a question at all but would be settled by the Führer’s decrees. Thus, as we shall see, during these years the major thinkers of the time became

strike out everything I have done so far—I must really begin from the very beginning./I must once again get clear on what the real question is—and I have to change my working plans accordingly […]/Thus far I have assumed that the account of the original concept of philosophy (including the critique sketched of the modern concept of philosophy) could suffice, since for me the right and the necessity of philosophy was certain. Impressed by Kierkegaard and recalling my earlier doubts, I must raise the question once again and as sharply as possible whether the right and the necessity of philosophy are completely evident. Since this is the case, much more important than the topic ‘Socrates’ and ‘Introduction to pol[itical] philos[ophy]’ becomes—philosophy and the Law or (perhaps) Philosophy or The divine guidance.” Leo Strauss Papers, Box 11, Folder 11. (Cited in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 29.) To continue chronologically, see the 1951 ‘Preface to the American Edition’ of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (“I assumed that political philosophy as the quest for the final truth regarding the political fundamentals is possible and necessary…”); Natural Right and History (1953), 167 (Hobbes takes on trust “the view that political philosophy or political science is possible or necessary”); “On Aristotle’s Politics” (1964) in The City and Man, 18 (“…political philosophy is more questionable than philosophy as such”); Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), 3 (“Our great tradition includes political philosophy and thus seems to vouch for its possibility and necessity. According to the same tradition, political philosophy was founded by Socrates”). 36

For a concise statement of the theological-political problem thus conceived see Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assman, “Afterword,” in Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 115-142, here 140.

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implicitly or explicitly concerned with Strauss’s question concerning the necessity and possibility of political science or with the question of the source of a “a human order of human life.”37 Contrary to what seems to be the tacit assumption of most Strauss scholarship, it shall become clear in what follows that the origins and the meaning of this understanding of political science cannot be appreciated properly without an attempt to at least sketch the alternatives which Strauss explicitly confronted.38 One of the first attempts to address the crisis of the time—and going from least to most important for Strauss—was Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Mannheim’s manifesto for a sociology of knowledge, Ideology and Utopia (1929), would become the most widely debated book by a living sociologist in Weimar.39 Indeed, when its theses were first presented at the Sociologists’ Congress in September 1928 it was seen as a “spiritual revolution” 37

Strauss, Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933/34), in GS3, 274.

38

This is specially true with respect to Strauss’s engagement with Heidegger. Among recent studies that seek to explain how Strauss became Strauss, Heidegger is a tangential figure or at the most one of the ‘existentialist’ thinkers Strauss thought against. See David Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 2008); Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Heinrich Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Svetozar Minkov (ed.), Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2006). Cf. however, Meier’s statement that Heidegger’s idea of a “destruction of the tradition” may have “allow[ed] [Strauss] for the first time to find his way to his own distinctive undertaking.” Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 62. 39

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [1929] 1985). Ideology and Utopia was reviewed in Germany by, among others, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Tillich, Günther Stern (Anders), Karl A. Wittfogel. In the United States it was reviewed, inter alia, by Hans Speier, Robert Merton, Kenneth Burke und C. Wright Mills. See Verhandlungen des 6. Deutschen Soziologentages in Zurich, 1928, (Tubingen: Mohr, 1929). See also Hans-Joachim Lieber (ed.), Ideologienlehre und Wissenssoziologie (Darmstadt, 1974) (where Arendt’s review is collected), and especially, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds.), Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie, 2 vols. (1982).

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(Norbert Elias) and as pervaded by an “alarming sense of trying to sail a stormchurned ocean on an unseaworthy ship” (Alfred Meusel).40 Writing in a time of intense political and class struggle in which the fate of the Weimar Republic was being decided, Mannheim responded to the collision between the different political forces of the time—liberal-bourgeois, socialist, fascist, buraucratic, conservative—by suggesting that we have reached a stage in history in which the ideological character of all thought becomes apparent, thus enabling a purification of thinking that could give rise to a science of politics in the form of political sociology.41 “It has become incontrovertibly clear today that all knowledge which is either political or which involves a world-view is inevitably partisan… But this implies the possibility of an integration of many mutually complementary points of view into a comprehensive whole.”42 Thus, “politics as a science is for the first time possible” because we see that mutually opposing views are not infinite and not products of arbitrary will but mutually complementary since they derive from specific social and historical situations. Political science in the Mannheimian sense, in short, aimed to rescue liberalism as a therapist rescues a sinking 40

Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), 212. 41

Mannheim argued that the sociology of knowledge is born with the formulation of a “total” conception of ideology. This conception makes it possible to turn “what was once the intellectual armament of a party into a method of research,” in such a way as to “provide modern men with a revised view of the whole historical process.” The sociology of knowledge is also a means for the purification of thinking: “the attempt to escape ideological and utopian distortions is, in the last analysis, a quest for reality…[it provides us] with a basis for a sound scepticism…[it can] be used to combat the tendency in our intellectual life to separate thought from the world of reality, to conceal reality, or to exceed its limits. Thought should contain neither less nor more than the reality in whose medium it operates.” Ideology and Utopia, 78, 98. 42

Ibid., 148-49.

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marriage: no-one possesses the absolute truth, there are no absolute oppositions— these result only from different perspectives—only a ‘freefloating’ intelligence (Mannheim’s ‘freefloating’ intellectuals playing the role of therapists) can neutralize these apparent differences.43 An alternative defense of Weimar liberal democracy was the attempt to overcome the ‘anarchy of worldviews’ that dominated the time by an appeal not to a synthesizing view but simply (so to speak) to the validity of the rules of the game. From the perspective of Hans Kelsen’s positivism, the situation called for a legal science that is “politically indifferent”—in the sense that it “accepts the given legal order without valuing it as such”—and that sees behind any claim to natural right but the ideology of an interest group.44 Kelsen was a defender of the republic, and yet from the standpoint of his pure theory of law his defense of democracy was, paradoxically and yet consistently with his own premises, relativistic and ideological. As he put it in 1929: “A metaphysically absolute ideology entails an autocratic attitude, a critically relativist one entails a democratic attitude. Anyone who considers absolute truth and absolute values of human cognition to be barred to us, must at least regard an opposite opinion as

43

Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 213.

44

Hans Kelsen, Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Naturrechtslehre und des Rechtspositivismus (Charlottenburg, 1928), 67. Cited in Strauss, “Vorwort zu Einem Geplanten Buch Über Hobbes,” (1931), in GS3, 202.

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being possible. That is why relativism is the ideology presupposed by the democratic idea.”45 A third type of defense grew out of the deepest tradition of German humanism going back to Kant and the spirit of Goethe, and was articulated by perhaps the greatest representative of German academic philosophy of the time: Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer, Strauss’s mentor, was the last successor of the Marburg neo-Kantian school which had dominated the German philosophical establishment since the 1870s. In 1928 Cassirer became the first Jew to be named rector of a German university (the university of Hamburg)—an opportunity he used to go on record for defending the Weimar constitution. Generally speaking, neoKantianism in the context of Weimar can be seen as an attempt not to synthesize or to relativize the questions raised by a plurality of worldviews but to compartmentalize these questions into different ‘provinces of culture’, that is, into questions of science, law, art, and religion.46 Cassirer’s own philosophy of culture found its systematic expression in a philosophy of symbolic forms which grew out of an Olympian effort using the unique sources of the Warburg library in Hamburg to provide “an analysis of all the fundamental forms of world-

45

Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929), 101. Cited in Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, 3rd ed. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1992), 181 (my emphasis). 46

For a classic statement of the Marburg school of philosophy see Paul Natorp, “Kant und die Marburger Schule,” Kant-Studien, 17 (1912):193-221. See specially, 196-197.

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understanding.”47 In an attempt to draw all the consequences of Kant’s Copernican Revolution in a systematic form, Cassirer argued that, just as much as science, so too myth, religion, art, and language are forms of objectivating the world—they are “symbolical forms” in which is accomplished a “synthesis of world and spirit”—and that it is the task of philosophy “to grasp each of these forms in its individuality and in their systematic relations.”48 Cassirer, we could say, was the most dedicated and serious believer in the possibilities afforded by culture understood as “the process of man’s progressive self-liberation.”49 And thus indeed, according to Cassirer—referring back to the crisis of Weimar—there would be no reason why two human beings could not in principle come to an agreement on even the most divisive issues, even religious ones, provided these human beings are highly cultivated, that is, provided that they know that it is “in the last instance the ‘same’ human being that always confronts us in thousands of manifestations.”50 Cassirer defended the Weimar constitution along these lines as “an outgrowth of German soil … fed from the

47

Ernst Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt. Goethe/Schiller/Hölderlin/Kleist. Fünf Aufsätze (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1921). Cited in Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer. Von Marburg nach New York: eine philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 70. 48

E. Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt, 69, 73; cited in Ibid., 50.

49

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 228. 50

E. Cassirer, Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, 1971, 76. Cited in W. Perpeet, “Kultur, Kulturphilosophie,” in HWPh, Vol. 4, 1312.

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force of idealistic philosophy.”51 Specifically, he drew a parallel to Kant’s position on the French Revolution and its republican constitution. Kant had posited that, whether the Revolution and constitutional reform succeed or not, it is a phenomenon that will not be forgotten in human history “because it discovers a disposition in human nature towards the better.” In 1928 Cassirer appealed to that spirit claiming that “In these sentences is most clearly expressed that type of symbolic consideration that characterizes the ethicist, the philosophical idealist Kant.”52 Finally, there was in the Weimar republic a theological or theologicalpolitical reaction against all of this—and specifically against the philosophy of culture—on the part of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic thinkers including (among many others) Franz Rosenzweig, Friedrich Gogarten, and Karl Barth, whose importance (especially politically) stands in a strange relation of disproportionality to the amount of attention it receives in studies of the politicalphilosophical debate of the time.53 For these thinkers the various attempts at

51

Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur verfassungsfeier am 11. August 1928 (Hamburg: De Gruyter, 1929), cited in H. Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 71. 52

Cassirer, Die Idee Der Republikanischen Verfassung. Cited in Ibid., 72-73.

53

This is especially true with respect to analyses of the genesis of the thought of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss, particularly in the Anglo-American context. Some exceptions are the following. With respect to Heidegger: Christopher Rickey, Revolutionary Saints: Heidegger, National Socialism, and Antinomian Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Concerning Strauss: Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On Arendt in the Weimar theological-political context, see Peter Eli Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political Theology,” Social Research, Vol. 74, 3, Fall 2007, 855-876. Though not dealing directly with these thinkers, the following studies also shed light on the theological-political predicament in

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synthesizing, relativizing, or compartmentalizing the fundamental questions that divide human beings are but humanistic evasions of God’s transcendence: indeed self-divinizing evasions of fundamental decisions with tragic consequences. Hence against the attempt to find God in human cultural activity—a nineteenth century hope that had first led to bourgeois self-complacency and then in reaction to nihilistic militarism—Gogarten called for “a religion which is a constant crisis of this and every culture,” a religion that “attacks culture as culture … that attacks the whole world.”54 Somehow more moderately, Barth called for a decision either for man or for God, for history or for eternity, a decision that amounts to “a war of life and death, a war in which there can be no armistice, no agreement—and no peace.”55 As for Rosenzweig, he appealed to “the calm and silent image of our

Weimar. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007). Jean-Lois Gasse, “République de Weimar et Théologie Protestante,” in Manfred Gangl and Hélène Roussel (eds.), Les intellectuels et l'etat sous la République de Weimar (Paris: CID, 1993). Kurt Nowak, “Religiöse Sozialisten – Deutsche Christen. Zur theologischen Wechselbeziehung zwischen politischen Antipoden,” as well as Hartmut Ruddies, “Flottierende Versatzstücke und ideologische Austauscheffekte: Theologische Antworten auf die Ambivalenz der Moderne,” in M. Gangl, and Gérard Raulet, Intellektuellendiskurse in der Weimarer Republik: Zur politischen Kultur einer Gemengelage (Paris: Editions de la Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1994). Karl Löwith, “Postscript: On Martin Heidegger’s Political Decisionism and Friedrich Gogarten’s Theological Decisionism,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 159-173. Alexander Schwan, “Zeitgenössische Philosophie und Theologie in ihrem Verhältnis zur Weimarer Republik,” in K. D. Erdnamm and Hagen Schulze (eds.), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1980), 259-305. 54

Friedrich Gogarten, “The Crisis of Our Culture,” in James M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, Vol. I (Richmond: John Knox Press, [1920] 1968), 299. 55

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Eswyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1921] 1968), 225.

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existence … worldless evidence which gives the lie to the worldly and all-tooworldly sham eternity of the historical moments of the nations.”56

56

Franz Rosenzwig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 334-35.

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Götterdämmerung: The Davos Disputation Between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer (1929) In a sense, at least for Strauss, the confrontation between all of these possibilities of the thinkable and the doable culminated in the debate between Cassirer and Heidegger that took place in the Swiss ski resort of Davos during the last weeks of March of 1929.57 The debate between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos was about the correct interpretation of Kant, and specifically whether Kant is to be read as an ontologist concerned with “a theory of beings in general,” as Heidegger suggested, or whether, as Cassirer would have it, Kant was a philosophical idealist primarily concerned with the possibility of objectivity, that is, of transcending human finitude both in an ethical realm which leads beyond the world of appearances and in a scientific sphere where necessary and universal truths can be found in the form of synthetic, a priori judgments.58 At stake, however, was a much broader and urgent question (politically and otherwise), namely, whether understanding is possible on the basis of reason and a common language which finds expression in philosophy. Cassirer insisted that this must be possible. Heidegger showed both through his interpretation of

57

For an account relating Strauss and Heidegger, see Geoffrey Waite, “On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos,” Political Theory 26, no. 5 (Oct., 1998): 603-651. 58

The Davos disputation is collected in Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, Fifth Edition, Enlarged (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), here, 196, 194, 195. (In what follows I refer to this text in parentheses.)

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Kant and through his way of responding to Cassirer—in “a completely different language,” as one of the participants remarked, and perhaps even through his refusal to shake hands with Cassirer at the end of the debate—that that is not possible—indeed that the question cannot even be properly raised until the true grounds of human language and rationality are recognized. Heidegger’s central argument to this effect was that Kant himself had already seen that, strictly speaking, that ground is an ‘non-ground’ (Abgrund); that, consequently, when we search for the roots of both practical and theoretical reason, which themselves are the conditions for the possibility of moral and scientific progress, we encounter an abyss: “In attempting to lay the ground for Metaphysics, Kant was pressed in a way that makes the proper foundation into an abyss [Abgrund]” (196). Heidegger’s point here can be read as resting on an interpretation of Kant which as such may be debatable, but it can also be read as a more general statement concerning the human situation from which philosophical questioning and with it the discourse of reason (or logos) first arises. The interpretive point is that Kant saw that beneath the “two stems of human knowledge”—sensibility and understanding—there is “a common, but to us unknown root” and that he thus realized that his initial point of departure—pure reason as the basis of the Critique—is itself derivative (25). “The point of departure in reason has thus been broken asunder. With that Kant himself, through his radicalism, was brought to the brink of a position from which he had to shrink back” (192). This, however

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implies according to Heidegger, the “destruction of the former foundation of Western metaphysics (spirit, logos, reason),” that is to say, the destruction of the grounds upon which the question of Being is raised, and hence the destruction of the (traditional logos-based) grounds of philosophizing. Heidegger’s general point at this stage of his career, again, is that that ‘ground’ is more of a non-ground: it is human finitude open in anxiety to the totality of beings. The unbridgeable gap between his and Cassirer’s conception of philosophizing (and indeed of man) becomes manifest in the following statements which are worth recording in full as they summarize the state of Heidegger’s philosophizing at the time when both Strauss and Arendt began to respond to him. Contrary to Cassirer who, as we saw, sees culture as the “progressive selfemancipation of man” and hence conceives of freedom (in Heidegger’s words) as “becoming free … for the forming images of consciousness and for the realm of [cultural] form,” Heidegger understands freedom as “becoming free for the finitude of Dasein.” This Dasein, Heidegger says, “does not allow translation into a concept of Cassirer’s.” What, then, does Heidegger mean by Dasein? Simply put: “Should one say consciousness, that is precisely what I rejected” (203). Or as he puts it more explicitly: The central question, the question of Dasein in Kant’s terms is “the question of what man is”—nothing less is at stake. This is a question that is “only essential for the philosophers in the way in which the philosopher simply disregards himself, so that the question may not be posed anthropocentrically.” “On the contrary, it must be shown that: because man is the

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creature who is transcendent, i.e., who is open to beings in totality and to himself, that through this eccentric character man at the same time also stands within the totality of beings in general—and that only in this way do the question and the idea of a Philosophical Anthropology make sense.” Heidegger’s final statement in the debate culminating in his sharpest attack on Cassirer continues as follows (204):

The question concerning the essence of human beings is not to be understood in the sense that we study human beings empirically as given objects, nor is it to be understood in such a way that I project an anthropology of man. Rather, the question concerning the essence of human beings only makes sense and is only justifiable insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central problematic itself, which leads man beyond himself and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to him there, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein. This nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the shallow aspect of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit.

Cassirer, the highest representative of classical German Bildung and of the work of spirit, was symptomatically—or so, at least, Strauss would see it—forced from one extreme of the Enlightenment to the other, from Kant to Nietzsche (as he understood them). His own final statement thus reads as an either/or: given what

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Heidegger had just said, either “we have been condemned here to a relativity,” meaning in Nietzschean terms that “‘What one chooses for a philosophy depends upon what sort of human being one is’” (205), or, says Cassirer, since “we may not persevere in this relativity which would be central for empirical men,” we must insist on the possibility of a common language reminding ourselves that through “the Objectivity of the symbolic form … the inconceivable [is] done … From Dasein is spun the thread which, through the medium of such an objective spirit, again ties us together with another Dasein. And I believe that there is no other way from Dasein to Dasein than through this world of forms” (205).

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Descending From Davos—What Did Leo Strauss Do?

Strauss’s account of what had happened in the debate, I shall argue in what follows, explains the direction that his search for a political science would take.59 The debate made it clear that the question of the necessity and possibility of political science—of an immanent, rational foundation of one’s way of life— had to be rethought from its grounds. Strauss seems to have regarded Heidegger’s predecessor in Marburg, Hermann Cohen, as the last great thinker to stand for the necessity and possibility of political science thus conceived.60 And yet Cohen’s system had been overcome by Heidegger’s more timely and originary thinking:

There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neoKantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose 59

It is an open question whether Strauss attended the Davos disputation. Though Strauss seems to speak from the perspective of an eyewitness, he never explicitly confirms that he was there. Walter Benjamin’s correspondence with Scholem suggests that he left Berlin exactly during the time of the debate. On March 15, 1929 Benjamin writes: “Strauss, whom I mentioned previously, has disappeared from sight [Benjamin had previously met Strauss in the state library in Berlin]. But I will send out a warrant for his arrest since he took with him an extensive bibliography on the nature of the fairy tale.” See Scholem (ed.), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 347, 349. 60

As he noted in 1954: “As regards the philosophers, it is sufficient to contrast the work of the four greatest philosophers of the last forty years — Bergson, Whitehead, Husserl, and Heidegger — with the work of Hermann Cohen in order to see how rapidly and thoroughly political philosophy has become discredited.” Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?,” in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 17.

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center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen’s system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had been silently dropped: he had not faced the problem of ethics. Heidegger did face the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.61

What Strauss means by this last sentence can be glimpsed from another occasion in which he spoke of the Davos encounter in slightly different but equally telling terms: “having been a disciple of Hermann Cohen, [Cassirer] had transformed Cohen’s philosophic system, the very center of which was ethics, into a philosophy of symbolic forms in which ethics had silently disappeared. Heidegger on the other hand explicitly denies the possibility of ethics because he feels that there is a revolting disproportion between the idea of ethics and those phenomena which ethics pretends to articulate.”62 The last phrase is crucial for understanding Strauss’s turn to political science. For Heidegger, as we saw in the last chapter, ethics understood as the possibility of distinguishing between “man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-hecould-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature”63 presupposes that man (or Dasein) is just like any object in the world which is producible in some ideal form. Ethics

61

Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in Thomas L. Pangle (ed.), The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss: Essays and Lectures (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28. 62

Strauss, “Kurt Riezler,” in Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 246 (my emphasis). 63

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 52.

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thus misses the specific character of human being in the world: our natality and mortality; “the destiny of man and the enduring world; death, coming to the world, leaving the world…”64 More generally, then, ethics as a science or as knowledge of man’s essential nature would seem to be impossible for Heidegger because “science proper” is said to be “concerned with beings which always are,” while “the Being of man,” which is the subject of ethics, “can also be otherwise.”65 Now, that there is a ‘revolting disproportion’ between ethics and the phenomena it refers to was a common theme of the thinkers that shaped the spirit of the time. Thus, for instance, according to Kierkegaard “…all speculative talk of sin from an ethical viewpoint (that is objective, correct talk) is frivolous,”66 just as it would be frivolous to emit an ethical judgment for or against Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.67 In a similar way, Nietzsche expressed his revulsion against every morality that pretended to know what Socrates did not know, and against every claim to live a Christian life, when “at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”68 Likewise, for theologians such as Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten, and Rudolph Bultmann—Heidegger’s close collaborator at 64

Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, 270. 65

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schwur (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1997), 90. 66

Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Lowrie (Doubleday, 1955), 251.

67

Cf. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds. and trans.), Fear and Trembling. Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 54-67. 68

See Beyond Good and Evil, § 202; and The Anti-Christ, § 39.

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Marburg—any system of ethics would either be arbitrary—with no connection to God and the eternal—or blasphemous if it pretended to grasp the true content of a Christian life.69 Heidegger, for his part, would adopt a similar language, specially in the late 1920s. Thus, as famously expressed in Being and Time, any ethics traditionally conceived is an ethics of the mass or of the ‘they’: “The common sense of the they knows only what is sufficient or insufficient with respect to handy rules and public standards.”70 It does not know that “Dasein as such is guilty,” and that this original guilt is “the existential condition of the possibility of the ‘morally’ good and evil.”71 It does not see that every action is necessarily “without conscience.”72 It does not realize that death is not an event ‘in’ time, but the end of time. It therefore makes a mockery of the phenomena that give rise to an authentically ethical life. It is thinking along such lines, it seems, that Heidegger would later claim that one can better experience what ethics is from Sophocles or from three words of Heraclitus than from the lectures of Aristotle.73

69

According to Bultmann, a man ultimately does service to God only when he “never dreams that any sort of approximation to God’s world can be realized in this world.” Indeed, as Barth and Gogarten put it and as Bultmann approvingly cites, “‘A system of ethics for this world, based on the Gospel, would have this singular character: its action would be without any immediate relation to God and the Eternal’.” Rudolph Bultmann, “Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement,” in Faith and Understanding, trans. L.P. Smith, ed. Robert W. Funk (NY: Harper & Row, 1969), 45. 70

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 265. 71

Ibid., 263 (my emphasis), 264.

72

Ibid., 265.

73

Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 256.

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Where did Strauss stand in this debate in the late 1920s when his turn to political science began? The standard answer in the literature is that Strauss then saw that modern rationalism was self-destructing, which led him to explore the possibility of pre-modern alternatives. Strauss developed his thesis of the selfdestruction of modern rationalism in the 1935 introduction to Philosophy and Law, which he then reproduced and complemented in his most famous autobiographical statement published in 1965, the Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Strauss understands the argument that modern rationalism is selfdestructing in Nietzschean terms. According to Nietzsche, modernity is a form of secularized Biblical faith. Central to Biblical faith, however, is a commitment to truthfulness that in the end makes any faith, including the faith in modernity, incredible. Strauss expressed this thesis in 1932 as follows: “Of modern philosophy this holds true: without Biblical belief one did not and does not arrive in it … ‘modern philosophy’ is therefore only possible as long as Biblical belief has not been shaken in its grounds. This, however, is since Nietzsche … no longer the case.”74 What remains of modern philosophy after Christian truthfulness sublimated into the scientific conscience has made its faith in God and its faith in progress incredible is a form of “absolutely honest atheism.”75 This atheism—“the only air we breathe,” as Nietzsche puts it—is central to the work of some of the 74

Letter to Krüger (December 12, 1932), in GS3, 414.

75

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, § 27 (“Der unbedingte redliche Atheismus…”); The Gay Science, § 357.

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most important thinkers of what Strauss refers to as the ‘ultramodern’, such as Kierkegaard,76 Nietzsche,77 Weber,78 and Heidegger.79 Strauss saw early on, perhaps also with the help of Nietzsche, that the modern will to truth resulting in the atheism of probity must itself be subjected to critique, for, as he put it in 1935, “the new intellectual probity is something

76

See, e.g., Soren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon ‘Christendom’, “What Do I Want?,” in Robert Bretall (ed.), A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 439-441. 77

See, for instance, Nietzsche, Daybreak, book I, § 84; V, § 456: “Such assertions and promises as those of the antique philosophers concerning the unity of virtue and happiness … have never been made with total honesty and yet always with a bad conscience: one has advanced such propositions, which one very much desires to be true, boldly in the face of all appearance and has felt in doing so no religious or moral pang of conscience. … Many worthy people still stand at this level of truthfulness. … Notice, however, that honesty is among neither the Socratic nor the Christian virtues: it is the youngest virtue … something in process of becoming which we can advance or obstruct as we think fit.” trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 457. Compare, however, Nietzsche’s later stance in On the Genealogy of Morals, III, § 27: “absolutely honest atheism … is the awesome catastrophe of two thousand years of training for truth which finally prohibits the lie of belief in God.” See also, The Gay Science, § 159, § 357. Beyond Good and Evil, § 9, § 227. “Probity as a consequence of long moral training: the selfcritique of morality is at the same time a moral phenomenon, an event of morality.” “We are no longer Christians: we have grown out of Christianity, not because we dwelled too far from it, but because we dwelled too near it, even more, because we have grown from it—it is our more rigorous and fastidious piety itself that forbids us today to be Christians.” For the last two citations see F. Nietzsche, Grossoktavausgabe Nietzsches Werke (GOA) (Leipzig: Kröner, 1901-1913), vol. XIII, 121 and 318. Cited in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 160 (see also 206-207 on the relation between probity and positivism). Compare Jacob Taubes’s critique of probity in J. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 44-45. 78

See Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 551ff., 553, 554. Cf. Jaspers’ remarks on the “cause of honesty” as furthered by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and, above all, Weber—“They were all three sick men, but Weber was different.” Letter to Arendt of April 29, 1966, in Arend and Jaspers, Correspondence, 636-37. 79

See, e.g., M. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation.” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992, 367; Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. GA 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1924] 2002), 6. Consider, in particular, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39-62, esp. 53. For Strauss’s critique of the atheism of probity in general and—albeit implicitly—of Heidegger’s resolute unbelief in particular, see L. Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 25; cf. also “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 148-149.

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different from the old love of truth.”80 The problem with the new probity is most immediately moral. While it would compel a denial of morality—as secularized Christianity—it in fact rests on a new morality, namely a “new form of courage [or fortitude]” “to look one’s forsakenness in its face,” “to welcome the terrible truth.”81 This new morality is blinding—and hence the problem becomes also theoretical. Seen historically, what occurs is that when the modern enlightenment has finally overcome its ‘mortal enemy’—viz., orthodoxy—it has ceased to be a form of enlightenment and has become in all probity, quite literally, a form of obscurantist terror. Thus, the ‘true reality’ of man is described in such terms as a “feeling of smallness and impotence before the whole of the world”82 (Freud), or as Heidegger put it in 1929, in a time in which he began to invoke those thinkers “able to instill our Dasein with a terror,” “the clear night of the nothing of anxiety.”83 The danger with ‘the dark enlightenment’ of ‘ultramodern times’, as Strauss would put it in 1965, is that it can turn into “a race in which he wins who offers the smallest security and the greatest terror … But just as an assertion does 80

Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 25. “‘[P]robity’,” Strauss claims in 1932, “is as such only necessary and even possible as long as there is still a Christianity that must be combated.” GS3, 414. See also SCR, 172 and “An Epilogue” (in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern), 218 (intellectual honesty is “a kind of self-denial” “because truth has come to be believed to be repulsive”); “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” (in SPPP), 189 (“cruelty directed toward oneself”). 81

Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 25.

82

Cited in Strauss, “Die Zukunft einer Illusion,” (1929), in GS1, 437.

83

See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 198-245, here 210. Compare Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin: W. de Gruyter and co., 1931): “Alles ist fraglich geworden; alles sieht sich bedroht” (66). Der Mensch erkennt, dass er “vor das Nichts geraten ist” (180).

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not become true because it is shown to be comforting, it does not become true because it is shown to be terrifying.”84 At that time, Strauss famously decided that modern thought had culminated in nihilism, whose “inescapable practical consequence” is “fanatical obscurantism.”85 As “it would be unwise to say farewell to reason … I began … to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially Jewish-medieval rationalism and its classical (Aristotelian and Platonic) foundation.” Such a realization led Strauss, as he tells us in a 1965 Preface, to a “change in orientation” which “found its first expression” in his 1932 “Notes” on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.86 The direction of Strauss’s change in orientation has become a subject of intense controversy, for on it depends the answer to the central question, Why ‘political philosophy’? In the early 1930s, Strauss set out in three directions examining three different understandings of political science: Socratic-Platonic, Hobbesian, and Jewish-Arab Medieval.87 Quite naturally, however—and specially so given the historical emergency in which Strauss began to search for a political science—his 84

Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 149 (my emphasis).

85

Strauss, Natural Right and History, 6.

86

Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 173.

87

See Strauss’s letter to Scholem of December 7, 1933 where he characterizes his current project as a “comparative analysis of the Hobbesian…and the Platonic politics” (GS3, 706-709). For the confrontation between classic, Socratic-Platonic, and the Jewish-Arab medieval conceptions see Strauss’s letter to Krüger of June 26, 1930, in Ibid., 382-83.

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investigations began as engagements with contemporary thinkers; notably, with Hermann Cohen, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. Three different kinds of explanations have been given for Strauss’s ‘change in orientation’, each of them emphasizing either its Socratic-Platonic, Hobbesian, or Jewish-Arab aspects. According to the view that “[t]he question of Socrates was from the very beginning the decisive, fundamental question for Strauss,”88 his reorientation occurred as follows. Strauss realized that the spiritual situation of the time was characterized by the forgetfulness of the Socratic question concerning the right or the best life for man and for a collectivity. This forgetfulness originated in the theological-political treatises that founded political modernity—notably those of Spinoza and Hobbes—whose aim was to confront, in a fateful alliance with worldly sovereigns, the theological and political answers to the question of the best life for man. Acting politically for the sake of philosophy, “the founding fathers of modern philosophy” supplied “the reliable and manageable knowledge required for the methodical conquest of nature and the rational reorganization of society,” in exchange for the peace and security which would guarantee the freedom to philosophize.89 However, the success of this strategy, much as the earlier success of Plato’s action to safeguard philosophy from the fate of Socrates “had grave repercussions for philosophy itself” as it would cease to understand

88

Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 86. David Janssens argues along similar lines. See David Janssens, “A Change of Orientation: Leo Strauss’s ‘Comments’ on Carl Schmitt Revisited,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 33, no. 1 (2005), 93104. 89

Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 60, 10. Cf. also GS3, 142, 225.

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the seriousness of its political and theological contenders.90 At the end of this process the forgetfulness of the theological and political alternatives to the question of the best life becomes particularly manifest in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger as they uncritically reassert pre-philosophical political ideals such as courage and manliness (specially in the case of Nietzsche)91 and Christian ideals such as probity or conscience or ‘depth’. To restore philosophy’s capacity to address the fundamental questions—especially the Socratic question of the right life—Strauss therefore develops his thought in the form of theologicalpolitical treatises with an opposite ‘tendency’ as those of the seventeenth century.92 Strauss thus affirms, notably with Schmitt for instance, the seriousness of the political, or in his studies of Maimonides and his predecessors, of a life guided by divine revelation—all ultimately for the sake of strengthening philosophy’s capacity to respond to the question of the best life for man.93

90

Ibid.

91

See, e.g., Strauss’s letter to Krüger of December 12, 1932, in GS3, 415; Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, in GS3, 186. 92

Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, GS2, 31. Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 23. 93

Political philosophy must confront the answers of theology and politics “if [it] is fully to develop its own power and strength in the attempt to answer the question of the order of human things…” Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 86. “Politics and religion deserve the special attention of political philosophy not although but, rather, because politics is not everything and because not everything is faith.” Ibid., 87. ‘Political philosophy’ in other words stands as an “[a]bbreviation to the urgency of the confrontation with the theological and political alternatives to philosophy.” Meier, Preface to GS3, xxvi. Janssens interprets Strauss’s change of orientation as a turn away from politics towards a more fulfilling philosophical life: “At the moment of his philosophical breakthrough, Strauss was taking leave, not only of the political Zionism to which he had been strongly committed since his youth, but also of political activism and modern politics as such.” Strauss, that is, discovered in Socratic questioning a way of life more fulfilling than the political life. Janssens, “A Change of Orientation,” 100 f. Cf. Strauss,

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A different set of considerations leads to rather different conclusions. Strengthening philosophy’s capacity to answer the question of the right life in 1932 would seem to be for a thinker like Leo Strauss to fiddle while Rome burns. According to the argument that Strauss was at core a Hobbesian, Strauss’s early work is a philosophy of politics meant first of all to stop the collapse of the Weimar republic.94 Strauss, like Carl Schmitt, understood Hobbes’ problem to be not that he was too successful in combating the theological and political alternatives to the philosophical life, but that the means he used for this purpose— natural science and technological thinking—led to an age of depoliticizations and neutralizations which undermined the foundations of the state. Together with Schmitt Strauss thus sought to retrieve the fear of death as the “primal source of political order” by radicalizing Hobbes, that is, by more decisively affirming the dangerousness of man—indeed his moral baseness—and the fear of violent death at the basis of the bargain of protection for obedience that guarantees the stability “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” 129: “Politics and theology, as distinguished from science of all kind[s], appeared to be much more closely connected with the basic interests of man as man than science and all culture: the political community and the word of the living God are basic; compared with them everything else is derived and relative. ‘Culture’ is superseded by politics and theology, by ‘political theology’” (129). 94

John P. McCormick provides in my view the strongest case along these lines. See his “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (November, 1994): 619-652. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); “Political Theory and Political Theology: The Second Wave of Carl Schmitt in English,” Political Theory 26, no. 6 (December, 1998): 830-854; “Irrational Choice and Mortal Combat as Political Destiny: The Essential Carl Schmitt,” Annual Review of Political Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 315-339. Cf. Strauss, “Living Issues…,” 131, which suggests that Strauss turned to Hobbes for a positive appropriation: “Return to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, or more precisely to the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, seemed to be recommended by … [t]he urgency of a convincing, generally valid moral teaching, of a moral teaching of evident political relevance … Such a moral teaching seemed to be discernible in the natural law doctrines of the 17th and 18th centuries…”

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of the state.95 From this perspective, Heidegger would serve the purpose of a “Germanization of Hobbes” in which “the significance of anxiety over death” is politicized and recast in Hobbesian terms as the fear of violent death. It is this fear “that brings an other into proximity with a being and thus raises the question of the social and political in Schmitt’s sense of the terms.”96 A third explanation emphasizes the importance of Strauss’s discovery of the Platonism of Maimonides and his Muslim predecessors.97 According to this view, Strauss’s aim was to preserve the ethical and cognitive value of those traditions that understand the Law—the binding order of life—to be a “fundamental concept of humanity,”98 and that see philosophizing as always already related—in opposition to or in the quest of—a (lawful) order of life.99 Such were the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece in the quest for a natural order occasioned by the collapse of a pre-philosophical nomos, and so was the meaning of classical philosophy understood by the Jewish and Arab commentators of the Middle Ages, that is, wherever the idea of a binding order was not covered over by the Christian tradition that began with Paul’s radical 95

McCormick, “Irrational Choice and Mortal Combat,” 335-336.

96

“It is the privileged place of the fear of violent death in Strauss’s early political philosophy that might lead one to view these works as the first explicit politicization of the significance of anxiety over death in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.” Strauss would thus represent that “very special mixture of Schmitt and Heidegger” Habermas sees as the core of post-war conservatism. McCormick, “Political Theory and Political Theology,” 853. 97

The fullest accounts from this perspective are K. H. Green, Jew and Philosopher; and Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss. 98

Strauss, Cohen und Maimuni, in GS2, 428.

99

See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of December 16, 1932 in GS3, 417.

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critique of the Law.100 Strauss’s attention to Hobbes and Heidegger in the early 1930s could be seen from this point of view as primarily deconstructive, that is, as a way of tracing the modern forgetfulness of a given Law prior to the human will in the most authoritative thinkers of modern (Hobbes) and ‘ultra-modern’ times (Heidegger), both of whom were philosophical atheists but Christian thinkers. These explanations shed light on different aspects of the genesis of Strauss’s thought. However, they all fail to explain—and no study to date has done this—what Strauss suggested on various occasions: that, given his realization already in 1922 that Heidegger was the greatest thinker of our time, his critical engagements with different possibilities of political science in the late 1920s and early 1930s either presupposed the truth of what he had learned from Heidegger or were true themselves only to the extent that they could go beyond the Heideggerian horizon. Concretely, Strauss made three claims which remain unexplained in the literature, thus making accounts of his turn to political science—and his answer to the question, Why political science?—radically incomplete. The first claim is that Heidegger made possible a way of thinking that had been lost for centuries, or, as Richard Velkley puts it, that “after a certain historical development a kind of thinking was not possible until the appearance of Heidegger.”101 The second claim is that this way of thinking is not a return to the

100

Strauss, Cohen und Maimuni, in GS2, 428.

101

Richard L. Velkley, “Leo Strauss and History: Is Modernity an Unnatural Construct?,” New Perspectives on Leo Strauss from America and Europe, New School for Social Research, November 17-18, 2005. Strauss’s central statement to this effect is that “[Heidegger] made it possible for the first time after many centuries—one hesitates to say how many—to see the roots

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past but the highest self-consciousness of modern thought. As such, it makes certain philosophic positions untenable while revolutionizing others in a movement of incorporation and transcendence that points to an altogether new way of thinking.102 Heidegger would thus represent, to use a Sartrean expression, the unsurpassable horizon of our time with which or against which any form of thought aware of its presuppositions must assert itself. The third claim is that the most revolutionizing aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy is his interpretation of Aristotle.103 In subsequent chapters we shall see that Heidegger is indeed the unnamed presence to whom Strauss directs himself in virtually every one of his writings following the Davos disputation. Thus we shall be able to see more clearly why Heidegger was for Strauss the authoritative thinker of our time; what this has to do with his interpretation of Aristotle; and, most importantly, what the way of thinking made possible by Heidegger has to do with ‘political philosophy’. In the remainder of this chapter I will begin to address these questions by returning to the Davos encounter. So far I have suggested that the best clue to understanding

of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know, what so many merely believe, that those are the only natural and healthy roots.” Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College in Honor of Jacob Klein,” in JCPM, 450. 102

“Heidegger, who surpasses in speculative intelligence all his contemporaries…attempts to go a way not yet trodden by anyone or rather to think in a way in which philosophers at any rate have never thought before.” Ibid. See also “What is Political Philosophy?,” in WPP, 55. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” SPPP, 32-34. GS3, 380, 398, 406, 420. 103

“Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle was an achievement with which I cannot compare any other intellectual phenomenon which has emerged in Germany after the war.” Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 134. See also “An Unspoken Prologue…” in JCPM, 450.

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Strauss’s turn to political philosophy is what occurred there, and specifically that Davos revealed the limits and the possibilities of the thinkable and the doable as Strauss understood them in the context of Weimar. If this is true, then one should be able to show that already then Strauss saw certain positions as untenable given Heidegger’s revolutionizing influence while regarding others as compatible but somehow transcended by Heidegger’s thought. Strauss’s recollection of the debate and the analysis of the competing intellectual discourses that attracted his attention at the time developed earlier suggest that the fault line of Weimar thought for him lay between forms of thought that confronted the problem of ethics or of the right or the best life and forms of thought that did not. To the former would belong Cohen; the neoOrthodox thought of Rosenzweig and Barth; and Heidegger. Among the latter would be Cassirer, who ‘silently drops’ the problem of ethics; Kelsen, for whose legal science the question of the right life is not a problem; and Mannheim, who considers it possible to synthesize competing ideas of the best life into a higher unity. This raises two questions. Do Strauss’s recollections of Davos from the 1950s correspond with what he understood to be happening at that time? And what is the relation, if any, between the thought of Heidegger on the one hand and the thought of Cohen and the neo-orthodox thought of Rosenzweig or Barth on the other?

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Strauss was not the first to tell the story of Davos in the terms he did. Franz Rosenzweig, to whom Strauss dedicated his book on Spinoza in 1930, recounted the events at Davos that same year as follows:

In Davos recently there took place before a European forum that conversation between Cohen’s most distinguished pupil, Cassirer, and the current custodian of Cohen’s Marburg chair, Heidegger, [which … has been interpreted] as a representative encounter between the old and the new thinking. And here Heidegger, the student of Husserl, the Aristotelian scholastic, whose tenure in Cohen’s chair can only be felt as an irony in the history of spirit by every ‘old Marburgian’, represented against Cassirer a philosophical position, just that position of ours, the new thinking, that lies in the line descending from that ‘last Cohen’.104

Whether Strauss was the source of Rosenzweig’s version of the story or his version is an adaptation of Rosenzweig’s (or both drew on someone else),105 the fact is that already in 1931 Strauss would express Rosenzweig’s view that his

104

Rosenzweig, “Vertauschte Fronten,” Der Morgen 6, 6 (April 1930), 86. Cited in Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 293. 105

Rosenzweig refers explicitly to Hermann Herrigel’s reports in the Frankfurter Zeitung published as “Denker dieser Zeit, Fakultäten und Nationen treffen sich in Davos, I” (and the follow-up, II), Frankfurter Zeitung, Abendblatt (Friday, May 10, 1929), 73, 345: 4. Peter Eli Gordon notes that there is no evidence of any other source of Rosenzweig’s knowledge of Heidegger. (Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 289.) We know, however, that Strauss had been in communication with him about Heidegger since 1922 (if not earlier).

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thinking (Rosenzweig’s) stands together with Heidegger’s in the line descending from the ‘last Cohen’.106 Now, while it is true that Heidegger occupied Cohen’s Chair at Marburg, his filiation with Cohen would not seem to be anything but institutional. Heidegger did not consider Cohen to be an important thinker, and so any talk of discipleship would be out of the question for him.107 If anything, Cohen would represent the antithesis of what Heidegger stood for. For Cohen all true science and all true philosophy begin from constructions of reason, and not from the selfillumination of human praxis in ever-changing historical situations.108 True philosophy, from Plato to Kant to Cohen’s own Critical Idealism, is a science of grounding that is meant to secure and promote the cultivation of practical and theoretical reason. Philosophy begins from the ‘facts’ of culture—science, art, religion, jurisprudence—and not from an Angst-full mood disclosing an abyss. It begins and culminates in an ethical project: knowledge has no meaning and no value if it does not see the good it presupposes and pursues.109 Finally, the good pursued by true science and philosophy and the good pursued by true religion are the same: indeed, there is a symbiosis between philosophy and religion such that

106

See Strauss, Cohen und Maimuni in GS2, 410.

107

See Heidegger’s remarks on Cohen in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 270.

108

See, for instance, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” in Christop Schulte (ed.), Deutschtum und Judentum. Ein Disput unter Juden aus Deutschland (Stuttgart: Reclam, [1915] 1993), 44. 109

Hermann Cohen, “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis,” in Bruno Strauss (ed.), Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn, [1908], 1924), 226.

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religion is the development of humanity’s ethical ideal and ethics is its guarantee.110 When Rosenzweig speaks of the ‘last Cohen’ as the origin of a ‘line’ descending to Heidegger and himself he must therefore have another Cohen in mind. Following Nietzsche’s view that of philosophical systems that have been superseded what remains is the personal—“the eternally unrefutable”111—and following Strauss’s practice in this case, let the ‘later Cohen’s’ position be illustrated by an anecdote. According to a story that Strauss reported to Rosenzweig, it is said of Cohen that “When [he] was still in Marburg, he once confronted an old Marburg Jew with the idea of God as propounded in his Ethics [Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will]. The latter listened respectfully, and when Cohen was done, asked him, ‘And where is the B’aure Aulom [the Creator of the World]?’ But Cohen said nothing and broke in tears.”112 According to Peter Gordon, “[w]hen Cohen falls silent and begins to weep, it is as if all of idealism has confessed defeat.”113 Whether one accepts this view or not, for Strauss at any

110

H. Cohen, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 46-47. “Das Gesetz Gottes ist das tiefste Fundament aller Sittlichkeit, daher vor allem des Rechts und des Staates” (50). 111

F. Nietzsche, “Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen,” in Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 1 (Munich: DTV, 1999), 803. 112

Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 38. For a concise account of Cohen’s idea of God see Julius Guttman, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 352-367. 113

Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 76.

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rate the story shows that “the gulf between [Cohen’s] belief and the belief of the tradition is unbridgeable.”114 The ‘late Cohen’, we could say, represents for Rosenzweig and Strauss not the Professor of Philosophy furthering the work of Kultur and Zivilisation but the philosophizing human being who knows, as Cohen himself put it privately, that “to regard the intellectual transport into eternal culture as the highest … value of the poor, human individual” is to miss what is “truly of value in [him],”115and who thus realizes that there is indeed a ‘revolting disproportion’ between a system of ethics and the phenomena it pretends to articulate, or, in our example, between the Kantian God—an idea of reason—and the God of the old Marbug Jew—the Creator of the World. Seeing himself as a descendent of the ‘late Cohen’, Rosenzweig developed a ‘new thinking’ that uses robustly religious language to do justice to the phenomena as they appear not only to the believer but, he would claim, to common sense. As perhaps most clearly expressed in his 1925 “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig argued that God, the world, and man open up to us “only in creation, revelation, redemption.”116 This, he would claim, is not theology but ordinary thinking: “God himself, if we want to comprehend him, conceals

114

Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 38.

115

Cohen in a letter to August Stadler written in 1890. Cited in Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 76. 116

Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’: A Few Supplementary Remarks on The Star,” in Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’ (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999): 67-105, 85. (Hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.)

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himself; man, our very self, shuts himself in; the world becomes an apparent puzzle” (85). We somehow know that God is something other and not ‘in me’ or ‘only my higher self’, for else “this God would hardly have anything to tell me since I know already what my higher self has to tell me” (85). We also know that man too is ‘other’, for “if ‘in the deepest depth’ the other were the same as myself, ‘deep down’ … I could not love him, but only myself” (85). Finally, we know that the world opens up to us not when the cogito—the ‘I’ that presumably must accompany all knowledge—asserts itself, but when it forgets itself: when “I only know of the tree and nothing else” (80). According to Rosenzweig, we miss all of this—or at any rate Western philosophy from Parmenides to Hegel does— because of a deep-seated tendency going back to the origins of the philosophical tradition to apply the same ‘What is?’ question to everything. Thus we reduce everything either to God—such that “the world and man are of divine ‘essence’” (75)—or to Nature—“man is only a product, and God nothing but a reflection of ‘Nature’” (75)—or to the I—such that “in all knowledge the ‘I’ must necessarily accompany it” (80). In other words, the problem is that, like the early Cohen, we try to build bridges—in Cohen’s case between the reality of the thinking I and the reality of God. Everything then depends on understanding the “separateness of ‘Being’” (85). This cursory look at Rosenzweig’s ‘new thinking’ should suffice to illustrate its superiority to the ‘old thinking’ represented by Cohen, at least when it comes to articulating the phenomena of an ethical existence—particularly the

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relation to the ‘other’ or to the neighbor and the reality of the divine—and at least as these phenomena appear to a believing person. There can be no disproportion between ethical language and what it refers to because the ‘new thinking’ does not seek to understand the Being of God or the Being of the world in terms of the Being of man.117 It should also be sufficient to illustrate the striking resemblance of Rosenzweig’s thinking to Heidegger’s.118 Both propose to move beyond philosophy towards forms of ‘new thinking’. Both propose different versions of the destruction of the history of ontology. For both, a central omission of western philosophy has been that in its quest for knowledge of timeless essences it “wants to know nothing of time” (82). Rather, as Rosenzweig puts it, we “cannot know independently of time” (83). For both, truth is not (or not primarily) ‘what is the case’ or what works or what is a necessary postulate of reason, but what reveals itself to us in and through time, and not in passive contemplation but in and through care or commitment (99). Consequently, a theory of knowledge that precedes knowing does not make sense, “[f]or all knowing, if something is really known, is a singular act and has its own method” (97). The ‘new thinking’, like Heidegger, thus proposes to move beyond theoria: “What does not happen any 117

Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’…,” 74. As Karl Löwith puts it, “Experience discovers in man, however deeply it may dive, only human qualities, in the world worldly things, and in God divine: but this in God alone, as worldly things only in the world and human qualities only in man.” Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Sep., 1942): 53-77, 64. Cf. Rosenzweig’s remarks on ethics in The Star of Redemption, 10 (“Philosophy had intended to grasp man, even as a ‘personality’, in ethics. But that was an impossible endeavor. For it and as it grasped him, he was bound to dissolve in its grasp”). 118

The first comparative reading of Heidegger and Rosenzweig was attempted by Karl Löwith in 1942. See his “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity.”

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longer is only the ‘looking’.”119 Above all, perhaps, both Rosenzweig and Heidegger attempt ‘theologies without God’ or accounts of religious consciousness that nevertheless claim to be beyond theology or religion or even philosophy of religion.120 The main work of Rosenzweig’s New Thinking, The Star of Redemption, appeared in 1921.121 By the following year Strauss was already well-acquainted with him, and thus it was to Rosenzweig that Strauss reported his impression of Heidegger, specifically, of his interpretation of the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.122 One year later, in 1923, Strauss would be recruited by Rosenzweig to teach at the Free Jewish House of Learning. Thus it is safe to assume that beginning in 1922 Strauss’s thought already moved within the orbit of the New Thinking—somewhere between Rosenzweig and Heidegger, or attempting to go beyond them.

119

Rosenzweig in a letter to Hans Ehrenberg of 1921, quoted in Barbara E. Galli, “Introduction,” in Galli and Udoff (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’, 41. 120

“Theology may not debase philosophy to the [role of] handmaiden; but just as degrading is the role of the cleaning woman which philosophy in modern times and the recent past had accustomed itself to attribute to theology. The true relationship of the two renewed sciences … is that of siblings, indeed it has to lead to the point where both are united in one person. The theological problems are to be translated into the human, and the human driven forward until they reach the theological.” Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’…,” 89. See Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” 56. Cf. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 237 (the new thinking sought “to escape from the evidence of the biblical understanding of man,” but failed; “Heidegger wishes to expel fom philosophy the last relics of Christian theology”). (See also chapter 3 for a fuller discussion.) 121

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame press, 1985). 122

“A Giving of Accounts,” in JPCM, 461.

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This begins to explain, I believe, the tangential role attributed to Heidegger in accounts of Strauss’s Weimar turn to political science. Ironically, it is not because Strauss was too far from Heidegger’s fundamental positions that he hardly ever mentions him but because he was too close to him. In part, of course, this has to do with the fact that Heidegger did not publish any major work between 1922 (when Strauss encountered him) and 1927 (when Being and Time was published). But even after 1927 Strauss engaged Heidegger’s thought only with great circumspection: rarely mentioning him by name; commonly letting others (notably Kojève) stand for Heidegger’s position; never reading him closely (and then writing about him) as Strauss read other major thinkers; and, most interestingly it seems to me, never explicitly discussing Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle—which, as we have seen, he regarded as the most important intellectual phenomenon to have emerged in Germany after the First World War.123 And yet, arguably every writing of Strauss is directed to the unnamed presence of Heidegger.124 In what sense, then, can it be said that Strauss was ‘too close’ to Heidegger in his early years? Given Strauss’s personal acquaintance with Rosenzweig, and assuming that he had read his Star of Redemption published in 1921, Strauss must have 123

Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115-139, here 134-135. 124

See Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 256.

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understood Heidegger’s early lectures in light of or in dialogue with Rosenzweig’s ‘new thinking’. Now, among all the coincidences between Heidegger and Rosenzweig there is one that points directly to what most impressed Strauss about Heidegger, namely, his interpretation of the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Both Rosenzweig and Heidegger sought to move beyond the view that philosophy culminates in the godly ‘look’ of theoria. This meant taking a stance against Hegel. Indeed, while, as mentioned earlier, Hegel saw Aristotle’s Metaphysics as the authoritative account of ancient thought culminating in his own view that philosophy is speculative science,125 Heidegger, as we saw in the last chapter, went back to it to show that Aristotle had not been understood. Philosophy in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle “goes along with the factical tendencies of interpretation of factical life,”126 and becomes a form of detached ‘looking’, a theoria disjoined from life—from ‘natality and mortality’— only because of a prejudice that regards certain beings—viz., complete and selfsufficient beings—as higher than others and as more worthy of being known. It is the mistaken assumption that one can understand human being-in-the-world as one understands other beings of the world that leads to the belief that ethics as a science and politics as an art of production are possible and necessary. Soon after the Davos disputation this became the question that runs as a red thread through Strauss’s work over the decades—whether political science is 125

Joachim Ritter, “Aristoteles und die Vorsokratiker,” Metaphysik Und Politik. Studien Zu Aristoteles Und Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 34. 126

Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles, 78.

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possible and necessary.127 But, again we must ask, why only after Davos and not earlier? Earlier, it seems, Strauss simply accepted Heidegger’s attack against what he called the ‘tyranny of the theoretical’ together with its corollary that a science of politics is impossible. Though an analysis of Strauss’s writings prior to Davos is beyond the scope of this dissertation, it must at least be mentioned that in his study of Spinoza Strauss takes a clear stance against the primacy traditionally accorded to theory and, particularly, against the possibility of a theoretical understanding of politics.128 This begins to change in 1929 as Strauss becomes aware of the possibility of a return to classical political philosophy. Earlier we suggested that Strauss’s Weimar was made up of two groups of thinkers: those that confronted the problem of ethics and those who dropped the problem (Cassirer) or relativized it (Kelsen) or attempted a synthesis of various answers (Mannheim). Beyond this,

127

See note 35 above.

128

On Spinoza’s privileging of theoria specially, see Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas, in GS1: 76-78, 138, 142, 155 (“the freedom of philosophizing…is the primary and ultimate purpose for which Spinoza wrote the Treatise”), 249, 288: “The cool statesmanship for which Spinoza makes a claim against the philosophers is not the spontaneous outcome of political life, political interest, political responsibility. In the last instance, it is nothing other than the pure understanding, by which man consciously shares in the imperishable whole. His interest in the state is mediated by his interest in theory. His political theory presupposes that theory is the one thing needful—even though only as the sole means of attaining perfect happiness. For on this assumption the gulf between the few wise and the multitude is given, and political theory is unconcerned with the wise and concerned only with the multitude. The abyss, created by interest in theory, between the wise and the multitude, makes the wise essentially spectators of the life of the multitude. For the wise, the multitude becomes an object of theory” (=229 of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion). Cf. Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 11 (the Treatise is dedicated to the philosophical few, specially to those “whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to theology” (cited in GS1, 154). See also Spinoza’s letter to Oldenburg of 1665 (letter 30) in Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1996), 185f. (Cited in Michael Zank, Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 163.)

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what the latter group has in common is the attempt to resolve fundamental questions concerning right and wrong, just and unjust, belief and unbelief through different forms of theorizing. As he had done with Spinoza, Strauss would also take a stance against this presumption. Thus, most notably, in 1929 Strauss would criticize Mannheim for raising “the question of the meaning of science, in particular of the possibility of politics as science” while forgetting “the foundations of our scientific tradition that lie in Greek antiquity.”129 Referring to Heidegger, Mannheim had warned against “the danger inherent in the ‘false contemplation of the investigative attitude’ vis-à-vis political praxis,”130 and generally against the “contemplative craving for knowledge.”131 To this Strauss responds that: “the same problem exists with respect to scientific praxis,” that is to say, “Mannheim is dominated by liberalism … insofar as it is the essence of liberalism to elevate insights won in a contemplative attitude to principles of praxis.”132 This begins to show why Strauss characterized the form of thinking against which he began to raise the question of the necessity and possibility of political science, as sophistry.133 As we shall see more clearly in later chapters, he 129

Strauss, “Der Konspektivismus,” in GS2, 372.

130

Ibid., 373.

131

As quoted in Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland.

132

Strauss, “Der Konspektivismus,” in GS2, 373.

133

See his letters of 17 November 1932 to Krüger in GS3, 404 (“how can a philosopher, a man of science, teach like a sophist?”); of 23 June 1934 to Klein (revelation and philosophy are one vis-àvis sophistic, i.e., “modern philosophy as a whole”); February 7, 1933 to Krüger; Philosophie und

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meant this literally as the failure to raise the question of the good and to understand the problems involved in a techne politike. Crucially, however, Strauss’s response was not Platonic in the common understanding of the term, namely, a recourse to politics as a form of fabrication.134 Rather, in accord with what Heidegger taught in the early 1920s concerning the difficulties of a science of politics, Strauss began to search for a response in what he called “the critical philosophy of Plato.”135 Of this philosophy it can be said provisionally that its quest for an order of human life “is not tied to a previous knowledge of phusis”136 or even to a knowledge of human nature.137 Around 1929 Strauss thus began to retract against his earlier critique of theory in favor of his own version of a ‘new thinking’ which he would later call as an émigré in America ‘political philosophy’. It would take a long time, however, before he would assume the ‘Straussian’ positions for which he is best known: for instance, that the life of contemplative theoria is the best life for man; that there is such a thing as classical ‘political philosophy’ (when the very term was never

Gesetz, in GS2, 9-10; 27 March 1935 to Klein (‘Sophistik’ “is meant completely literally (following the Protagoras-Mythos): to come under submission to what the Athenians say on the grounds of an epimethean physics…” (GS3, 442). See also the reference to Plato’s Protagoras in Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft, in GS3, 147. Compare Strauss’s apparent retraction years later (in 1946): “The temptation to identify modern philosophy with sophistry is considerable, and Wild is not the first to succumb to it.” “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” 335. 134

See e.g., Plato, Gorgias, 503 d 5ff. Timaeus, 27d5ff. 30a 1-6.

135

Letter to Krüger (18 August 1934), in GS3, 440.

136

Letter to Krüger (7 February 1933), in GS3, 426. See also Strauss’s letter to Klein of October 13, 1934, in GS3, 529. 137

Letter to Krüger (17 November 1932), in GS3, 407.

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used by Plato and only once by Aristotle); or that “political philosophy as quest for the final truth regarding the political fundamentals is possible and necessary”138 (when the ‘greatest thinker of our time’ had apparently persuaded him of the absurdity of such a quest for ‘final truth,’ specially regarding political things). Having considered the context of Strauss’s turn to political science, the task now becomes to read the works in which and through which Strauss became the Strauss we know by responding to Heidegger’s view that ethics and politics as science are impossible. To this we shall turn in chapter four.

138

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, xv.

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Concluding remarks

In this chapter I have tried to trace the genesis of Strauss’s project in the intellectual debate he witnessed during the final years of the Weimar Republic. In the work of a thinker as complex as Leo Strauss, it is difficult to find a single defining theme. Indeed, Strauss was deeply attracted to philosophical and political positions which—at first sight at least—have very little (if anything) to do with each other: the young Strauss ‘believed everything Nietzsche said from age 22 to 30’ (i.e., until around 1929); he agreed with Schmitt that Hobbes was ‘by far the greatest and perhaps the only truly systematic political thinker’; he saw Hermann Cohen as ‘surpass[ing] all other German professors of philosophy of the period between 1871 and 1925 by the fire and power of his soul’; he came to consider Maimonides as ‘the true natural model’ of rationalism; he took Heidegger to be ‘the greatest thinker of our time’; and he regarded the neo-orthodox thought of Barth and Rosenzweig as at least potentially superior to any modern philosophy of religion, and as a guide to the quest for truth. Reflecting the complexity of his intellectual affinities, Strauss has been read as at core a Nietzschean (Laurence Lampert), Maimonidean (Kenneth Hart Green), Farabian (Daniel Tanguay), Socratic (Heinrich Meier), and Schmittean-Hobbesian (John McCormick) thinker. What Strauss was ‘up to’ is similarly unclear. ‘Political philosophy’ is the common answer. But the meaning of ‘political philosophy’ according to scholars of Strauss ranges from ‘philosophical propaganda’ meant to reinstitute the

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‘conservative enlightenment’ (Stanley Rosen) to a means of retrieving the ordinary experience of what is ‘first for us’ with the aim of purging political practice from utopian designs and of renewing philosophizing as a dialectical ascent from ordinary experience (Victor Gourevitch). The theme of Strauss’s reflections has similarly been interpreted variously as ‘the city and man’ (or the conflict between philosophy and society) (Gourevitch), the ‘quarrel between the ancients and the moderns’ (Gadamer), and ‘the theological-political predicament’ (Meier). I have proposed, rather, to begin to read the work of Strauss as guided by the question of ‘the necessity and possibility of political science’. I thus concur with the reading of Strauss as a Socratic, insofar as it was Socrates who seems to have been the first to raise the problem of the necessity and possibility of a techne politike. I further agree with the view that the ‘theological-political predicament’ (or, generally speaking, the question reason or revelation?) became for Strauss the central problem. This insofar as precisely the question of the necessity of political science points to the alternative of a life guided by divine revelation. Nonetheless, the ‘necessity and possibility of political science’ still seems to me to be a better guide to understanding the goal and the movement of Strauss’s thought. First, this question appears far earlier as a central theme in his writings than the conflict between philosophy and society or the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Second, whether or not it predates or is more fundamental than ‘the theological-political predicament’, it can be traced more consistently over several

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decades of Strauss’s work. Finally and most importantly, it makes it possible to see the deep doubts that Strauss harbored with respect to a project—viz., the restoration of classical political philosophy—that is too often read and taught as self-evidently plausible.139 Paying attention to the context of Strauss’s early work makes it clear that the path to ‘political philosophy’ is far more arduous than it seems—but precisely because of that, it seems to me, it is also far more interesting and thoughtprovoking. To name but a few results of this chapter in order to conclude: first, Strauss’s ‘political philosophy’ is hardly ‘classical’; rather it seems to originate in Strauss’s early adherence to Heidegger’s ‘ultramodern’ attempt at developing a comprehensive philosophy of the human situation that overcomes—by transcending and incorporating—the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. That is, the young Strauss seems to have believed in the possibility of a purely atheistic answer to the question of the right life for man. The question reason or revelation? or the ‘theological-political predicament’ are therefore to be read as a reversal of Strauss’s own early atheism (as distinguished from his later ‘unbelief’). Something similar holds for the claim that the best life is the life of philosophical contemplation. Following Heidegger (and others, e.g., Rosenzweig and Nietzsche), the young Strauss was a critic of ‘the general domination of the 139

No doubt, Strauss’s own claims are partly responsible for this—for instance the claim, already mentioned, that ‘[t]he meaning of political philosophy and its meaningful character is as evident today as it always has been since the time when political philosophy came to light in Athens’; or that ‘[t]he whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel and certainly all adherents of natural right, assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final solution’— namely on the grounds of ‘the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live’, that is, on the assumption that the best life is the philosophic life.

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theoretical’ knowing that the paths to truth are manifold and lead through praxis, political and otherwise. The ‘Straussian’ thesis that contemplation is the highest form of life, as we shall see more clearly in a later chapter, seems also to be a reversal of a different—indeed opposite—position that prevails in the thought of the young Strauss. The key to understanding the movement of Strauss’s thought therefore seems to me to be his young encounter with Heidegger. As to the meaning of ‘political philosophy’, we could say so far that it aims at awareness of ‘fundamental problems’—reason or revelation, theory or praxis—as Strauss himself lived them.

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CHAPTER THREE Hannah Arendt in Weimar: Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament?

Reading Arendt from the start has been the exception rather than the norm. While some studies emphasize the centrality of the German-Jewish experience for the development of her thought paying particular attention to her biography of Rahel Varnhagen begun in the early 1930s,1 few go back to Arendt’s earliest writings, and in particular to her dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine.2 In part this is due to the fact that Arendt’s dissertation remained untranslated until 1996, which meant that even for German readers the only statement of her youthful writing was a version “printed in Gothic script, filled with … Latin and Greek

1

Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). See, for instance, Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996); Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996); and Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 2

Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, edited by Joanna V. Scott and Judith C. Stark (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). See specially the interpretive essay by the editors in Ibid., 115-213; and, more recently, Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). For a recent reading of Love and Saint Augustine as a response to Heidegger see Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Lévinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

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quotations, and written in Heideggerian prose.”3 More importantly, however, the failure to incorporate the dissertation into the Arendt canon seems today to be due to a neglect of the theological sources of her thought. This applies even for— indeed especially for—Heidegger who, as is now well known, “would never have arrived on the path of thinking” without his theological background.4 Thus, while it has been noted for decades now that Arendt’s thinking developed out of a critical engagement with Heidegger,5 there are no studies of their relation to date that take into account his theological concerns, and in particular his close collaboration with the New Testament theologian Rudolph Bultmann who mentored Arendt in theological questions. This way of reading Arendt has led to the view that, as Peter Gordon has recently put it, “what Leo Strauss termed ‘the theological-political predicament’… left virtually no imprint upon [her] thinking.”6 In what follows I shall argue that this is a mistaken presumption that conceals far more than it reveals of Arendt’s deepest political and philosophical insights. 3

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 490. See Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation, edited by Ludger Lütkehaus (Berlin: Philo, [1929] 2003). 4

Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. GA 12 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, [1959] 1985), 96. See the important study of John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For more recent studies of the origins of Heidegger’s thought see Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger Und Die Anfänge Seines Denkens. Heidegger-Jahrbuch. Vol. 1 (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2004). 5

See specially Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (New York: SUNY Press, 1997) and Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6

Peter Eli Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political Theology,” Social Research, Vol. 74: No. 3, Fall 2007: 855-878, 857.

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These insights grew out of an unfamiliar source, namely, from Arendt’s encounter of 1920s neo-orthodox ‘dialectical theology’. The importance of neoorthodox theology for twentieth century thought has largely been missed. This significance resides in the fact that, long before post-modernism, neo-orthodoxy set out to destroy ‘metaphysics’ or ‘onto-theology’—with both liberating and nihilistic consequences. Neo-orthodox Destruktion liberated human judgment from reliance on the ‘gods’ of this world—History, Science, Nature. And yet, specially in its Christian variants, it also involved a certain anti-nomianism— dating back to Paul’s critique of the law and early Christian thought more generally—that made it radically anti-political. The young Arendt was torn between her attraction to such a form of thinking and her Judaism in a complex way which involved, on the one hand, a ‘factical’ condition of ‘homelessness’ or insecurity in the world similar to the early Christian experience, and on the other hand, a radically different understanding of ‘being-in-the-world’ shaped by a sense of gratitude for what is ‘given’ to the human condition and by the relevance of the ‘other’ or the neighbor. It is from this tension, I shall argue, that her political thought arises. To see the full significance of the theological-political background of Arendt’s thought, it is necessary to reconstruct the path that led from nineteenth century theological-political liberalism to neo-orthodox theology, and thence to her response. This will involve discussing thinkers such as Hermann Cohen that exercised a far more important influence on the ‘spiritual situation’ of the time

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than is recognized in the literature. Though Arendt mentions Cohen only very rarely, it seems to me that some of her central theses—including the rejection of the will in politics, the critique of the ‘social question’, and generally her critique of liberalism—must be understood with Cohen in mind. I have tried to reduce my preliminary approach to Arendt to the minimum but it still seems necessary to apologize for unavoidable prolixity.

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The ‘theological-political predicament’

Leo Strauss referred to the “theologico-political predicament” (or “problem”) in two famous statements. The first appears in the opening sentences of his 1962 autobiographical preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion: “This study on Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise was written during the years 1925-28 in Germany. The author was a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.”7 Two years later Strauss used the term to explain the motivation behind his study of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: “My study of Hobbes began in the context of an investigation of the origins of biblical criticism in the seventeenth century, namely, of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. The reawakening of theology, which for me is marked by the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig, appeared to make it necessary to investigate how far the critique of orthodox theology—Jewish and Christian—deserved to be victorious. Since then the theological-political problem has remained the theme of my investigations.”8

7

Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Kenneth H. Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought by Leo Strauss (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 137. 8

Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Ibid., 453.

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What exactly Strauss meant by the theological-political predicament is a subject of debate.9 These statements, however, suffice to convey the basic sense that the problem has to do with the conflicting claims of political and religious norms, or of norms derived from reason and norms whose source is attributed to divine revelation. Strauss described the problem in terms such as the following: “No alternative is more fundamental than the alternative: human guidance or divine guidance. Tertium non datur.” “[T]his indeed is the question: whether men can acquire knowledge of the good, without which they cannot guide their lives individually and collectively, by the unaided efforts of their reason, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on divine revelation…”10 Or: “The fundamental alternative is that of the rule of philosophy over religion or the rule of religion over philosophy.”11 As Gordon points out, a similar understanding of the fundamental alternative confronting humanity pervades the work of Franz Rosenzweig with whom Strauss was closely associated and who was arguably the greatest Jewish thinker of the Weimar era. Deeply marked by his experiences in the war front and by his discovery of the concept of revelation, Rosenzweig was led to the view that the vocation of the Jewish people consisted in providing the world with a

9

Particularly when it comes to understanding the theological-political problem as “the theme” of Strauss’s investigations as a whole. See the discussion in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3-28. 10

Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” in Ibid., 141-180, here 149.

11

Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 176.

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collective model of what may be called non-political redemption.12 Thus, while the peoples of the Christian age “know that God’s will somehow realizes itself in the martial fortunes of their state,” the Jews—who conducted a holy war only once and for all time (in Joshua’s conquest of the holy land)—are “practically the only human being[s] who cannot take war seriously, and this makes [them] the only genuine pacifist[s].”13 Similarly, while the nations of the world are bound to a particular land, law, and language, the Jewish people are bound to land only as a yearning—since for a “people in exile … home is never a home in the sense of land;” to a particular ‘present’ law only insofar as it flows “into the common basin of what is valid now and forever” (viz. the holy law); and to particular ‘temporal’ languages only for the business of daily life—the eternal language being the holy language of prayer.14 Whereas Strauss raised the question, politics or revelation? to remind us of what is at stake in politics—the right or the good life and ultimately happiness— while leaving the question undecided,15 Rosenzweig, we can say, decided it in favor of revelation and against politics. Thus, since the Jewish people has already reached “that inner unity of faith and life” “toward which the nations are still moving,” it is “numb to the concerns, the doing, and the struggling of the world,” 12

See Stéfan Mosès, “Politik und Religion. Zur Aktualität Franz Rosenzweigs,” in Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1866-1929), Vol. II (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1988), 855-875, esp. 865. 13

Franz Rosenzwig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 331. 14

Ibid., 300, 303, 302.

15

See Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 3-28, esp. 16 and 28.

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and indeed “must deny itself active and full participation in the life of the world with its daily, conclusive solving of all contradictions…”16 Nothing, it seems, could be more foreign to the thought of Hannah Arendt. Thus Gordon’s claim that “to this apolitical inheritance Arendt’s political theory offers a dramatic alternative” appears entirely justified.17 Is it true, however, that to Strauss’s “conception of theological-political conflict” Arendt develops an “alternative conception of non-theological politics”?18 To answer this question it is necessary to begin by taking a closer look at Strauss’s understanding of the “theological-political predicament.” According to Strauss, the core of this predicament lay in the political and spiritual dependence of German Jewry on the German nation.19 Not only did the German Jews owe their full political emancipation to the Weimar Republic; long before that, their thinking had become “open to the influx of German thought.”20 The spiritual dependence of Judaism on German philosophy can be briefly illustrated by referring to the title of the culminating work of pre-war Jewish thought: Herman Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism.21

16

Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 331-332 (my emphasis).

17

Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical,” 869-70.

18

Ibid., 859.

19

Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 140. 20

Ibid., 139-140.

21

Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1972).

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Cohen, who was “the center of attraction for philosophically minded Jews” like Strauss and Rosenzweig,22 had sought to reconcile the moral truths of Judaism with the Protestant spirit of German rationalism, as well as with the basic tenets of an ‘ethically socialist’ political liberalism. But this assimilationist attempt to solve the Jewish Question revealed itself as a dismal failure. For soon after the war both German rationalism and liberal democracy were in a terminal crisis—and so, not coincidentally given its dependence on the German spirit, was Judaism qua ‘religion of reason.’ This crisis of liberal Judaism became manifest in the turn from liberal to neo-orthodox theology undertaken, most notably, by Rosenzweig. The predicament for “a young Jew born and raised in Germany” was, then, how to liberate the Jewish heritage from its dependence on modern reason (which had fallen into disrepute) without embracing orthodoxy, that is, without saying farewell to reason tout court.

22

See Strauss, “Introductory Essay for Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 233-248, here 233.

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Philosophy and theology: “for me they belonged together”

Arendt spoke on one occasion of a predicament that echoes the problem just described. In a 1968 interview with Günter Gaus she noted that during the time of her studies she regarded philosophy and theology as “belong[ing] together.”23 Almost in passing she then went on to say that “I had some misgivings only as to how one deals with this if one is Jewish … how one proceeds. I had no idea, you know. I had difficult problems that were then resolved by themselves.”24 The superficial explanation of Arendt’s difficult problems is this: as a Jewish student attending the New Testament seminars of the Protestant Theologian Rudolph Bultmann she had to make it a condition of her attendance that “there must be no anti-Semitic remarks.”25 But Arendt’s difficulties, I shall argue, ran much deeper. Regarding philosophy and theology as “belonging together” was in itself nothing unique. Heidegger, as we shall see, saw his work at that time as a contribution to both philosophy and theology—a contribution that became essential to the work of Bultmann as well. The work of their students—among them Hans Jonas, Karl

23

H. Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 9. 24

“A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” 9.

25

See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 61-62. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Ich Will Verstehen, edited by Ursula Ludz, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 2006), 56, n. 7.

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Löwith, and Gerhard Krüger—reflected this collaboration.26 Indeed, the university of Marburg itself, committed as it was to the Reformation, stood for the same principle.27 And the idea that German thought as a whole arose from a field of questions that was as theological as it was philosophical was fairly widespread. Thus the Protestant theologian Emmanuel Hirsch could argue in the 1930s that the aim of “all the more serious German thinkers” from Leibniz on was “out of philosophical reflection freely to produce the essential content of Christian piety and morality,” thus making human and divine truth coincide.28 And yet, of course, Arendt was not a Christian. In that regard she was in the situation of other Jewish students of Heidegger such as Jonas and Strauss. These thinkers had two important commonalities. They were deeply influenced by the collaboration of theology and philosophy in the 1920s, and specifically by the view that existentialist philosophy could provide a universal key for understanding human consciousness, including religious consciousness.29 And

26

See, for instance, Hans Jonas, Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zur Genesis der christlich-abendländischen Freiheitsidee (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1930); Gerhard Krüger, “Die Herkunft des philosophischen Selbstbewusstseins,” Logos, Bd. XXII, 1933: 225-272; Karl Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie und protestantische Theologie,” in Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1930-1970 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, [1930] 1971), 9-41. 27

See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Restricted Conception of Rhetoric,” in Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 166: “By going to Marburg in 1923 [Heidegger] had come to a university that had committed itself to the Reformation; theology and philosophy should work in concert.” 28

See John Stroup, “Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany, 1928-1939: Emmanuel Hirsch as a Phenomenon of His Time,” Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 80, No. 3. July 1987, 340. 29

In the late 1920s Strauss referred to Heidegger’s interpretation of the call of conscience in Being and Time and to his critique of the primacy of “seeing” (theorein) as decisive for an atheistic

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they broke away from their early Heideggerian existentialism not only because of its political consequences but because of its religious presuppositions.30 Perhaps due to the sui generis nature of her investigations, which reflect her love of the world far more than her love of books—thus concealing the intellectual sources of her work—Arendt has typically been read as an anomaly whose thought reflected a variety of tensions—between modernism and nostalgic Grecophilia, between Socrates and Heidegger, between radical agonism and elitism31—but nothing comparable to a “theological-political predicament.” To question this view I shall attempt to situate Arendt’s early thought within the broad movement of philosophy and theology that led to the theological-political predicament confronted not only by Strauss and Rosenzweig but, in different ways, by the neoorthodox theology in which Arendt was schooled. interpretation of the Bible that would make it possible to overcome religion. See Strauss’s letter to Gerhard Krüger of January 7, 1930 in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 398. For Jonas’ early understanding of Heideggerian existentialism as “the explication of the fundamentals of human existence as such” see his “Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” in The Gnostic Religion, 2nd revised ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 320-340, here 321. 30

In 1931 Strauss began to take a critical distance from the Christian tradition “in whose track moves at least our philosophical thinking.” See Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2: Philosophie und Gesetz; frühe Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 393-436, 428. As in several other statements of the time, the primary (though unnamed) target of Strauss’s critique is here Heidegger. For a more detailed analysis of Strauss’s early response to Heidegger see Rodrigo Chacón, “Reading Strauss From the Start: On the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy’,” European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming). (See also note chapter two above, n. 120.) For Jonas’ critique of the Gnostic presuppositions of Heideggerian existentialism see his “Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” and, more generally, Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” The Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964): 207-33. 31

See respectively Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

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Liberal theology: the religion of culture

The neo-orthodox revival of the 1920s was a reaction against the liberal theology that dominated the nineteenth century, also known as ‘free,’ ‘rationalist,’ or ‘modern’ theology; or as characterized by its opponents, Kulturprotestantismus.32 Liberal theology can be understood as a consequence of the philosophical—or, more specifically, historical-critical—treatment of religion that gained particular strength in Germany in the nineteenth century.33 Religious faith would either be undermined, as its basic tenets—such as the resurrection or the existence of a creator God—were revealed as more myth than reality, or it would have to become reconciled with modern culture, that is, with modern morality and science. The most important representative of Christian Kulturprotestantismus was Adolph von Harnack (1851-1930).34 Along with other liberal theologians, Harnack attempted to recover the “Jesus of History” from the “Christ of dogma.”35 Dogmatic Christianity, which understands Christ as “Logos incarnate” 32

R. Beer, art. “Theologie, liberale,” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2007), Vol. 10, 1101. 33

See Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Anchor, 1967), 323-86. 34

For a recent critical appraisal of Harnack within the context of liberal theology see Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 35

Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming. How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (New York: Random House, 1986), 13.

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and as the God-man,36 Harnack argued, is the “work of the Greek spirit on the grounds of the Gospels.”37 Against this dogmatic conception, Harnack turned to the earliest records of Jesus’ life to find in them an entirely human prophet who did not speak as “a heroic penitent, or like an ascetic who has turned his back upon the world.” Jesus’ message, he argued, lies beyond any “dramatic eschatological apparatus,”38 and its essence consists in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the “infinite value of the human soul.”39 Emphasizing this last aspect, Harnack claimed that the message of the Gospel—the coming kingdom of God—is directed primarily to the interior man: “[t]he kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals…”40 To make this message available to “our modern way of thinking and feeling,” Harnack further described it as “superior to all antithesis and tension between this world and a world to come, between reason and ecstasy, between work and isolation from the world, between Judaism and Hellenism.”41

36

Adolph von Harnack, What is Christianity, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957), 203. 37

Harnack, Dogmengeschichte (Tübingen, 1991), 4. Cited in Gunther Wenz, “Adolph von Harnack. Herzensfrömmigkeit und Wissenschaftsmanagement,” in P. Neuner and G. Wenz (eds.), Theologen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 33-51, 40. 38

Harnack, What is Christianity?, 38, 41. Cf. Sheehan, The First Coming, 16.

39

Harnack, What is Christianity?, 63; see also 51.

40

Ibid., 56.

41

Ibid., 63.

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Thus, far from warning us that “you must change your life,” the Gospel according to Harnack would seem to require us to adapt it as much as possible to modern humanist ideals. Indeed, the Gospel “is in nowise a positive religion like the rest … it contains no statutory or particularistic elements;” it contains no “ordinances or injunctions bidding us forcibly to alter the conditions of the age in which we may happen to be living.”42 Quite to the contrary, the ideal it contains is the “goal and lodestar” of “our historical development.” Writing in 1900, Harnack believed that modern civilization was moving closer to precisely that “lofty and noble ideal” which

we have received from the very foundation of our religion. Who can tell whether man will ever achieve it? But we can and ought to draw nearer to it, and today—as opposed to two or three hundred years ago—we are already aware of a moral obligation to proceed in this direction, and those among us whose experience is more subtle and therefore prophetic no longer look upon the kingdom of love and peace as a mere Utopia.”43

As Mark Lilla has recently argued, Protestant liberal theology left its mark on German Jewish thought as well.44 Christianity and Judaism faced the same challenge of adapting their message to the modern world. In stark contrast to Christianity, however, Judaism confronted in Germany a culture that was deeply 42

Ibid., 101.

43

Ibid., 113-14 (translation altered as cited by Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 189.) 44

Lilla, The Stillborn God, 256; see also 238-244.

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hostile. This was true not only on the level of popular opinion, as became evident in the anti-Jewish riots that followed upon the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812 and the founding of the Reich,45 but on a philosophical level as well. Suffice it to recall a statement such as Kant’s to the effect that “[t]he euthanasia of Judaism is the pure moral religion,”46 or Hegel’s view that “[t]he great tragedy of the Jewish people … can arouse neither terror nor pity … but horror alone,”47 or Heinrich von Treitschke’s warning to the new Germany that “the Jews are our disgrace.”48 The most ambitious attempt to make Judaism compatible with German thought and culture was undertaken by Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). In the 1880s Cohen responded to the rise of anti-Semitism in the academy with an attempt to demonstrate the universal meaning of Judaism for the culture of humanity.49 According to Cohen, anti-Semitism is not a racist worldview but a matter of prejudices that belongs really to the past since Jewish and Protestant

45

See Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann), 147-48. 46

Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Arabis, 1979), 95. 47

G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, trans. T.M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 204-205. 48

Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Ansichten,” in “Preussische Jahrbücher,” November 1879; repr. in Walter Boehlich (ed.), Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag, 1965), 5-12. On German philosophy and Judaism, more generally, see Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 49

See Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 146-157. See also Andrea Poma, “Hermann Cohen’s Response to Anti-Judaism,” in Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen’s Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 1-21.

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elements in German spiritual history have long been reconciled.50 Cohen attempted to prove that Judaism is not only compatible with “the pure moral religion” or with the “purer form of Christianity” defended in different ways by Kant, Harnack or Treitschke, but that it is the original source of Christianity and of the cultural, religious and philosophical ideals with which it is associated. With Kant, Cohen argued that religion and morality are concerned with the same fundamental problem—with the question, how should I live?51 Historically, religions have been a rich source—if not indeed the source—of ethical idealism.52 However, in the historical religions ethical ideals are still entangled with mythological, mystical, and metaphysical elements that are incompatible with autonomous morality and the findings of modern science. Thus faithfulness to our religious heritage—not least as the source of our ethical ideals—commands us to work towards the rational purification or ‘idealization’ of the historical religions.53 Religion must be transformed or must grow into ethics: religion is the

50

Cohen, “Ein Bekenntnis in der Judenfrage,” in H. Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, Vol. 2, edited by Bruno Strauss (Berlin: Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924), 73-95, 79f. 51

See, for instance, Cohen, Ethik des Reinen Willens, 3rd ed. (Berlin, [1904] 1921), 55-56.

52

See Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 358. Cohen, “Religion und Sittlichkeit,” in Jüdische Schriften, vol. 3 (Berlin: Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924), 100ff., 155. Reason and Hope. Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, trans. Eva Jospe (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1993), 69, 72, 87. 53

Ethik des Reinen Willens, 592; see also 52ff.

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“state of nature” of which ethics is the “state of maturity.”54 In his attempt at a rational purification of Judaism, Cohen, we could say, was more Kantian than Kant. Thus, rejecting the postulates of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God,55 Cohen argued that God does not exist as a metaphysical reality but only as an idea,56 while the immortality of the soul remains but “a moral hope.”57 Similarly, Cohen rejected the dogma of God’s incarnation and the idea of the trinity to which Kant had made concessions.58 Echoing the Protestant distillation of Christianity to its humanistic essence, Cohen claimed that “…we do make a clear and vital, though possibly still somewhat embarrassed distinction between the ritualism of our religion and its eternal essence.”59 Against the historical procedure of Harnack, however, he also noted that only the philosophy—and not the history—of religion “knows how to construe the essence of a religion through the conceptual idealization of its basic thought.”60 Cohen argued that the idealization or spiritualization of Judaism was a process that began with the Hebrew Bible itself. It is through this process that

54

Ibid., 591.

55

Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, 354.

56

Ibid., 354, 356, 366; Cohen, Ethik, 449 ff.

57

Cohen, Reason and Hope, 85.

58

Ibid., 83.

59

Ibid., 89.

60

Ibid., 88.

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Judaism became the “original source” of the “religion of reason.”61 What Cohen meant by this can be illustrated by referring to some of the key stages of Judaism’s idealization. The most important one is the development of monotheism from polytheism and mythology.62 Monotheism, Cohen argued, was the product of a uniquely spiritual culture (Geisteskultur) which learned that there is only one being; that all other being is, “as Plato would say, only appearance.”63 This development implied a movement away from plastic culture to poetic imagination, as the being of God cannot be represented but only contemplated— much like the Platonic idea of the Good.64 Thus Judaism also transcended materialism and eudaemonism; namely by deprecating “all earthly things”—as well as their images—“in view of their irrelevance with regard to the knowledge of the good.”65 In this way, Judaism became a religion motivated by the ethical interest from beginning to end. As monotheism unites all nations and states into one humanity guided by an ethical ideal, it “reaches its summit in Messianism”— in the unshakeable confidence that “[m]orality will be established in the human world.”66

61

Cohen, Religion of Reason, 8; see also 7, 34.

62

Ibid., 37.

63

Hermann Cohen, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” in C. Schulte (ed.), Deutschtum und Judentum. Ein Disput unter Juden aus Deutschland (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 47. See also Religion of Reason, 41, 44. 64

Cohen, Deutschtum und Judentum, 47.

65

Cohen, Religion of Reason, 46.

66

Cohen, Religion of Reason, 21.

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Thus Cohen tried to show that Judaism is a fundamental source of the highest aspirations of Western culture—aspirations such as science, autonomous morality, and an ‘ethically socialist’ politics. Cohen’s philosophical and theological thought translated into an unshakable trust in the realization of the religion of reason in world history. In a way similar to Harnack Cohen claimed that “historical developments prove ever more distinctly and definitively that the idealization undertaken by our philosophy of religion is correct.”67 The value of Judaism “as represented by its prophetism (hence, its ethics), its universalism, and its humanism is already widely acknowledged today.” And “there is comfort and hope” that this will continue to be the case—that “classical thinking will once again awaken in philosophy as well as in art, and from it there will emerge a new direction in politics. Akin to the moral purity of prophetic monotheism, this new political orientation will come to acknowledge and appreciate Judaism as its most natural ally.”68 Cohen’s vision was soon proven tragically wrong as the moral culture of the nation proved to be anything but faithful to its Judeo-Christian sources. In light of what was to come, Cohen’s motto for the new world—“All the people a nation of priests”—appears uncannily naïve.69 Yet, in another sense, Cohen may also be said to have been tragically right. For he insisted throughout that the existence of an ethical culture cannot be taken for granted; that it cannot be simply invoked in 67

Cohen, Reason and Hope, 88-89.

68

Cohen, Reason and Hope, 88-89.

69

Ibid., 76.

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man at any given moment; that one cannot rely, as Kant did, on the ‘fact’ of pure practical reason.70 True Sittlichkeit, he came to insist more and more, cannot exist without religion.71 Cohen’s thought underwent a profound transformation, which pointed away from his unshakable trust in the synthesis of (Judeo-Christian) monotheism with modern—and, especially, German—culture.72 This incipient ‘turn’, however, would count for very little at that time especially in light of Cohen’s enthusiastic support of the Reich’s imperialistic ambitions during the First World War. Indeed, the most immediate impact, not only of Cohen’s work but of the defense of German culture undertaken by some of the most prominent German theologians— such as Harnack, Troeltsch, and Wilhelm von Hermann—was, ironically, the powerful rejection it generated. For these theologians and representatives of German Bildung became ardent supporters of Germany’s imperialistic ambitions, not in spite of but—in their own self-understanding—because of their commitment to the highest ideals of Judeo-Christian religiosity and culture.73 70

Cohen, Kant’s Begründung der Ethik, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1910), 254 ff. Cited in Helmut Holzhey, “Der systematische Ort der ‘Religion der Vernunft’ im Gesamtwerk Hermann Cohens,” in H. Holzhey, et als., (eds.), “Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums.” Tradition und Ursprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens Spätwerk (Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000), 47. 71

Cohen, “Religion und Sittlichkeit,” in Jüdische Schriften, Vol. 3., 111; and Holzhey, “Der systematische Ort,” 47. 72

This, at least, according to Rosenzweig’s understanding of Cohen. See his “Introduction” in Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, Vol. 1, xiii-lxiv. (See chapter two.) 73

See Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God, 245, as well as the “Appeal to the Civilized World,” signed by ninety-three scholars including Harnack and Hermann, in New York Times Current History of the European War, 1: 1 (1914: Dec. 12), 185-187. For Troeltsch’s declarations of support see “An die Kulturwelt,” in Karl Hammer (ed.), Deutsche Kriegstheologie (1870-1918) (Munich, 1971), 263-65. For Cohen see his “Deutschtum und Judentum” (op. cit.).

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Dialectical theology: destroying the gods of this world

Dialectical theology emerged as a response to the crisis of liberal humanism that culminated in liberal theology’s embrace of militaristic nationalism. The movement found its strongest expression in Karl Barth’s commentaries on Paul’s Epistles to the Romans published between 1916 and 1921.74 Among its most important representatives were Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen, and Rudolph Bultmann—all of whom were frequent contributors to the journal “Between the Times” (1922-1933). It was the reaction against the liberal theologians’ Kulturkrieg that gave the movement pioneered by Barth its essential characteristics. First, dialectical theology called for a crisis of culture. As a student of Harnack, Hermann, and Cohen,75 Barth initially stood for the belief that human culture could bring us closer—and in fact was bringing us closer—to the ‘lofty and noble ideals’ of Judeo-Christian religion.76 Socialism, he claimed in 1915, is “despite its inconsistencies … one of the most encouraging signs for the fact that

74

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Eswyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1918] 1968). 75

See Georg Pfleiderer, “Karl Barth. Theologie des Wortes Gottes als Kritik der Religion,” in Neuner and Wenz (eds.), Theologen, 125. 76

See Rudy Koshar, “Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?,” Modern Intellectual History, 5, 2 (2008): 333-362, 340.

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the kingdom of God does not stand still, that God is at work.”77 This was bound to change, however, as the distinction between the culture of socialism and the culture of nationalism could no longer be maintained. Indeed, already in 1914 Barth had referred to the war as a calling no longer to expect to see God’s work in the world: “We thought we were on the right path, we Europeans … Now comes God and says … No! You are not on the right path! ... your ways are not my ways, and your thoughts are not my thoughts.”78 These ways and thoughts, Barth began to argue, are inaccessible to us. Indeed, “…it is sentimental liberal selfdeception to think that from nature and history, from art, morality, science, or even religion, direct roads lead to the impossible possibility of God.”79 The experience of the war gave dialectical theology a second essential characteristic—a new receptivity to the word of the Bible. As Thurneysen put it: “We knew [the Bible] indeed and truly so. But we had read it through the lenses of certain interpretations […which] broke apart as the theology and the worldview that … supported such interpretations became shaky. And so we read the Bible anew, with far less reservations than before… We read it (I dare say) more penitently, much more than before as an eternal Word directed to us and to our 77

Cited in Dieter Schellong, “Jenseits von politischer und unpolitischer Theologie. Grundentscheidungen der ‘Dialektischen Theologie,” in Jacob Taubes (ed.), Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, Vol. 1: Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1983), 297. 78

Cited in Ibid.

79

Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 337 (translation altered). Or as Gogarten put it in 1920, “…a thousand eternities would not suffice to walk the path which leads from man to God.” F. Gogarten, “Between the Times,” in James M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, Vol. 1 (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1968), 285.

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time. We niggled less about it … We read it with the eyes of the shipwrecked.”80 Thus, instead of reading and discarding what appears to be outdated or a remnant of Judaism or Greek metaphysics, every effort was made—especially by Barth— to “see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit;” to take seriously the fact that “[w]hat was once of grave importance, is so still,” and that “[w]hat is today of grave importance … stands in direct connection with that ancient gravity.”81 In the case of Barth, this led him to embrace the old dogmas of the trinity and of God’s two natures.82 Bultmann, as a pioneering ‘demythologizer’ of the apocalyptic myths that permeate the New Testament, was far less of a literalist.83 And yet he also insisted that Christianity cannot dispense with Christology, if only (as we shall see) for the “existential challenge to authenticity” it conveys.84 It is this acceptance of Christian dogma that gave the movement its neo-orthodox character. And yet, none of this is to say that the dialecticians were obscurantists or dogmatists. Indeed, the third characteristic of the movement—its ‘dialectics’—is key. What this means is perhaps best explained by Barth’s own rejection of this label. According to Barth (even though he used it himself) “dialectical” was a

80

Cited in Schellong, “Jenseits,” 305.

81

Barth, The Epistle, 1.

82

Schellong, “Jenseits,” 300; Pfleiderer, “Karl Barth,” 127 f.

83

See his critique of Barth in Bultmann, “Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in its Second Edition,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectical Thelogy, 100-121, esp. 119. 84

Sheehan, The First Coming, 22.

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term “hung upon them” by some “spectator.”85 Likewise the idea that they constituted a movement or a school was rejected. There was nothing ‘neoorthodox’ about ‘dialectical’ theology, he claimed;86 and we could add, what they did was not even theo-logy anyway. This penchant for deconstructing their own views is a consequence of the serious fact that there is, indeed, no logos about, no rational grasp, and hence no theology, of God’s revelation.87 Rather, in dialectical theology the very idea of knowing through seeing or theorizing collapses: the relation between God and man is that between a Deus loquens and a homo audiens, a relation of ‘hearing’ rather than ‘seeing.’88 ‘Dialectical’ thus means that every statement about the reality of God in Jesus Christ is incomplete and must constantly be reframed and expressed anew in different ways of speaking

85

K. Barth, E. Thurneysen, G. Merz, “Abschied von ‘Zwischen den Zeiten’,” in: J. Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge der Dialektischen Theologie, Vol. 2 (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, [1933] 1963), 313– 331, 313. Barth began to use the term in 1922 to characterize his approach and that of his friends in Barth, “Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie,” in Gesamtausgabe 19 (Zürich 1990), 172. Cited in H.-G. Geyer, art. “Theologie, dialektische,” in J. Ritter, et. als., (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 10, 1099-1101, 1099. 86

See Barth’s “Preface to the Second Edition,” in The Epistle, 3, cf. 8; and, more generally, Pfleiderer, “Karl Barth,” 127, n. 4. Cf. Bultmann’s remark that the seriousness of dialectic theology “lies precisely in the fact that it takes very seriously the dissimilarity of its talk to divine talk—that it takes seriously the ultimate lack of seriousness of its own theology and all others as well.” “The Question of ‘Dialectic’ Theology,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings, 262. 87

Thus, for instance, according to Bultmann (writing in 1928), “men do not know God; for knowing God does not mean to have ideas (perhaps correct ideas) about him. To know him is to see him as really made manifest, and that means to recognize him as Creator, to submit one’s self to be determined by him.” “Jesus himself is … present in his Word…But the Word does not become ‘idea’ and as such enter into the ‘history of thought.’” R. Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” in Bultmann, Faith and Understanding I, edited by Robert W. Funk (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 168, 178. 88

H.-G. Geyer, art. “Theologie, Dialektische,” 1101.

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and thinking.89 Paradoxically, one could argue that the most important accomplishment of dialectical theology was its contribution to secularization.90 The paradox is this— that only acceptance of what is beyond the human as the truth liberates purely human judgment. That seems to be the true and lasting significance of the crisis of culture called for by the movement. Friedrich Gogarten’s extreme position is particularly illustrative in this regard. Against liberal theology, Gogarten noted that “a religion which has to reconcile itself to this world as it is … is itself drawn along into the contingencies from which it should be freeing us, and it will dance the insane dance of world history.” And when, as happened towards the end of the ‘summer of 1815-1914’, “the immanent strength dies out of that greater context of contingencies we call culture, then this religion—which is perhaps the closest, most direct, and most subtle expression of the immanent strength of a culture—will die too.”91 The fatal blunder leading to this outcome lies (from this perspective) precisely in the attempt to create a religion of reason; or, to borrow a phrase from Rosenzweig, it lies in the attempt to bring about “the monstrous birth of the divine out of the

89

Schellong, “Jenseits,” 301; cf. also Bultmann, “The Significance,” 146 f., and for a somewhat different view, “The Question of ‘Dialectic’,” 257. See also Gogarten, “The Crisis of Our Culture,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings, 289. 90

Cf. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 4-5. 91

Gogarten, The Crisis of Our Culture,” 291. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

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human.”92 The result is that culture becomes God, or that religion becomes “culture-religion.” Thus, instead of a religion “which seeks to be the soul of culture,” Gogarten called for “a religion which is a constant crisis of this and every other culture” (293). By this Gogarten meant first of all a renunciation of “[e]very objective ascertainment … which has not already died to all things,” that is, every ascertainment which has not died “to the good and the bad, to life and death, to heaven and hell” (288). Here it must be stressed that Gogarten was not calling for an attack against a particular (bourgeois-liberal) “culture-religion,” but against culture as such. Thus the theological ‘Destruktion’ of culture undertaken by dialectical theology left very little to hold on to, for ultimately “none of our thoughts reach beyond the human sphere.”93 All that remained, then, was, on one side, the Word of God—wholly impenetrable to human reason—and on the other this “world of apostasy, of the Fall, and of original sin” (295). What was to be done? Gogarten argued as follows. If we cannot grasp God’s Word, we would have to say that ‘in the beginning was the deed’: “Here there is only the independent act which takes place at this very moment, simply because I exist and live face to face with this world, which I recognize as my world and for which I bear all the responsibility” (296). Hence rather than a “mystical retreat from the world,” what religion would seem to require is “complete worldliness” (294). Rather than 92

Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” in Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig. Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 23. 93

Gogarten, “Between the Times,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings, 279.

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saying no to the world, we have to respond to everything that happens in the world. Indeed, the “sole possibility of escape from the world and from time demands that we do not free ourselves from either world or time, not even to the extent of a single fiber of our being; that we, on the contrary, take world and time upon ourselves, shirk not one difficulty and assume the burden of all responsibility for everything which exists or happens” (296). Barth was equally incisive in his Destruktion of so-called ‘culture-religion’. “The Word of God is the transformation of everything that we know as Humanity, Nature, and History, and must therefore be apprehended as the negation of the starting-point of every system which we are capable of conceiving.”94 Yet far from serving as a guide, the Word of God is also the negation of any religious ‘system.’ The Word of God is a “scandal” that “criss-crosses every form of rationalism.”95 Thus Barth did not shy away from saying that “[t]he absolute character of Christian ethics lies in the fact that they are altogether problematical,” or that “all that we are and do moves within the sphere of relativity,” or that “[a] political career … becomes possible only when it is seen to be essentially a game; that is, when we are unable to speak of absolute political right.”96

94

K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 278. (Hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.)

95

Ibid., 276.

96

Ibid., 465, 489.

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Arendt in Marburg: between Bultmann and Heidegger

Arendt came into contact with dialectical theology through Bultmann, under whom she studied at Marburg in 1924/25.97 Bultmann stood for a position within dialectical theology that must be discussed separately. His opposition to liberal theology became equally strong. On the other hand, however, he was far more interested than Barth and Gogarten in providing the New Testament’s understanding of life with a philosophical basis.98 This attempt to provide a radical critique of ‘culture-religion’ with a theological and philosophical basis left a deep mark on Arendt—and perhaps not surprisingly so, since it was made possible by Bultmann’s closeness to Heidegger. Bultmann and Heidegger worked closely together during the time of Arendt’s doctoral studies (1924/25-1928).99 Since the early 1920s Heidegger had

97

Arendt’s relation to Bultmann seems to have been close. According to Hans Jonas, both of them (apparently the only Jews in the New Testament theological seminar) formed together with Bultmann in their “extraordinary situation an almost natural alliance.” See Jonas, “Im Kampf um die Möglichkeit des Glaubens. Erinnerungnen an Rudolph Bultmann und Betrachtungen zum philosophishen Aspekt seines Werkes,” in Otto Kaiser (ed.), Gedenken an Rudolph Bultmann (Tübingen, 1977), 41-70, 41. See also Arendt’s letter to Jaspers of July 13, 1953 in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, edited by L. Kohler and H. Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 221-222. 98

See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger und Bultmann. Philosophie und Theologie,” in Markus Happel (ed.), Heidegger—neu gelesen (Würzburg: 1997), 44, 45. See, for example, R. Bultmann, “Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans,” in Robison (ed.), The Beginnings, 100-130; and “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis of the New Testament,” Ibid., 236-256. 99

Heidegger and Bultmann became close friends during Heidegger’s five years at Marburg (192328). They met regularly—for a time, weekly—to read the Gospel of John and also convened with a group of students including Gerhard Krüger, Heinrich Schlier, Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Jonas. See Otto Pöggeler: “Heidegger und Bultmann,” 42. See also Gadamer,

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been trying to develop an interpretation of Christian consciousness that was adequate to the time.100 As a formerly Catholic philosopher, his approach was different but analogous to that of dialectical theology. In order “to find the word that is capable of calling one to faith”101 in our time, he argued, it is not only necessary to overcome liberal theology and the German idealist philosophy that sustained it; rather, one has to uproot the whole tradition of philosophy beginning with Aristotle. Concretely, this required dismantling the static metaphysics of eternal “substances” and “natures” that had been adopted from a particular interpretation of Aristotle and that pervaded most of Western philosophy and theology. If one is serious about appropriating radical possibilities of (Christian) existence, Heidegger argued, it is necessary to go back in a “dismantling return” to the “basic philosophical experiences and motives” that underlie Christian consciousness.102 One such experience was the experience of time in early Christianity, which Heidegger characterized as the “deepest historical paradigm of

“The Marburg Theology” in H.-G. Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 29-43. 100

See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’ Jugendschrift,” in Gunther Neumann (ed.), Martin Heidegger. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 77; as well as Gadamer, “The Religious Dimension,” in Heidegger’s Ways, 175. Cf. specially Heidegger’s description of his task in 1920 as finding “the way to an original Christian— Greek-free—theology.” M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks: Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung. GA 59 (Frankfurt, a. M.: Klostermann, [1920] 1993), 91. 101

Gadamer reports that he heard Heidegger describe the true task of theology in these terms in 1923. See Gadamer, “The Religious Dimension,” in Heidegger’s Ways, 175. 102

Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992, 371-72.

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the world of inner experience,” or of “live[d] temporality as such.”103 Heidegger’s project thus became to refound philosophy as it grows from precisely the lived temporality of ‘factical’ life-experience.104 In his Marburg years Heidegger would then attempt more systematically to provide “the [ontological] concepts for things which are usually treated in a nebulous way … in theology” such as faith, sin, anxiety, and revelation.105 Heidegger’s premise was that “a purely rational grasp of all basic theological concepts” is possible insofar as “all theological concepts necessarily contain that understanding of being that is constitutive of Dasein as such.”106 Thus, for example, faith was to be understood existentially as rebirth, or as “a way in which a factical believing Dasein historically exists in that history which begins with the occurrence of the revelation;”107 revelation was to be understood in terms of Dasein’s openness for meaning or sense (Sinnoffenheit); and the experience of sin in terms of the indebtedness of life.108 Drawing on Heidegger’s approach, Bultmann conceived of theology as

103

Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. GA 58 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, [1919/20] 1993), 61. Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. GA, 60 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, [1920/21] 1995), 80. 104

See Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung, 8, 4, 9, 28.

105

Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), 292. 106

Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51. 107

Ibid., 44.

108

Pöggeler, “Heidegger und Bultmann,” 43.

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“nothing other than the conceptual presentation of man’s existence as determined by God.”109 “[I]n speaking of God,” Bultmann argued, “theology must at the same time speak of man.”110 Theology must speak of man because every theological exegesis presupposes a specific self-interpretation. That is, “I can understand … a text only if I bring to it a pre-understanding of the subjects there discussed.”111 To understand the Bible I must bring to it my own understanding of the meaning of such terms as ‘revelation,’ ‘world,’ ‘death,’ ‘love,’ ‘joy,’ ‘flesh,’ and ‘body.’112 The following difficulty results: the text is meant to determine our lives but we see in it what our lives determine. To escape this hermeneutic cycle—to the extent that this is possible—one must either possess an understanding of all the possibilities of existence113—of love, joy, death, and so on—or else give up this notion altogether. That is, one must abandon the view that human existence is the realization of certain potentialities which we can theoretically grasp and approximate in practice. Instead, one must recognize that understanding requires taking up existential challenges, that is, trying things out, projecting possibilities, or in Bultmann’s words, “realizing [our] own potentiality-to be.”114 Like Heidegger, Bultmann chose the latter option, without however giving up on the 109

Bultmann, “The Question of ‘Dialectic’ Theology,” 274; “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis,” 252. 110

Bultmann, “The Significance,” 148.

111

Bultmann, “The Significance,” 156.

112

Ibid., 156, 160, 150, 159, 160 f.

113

Ibid., 150.

114

Ibid.

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first altogether. Somehow, that is—presumably because we do have a sufficient grasp of the possibilities of human existence—we know that the being of man is historical. “And we understand by the historical nature of man’s being that his being is a potentiality to be. That is to say, the being of man is removed from his own control … and goes through decisions in which man does not choose something for himself, but chooses himself as his possibility.”115 “Understanding, therefore, is always simultaneously resolve, decision.”116 In considering the practical-ethical consequences of this way of thinking, it is important to emphasize that despite its renunciation of a theoretical grasp of different possibilities of life, Bultmann’s theology is not a kind of humanism for which existence—the ‘projection’ of possibilities—somehow precedes essence. Rather, understanding is resolve—but this is a resolve to obey. Indeed, only when one “admits that the possibilities of human existence are not marked off beforehand and not determined in the concrete situation through the use of reason” does one “allow the text to speak with authority.”117 Only then can the mistake of liberal theology be overcome: the text “is there not to be inspected, but to determine the existence of the reader.”118 Practically speaking, the question then becomes: How can existence be thus determined, if the ways of God are so utterly foreign to the ways of man? 115

Ibid.,149.

116

Ibid., 158; see also “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis,” 245.

117

Bultmann, “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis,” 245.

118

Ibid., 238.

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Bultmann’s answer to this question in the 1920s went roughly as follows. The most important decision to be able to realize the possibilities of existence disclosed in the Gospel119 is “either to fall into the world or to grasp life.”120 That is, one must decide whether or not to be “of the world.”121 Being “of the world” means “surrender[ing] [one’s] authentic possibilit[ies]. The world’s view is that man has possibilities at all times. The world forgets that man is at all times himself possibility, that his being is potentiality-to-be.”122 Not being ‘of the world’ means regaining “authenticity in its potentiality to be;” it means “being-inthe-future.” “[M]an can now live in the future. That is, he can love.”123 But, again, love who or what? For a Christian the answer would seem to be simple: we are to love our neighbor as we love God. Yet if man lives in expectation of the future and is not ‘of the world,’ how can he have any genuine neighbors? In a context in which all liberal (theological or philosophical) positions had become discredited, and in which intellectual honesty compelled one to admit that the Word of God is inaccessible in theory or practice, it became extremely difficult to answer such basic ethical/theological questions. In 1924 Bultmann let Barth speak for him on the question of neighborly love. Against his teacher 119

Bultmann, “The Significance of Dialectical Theology,” 158.

120

Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” 180.

121

Ibid., 170.

122

Ibid., 102.

123

Ibid., 176, 179, 182.

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Harnack, who claimed that the equation of love of God and love of neighbor proved that there is no “absolute contradiction” between “life in God and life in the world,” Barth objected: but “what fact in the world is more alien, more incomprehensible than just a ‘neighbor’? Is there any fact on which we are more in need of God’s revelation?”124 Two years later, markedly under the influence of Heidegger and in polemic with Martin Dibelius—Arendt’s Heidelberg New Testament professor—Bultmann sought to give ontological grounding to neighborly love. A man who exists only in the future, in expectation of eternity (as Dibelius conceives him), has no genuine neighbors, “only very agreeable subjects over whom he can let the powers of his new being flow. But my neighbor is the man with whom I am constantly associated in my concrete historical existence. This means that the concept of the neighbor depends on the conception of human existence as a mutual inter-relation which conditions my existence from its very beginning, and apart from which ‘man’ is a pure abstraction.”125 Man is a conditioned being, thoroughly pervaded by ‘world.’126 Yet again, a true Christian cannot be pervaded by ‘world;’ he cannot be ‘of the world.’ Bultmann’s final word on this difficulty seems to have been that “the eschatological existence” of a Christian is not a “flight from the world” but is rather the embodiment of the Pauline disposition of being in the world while not being of the world, or of living in the world “as if not” which thus wants to be “loving responsibility for the 124

Bultmann, “Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement,” 43.

125

Bultmann, “Historical and Supra-historical Religion,” 111.

126

Ibid., 112.

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world.”127

127

R. Bultmann, “Der Mensch und seine Welt nach dem Urteil der Bibel,” in Glauben und Verstehen 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, [1957] 1993), 151–165: 165. Cf. 1 Corinthians 7, 29-31.

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Love in Augustine

After having studied under Heidegger and Bultmann in Marburg for about a year, Arendt decided to conclude her doctoral studies at Heidelberg under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. The guiding question of Arendt’s dissertation became “the meaning and importance of neighborly love.”128 Arendt posed this question to Augustine since his “every perception and every remark about love refer at least in part to this love of neighbor” (3). The dissertation examines three contexts in Augustine’s work where love of neighbor is central: first, when love is understood as future-oriented craving or desire for eternity; second, when it is conceived as the nondesirous charity of a creature of God; third, when it is understood as an element of social life. In the first two contexts Arendt finds that “love of neighbor remains incomprehensible in its true relevance” (98). Arendt argues that Augustine comes closest to accounting for the true relevance of neighborly love in his reflections on social life. Arendt’s dissertation is a difficult text. Not only is it a Jugendschrift

128

Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 3. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.) Arendt’s dissertation was first published in 1929 as Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation in the series Philosophische Forschungen edited by Jaspers (Berlin: Springer, vol. 9). In the 1960s a translation was prepared by E.B. Ashton. This translation was revised by Arendt in 1964/65, but only partially so (thus, for instance, the Introduction and Part III were not revised). The English version of the dissertation edited as Love and Saint Augustine is thus composed of three layers: Arendt’s 1929 original, the Ashton translation, and Arendt’s revisions of 1964/65. In what follows I will use the English version noting when it departs from the original.

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conceived when Arendt was barely twenty-two years old, but its argument is deliberately fragmentary and multi-layered. Indeed, Arendt’s aim was to pursue different thought trains in Augustine until they led to contradictions, which themselves resulted from the conflicting—neo-Stoic, neo-Platonic and Christian—sources of his thought (3-4). The basic argument, however, can be stated in relatively simple terms by explaining, as it were, the ‘logic’ and the limits of neighborly love in each of the three contexts Arendt analyzes. In a first context love is understood as craving or as “a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy” (9). This craving “gives rise in the moment of possession to a fear of losing” (10). Thus happiness consists “in having and holding” our good, but “even more in being sure of not losing it” (10). Now, “[s]ince life in its approach to death is constantly ‘diminished’ and thus keeps losing itself,” (12) human desire is either everlasting (since it can never have and hold the good) and thus a contradiction in terms or it is “a description of hell” (32). Hence a desire that “craves its fulfillment, that is, its own end” (32) must of necessity transcend human mortality and temporality: “Just as the lover forgets himself over the beloved, mortal, temporal man can forget his existence over eternity” (29). Such self-denial, however, makes “the central Christian demand to love one’s neighbor as oneself well nigh impossible” (30). For not only does it deny “the present, mortal self that is, after all, God’s creation,” but it does this not “for the sake of others or of God, but for the sake of the eternity that lies ahead” (30).

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In a second context of Augustine’s work the idea that love is an object-driven desire is transcended on the premise that “all desires reckon with a love that is nondesirous” (45). The longest part of Arendt’s dissertation is devoted to explaining the existential sources; the theological and philosophical presuppositions; and the consequences of this understanding of love. For only by breaking away from the traditional (and, we could say, commonsensical) view that love implies (at the very least) desire, an object, a will, and future-oriented expectation can neighborly love become intelligible. That “all desires reckon with a love that is nondesirous” means, first of all, that “[o]ur craving and the relationships we establish through it only seem to be in our own power. In truth, craving and its relationships depend upon a pre-existing reference whose object was forgotten in desire’s exclusive direction toward the future” (48). This “preexisting reference” of our desires is revealed to us by memory, which “opens the road to a transmundane past as the original source of the very notion of the happy life” (48). More concretely, memory opens the road to the “the original beginning,” to the Creator in whom we find the inspiration to desire happiness (49). Thus, object-driven and future-oriented desire is transcended insofar as man no longer depends upon a desired object which he anticipates in hope and fear, but rather “relies exclusively on remembrance and refers back to the past” (51). It is in this context that neighborly love becomes conceivable as a nondesirous love that is God-given (93). In neighborly love, man loves as God loves (94) and the other is loved in his createdness (95). Yet, once again, Arendt argues, this second

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context also fails to account for the true relevance of neighborly love (98). For in accepting God’s love we now “love and hate as God does” (94). And in thus renouncing ourselves we renounce all worldly relations. Loving the other in his createdness we “love all people so completely without distinctions that the world becomes a desert” (95). Arendt finds that Augustine comes closest to accounting for the significance of neighborly love in a third context—in his reflections on social life. She refers to such reflections as “another empirical context” in Augustine’s work where the “experiential ground” of community “can no longer be traced by the inner dialectics of faith” (99). This experiential ground is historicity or the fact that “All share the same fate” (100). It is our common mortality that grounds the equality of all people, which in turn “permits us to understand interdependence, which essentially defines social life in the worldly community” (101). This is a ground of community beyond the “dialectics of faith” because “[i]n the society founded on Adam man has made himself independent of the Creator. He depends on other persons and not on God” (103). Whereas the individual as creature “feels that ‘all the way back’ he was ‘out of this world’, as a member of human society he feels that even all the way back he has been worldly” (104). Man’s origin is “the beginning of the man-made world” through which the world ceases to be “an utterly strange place into which the individual has been created” (104). Neighborly love acquires a new meaning in this context: human coexistence ceases to be “inevitable and [a] matter of course” and becomes “freely chosen and

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replete with obligations” in virtue of the fact that we are equally sinful and hence mortal (102). Still, the question remains: does this not simply repeat the problem that loving all without distinctions turns the world into a desert (cf. 30)? Arendt concludes her dissertation by linking the second and third contexts of Augustine’s reflections on love—viz., man as a creature of God and man as a social being qua descendent of Adam. Augustine, she argues, had a twofold theory of man’s origins as both creature of God and descendent of Adam. Thinking these together Arendt moves towards a new understanding of man’s dwelling in the world— towards a “new social life” (108). In this understanding alienation from the world by means of faith does not cancel out togetherness (106). “Faith dissolves the bonds that tied men to the world in the original sense of the earthly city, and so faith dissolves men’s dependence on one another. Therefore, one individual’s relationship to another also ceases to be a matter of course, as it was in interdependence…” (108). Beyond this, Arendt does not make it clear how exactly the two possibilities of being both estranged from the world and being of the world—or worldly “as a matter of course”—are compatible or even complementary. She does conclude, however, by suggesting that the very fact that Augustine poses the question of the being of humanity in reference to both the individual and the human race means that he already saw that “Man is the other, whether he understands himself as an isolated individual or as conditioned … by the fact of belonging to the human race” (my emphasis, 112).

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Arendt’s theological-political predicament

To judge from its treatment in the literature, Arendt’s dissertation has often left readers cold—but also, as she herself put it when she rediscovered it in the 1960s, “strangely fascinated.”129 What is going on in Love in Saint Augustine? One answer is that its “central problematic” is “[f]ounding new moral communities in the Germany of 1929” on the basis of “renewed love of neighbor.”130 Arendt, in other words, is “suggesting the possibility of ‘constituting’ new worlds based on mutual caritas.”131 Thus the dissertation is read as containing the germ of Arendt’s philosophy of natality—a philosophy that would become “expressly political” in her understanding of “new ‘committees’, ‘public spaces’ and ‘soviets.’”132 As an incipient philosophy of natality the dissertation is seen as Arendt’s early response to Heidegger’s “death-driven phenomenology.”133 Concretely, Arendt is said to side with “Augustine’s ‘Creator’ God over the Neoplatonic, and Heideggerian, God of death and

129

See Arendt’s letter to Mary McCarthy of October 20, 1965, in Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 19491975 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 190. 130

Scott and Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” 123-24, 184.

131

Ibid., 178.

132

Ibid., 184.

133

Ibid., 124; see also 173-74.

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desire”:134 “Juxtaposing the saint and Heidegger, Arendt asserts that ‘it is memory and not the expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.’”135 Arendt’s dissertation has also been read as a critical engagement with “the greatest philosophical spokesman of … Christian antiworldliness” (viz., Augustine), and thus, as it were, as the opening salvo of her “head-on confrontation with Christianity.”136 The dissertation “may indicate that Arendt was a political philosopher before she knew she was one.” Indeed, “the entirety of Arendt’s philosophical work merely elaborates the question she had posed directly to Augustine: ‘Why should we make a desert out of this world?’”137 Yet others have argued that Love in Saint Augustine in fact turns to Christianity as a positive model for a “…universal bond among men, an ontological foundation, a transcendent principle guiding men who are in the world but not of it.”138 Reading the dissertation along such lines, it has been considered almost an embarrassment

134

Ibid., 121.

135

Ibid., 125, citing Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 56. (This statement is not in the original version of the dissertation.) 136

Ronald Beiner, “Love and Worldliness: Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Saint Augustine,” in Larry May (ed.), Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 269. 137

Ibid., 270, 281, citing Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 19. (This is also a revision missing in the original version.) 138

Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 499.

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(for any true ‘Arendtian,’ that is), insofar as it is the work of “an unpolitical intellectual studying antipolitical theology.”139 As this overview suggests, Love in Saint Augustine has been read for the most part from the perspective of Arendt’s later works, and typically in light of a few key revisions that Arendt introduced in the 1960s. Ironically, Arendt’s Existenz has thereby been missed, that is, both her ‘factical’ condition as a young Jewess born and raised in a nation that meant as much to the Jews as it would inflict misfortune on them,140 and as a thinker trying to hold philosophy and theology together in a context dominated by the Protestant collaboration of Heidegger and Bultmann. In his evaluation of Arendt’s work Jaspers pointed to precisely these predicaments. “Neither historical nor philological interests are primary. The impulse comes rather from what is left unsaid: through philosophical work with ideas the author wants to justify her freedom from Christian possibilities which also attract her.”141 What are these possibilities? First, as we have seen, Arendt seems to be attracted to a conception of love that points to “a deeper and more fundamental mode of human dependence than desire can ever detect when it acts in accord with its own phenomenological meaning” (49). This is a dependence on 139

Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, 8-9.

140

See Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 60. For an exception see Patrick Boyle, “Elusive Neighborliness: Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Saint Augustine,” in James W. Bernauer (ed.), Amor Mundi. Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (Boston: Martinus Nijhof, 1987), 81-115, esp. 84 f., 100. 141

See Ludger Lütkehaus (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, 130.

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“a notion of happiness that [man] could never experience in his earthly life” and that signifies “that human existence as such depends on something outside the human condition as we know and experience it” (49). Second, this points to an understanding of the human condition as non-worldly, or as a form of being in the world but not of the world. As Arendt puts it, God’s creation is “not worldly as such; neither is man” (66). Finally, the result is a Paulinian (and Bultmannian) ethos of living in the world “as if not.”142 Indeed, as Arendt claims in a statement removed from the English version, neighborly love is “the peculiarly Christian possibility for a relationship to the world even in attachment to God.”143 More generally, this ethos—in the literal sense of a way of dwelling in the world— begins to take shape in the final part of Arendt’s dissertation. There, as we saw, Arendt reflects on the possibility of a “new social life” from the standpoint of Augustine’s twofold theory of man’s origins. As descendents of Adam, “[b]eing a stranger in the world, for the Christian, is only a possibility, for the matter of course is to be at home in the world” (105). This very possibility, however, changes the nature of social life in decisive ways: it becomes “freely chosen and replete with obligations” (102); it “gives a new meaning to human togetherness— defense against the world” (108); it results in “mutual love … replac[ing] mutual dependence” (108).144

142

Cf. Patrick Boyle, “Elusive Neighborliness,” 94.

143

Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff, 50.

144

For Arendt’s conception of Christian possibilities of existence in her later work, see, e.g., “Religion and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 373: “The freedom which Christianity brought into

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Arendt is attracted to these Christian possibilities but she also wants to justify her freedom from them. This reminds us of Arendt’s statement that she had “difficult problems” doing philosophy and theology as a German-Jewish woman. How are these difficulties manifested in her dissertation? To justify her freedom from what is specifically Christian in the possibilities of existence contained in Augustine’s writings Arendt attempts to base her interpretation on the “pre-theological sphere” (5) or on the existential origins of his reflections. A few examples shall suffice for illustration. “‘Christian’ will never mean more than ‘Pauline’” (3). “Augustine’s dogmatic subservience to scriptural and ecclesiastical authority will be largely alien to our analyses” (4); this is “relatively easy” to justify in Augustine’s case because “[f]or Augustine, authority commands from without what we would also be told by conscience, the inner law, if habit had not ensnared us in sin” (4-5). When Augustine speaks of love as desire “he hardly speaks as a Christian. His starting point is not God who revealed himself to mankind, but the experience of the deplorable state of the human condition” (21). “Augustine’s deepest pre-Christian experience” must have been “man’s utter strangeness in the world he is born into” (22). Above all, Arendt’s attempt to understand Augustinian neighborly love as pre-theologically grounded is evident in her quest for “another empirical context”

the world was a freedom from politics, a freedom to be and remain outside the realm of secular society altogether…” The Human Condition, 60, n. 55: “The Christian precept to mind one’s own business is derived from I Thess. 4: 11: ‘that ye study to be quiet and to do your own business’…”

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in his work where “the experiential ground” of community “can no longer be traced by the inner dialectics of faith” (100). Arendt turned to Augustine to recover possibilities of existence in an “attempt at an inquiry of purely philosophical interest” (6) for which Augustine seemed an ideal subject. Indeed, like Arendt, Augustine confronted “no radical breach between authority and reason” (5) or, we could say, between reason and revelation. He was a thinker, in other words, who lived through the “theologicalpolitical predicament,” but whose thought, as Arendt understood it, could somehow provide answers to fundamental questions of living together without “becom[ing] involved in the eternally paradoxical problems of faith” (5). Augustine seemed most appropriate for Arendt’s purposes for other crucial reasons as well. The Protestant spirit that dominated German philosophy and theology, Arendt suggests, originated in Augustine: “indeed, neither the Protestant conscience, Protestant individuality, nor Protestant biblical exegesis”—on which Luther’s (and arguably Heidegger’s) Destruktion of the Aristotelian tradition is grounded—“would be conceivable without Augustine…”145 Arendt’s turn to the existential origins of Augustine’s ideas could thus be seen as her own “dismantling return” to a standpoint from which she could justify her 145

See Arendt’s 1930 article “Augustine and Protestantism,” in Essays in Understanding, 24-25. On the connection between Protestantism and Destruktion, see Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 162-63. (Van Buren argues that “Long before Nietzsche, Luther had already killed the ontotheological God of western metaphysics” providing Heidegger with a model—and a term— for ‘Destruktion’. “[F]atefully for the young Heidegger, Luther’s Theses 19 and 20 translate the term ‘destroy’ in I Corinthians into the Latin word destruere, to pull down, to dismantle, to destroy, to deconstruct” (163, 162). Cf. Corinthians I: 19: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will make void the intelligence of the intelligent.”) Arendt would later refer to Augustine also as “the father of all Western philosophy of history.” Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 321.

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‘Germanness’—which she characterized as “my mother tongue, philosophy, and literature;” the origins of which can be traced back to Augustine’s discovery of the inner life—while preserving a critical distance.146 In lieu of an explicit attempt to come to terms philosophically with her Jewishness, I would suggest, Arendt sought to provide a philosophical interpretation of Augustine’s understanding of a human condition that closely resembled her own—in its deep religiosity; in its love of community and the ‘world’; and in its experience of insecurity in the world.147 It seems to me, then, that at least part of what Arendt meant by her “difficult problems” is this. First, Arendt attempted to recover possibilities of existence that are hardly conceivable beyond faith while at the same time avoiding the “eternally paradoxical problems” that result from it. That is, Arendt attempted to understand faith as “the most radical possibility of being human” (99; also 98)—and indeed as a condition for a “new social life”—while at the same time remaining a philosopher, and thus, in effect or in practice, defending an essentially atheistic form of existence.148 Arendt left it unsaid but the

146

See Arendt’s letter to Jaspers of Janary 1, 1933, in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 16.

147

On the problem of Arendt’s understanding of Judaism—and in particular of her own condition as a Jew—see R. J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, esp. 184-189. On the parallels between Augustine’s situation and the modern condition, see, e.g., “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 321. 148

Arendt did not explicitly link philosophy as a way of life to atheism, but the link is implicit in her attempt to interpret Augustine exclusively on the grounds of the pre-theological sphere in his thought. The difficulty lurking here—at least if one is serious about the alternative between belief and unbelief—is that one of the central premises of Heidegger’s thought, which he repeatedly stressed, was that the ‘most radical possibility of being human’ is precisely not faith but a philosophical existence that lets “factical life speak for itself on the basis of its very own factical

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“theological-political” predicament involved here is obvious: Why philosophy, if faith is “the most radical of all possibilities available to human existence” (98)? Or, in other words, what is to determine the choice between a resolve to obey the authority of Scripture (Bultmann’s authentic existence) or a resolve to embrace the possibility for existence “to stand exclusively on its own, to make do without belief, without religion and the like” (Heidegger’s authentic existence)?149 Granted that “most serious German thinkers” had held philosophy and theology together, this had become more and more difficult as the work of Cohen, Rosenzweig and Heidegger made clear. Arendt was affected by the same difficulties. Indeed, Arendt’s difficulties were arguably greater because in her context the only language available to hold philosophy and theology together was the philosophical ‘sublation’ of Christianity attempted by Heidegger.150 Thus she also confronted the “theological-political predicament” in the second sense we specified at the outset, that is, the problem that arises from the dependence of

possibilities.” Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle,” 367 (see also 393); Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, GA 18 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, [1924] 2002), 6; “Phenomenology and Theology,” 53. 149

Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 6.

150

According to Bultmann, Heidegger’s existential analytic was a “profane philosophical articulation of the New Testament’s understanding of life.” R. Bultmann, “Neues Testament und Mythologie. Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung,” in Beihefte zur Evangelischen Theologie (Munich, 1988), 81. Cited in Friederike Nüssel, “Rudolph Bultmann. Entmythologisierung und existentiale Interpretation des neutestamentlichen Kerygma,” in Neuner and Wenz (eds.), Theologen, 83. While Heidegger may have disputed this, Bultmann’s view was fairly common at the time. See, for instance, Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie und protestantische Theologie,” esp. 10.

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one’s spiritual existence on two antagonistic (German-Christian and Jewish) sources. In her dissertation this becomes manifest in her appropriation of a Heideggerian language from which she also seems to want to break free.151 Thus, on the one hand, Arendt referred to human “Dasein” in terms of “Eigentlichkeit” (authenticity) and “Uneigentlichkeit” (inauthenticity) (26); “Sorge” (“care”) (31); “Verfallensein” (“fallenness”) (42); “Geschichtlichkeit” (historicity) (114); of its being “in die Welt gesetzt” (placed in the world) (35) and “in die Existenz gerufen” (called into existence) (62),152 while on the other hand she pointed to the possibility of a “new social life” “freely chosen and replete with obligations” (102); to a “new meaning [given] to human togetherness” (108), and to “mutual love … replac[ing] mutual dependence” (108).

151

While Arendt only began to address the question of the Jewish condition explicitly in her work on Rahel Varnhagen, it was a central concern of hers well before that, as can be gathered from her correspondence with Jaspers. See Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, 11 (March 24, 1930); 17 (January 3, 1933: Jaspers: “I find it odd that you as a Jew want to set yourself apart from what is German.”); 18 f. (January 6, 1933). 152

These page numbers refer to the original (German) version, as cited by Ludger Lütkehaus in his introduction to Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff, 12, 17.

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Beyond the theological-political predicament?

One question remains to be answered: how successful was Arendt in addressing her difficulties? Was she able to replace a “conception of theological-political conflict” with an “alternative conception of non-theological politics”? In Arendt’s dissertation the answer remains inconclusive. There, as we have seen, Arendt attempted an inquiry into Christian possibilities of existence that was meant to be of purely philosophical interest, and yet one of its results was a conception of a “new social life” which is unthinkable beyond faith. Later in her life Arendt ceased to regard theology and philosophy as belonging together, and her “difficult problems” “solved themselves.” Henceforth she would insist that philosophical questioning of matters of faith only introduces doubt into a realm in which it has “no business whatsoever.”153 As for the place of faith and piety in political life, it was decided by the turn world history took in the 1930s, which proved that the “death of God” had become a fact of our world.154 Despite her use of religious language and her persistent concern with theological and metaphysical questions—most notably with the question of radical evil— Arendt would no longer refer to experiences that are explicitly (and exclusively)

153

Letter to Jaspers of July 13, 1953, in Ibid., 222. See also “Religion and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 368-390, esp. 369. 154

See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind , v. 1. Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 11 f., 212.

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religious as politically relevant.155 Instead she would attempt to provide existential concepts for the religious notions that she had used in her dissertation. Thus, for instance, human ‘createdness’ would become human ‘conditionedness’ (Bedingtheit), and the memory of our beginnings, by virtue of which “[t]he creator is in man,” would become the “decisive fact” of “natality” “determining man as a conscious, remembering being” (51-52).156 The result is the iconic Arendt we know best: the fiercely independent thinker who immediately began to distance herself from her teacher; the Pallas Athena—as she was known in her student years—who turned against Zeus; the conscious pariah whose Jewishness was a purely political fact; the modernist anomaly who was beyond the whole thrust of German philosophy and theology, both in its ‘synthetic’ attempts to make human and divine truth coincide and in its ‘destruktiv’ drive to reverse the “monstrous birth of the divine out of the human.” And yet, as I have shown in this chapter, situating Arendt’s early thought within its intellectual context reveals a rather different picture. Concretely, I have suggested that Arendt was deeply marked by the attempts of Heidegger and Bultmann to provide a philosophical account of certain Christian possibilities of

155

The last (and perhaps only) time Arendt did this seems to have been in 1930. See her critique of Karl Mannheim in “Philosophy and Sociology,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 39-40. There, Arendt defends “Christian brotherly love” as a way of “saying no to the world” without falling into either ideology—claiming that one could achieve absolute transcendence from the world—or utopia— wanting to realize God’s kingdom on earth (39). Christian brotherly love is a way of being removed from the world that “does not give rise to any will to change the world, but at the same time does not represent an escape from the world” (40). 156

As pointed out earlier, this is a statement used by Arendt in the 1960s to explain in more secular terms (or perhaps to revise) what she meant to say in 1928.

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existence. To understand what this implies—specially in ethical-political terms— however, one has to consider the relevant background we also discussed. Arendt’s attempt to hold philosophy and theology together was not meant to “absorb in human terms the ‘utopian contents of … religious tradition.’”157 Nor—as some of her detractors would have it—was it a form of nostalgia for a ‘lost world’ where human life is subject to “the measurements of religion or the law of nature.”158 The former explanation situates Arendt within a current of thought running from German idealism to critical theory that was foreign to her, while the latter is little more than a form of enlightenment blackmail which reduces Arendt’s thought— together with that of Heidegger and Strauss—to anti-modernist conservatism. Instead, the context of Arendt’s thought suggests that she was a far more complex and interesting thinker—and this, not in spite of, but because of the experiential background she shared with philosophers like Cohen, Rosenzweig and Strauss. This background sheds new light on Arendt’s project. First, it points to the ethical and religious questions that motivate it. Arendt was not drawn to Cohen as “the center of attraction for philosophically minded Jews” like Strauss and Rosenzweig, for one thing, because the Marburg she knew had long ceased to be the Mecca of neo-Kantianism. But it seems to me that what Derrida suggests with respect to Heidegger holds true for Arendt as well: “It is too often forgotten” that 157

J. V. Scott, “‘A Detour through Pietism’: Hannah Arendt on St. Augustine’s Philosophy of Freedom,” Polity 20, no. 3 (Spring, 1988): 394-425, 397. 158

Robert B. Pippin, “Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origins of Totalitarian Evil,” in The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 165-167.

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(Marburg) neo-Kantianism “largely determined the context in which, that is to say also against which” Heidegger’s thinking arose.159 Everything Cohen stood for would seem to be foreign, nay, anathema to Arendt: his ethics of the ‘pure will;’ his ‘religion of reason;’ his hyper-normativism—the law and jurisprudence as ‘the mathematics of the human sciences;’ his belief in the continuity of the tradition— of ‘Plato and the prophets;’ his faith in the realization of an ethical culture in history—his belief that anti-Semitism is a matter of mere prejudice; his political attention, above all, to the social question; his assimilationist persuasions; his patriotism. And yet, it could be shown that each of these aspects of Cohen’s work concerned Arendt deeply, to the point indeed that she dedicated her work to conceiving of alternatives. While it is true that Arendt almost never referred to Cohen in her work,160 her affinity to the dialectical theology that did respond immediately to the way of thinking he represented is evident. Like Bultmann, Barth and others, Arendt was not a moral—let alone a ‘normative’—thinker, not because of her alleged affinities to pre-Platonic or post-modern agonism, but because (human) morality—especially in the form of an ethics of the ‘pure will’—is essentially a rebellion against what conditions us or what is given to us.161 Thus, again like

159

Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” Pysche. Inventions of the Other, Volume II (Standford: Standford Univeristy Press, 2008), 244. 160

For an important exception, see Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 48-49, and 112 n. 3. 161

See specially, Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, 2 vols. edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 163, 165. See also 138. Cf. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt

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Bultmann, Arendt problematized a fundamental ethical and religious precept— neighborly love—from the standpoint of a more authentic understanding of its existential sources in Christian religious experience. More generally, she suggested that being true to the world requires destroying the gods of this world— the ideologies of History, or spirit, or nature or pseudo-Christian morality. Only then is human judgment free; and only then do we truly assume responsibility for the world.

and the Jewish Question, 188: “The sentence which epitomizes Arendt’s blindness/insight, which has deep resonances within the tradition of Judaism, is: ‘There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is.’” Bernstein refers specifically to a strand of Judaism “that is central and dominant in Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Lévinas when they remind us that ‘The Good Lord did not create religion; he created the world.” (This aspect of Arendt’s work will be addressed in detail in chapter five.)

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Concluding remarks

Searching for the origins of Arendt’s understanding of political philosophy, this chapter has encountered territory that is largely foreign to Arendtian studies. The most common way of reading Arendt today is as a political theorist who did not want to be read as a philosopher, let alone as a religious thinker. However, as someone who (as she put it) ‘came from German philosophy and literature’ and who ‘never doubted the existence of God’ she naturally confronted—more or less self-consciously—the ‘theological-political predicament’. Furthermore, as a thinker educated in the philosophy of existence of Jaspers and Heidegger, and given her situation as a Jew born and raised in Germany, Arendt’s philosophizing reflected—again, more or less self-consciously—deep tensions resulting from her attraction to Christian and Jewish ways of being in the world. Concretely speaking, the ‘theological-political predicament’ becomes manifest in the work of the young Arendt in her awareness—and apparent conviction—that faith may be sufficient for realizing our most ‘radical possibilities’. Or, indeed, faith may even be necessary for such a purpose. This does not mean subservience to dogmas or passive obedience. Rather, one of the peculiarities of early twentieth century German thought is that both theology and philosophy—notably through the collaboration of Bultmann and Heidegger— arrived at an understanding of human realization for which the disposition of the faithful seems to be essential, that is, ‘wakeful and anxious expectation’,

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‘openness to meaning’, the projection of possibilities. Whatever one’s take on the question whether Heidegger’s thought, as Bultmann understood it, was a ‘profane philosophical articulation of the New Testament’s understanding of life’, the fact is that it represents a very deep challenge to the classical view that it is possible to grasp something like ‘the right order of human life’ theoretically. For, as becomes particularly clear in the study of scripture, a text only speaks to us when we bring to it our own historically conditioned pre-understanding of, for instance, ‘love,’ ‘joy,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘body’, ‘faith’ and ‘revelation’, or in the case of philosophical texts of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘evil’, and ‘just’. Either, then, one would have to provide existential or ontological concepts for these terms—e.g., explain faith as rebirth, revelation as openness to meaning, good as ‘fit for’ and so on—or, more likely, before such a universal ontology is completed, one would have to act ‘resolutely’ to try out possibilities of existence—or in Bultmann’s words, one would have to accept that ‘the being of man is removed from his own control’ and that one must go ‘through decisions in which man does not choose something for himself, but chooses himself as his possibility’. How does this matter for political philosophy? In the case of Strauss, it seems to me, the blurring of the divide between two apparently very clear alternatives—reason or revelation, human or divine guidance—led him on a search for alternative pre-Christian (ancient Greek) and extra-Christian (Jewish and Islamic) understandings of the relation between reason and revelation. (This we shall see more clearly in the following chapter.) It also reinforced his

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awareness—perhaps unparalleled in twentieth century thought—of the difficulties of providing an immanent, rational answer to the question of the right way of life for a community. More generally and bearing now also on Arendt’s case, this chapter makes clear just how much the Destruktion or ‘deconstruction’ of the western philosophical and theological traditions was the work of theological (and anti-theological) discourses. The shared conviction held by probably the most influential theological and philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century— Bultmann (or Barth) and Heidegger—that a Christian ethics and a philosophical ethics are impossible is not the result of mere chance but of a long history of attempts at reconciling divine guidance with human guidance. The reaction to what appeared to some as ‘monstrous’ attempts to bring about the birth of the divine out of the human or to realize the kingdom of God on earth or to talk in a ‘revoltingly’ disproportionate (i.e., ‘merely’ ethical) way of divine matters led to a condition resembling nihilism in which the highest values (qua merely human values) have lost all value. This liberation or loss—depending on how one reads it—resembles the postmodern condition, and in that sense (to the extent that they were aware of this) I have proposed to read Arendt and Strauss as postpostmodern thinkers. What this means concretely I shall try to make clear in the following chapters. So far we can say the following regarding the case of Arendt. In her dissertation Arendt addressed a most elementary ethical precept and condition for social life—love thy neighbor as thyself—that had been rendered problematic by

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‘dialectical’ thought, both Jewish and Christian (e.g., Cohen, Buber, Barth, Bultmann). Arendt went back to the problem as it becomes manifest in the philosophy of Augustine. Among the various strands of Augustine’s thought— some leading to the Protestant conscience, Protestant individuality, Protestant biblical exegesis, and the idea of sovereignty—Arendt explored the possibility of a philosophy of existence as political existence. Drawing on the tradition of Judaism and responding to Heidegger’s quasi-Gnostic understanding of the forsakenness of man in the midst of the whole, Arendt began to develop a philosophy of the human situation centered on the world as the condition of life given to us, on our mutual interdependence and sense of a shared fate, and on a tension-ridden relation between individual and collective existence.

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CHAPTER FOUR Strauss’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1931-1936)

Leo Strauss made the importance of Heidegger for any possible ‘political philosophy’ clear enough. After the revolution effected by the thought of Heidegger, he claimed in the 1950s, “[t]here is no longer in existence a philosophic position, apart from neo-Thomism and Marxism crude or refined. All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.”1 This importance has not escaped the attention of some of the most perceptive students of his thought. Stanley Rosen has pointed out that “the central fact about the thought of Leo Strauss is his confrontation with Heidegger on the nature of philosophy,”2 while Steven Smith takes Heidegger to be “the unnamed presence to whom all of Strauss’s writings are directed.”3 Similarly, Heinrich Meier has suggested that Heidegger’s idea of a “destruction of the tradition” may have “allow[ed] [Strauss] for the first time to find his way to his own distinctive

1

Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in Thomas L. Pangle (ed.), The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29. 2

Stanley Rosen, “Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Philosophy, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, 2000), 542. 3

Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 256.

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undertaking.”4 Yet, despite this recognition, the most direct way to understand Heidegger’s influence on Strauss has not yet been explored. This is to carefully consider Strauss’s earliest writings on ‘political science’, which, as I shall try to show, elaborate some of the possibilities of thought opened up for him by Heidegger.5

4

Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 62. 5

It has long been known by students of Strauss that he closely followed the development of Heidegger’s thought, and in particular the early lectures on Aristotle analyzed in chapter one. See Stanley Rosen, “Phronesis Or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger,” in Riccardo Pozzo, The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 11: “…my own teacher Leo Strauss…spoke of a seminar on Aristotle’s Rhetoric that contained an ontology of the human passions.” See also Harvey C. Mansfield’s remarks concerning Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotle’s Physics in Peter Kielmansegg et als. (eds.), Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 170.

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Maimonides in Weimar and his Critique of Heidegger: Strauss’s “Cohen and Maimonides” (1931) Strauss’s first substantive proposal to respond to the crisis of his time, which he understood to be the crisis of ‘political science’ as the quest for a rational answer to the question of the right order of human life, dates back to a talk he gave in May of 1931 on “Cohen and Maimonides.”6 The talk revolves around Hermann Cohen’s 1908 “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis.”7 Cohen had died in 1918 and, to judge from Strauss’s appraisal of the Davos disputation, his thinking had been superseded by Heidegger’s more timely and originary thinking. Moses Maimonides had died in the thirteenth century, in 1204. Cohen was credited by one of the foremost authorities on the thought of Kant (Ernst Cassirer) for having essentially rescued Kantian philosophy and thus modern (critical, post-metaphysical) rationalism from the growing dominance of the positive sciences. Maimonides was the greatest authority of Jewish rabbinic thought. Kant, to say the least, did not lend great weight to any law that was not the result of unassisted human reasoning. Maimonides, by contrast, had 6

In GS2, 393-437. See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of May 7, 1931 where he gives a report of the speech to his friend (in GS3, 385). At the same time or soon thereafter Strauss wrote part IV of Philosophie und Gesetz which should therefore be read together with “Cohen und Maimuni.” (Strauss finished writing part IV of Philosophie und Gesetz in July 1931.) See Heinrich Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Svetozar Minkov (ed.), Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 363, as well as Philosophie und Gesetz, GS2, 87, n. 1. 7

Hermann Cohen, “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis,” in Bruno Strauss (ed.), Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn, [1908], 1924), 221-289. For an English translation see Almut Sh. Bruckstein (ed. and trans.), Ethics of Maimonides. Hermann Cohen (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

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apparently so little to object to the 613 commandments of the Torah that he sought to provide a rationale for each one of them.8 What could Cohen and Maimonides have to say to Heidegger as the thinker who for Strauss dominated the epoch? How could Strauss situate himself between the extremes represented by these thinkers to develop one of the strongest currents of contemporary political philosophy? The key lies in the return to the ancients that Strauss begins to delineate in this talk. What unites Maimonides, Cohen, Heidegger, and Strauss is the critique of the Aristotelian tradition that regards metaphysics, understood as knowledge of the suprasensous or of the highest intelligibles, as the core of philosophy. Instead, for all in different ways it is ethics, broadly understood as the “philosophy of human affairs”9 that is its core. We shall first consider what this means for Maimonides, Cohen and Heidegger, in order then to address the points of contention between them through whose analysis Strauss establishes his own position.

Ethics as first philosophy in Maimonides… Cohen’s thesis in his “Characteristics of the Ethics of Maimonides” is that, contrary to what most authorities suggest, Maimonides “was in deeper harmony

8

Ibid., 238/46. (Henceforth the second number refers to the English translation.)

9

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1181 b 15 (“ἡ περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπεια φιλοσοφία”).

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with Plato than with Aristotle.”10 This means that for him ethics and politics are—in a way we shall specify—pre-eminent over metaphysics or theology. Now, according to the dominant view, this could hardly be the case since Maimonides not only saw little use in even reading Plato,11 but he followed Aristotle in affirming that theory understood as the contemplation of the divine is the highest human activity.12 Yet, according to Cohen, there remains an essential difference between Maimonides and his master Aristotle: “With due respect to the God of Aristotle, he is not the God of Israel” (329/50). The fact that Maimonides has typically been read as an Aristotelian but is nevertheless more of a Platonist in Cohen’s view can be explained as follows. Even though for Aristotle practical wisdom or phronesis would seem to be the highest form of knowledge since on it depends the possibility of ‘seeing’ the good in a particular moment and thus of accomplishing those actions that lead to the

10

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 396. Bruckstein refers to the following interpreters holding the Aristotelian reading: Harry A. Wolffson, Isaac Husik, Julius Guttmann, Shlomo Pines, Marvin Fox, and Collette Sirat. Bruckstein, Ethics of Maimonides. Hermann Cohen, 24. Note that Strauss himself in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion had “presented Maimonides as a classic Aristotelian, the Jewish equivalent of Thomas Aquinas.” David Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (NY: SUNY Press), 109. 11

Maimonides saw Aristotle as representing “the extreme of human intellect” whose writings “suffice” such that “we need not occupy [our attention] with the writings of earlier philosophers.” Rémi Brague, The Law of God. The Philosophical History of an Idea (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 114 f. 12

Cohen, “Characteristik der Ethik Maimunis,” 241 (metaphysics for Maimonides too is the “Godly science” (göttliche Wissenschaft) and God is the object of science). Furthermore, “Maminonides remains beholden to his teacher for one essential lesson: despite all that profoundly separates them, Aristotle serves him as master and model in his enthusiasm for pure theory, scientific cognition for its own sake, which is the ultimate and absolute purpose of human existence” (243) (and, again, the highest cognition is of God). Hereafter I cite Cohen in parentheses in the main text.

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good life and to eudaimonia, he nevertheless regards theory as the highest human possibility leading to the highest form of wisdom because, essentially, the wisdom of right action is merely human, while “[t]here are other things whose nature is much more divine than man’s.”13 Maimonides does not teach otherwise: “Aristotle serves him as master and model in his enthusiasm for pure theory, scientific cognition for its own sake, which is the ultimate and absolute purpose of human existence” (243/61). And again the highest cognition for Maimonides is knowledge of God. But, the question is: how if ‘the God of Israel’, as Maimonides insists, is the God that cannot be known? (245/67-68) “How could Maimonides deny the cognition of divine attributes on the one hand, and on the other hand proclaim knowledge of God as the main principle of his theology and his ethics?” (Ibid.) The answer is: exactly in the same way that Plato denied the cognition of the Good and still made its knowledge the ultimate goal and foundation of all science, theoretical or practical. According to Cohen, then, for Maimonides “ethics constitutes the core and effective center of his metaphysics” (231/23); “the meaning and purpose of wisdom [is] ethics” (231/24). Yet to understand what this means exactly, we must ask: What kind of ethics or what kind of rational answer to the question of the good life can this be if the end of wisdom is still knowledge of the divine and if

13

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1141a20ff.: “For it would be strange to regard politics or practical wisdom as the highest kind of knowledge, when in fact man is not the best thing in the universe.”

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the divine in Judaism is the divine of the revealed Law par excellence?14 The answer hinges on the nature of ‘the God of Israel’, whose attributes, Maimonides insists, cannot be known: “there are no other divine attributes than those posited by revelation,” and thus “[i]t is philosophy’s impotence that is exposed here” (my emphasis; 246/68). And yet, says Cohen, “Let us recall … how even Plato formulates his idea of the Good in seemingly negative terms as non-foundation” (250/86-87). Just as Plato’s aim was not to show that the Good could not be known, but rather quite the opposite, that we should strain every nerve in us to know the Good and live according to it, so Maimonides “is not … ultimately concerned … with the unknowability of God’s essence. Rather, by multiplying negations, Maimonides promotes the true, seminal, (ethical) cognition of God” (254/98).

…Cohen For Cohen, as Strauss notes, ethics as the “doctrine on man [Lehre vom Menschen]” is “the center of philosophy.”15 Now, according to Cohen it is Socrates who first of all mortals gave a foundation to ethics “in that he declared

14

“This problem is aggravated by the nature of Jewish tradition, which, much more than Christianity or Islam, is dominated and controlled by laws of Scripture, and even more laws of oral transmission, regulating in detail the ethical conduct of all individual and social activity” (232/22). 15

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 394. Ethics “requires logic for its preparation as well as aesthetics as its complement [zu ihrer Ergänzung], thus it is not the whole of philosophy; but it is the central philosophical discipline” (Ibid.).

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virtue to be knowledge” (221/1). “[W]ith the religious zeal of a prophet, Socrates made all Hellenic pursuits of nature and natural sciences yield to the benefit of the human soul. Thus Socrates considered ethics not only to be a science, but to be the science par excellence. He proclaimed ethics to be the core and focus of human cognition” (221/1-2). Still, Socrates’ founding deed was but a preparation, a “program” whose “sense and value” had first to be illuminated by the scientific work of Plato: “Socrates was the [herald] Elijah; Plato is the Messiah” (221/2). Only within Plato’s epistemological context, Cohen argues, could ethics “flourish and advance as a science” (222/3). Specifically, Socrates had conceived of the Good as a concept, but Plato elevated it to the rank of an idea, the difference being that while “[t]he concept can do no more than indicate—it is an indication of what is relevant,” (222/4) an idea demands accountability (223/5). In the idea, says Cohen, Plato discovered the scientific hypothesis: “the idea constitutes the necessary premise, or grounding, for every scientific investigation. It contains the rationale, the basis and foundation—the account that cognition renders of itself” (224/8). The central problem becomes: how does the Good account for itself? Plato’s solution was to convert the hypothesis, in the case of the Good, “into a matter of non-hypothesis (anupotheton), or non-foundation” (225/10).16 Thus “the idea of the Good may be defined as that hypothesis which constitutes the telos or

16

Cf. Plato, Republic, 507b, 510b.

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end of reason, and thus plainly terminates the report of its accountability”:17 “Whereas all other scientific hypotheses are predicated upon prior hypothetical propositions, the hypothesis of the Good constitutes its own ultimate ground, closing the cycle of reason. The non-foundation must be considered the ultimate, rock-bottom ground of all grounding. … The Good constitutes the foundation of the world” (226/11-12).18

…and Heidegger Heidegger is perhaps best known as the philosopher who recovered the question of Being to refound ontology on the basis of an ‘existential analytic.’ Thus in Being and Time we read that philosophy is “universal phenomenological ontology, taking its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein…”19 Yet, specially in his early writings, he also made it clear that “ontology is philosophically productive and scientifically relevant only insofar as it opens up new possibilities

17

“The idea of the Good must remain a hypothesis. Ethics does not evolve from political consitutions, nor from the impulse of human nature, as manifested in the growth of trees, or the beasts’ pursuit of enjoyment. The Good is a prophecy of wisdom; not as proclaimed by Plato in the dithyrambic style at the conclusion of his Philebus, but as the grounding of ethical cognition.” That the Good is hypothesis means that it is “a problem that demands ever-innovative rejuventation, new questions posed unceasingly, and new challenges yielded with every new solution.” It is an infinite task (225-26/10). 18

“Ethics is to be removed from any relativism, even from that which is part and parcel of the methodology of all scientific investigation. Having arrived at the idea of the Good, I am no longer justified in inquiring why and wherefore there ought to be ethics in the world, or whether such an ethical world might exist…” (226/11-12). 19

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 38.

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for life [Lebensausbildung].”20 The problem, then, of western philosophy is that it began to understand itself as ‘meta-physics’ conceived as “knowledge of the suprasensous” or of “those beings that lie behind and above other beings,”21 thus becoming disconnected from life, from natality and mortality.22 Philosophy ceased to be human theoria and became ‘divine’ in trying to emulate the noesis noesos of the God of Aristotle.23 Against these tendencies, Heidegger argued that, correctly understood, philosophy always begins from the self-illumination of life in its natality and mortality, and thus not only from the order of the sensible but from altogether practical deliberations concerning different (ethical) possibilities of human comportment. But beyond this, ontology or the disclosure of beings in their being not only begins from but depends on a particular (practical-‘ethical’) disposition,24 namely, on ‘living-in-truth’, meaning both “giving oneself as one is and as one thinks” and removing “the world from concealedness and

20

Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1922] 2005), 179 (my emphasis). 21

Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39, 40, 43. 22

Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, 270. 23

See Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992, 386. 24

See, e.g., Heidegger, Plato's Sophist (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, [1924/25] 1997),17; Sein und Zeit, 222; “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. Wiliam McNeill, in Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 103.

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coveredness.”25 In this regard, it can be said that, insofar as ethics for Heidegger is “a knowing concerning the Being of man in his authenticity,”26 the center of philosophy is ethics. Indeed, as Heidegger insisted, “[t]he basic question of philosophy, the question of Being, is in itself, correctly understood, the question of man … Yet the important thing is to raise the question of man in view of the problem of Being.”27

25

Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 264. Plato’s Sophist, 12. 26

Ibid., 68-69.

27

Martin Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, GA 26 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1928] 1990), 20-21. This is not to deny that Heidegger failed to address virtually every traditional ethical question concerning the right and the good, the just and unjust, or the noble and the base. When referring to the ‘proper’ human ethos or comportment, he also neglected those dispositions (or ‘virtues’) that are essentially political (e.g., generosity or justice) and instead focused on ones that are trans-political (e.g., wisdom and prudence (or phronesis)). (See, especially, Plato’s Sophist as well as Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie.) As Seyla Benhabib puts it, in the existential analytic “there are no categories … for thinking of actions demonstrating generosity or cupidity, friendship or treachery, love or hostility.” The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), 105. In my view, however, this clearly does not mean that Heidegger was not a thinker primarily concerned with the being of man or with the humanity of the human. It seems to me that the reason why Heidegger was reluctant to write about ‘ethics’ was similar to the classical philosophers’ (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) reluctance to speak of ‘practical philosophy’, ‘political philosophy’ and indeed ‘ethics’ as technical terms—namely, knowledge of the being of man and of his proper ‘work’ (ergon) is unavailable to us, especially in light of the fact that, as Aristotle put it, there is something divine—and hence supra-natural—in man (Nic. Ethics, 1177b30 sqq.). In that sense it is ethics that is the highest and the only properly metaphysical (i.e., supra-natural) form of knowledge. Cf. Claudia Baracchi, Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Heidegger’s classical statement on the problem of ethics in his “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, revised and expanded ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), esp. 233-34: “Humanism is opposed [in Being and Time] because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough;” 245: “…the essence of man consist in his being more than merely human.” It hardly needs to be added that Heidegger’s own comportment was anything but ‘divine’, which only deepens the problem of ethics.

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Strauss: Socratic political philosophy as first philosophy? Strauss develops his own position through a critical engagement with Cohen’s thesis. Heidegger is nowhere mentioned in the talk but his presence is unmistakable. The point of contention is Aristotle. Aristotelianism, says Strauss, is on the rise again and just like it diverted—at least in its historical impact—SocraticPlatonic philosophizing from the ethical and political things towards metaphysics, so contemporary Aristotelianism is threatening Cohen’s ethical-political philosophizing.28 To explain what this means three questions need to be addressed: first, what exactly is Socratic-Platonic philosophizing for Strauss? Second, how does contemporary Aristotelianism threaten such philosophizing? Third, what is to be done to respond to this?

1. Socratic-Platonic philosophizing as true philosophizing In “Cohen und Maimuni” Strauss provides his first explanation of the meaning of Socratic philosophizing. “Socratic philosophizing means: questioning” (411). This is “not a questioning concerning the things in Hades, below the earth and in the skies; but that questioning alone that is directed to what is most worthy of being questioned, that which is a need for life [lebensnotwendig], to the question:

28

“Die von Cohen angeblich überwundene Vergangenheit, der Aristotelismus, hat sich aufs neue erhoben und droht Cohen’s Lebenswerk in der Form, die er ihm gegeben hat, ernstlich in Frage zu stellen.” Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 410.

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How should one live, to the question of the right life” (411-412). “Raising the question of the right life—that alone is the right life.” “Raising the question of the Good—that alone is Socratic philosophizing” (412). This is always a questioning in relation to others. “He [Socrates] always asks together with others, not because he wants to convince others—only someone who teaches can want that—but because he is after mutual understanding and harmony. He is after mutual understanding and harmony, because only from mutual understanding and harmony … can the state be truthful. The truthful state—that is truthful living together; and human life is essentially living together; hence the right life: right living together, true State; hence all virtues of the individual are only possible and understandable from the State. So is Socrates’ sought knowledge a common understanding concerning the good, that as human good is a common good. … Socrates’ questioning is essentially political” (412). Yet it is one thing to say that all human thought arises from our political condition and is oriented to some good. Quite another thing is to suggest that ‘politics’ and ‘the Good’ are essential to true human thought; that they are not only its conditio sine qua non but its conditio per quam. Strauss makes the latter, much stronger, claim. In this he follows Cohen in affirming that there are oppositions in philosophy that pervade its entire history, or, more exactly, that human thought incurs in forms of forgetfulness or of repression of fundamental realities or fundamental experiences. Specifically, human thought is either

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oriented towards the question of the Good or it assumes that the Good is not a question or that we already know what it is. There is in that sense an opposition between Socratic-Platonic philosophizing, which Strauss would characterize as true philosophizing as it is guided by the ethical-political question of the Good, and those forms of philosophizing that take this question for answered which Strauss would characterize as forms of sophistry or of falsely ‘political’ philosophizing. Strauss’s justification for this division itself, however, is not based on ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ or ‘political’ preference (for indeed, that would make it sophistical in his understanding). Rather, the criterion is sound philosophizing which must be ‘political’ in order to have a secure foundation. What does this mean? It means, first of all, that “human life as such is living together and therefore political life. Hence all human doing and going about and thinking are in themselves political” (413). Now, human life may be political “without responsibility or in responsibility … without responsibility—that means without raising the question of the Good, that is, assuming that one knows what the Good is. Knowing what the Good is, I can teach it, teach it openly; I can also therefore write. If, however, there is no knowledge of the Good which I can posses, then I cannot teach, I cannot teach openly, I cannot write. Because Socrates knows that he knows nothing, that all understanding can only be agreement, he does not address the multitude, but only individuals; his conversation with others is dialogue” (413).

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That philosophy is political in this sense also means, secondly, that the idea of enlightenment as such, as it originates in Socrates and Plato (and not with the Sophist movement as is often supposed) is ethical-political: “The question that enlightenment poses to what is given: Why is this actually this way? Means: is it so as it is good? The enlightened critique is essentially practical, ethical” (402). Thirdly, human enlightenment is practical-ethical not because philosophy is necessarily a humanism but because to understand any philosophical opposition—even on questions of metaphysics—one must inquire into human (political) opinions in order, first of all, to clear the way (from erroneous opinions) to ‘the things themselves’.29 One begins from politics or the political because “politics is that field where philosophical, moral, internal [innerliche] oppositions become explicit, where what is at stake with respect to these oppositions is the whole, where what is at stake in them becomes revealed” (my emphasis; 406). Fourth, the turn to opinions or to pre-philosophic experience already means that enlightenment is not necessarily secular. Thus, together with Cohen, Strauss will argue that philosophy may be able to learn from the teachings of Judaism. And yet, that this possibility is not self-evident becomes clear “when one considers that there used to be and still are philosophers—the best known is Spinoza—that were of the opinion that it is only to the detriment of philosophy when it is put in any relation with revelation, and that there used to be and may 29

Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 21.

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still be Jews … that were of the opinion that Judaism would be destroyed by philosophizing” (my emphases; 398).30 Finally, there is a fifth sense in which true philosophy is for Strauss political philosophy: only thinking that is ethically-politically committed reveals to us the moments of (ethical-political) truth in the history of thought. “Cohen, himself guided by an ethical-contemporary [aktuell-ethisch] interest, or more pointedly: by a political interest, unlocks for us the access to the ethicalcontemporary, political meaning of the philosophy of RMbM [Maimonides]” (394). In other words, for Strauss it is a certain passion [Leidenschaft] of Cohen’s that makes of him a political philosopher (see 429; also 404, 407) and that accounts for the acuity of his vision. Theoretical vision, that is, would seem to require a certain comportment or a certain (truthful) disposition.31 30

Cf. also the “Introduction” to Philosophy and Law, 26 (=GS2, 14) (“…the radical Enlightenment still lives today, and it is in a certain way, viz. as regards its last and furthest consequences, far more radical today than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and orthodoxy too still lives today.”) 31

Yet it is here, on the question of the relation between theory and praxis, that Strauss begins to sharply disagree with Cohen. For in the extreme the passion of the political philosopher borders on messianism, and ‘truthful disposition’ becomes simply a certain will. Thus just as Cohen’s vision comes from his passion, so his deeply erroneous views—most notably of Aristotle—are also passionately wrong (see 407). Aristotle, says Cohen, misunderstood Plato because “his heart was not filled” with devotion for the Good. Aristotle was led by “enmity” towards the Good. But, says Strauss, what is someone who hates the Good as such but a devil? (407) Cohen demonizes Aristotle. He has no tolerance for him. Such is also his political judgment which guided by passion becomes more of a political theology. Strauss draws our attention to Cohen’s views on tolerance in his Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism: “There cannot be another God [but the God of Monotheism]…Monotheism cannot permit any tolerance of polytheism. Idolatry has to be destroyed absolutely…One has not acquired a true understanding of monotheism, which unites theory and practice, if one has not understood the destruction of idolatry as a relentless necessity, if one believes one is able to detect even a trace of intolerance, of fanaticism and misanthropy in this holy zeal against the false gods. These suspicions merely disclose that one’s heart is not completely filled with the unique God.” “What are we to say to this,” responds Strauss, “who really cannot say of ourselves that our heart is filled from the one God or from the idea of the Good?” (408) Thus Strauss takes issue with Cohen’s erroneous reading of Aristotle and also of

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2. Contemporary Aristotelianism as a threat to political philosophy As mentioned earlier, Strauss argues that the form of political philosophizing represented by Cohen is under threat due to a rebirth of Aristotelianism. The new Aristotelianism, says Strauss, is a consequence of the hegemony of phenomenology: “As phenomenology has become an all-determining power— whoever is not acquainted with the school-concept of phenomenology may be reminded that Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of a ‘new thinking’ is the worldconcept of this philosophy—so this means a decisive step towards the rehabilitation of Aristotelianism.”32 Maimonides’ himself as it is guided by passion bordering on intolerance. See H. Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1972), 52. 32

“Wenn die Phänomenologie inzwischen eine alle bestimmende Macht geworden ist—wer mit dem Shulbegriff der Phänomenologie nicht vertraut ist, sei daran erinnert, dass Franz Rosenzweigs Begriff des neuen Denkens der Weltbegriff dieser Philosophie ist—, so bedeutet das einen entscheidenen Schritt zur Wiederherstellung des Aristotelismus” (410). Two years earlier (in 1929) Rosenzweig had referred to Heidegger as “the Husserl disciple and Aristotelian scholastic” whose thought was an expression of his own (Rosenzweig’s) “new thinking.” See Franz Rosenzweig, “Transposed Fronts,” in Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig. Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 146-152. Strauss refers explicitly to Heidegger’s thought as “another form of the new thinking” in his “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 147. On the distinction between ‘Weltbegriff’ and ‘Schulbegriff’, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A838f.: “Until now, however, the concept of philosophy has been only a scholastic concept [Schulbegriff], namely that of a system of cognition that is sought only as a science without having as its end anything more than the systematic unity of this knowledge…But there is also a cosmopolitan concept [Weltbegriff]…that has always grounded this term, especially when it is…personified and represented as an archetype in the ideal of the philosopher. From this point of view philosophy is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason…” See also CPR, BXXXI f.: critique is essentially a limitation of the “the monopoly of schools” in “the interest of human beings.” For studies of the relation between Rosenzweig and Heidegger see Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Sep., 1942): 53-77, and more recently: Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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Strauss, at least to begin with, understands Aristotelianism together with Cohen as the abandonment of Socratic philosophizing for the pre-Socratic ideal of life in divine theoria. Aristotle “restores the fundamental possibility of the Greeks that had been questioned by Socrates: life in pure contemplation and understanding, in theory (theoria).” Specifically, “if Socratic philosophizing is questioning after the Good of human life, after the true state, so is Aristotelian philosophizing: pure contemplation of beings and understanding of Being. And if Socratic philosophizing is in itself political, so politics for Aristotle becomes secondary” (414).

3. How to respond to neo-Aristotelianism? That Strauss is almost certainly referring to Heidegger as the chief phenomenologist behind the Aristotelian revival will become clear as we consider his response to the whole problem.33 Strauss begins by noting that, granted that Aristotelianism is a threat against which Socratic-Platonic political philosophizing must reassert itself, it is the same Aristotelianism that can make possible such a response: “Aristotelianism and generally non-idealized and non-modernized Greek philosophy is not only a threat and therefore of present interest. Above all – the modern presuppositions that were binding for Cohen … may appear to us one day as decayed and brittle; we would then perhaps be glad, if non-idealized, non33

Consider also in this regard Strauss’s claim that Cohen sensed or had a correct intuition concerning “the deep connection of phenomenology with Aristotle” (“…dass Cohen den tiefen Zusammenhang der Phänomenologie mit Aristoteles, dem Lehrer der Scholastik, ahnte.” “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 410.)

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modernized Greek philosophy could show us a way out of the modern anarchy” (410). Aristotelianism is then, after all, not necessarily a threat. Against what Cohen believes and what is commonly believed, Aristotle does not abandon the Socratic-Platonic ‘program’. In fact the opposite is the case. Cohen’s thesis that Aristotle did not understand Plato is paradoxical in light of the fact that Aristotle spent twenty years in the Academy with Plato as his master. Above all, “the latest research has shown the deep connection between Plato and Aristotle; at the border of this research we confront the thesis: that Aristotle’s work completed the work of Plato” (410). By the latest research, Strauss probably meant that of Gadamer who in turn incorporated in his studies completed in the late 1920s the findings of classical philologists and philosophers such as Paul Friedländer and Julius Stenzel.34 Gadamer himself was responding to Heidegger, and specifically to that

34

See Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, xxxi f. Other members of what François Renaud refers to as the ‘Marburg school’ of Platonic studies (Krüger , Klein, Gadamer) held the same view concerning the relation between Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, Strauss could also have meant Krüger’s research. See Strauss’s letter of May 7, 1931, in GS3, 385 where Strauss refers to “how much I have profited from your lecture on Plato” (referring to a talk Krüger had delivered two days before). On October 13, 1934 Strauss writes to Klein that “Gadamer is surely the soundest [ordentlichste] of the German Plato scholars…” He points to the fact, however, that he only knows his “very thorough and very good reviews” (GS23, 528). (Gadamer’s reviews are collected in volume 5 of his complete works.) That Aristotle completed the ‘Socratic program’ was also one of the central theses of the work of Jacob Klein. See, e.g., J. Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in R. Williamson and E. Zuckermann (eds.), The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein (Annapolis, Md: St. John’s College Press, 1985). Klein reads Socrates as an ontologist, and he takes his fundamental premise to be that “the reasons for things being as they are, and the truth about those things, are to be found in the spoken—or, for that matter, silent—words and the nonta they embody.” He argues that “[i]t is safe to say, I think, that in one respect at least, Aristotelian philosophy consists in the execution of that Socratic program. It is in speech, in searching for and finding adequate words, that the logos of things, the logos of nature (phusis) becomes audible and capable of being understood” (179). For an account of the relations between Klein and Gadamer

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Heidegger that in Being and Time had claimed that the Socratic-Platonic dialectic was a “philosophical embarrassment” thankfully overcome by Aristotle.35 Against this view, Gadamer argued that Aristotle’s project is best understood as the execution of precisely the ‘program’ that begins from the Socratic-Platonic dialectic, and in particular from Socrates’ ‘flight into the logoi’ described in the Phaedo.36 It seems, then, that by the new Aristotelianism Strauss (following Gadamer) meant that pretension to scientificity that regards the movement from Socratic dialogue to Platonic dialectic to Aristotelian episteme as progress

and the “Marburg school” of Platonic thought in general see François Renaud, Die resokratisierung Platons: Die platonische Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1999). For a recent study of the relation between the philosophies of Socrates and Aristotle see Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). 35

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 25. Heidegger’s critique of dialectic dates back at least to the 1924/25 course on Plato’s Sophist. See Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 59, 113, esp. 137 (“…the only meaning and the only intention of dialectic is to prepare and to develop a genuine original intuition, passing through what is merely said”), 138 (dialectic as “a preliminary stage of theorein”); 148; 434: “Aristotle was the first to be able to understand dialectic positively and to appropriate it. Superseding it in a properly disclosive original ontology”). See Michael Allen Gillespie, “Martin Heidegger’s Aristotelian National Socialism,” Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 2000): 140166, 149 (“In Heidegger’s view…there is no … dialectical path because there is an unbridgeable ontological difference between Being and beings”). Francisco Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006), 426-442. (Gonzales emphasizes precisely Gadamer’s critique of Heidegger’s reliance on “phenomenological intuition” for the discovery of truth (see esp., 436 f.). The “opposition between dialectic and ‘phenomenology’ persists in Heidegger’s thought to the very end” (431).) See also Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), esp. 72 f. 36

See Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 70-83; The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 26: “It is not in the least excessive to see in Aristotle’s textbooks the execution of just this project, [namely “the program projected in the Phaedo’s flight into the logoi”] particularly in his Physics and his Politics, which contains his ethics.”

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towards a ‘higher’ and ‘purer’ understanding of Being,37 thus missing or neglecting the centrality of dialogue or of the examination of human opinions (logoi) not only for truthful living together but for the very possibility of securing access to ‘the things themselves’.38 More particularly, what is thereby neglected is the ‘idea’ of the Good or of excellence (arete) that always already guides our actions and thoughts and which is always a shared, public or political conception.39 Still, at least so far (i.e., in 1931), Strauss does not suggest how SocraticPlatonic political philosophizing could begin to address the crisis of his time. Moreover, the problem remains for Strauss that Aristotelianism has become a threat to the type of political philosophizing represented by Cohen, and again, at least on this occasion, it is with Cohen and Maimonides (and not with Gadamer,

37

See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 26.

38

See Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 21. Compare, by contrast, Walter Brogan, “Heidegger’s Aristotelian Reading of Plato: The Discovery of the Philosopher,” Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995), 274-75: Aristotle’s greatness, according to Heidegger, “is that he is able to take up in a positive manner the implicit direction of Plato’s thought, towards a logos that is not dialogos” (my emphasis). See, e.g., Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 59, 113. 39

Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 53: “All Dasein lives continually in an understanding of arete. What the good citizen must be and how he must act are prescribed for everyone in an explication that dominates the entire public understanding of Dasein: in what is called ‘morals’. So the concept of arete is a ‘public’ concept.” “Thus Protagoras describes it as sheer madness for someone to assert that he is not just.” (See Plato, Protagoras, 323b.) Of this foundational concept of Socratic-Platonic philosophy (the Good) Heidegger, especially in the late 1920s, argued that it had nothing to do with ethical comportment or with an ethical pre-understanding of things, but was rather proof that the Greeks understood being within the paradigm of fabrication (“the good” being essentially the demiourgos, the “producer pure and simple”). Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1927] 1982), 286: “ancient philosophy interprets being in the horizon of production”; “the idea agathou is nothing but the demiourgos, the producer pure an simple.”

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say) that Strauss ultimately sides. This points to the fact that the quarrel with Heidegger and Aristotelianism here runs deeper. As noted earlier, Strauss argued with Cohen that philosophy may be able to learn from the teachings of Judaism against those philosophers who are “of the opinion that it is only to the detriment of philosophy when it is put in any relation with revelation.”40 As we have seen, virtually every writing of Strauss post-dating the Davos encounter so far involves an implicit dialogue with Heidegger. This reference seems to be no exception. In a lecture delivered twice in 1927 and 1928 with the title “Phenomenology and Theology” Heidegger had argued that faith (in divine revelation) is “so absolutely the mortal enemy [of philosophy] that philosophy does not even begin to want in any way to do battle with it.”41 Whether Strauss knew about the lecture or not, it expresses in a drastic form what Heidegger had been arguing at least since the time Strauss knew him, viz., that philosophy must in principle be atheistic.42 The lecture starts from the premise of Being and Time 40

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” in GS2, 398 (my emphases).

41

Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, 53. Cf. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 85. Meier situates Heidegger’s statement within the context of the larger debate at the time between the proponents of a life guided by faith (e.g., Bultmann or Friedrich Gogarten) and the defenders of the philosophical life (especially Heidegger and, in a different way, Strauss). 42

For Heidegger’s affirmations of philosophical atheism see, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät, ed. Günther Neumann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 28; Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 6; Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 26. Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987), 5. Cf. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 237

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that philosophy is “universal phenomenological ontology” and as such the master science that clarifies the regional ontologies of every other positive science, including theology. Thus, both philosophy and theology are sciences, only of a different type and rank. As a positive science, “theology is closer to chemistry and mathematics than to philosophy.”43 This is because its positum does not arise from Dasein “or spontaneously through Dasein [as is the case for philosophy], but rather from that which is revealed in and with this way of existence [namely, faith], from that which is believed.”44 Between the way of existence of philosophy and the way of existence of faith there is therefore no possible mediation, but only a leap. “The existentiell opposition between faithfulness and the free

(“Heidegger wishes to expel fom philosophy the last relics of Christian theology”). Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr., ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1947] 1969), 259, n. 41 (“In our times Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy”). For Emmanuel Lévinas too, “Heidegger broke with theology ‘with a radicalism without precedent in the history of philosophy’.” E. Lévinas, Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 37, no. 5 (OctoberDecember 1937): 194-95. Cited in Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other. Emmanuel Lévinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 10-11. Cf. especially, Sein und Zeit, section 44C: “The assertion of ‘eternal truths’ and the confusion of the phenomenally grounded ‘ideality’ of Dasein with an idealized absolute subject belong to those residues of Christian theology in philosophical problems which have not yet been radically extruded.” Apparently the same point is made in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 206. Cf., however, his “Letter on Humanism,” 253: “it is not only rash but also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of man from the relation of his essence to the truth of Being is atheism.” 43

Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” 41. (Having understood philosophy and theology as “belonging together” in her youth, Arendt ended up holding Heidegger’s view. See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, edited by L. Kohler and H. Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 221-222.) For Heidegger’s stance on the relation between philosophy and theology in his later work, see, e.g., M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, 5: “…there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself. For the same reason there is no pagan philosophy…”; see also 166. 44

Ibid., 43-44.

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appropriation of one’s whole Dasein [in philosophy] is not first brought about by the sciences of theology and philosophy but is prior to them.”45 Most noteworthy in this lecture is the fact that philosophy is no longer the self-illumination of life in its everyday going about the world—as Heidegger had stressed in the early 1920s—but a science, even the master science. Consequently, the question that links philosophy as Socratically conceived with theology—the question of the right life for man—is completely missed. (Hence the strange claim that theology is closer to mathematics and chemistry than to philosophy.) Here it must be stressed that this is not only a consequence of the pretension to turn philosophy into fundamental ontology but of that understanding of theology— common to Heidegger and Dialectical Theology—which, much like any other positive science, is seen as dealing with given ‘facts’ (“The crucifixion … and all that belongs to it” (44)) which however, unlike any positive science, can only be believed and never rationally discussed, no matter how powerfully they shape our understanding of the right life for man.46 If, then, against Heidegger, Strauss argues that it is not to the detriment of philosophy when it is put in relation with revelation, what kind of relation does he envisage?

45

Ibid., 53.

46

See Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 26 (=GS2, 14) (on “the newer dogma that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ each has in view the ‘truth’ belonging to it” which accounts for the fact that “the radical Enlightenment still lives today,…and orthodoxy too still lives today.”) This statement comes close to reproducing Heidegger’s position in “Phenomenology and Theology” and may be an indication that Strauss did know of the lecture.

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Beyond Heidegger and Cohen: From ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ to ‘Mecca’ In 1929 or 1930 Strauss had come across a passage of Avicenna (A.D. 980-1037) which treats the study of prophetic revelation and the divine Law as an integral part of Platonic political philosophy, and specifically of Plato’s Laws.47 This discovery marked a revolution in Strauss’s thought as it pointed to a radically

47

See Avicenna, “On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences,” in Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (eds.), Medieval Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 95-98. Following Aristotle, Avicenna divides the sciences into “theoretical” and “practical.” Through the third part of practical science “one knows the kinds of political regimes, rulerships, and associations, both virtuous and bad … Of this science, the tratement of kingship is contained in the book by Plato and that by Aristotle on the regime, and the treatement of propechy and the Law is contained in their two books on the laws.” (Avicenna is referring to the Republic and the Laws; the reference to Aristotle is uncertain. It probably comes from the bibliographies of Aristotle’s writings, as the Politics seems never to have been translated into Arabic. (See Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” in GS2, 425, and for a more recent statement Brague, The Law of God, 115.)) Avicenna continues as follows: “By the nomoi, the philosophers do not mean what the vulgar believe, which is that the nomos is nothing but a device and deceit. Rather, according to them, the nomos is the law and the norm that is established and made permanent through the coming-down of revelation. … Through this part of practical wisdom one knows the necessity of prophecy and the human species’ need of the Law for its existence, preservation, and future life” (97). On Strauss’s discovery of the JewishArab Medieval enlightenment see, Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 463; Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 112. See also Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 57; and, more generally, Brague, The Law of God, 118, as well as his “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca: Leo Strauss’s ‘Muslim’ understanding of Greek philosophy,” Poetics Today 19, no. 2 (July 1, 1998): 235-259. Brague argues that Strauss’s read the ancients “with medieval eyes … and never ceased to do that.” “This outlook seems to stem from … Nietzsche” (239). The basic commonality between Islamic political philosophy and the philosophy of Nietzsche is the idea that philosophy is essentially a form of legislation for which Plato’s art constitutes the original model. According to Nietzsche, “Plato has given us a splendid description of how the philosophical thinker must within every existing society count as the paragon of all wickedness: for as a critic of all customs he is the antithesis of the moral man, and if he does not succeed in becoming a lawgiver for new customs he remains in the memory of men as ‘the evil principle’.” Nietzsche argues that it is therefore no wonder that Plato “intended to do for all the Greeks what Mohammed later did for his Arabs: to determine customs in things great and small and especially to regulate everyone’s day-to-day mode of life … A couple of accidents more and a couple of other accidents fewer—and the world would have seen the Platonisation of the European south.” F. Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), book V, 496. On Plato and Mohammed see also F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, aphorism 972. For a reading of Strauss as a Platonic-Farabian-Nietzschean political philosopher along these lines see Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially 146-147.

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different tradition of philosophic thought for which the rational discussion of the revealed Law is essential. Indeed, according to Maimonides and his Muslim predecessors, prophetic legislators are not inspired beings who work miracles whose commandments are to be taken as credo to be accepted on faith. Rather, they are men who enjoy extraordinary powers of theoretical and practical reasoning, and whose commandments are indispensable means for achieving human perfection, among other things, through philosophizing. The model they followed was Platonic, which means that they saw the prophet as assuming the role of the philosopher-king. Crucially, however, what Plato demanded of philosophers, namely, that they stand under the law and care and watch for others, “this is fulfilled in the age of revelation religions.”48 Or in the words of Maimonides, because “divine laws govern human conduct,” “we do not need all these laws and nomoi.”49 And yet, this does not mean that there is no need for political science. The philosophers know that their philosophizing depends on the legal order and hence need to justify it vis-à-vis that order; nay, they see their

48

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 426.

49

“The sages of the peoples of antiquity made rules and regulations, according to their various degrees of perfection, for the government of their subjects. These are called nomoi; and by them, the peoples were governed. On all these matters, the philosophers have many books which have been translated into Arabic. … But in these times we do not need all these laws and nomoi; for divine laws govern human conduct.” Maimonides, Treatise on Logic, trans. Israel Efros (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1938), 64. Cited in Brague, The Law of God, 109. See also Strauss, “Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science,” in What is Political Philosophy?, 155-169.

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philosophizing as a duty and in particular they see it as their duty to provide a rational interpretation of the revealed Law.50 Thus, philosophy, we can say, begins for this tradition from ethicalpolitical considerations. Not only this: it culminates in them.51 That is to say, the philosophers of the Jewish-Arab Middle Ages were free, as it were, to ‘Aristotelianize’, that is, to engage in metaphysical discussions concerning what the soul is and what its parts are, what Being is and what the One is, and so on, and yet they saw this ultimately as a preparation for addressing the question of the Good.52 Thus, they reversed the order of the Christian West where the beginning and end of science was precisely not political but metaphysical.53 50

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 426-27.

51

See, especially, Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans, Muhsin S. Mahdi, revised ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), esp. 49-50 (concerning the political conditions of philosophy: “Both [Plato and Aristotle] have given us an account of philosophy, but not without giving us also an account of the ways to it and of the ways to re-establish it when it becomes confused or extinct.”); 22-23 (concerning the culmination of philosophy in political science: the highest reach of philosophy is ‘metaphysics’ but what is literally beyond ‘physics’ or nature is the province of political science: “He will know that the natural principles in man and in the world are not sufficient for man’s coming to that perfection for the sake of whose achievement he is made. It will become evident that man needs some rational, intellectual principles with which to work toward that perfection. …There emerges now another science and another inquiry that investigates these intellectual principles and the acts of character with which man labors towards this perfection. From this, in turn, emerge the science of man and political science.”) See, more generally, Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 26, 57 (“Metaphysics does not simply crown the sciences. It does this, to be sure, but it also becomes a preface to political science…”). 52

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 426.

53

As Mushin Mahdi explains, the great achievement of Islamic philosophy as founded by Alfarabi was to revive the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and thus to liberate Socratic philosophy from Christian theology. “During the ten centuries that separated Cicero [106-43 BC] from Alfarabi [ca. 870-950], one cannot point to a single great philosopher for whom the problem of philosophy was inseparable from the problem of political philosophy or in whose writings political philosophy occupies a massive, central, or decisive position. Political philosophy may not be totally absent from pagan and Christian Platonism in the Hellenistic-Roman period, but it remained marginal and subterranean, or else overwhelmed by metaphysics, theology, and

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Strauss does not further explore here the curious affinity between the Judeo-Arabic medieval tradition and the thought of Cohen (and Heidegger) insofar as all share a concern with ethics or the proper being of man. He does note, however, that in sharp contrast to the ‘ethical’ thought of Cohen (and again, we may add, Heidegger), the essential characteristic of Jewish-Arab medieval thought is the centrality of the concept of Law. “Cohen’s outset—‘all honor to the God of Aristotle, but truly he is not the God of Israel’—leads no further if one interprets the God of Israel as the God of morality [Sittlichkeit]. Instead of morality, one should say: Law. It is the concept of Law, of nomos, which unites Jews and Greeks: the concept of the concrete binding order of life.”54 As Strauss goes on to explain, this idea has been “covered over by the Christian and the natural-right tradition, in whose track moves at least our philosophical thinking. By the Christian tradition: which begins with the radical law-critique of the Apostle Paul. By the natural right tradition, that postulates an abstract system of norms, that must first be filled with positive Right to become useful.”55 mysticism” (65). “It was not until the twelfth century that political philosophy penetrated Judaism through Maimonides, and not until the thirteenth that it penetrated Latin Christianity through the Averroists, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas” (30). References in parenthes refer to Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy. See also Strauss, “How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy,” in Pangle (ed.), The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 207226. 54

On order and law in Platonic thought, see Plato, Laws, 874 e 7ff. (cf. 688 a 1ff.); Gorgias, 503 d 5ff. (cf. Strauss, GS3, 369.); Timaeus, 27d 5ff; 30 a, 1-6. 55

Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 428. See Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” 4-5: “it is not the Bible and the Koran, but perhaps the New Testament, and certainly the Reformation and modern philosophy, which brought about the break with ancient thought. The guiding idea upon which the Greeks and the Jews agree is precisely the idea of the divine law as a single and total law which is at the same time religious law, civil law and moral law.”

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To see the full significance of Strauss’s point here, it is necessary to consider a different branch of his studies during the final years of Weimar. Going back a few years we shall now trace his critique of the Christian reception of classical thought, that is, we shall move from Maimonides and Cohen to Hobbes and Heidegger.

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Hobbesheidegger is Heideggerhobbes: Strauss’s Studies in Hobbesian Political Philosophy (1930-1936) At the same time that Strauss discovered the Platonism of the Jewish-Arab medieval enlightenment, he embarked on an extensive investigation of Hobbes. Hobbes was the most profound critic of classic natural right and of the nomos idea underlying Jewish and Greek thought. In that sense, he was the heir of Paul: a ‘destroyer’ of ‘the wisdom of the wise’ and, qua ‘deconstructionist’, a precursor of Heidegger. Like Heidegger, he defined his political philosophy in opposition to Aristotelian metaphysics. Like Heidegger also, he was a philosophical atheist but a deeply Christian thinker. Like the German Meister, Hobbes sought to ‘destroy’ Aristotelian metaphysics but recovered his Rhetoric. We shall see in what follows how Strauss attempted to uncover the roots of “our philosophical thinking” culminating in Heidegger—and in the abandonment of the idea of a binding order of life—by revisiting Hobbes. On January 8, 1930 Strauss wrote to his friend Gerhard Krüger that he intended to continue the investigation begun in his first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1930), “in the form of an analysis of the Hobbesian anthropology.”56 Strauss’s study of Hobbes would culminate six years later with the publication of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936). Between 1930, when he wrote to Krüger from his study in Berlin, and 1936, when he completed his book on

56

GS3, 382.

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Hobbes in London, Strauss engaged in a ‘hidden dialogue’ with the soon-to-be ‘crown jurist of the Reich’ (Carl Schmitt); discovered the Platonism of the Jewish-Arab Middle Ages; became an exile in Paris where he began a decadelong dialogue with Alexandre Kojève; and learned of Heidegger’s Nazism. These involvements and encounters are reflected in the flurry of writings he produced during those turbulent years, six of which are dedicated to Hobbes.57

Hobbes’ repetition and reduction of Socrates Strauss described the direction that his thinking would take after 1929 in rather precise, though indirect, terms in a preface he wrote in 1964 for the German edition of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.58 There he states that “[t]he final sentence of [Gerhard Krüger’s] Kant book, which corresponded completely to my view at that time and with which I would still today, with certain reservations, agree, explains why I directed myself wholly to the ‘true politics’, and why I did not write about Hobbes as a Hobbesian.”59 57

Strauss wrote the following pieces on Hobbes: an unpublished MS written between 1931 and 1932 entitled Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes. Eine Einführung in das Naturrecht; a “Disposition” for the planned book written in October/November of 1931; a “Preface to a planned book on Hobbes” (namely, to the MS, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes…) written towards the end of 1931; “Some remarks concerning the political science of Hobbes” (end of 1932/beginning of 1933); “Die Religionskritik des Hobbes” (1933/34); and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1934-36). (To this may be added his indirect confrontation with Hobbes in his “Notes” on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (April-May, 1932)). For the chronology, see Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Svetozar Minkov (ed.), Enlightening Revolutions, 376. 58

Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy, 453457. 59

Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” 454. The idea of a ‘true politics’ (die wahre Politik) points to Kant who contrasted it with “empirical politics” (die empirische Politik).

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Gerhard Krüger was one of Strauss’s main philosophical dialogue partners, and likewise a student of Heidegger. The last sentence of his Kant book reads as follows: “For the conditionedness [Bedingtheit] of man and above all history … must be the motivation for a philosophical, that is, for an unconditional questioning. The question can be truly unconditional, however, when … it questions the Good. Let the answer to this question … be left undecided. That for him that takes it up, the decisive question remains true, even when it finds no answer, is shown by the example of Socrates.”60 Strauss would follow Krüger’s way of responding to Heidegger: away from him—from modern historicist thought—and yet back to him—to the Socratic-Platonic political philosophy he had unintentionally recovered. Whereas Krüger saw Kant as the thinker standing at the threshold between SocraticPlatonic and the modern philosophizing that would culminate in Heidegger, Strauss went further back to Hobbes. As thinkers at the threshold, both Kant and

True politics assumes “that pure principles of right have objective reality,” “regardless of what objections empirical politics may bring against them.” “True politics can therefore not take a step without having already paid homage to morals, and although politics by itself is a difficult art, its union with morals is no art at all; for as soon as the two conflict with each other, morals cuts the knot that politics cannot untie.” Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpectual Peace,” in Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 346-347. Cf. Susan M. Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously: Schmitt’s ‘Concept of the Political’ and Strauss’s ‘True Politics,’ in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Walter Nicgorski (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994). 60

See Gerhard Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931), 236.

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Hobbes were read by Krüger and Strauss as at once originary thinkers and as objects of Destruktion.61 Strauss’s central contention with respect to Hobbes in those years was that his philosophy is a repetition of the Socratic-Platonic program of founding a techne politike that nevertheless overly simplifies or reduces the problems involved in such a founding. It is this Hobbesian repetition and reduction of ‘political science’, Strauss argued, that gave rise to modern rationalism.62 By such a reduction Strauss means to say, above all, that Hobbes does not raise the question concerning the nature of virtue, or in other words, that he does not sufficiently problematize ethics; that he therefore takes for granted the possibility of political science understood as the quest for a ‘human order of human life’: for Hobbes the standard of that order is “‘self-evidently’ social life or peace.”63 The general problem here seems to be the following: it is the same ethicalpolitical science that Hobbes took for granted at the beginning of modernity that Heidegger would come to regard as impossible at its end. This fate of modern reason was dramatized in Davos where Heidegger, much like a magician

61

The Kant Krüger is interested in—ultimately to respond to Heidegger—is the Kant of the Anthropology in Pragmatic Intent. It is this Kant, he claimed, that discovered “a wholly new fundamental position [Grundstellung] of science and likewise a new horizon of philosophy” by understanding man “in his bodily-factical concreteness in the midst of his world”—a world that Krüger likens to Heidegger’s Umwelt. This is a new horizon for philosophy in which its ‘worldconcept’ (Weltbegriff) replaces its ‘school-concept’ (Schulbegriff). Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der kantischen Kritik, 41, 43. 62

See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of October 15, 1931 in GS3, 394.

63

Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS) cited in GS3, xviii. “This standard is not clarified; it is taken over without deliberation [or misgivings: Bedenken] from life, or from the scientific [wissenschaftlichen] tradition” (ibid.; see also GS3, 173).

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astounding his audience, revealed the abyss at the grounds of modern reason. The question for Strauss thus became: How is it that practical or political philosophy went from self-evidence to impossibility at the end of a movement from Hobbes to Heidegger?64 This occurred through a series of reductions or simplifications, and thus through the missing of certain fundamental questions. As Strauss put it 1931/32: “Hobbes misses the question that has to be answered for political science to be science. He does not begin with the question: which, then, is the right order of human living together? or with the equivalent question: ti estin arete [what is (human) excellence or virtue]?”65 Strauss rejected Heidegger’s answer to the problem of ethics—namely: there is no ‘rational answer to the right order of living together’; we live such answers, but at the most we can ‘resolutely choose’ to accept them as destiny— and yet he could only begin to reject Heidegger’s historicism because of the new horizon it opens. To his critique of Hobbes’ ‘missing’ of the Socratic problem, Strauss adds the following note: “We have Heidegger to thank for this expression [viz., Versäumnis or ‘missing’]; see Being and Time, I, 24 and 89ff. Heidegger’s

64

Cf. Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 185-86.

65

Ibid., cited in GS3, xviii. The note referring to Heidegger stems from Strauss’s first manuscript on Hobbes, which was written between 1931 and 1932. Though the manuscript remains unpublished, it is striking to note that its plan (which has been published) foresees several sections dedicated to a critical engagement with Heidegger. See Meier’s Preface to Meier GS3, xix. The plan in question is published as “Disposition: Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes. Eine Einführung in das Naturrecht,” in Ibid., 193-201. The language of the MS (as can be gathered from the excerpts cited by Meier) seems to be equally Heideggerian. See e.g., GS3, x: “faktischen Zusammenleben”; “faktischen Staat.” For Hobbes’ neglect of the question of the essence of virtue, see also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 150.

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idea of the ‘destruction of the tradition’ is what first made possible the investigation carried out in this and in the previous sections.”66 In a letter to Krüger of the same year (1932) Strauss made the connection leading from Heidegger to Socratic ‘political science’ more explicit: “…modern philosophy, brought to its end, appears to me to lead to the point where Socrates begins. Modern philosophy thus reveals itself as a massive [gewaltige] ‘Destruktion of the tradition’, but not as a ‘progress.’”67 When Strauss thanks Heidegger for the idea of a Destruktion of the tradition he therefore implicitly thanks him (and Nietzsche) for opening a way back to Socrates: “…modern philosophy … believes it may take the fundamental questions as already answered and therefore ‘progress’, hence its missing of the Socratic question that was then denounced by Nietzsche, and its missing of ontology, which Heidegger discovered.”68 This, then, is the Hobbes to be ‘deconstructed’ for failing to take up the question of the right life. And yet, Hobbes, as we suggested, is also a model thinker for Strauss. Indeed, Strauss’s second central thesis with respect to Hobbes at the time was that, precisely his repetition of the Socratic-Platonic program— however ‘reduced’ it may be—attests to his unsurpassed originality in modernity. He is “incomparably more original than Spinoza,” not to speak of Hegel who

66

Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS) cited in GS3, xix.

67

December 12, 1932, in Ibid., 415.

68

November 17, 1932, in Ibid., 406. (On Nietzsche’s recovery of the Socratic question see also GS2, 461.)

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presupposes Spinozism, or Kant who sublates what is most significant in Hobbes. His thought is “the deepest stratum of the modern mind.”69 “Hobbes philosophizes in that fertile moment [Augenblick] in which the ancient tradition became unsteady and the modern tradition of natural science had not yet become solidified.”70 What does Strauss have in mind? First of all this: that the ancient tradition had become questionable when Hobbes philosophized means that the ideal of theoria had also become questionable. “Hobbes is incomparably more original [ursprünglich] than Spinoza.” Specifically, “If one considers the significance for Spinoza of the traditional ideal of theory … and if one considers on the other hand that Hobbes explicitly renounces this basic presupposition of pre-modern thought, one arrives at a different picture as the typical one concerning the ‘progressiveness’ [Fortgeschrittenheit] of Spinoza vis-à-vis Hobbes.”71 Strauss developed these theses between 1930 and 1932 in exchanges with Krüger as well as in a manuscript on Hobbes, which he wrote between 1931 and 1932 and sent to Carl Schmitt at the beginning of that year.72 They are the starting

69

Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1936] 1963), 5. 70

Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS), cited in GS3, xvii f.

71

Ibid., cited in GS3, xviii. On Spinoza’s privileging of theoria see note 127 of chapter two.

72

The MS of Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes was sent to Schmitt at the beginning of 1932 in the urgency of finding a scholarship to leave Germany. (See the Preface to GS3, ix; GS2, xxxi, n. 44.) Due to the financial crisis of the time, Strauss had lost his job in the Academy for the Science of Judaism. (This happened towards the end of 1931. See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17, 31, 134 f.) Schmitt first knew of Strauss through the latter’s analyses of Hobbes as presented in Spinoza’s

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point of Strauss’s Hobbesian studies of the 1930s. However, as the manuscript has not been published it is not possible to trace their precise aim any further. Suffice it to note that Strauss reads Hobbes as a founding thinker for modern times, whose thinking is radical enough not to presuppose that theory is “the one thing needful” and yet whose radicality pales in comparison to that of Socrates or Heidegger. As Strauss puts it in Heideggerian language, Hobbes “misses” the Socratic question concerning the right life because he begins “with that completely different question concerning the ‘nature’ of man,”73 or because due to his “ontological materialism” he seeks for a human order beginning from “the material from which the virtuous human being must be fabricated.”74 By thus taking for granted an inherited answer to the question of the nature of man (as “animal rationale”75) Hobbes misses the ethical problem—viz. how to live—as it arises for man in his confrontation with death: “Hobbes’ philosophy remains before death: it is a philosophy of averageness.”76

Critique of Religion. See Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of March 13, 1932: “the interest you have shown in my studies of Hobbes represents the most honorable and obliging corroboration of my scholarly work that has ever been bestowed upon me and that I could ever dream of.” The letter is reprinted in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 123. 73

GS3, 409; see also 172, 407, 416.

74

Ibid., 419.

75

Ibid., 407.

76

Ibid., 199.

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A. Political science for the crisis of the time (1931-1933)

Preface to a planned book on Hobbes (1931) The first published expression of Strauss’s Hobbes studies now included in his collected writings is a “Preface” he prepared for the planned book on Hobbes. It was composed in October/November of 1931.77 Strauss defines his quest there as guided by “[t]he question of the right order of living together – of its ‘natural’ order, of natural right…”78 “The question of natural right means the right order of human living together; the right order is that order that is determined by reason” (211; see also 212). This question “urges itself upon us in the face of the dominant anarchy” (201). Strauss means both ‘factical’ anarchy—in a time marked by political assassinations, attempted coups, paramilitary violence, extreme political polarization, and economic emergency—but also the anarchy of ‘systems’ of natural right. This is an anarchy, he argues, that has prevailed since Hobbes’ attack on traditional natural right (201). Since that attack “the most opposed doctrines of natural right quickly followed upon each other” leading to the view that natural right is as arbitrary as any individual belief (201). 77

For situating the “Preface” within the development of Strauss’s thought, compare the letter of October 15, 1931 where Strauss explains to Krüger that my “warrantor” (Gewährsmann) for “the possibility that natural right is possible in a world without providence” is no longer Hobbes but Plato (GS3, 393). 78

Strauss, “Vorwort zu einem geplanten Buch über Hobbes” (1931), in GS3, 201-215, 201. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

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This was Hans Kelsen’s view at that time—that natural rights are but ideologies used by interest groups to turn their particular struggles into universalistic demands. Strauss takes issue with Kelsen and other critics of natural right while also pointing to the sources of these critiques in neo-Kantianism (210) and the ‘historical school’ of Savigny (211).79 The preface was not meant to be published80 and the planned book was also abandoned because of the events of the following years. Nevertheless, it remains important for understanding the genesis of Strauss’s political science in light of its contemporary sources. As we saw earlier, the idea of “the right order of human living together,” or of “nomos” as a “concrete binding order of life” is what, according to Strauss, unites Jews and Greeks. It is also what distinguishes ancient from modern thought, as the latter was decisively shaped by Paul’s critique of the law. But far from being an antiquarian quest, or one only meant to dismantle modern thought to return to pre-modern conceptions, the idea of nomos and of order-thinking seems to have been introduced by Strauss at the time to address Carl Schmitt, who was gaining more and more influence in Berlin as an advisor of government

79

Readers of Natural Right and History will recognize here the germ of that project, namely, a grounding of the question of natural right prepared by a “critical history” of natural right theories—e.g., Hobbes, Grotius, and Rousseau—and of the different ‘waves’ of opposition to natural right: the early historicism of Savigny (whose better-known representative in NRH would seem to be Burke); the positivist critique of all ‘metaphysics’ in the name of ‘value-free’ science (Weber and others); and the radical historicism represented by Heidegger. See the letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396, and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953). 80

Letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396.

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officials on legal and political matters.81 And, indeed, in Strauss’s view at least, Schmitt’s turn from decisionism to “concrete-order thinking” (or Ordnungsdenken) in 1933/34, which coincided with Schmitt’s becoming a member of the Nazi party and Prussian Attorney General, was due to Strauss’s influence.82 This being said, however, the radical differences between Strauss’s and Schmitt’s conceptions must also be stressed. First, while one can imagine that a young Jew, who even in May of 1933 expressed his sympathy for “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” politics,83 and a conservative Catholic like Schmitt could find common ground as outsiders within a philosophical and theological world dominated by Protestantism,84 Strauss remained a Jew and Schmitt a Catholic. This is to say that whatever Strauss may have meant by “the right order” it had nothing to do, even genealogically, with “[t]he Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law of the Middle Ages” or with the “Germanic thinking of the Middle Ages” that

81

For a brief and lucid account of Schmitt’s activities during the final days of Weimar see John P. McCormick’s introduction to Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 82

“Have you seen Carl Schmitt’s latest brochures. He is now against Hobbes’ decisionism, for ‘Ordnungsdenken’ on the grounds of the argument in my review, which he naturally does not cite.” Letter to Jacob Klein of October 10, 1934, in GS3, 524. For Schmitt’s ‘concrete-order thinking’ see his On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, trans. Joseph W. Bendersky (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, [1934] 2004). 83

See Strauss’s letter to Karl Löwith of May 19, 1933, in GS3, 625. See note 15, chapter two.

84

For Schmitt’s Catholic views and his distance from Protestantism see C. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), esp. 12 (“…Catholic argumentation is based on a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical logic and whose focus of interest is the normative guidance of human social life.”), 25 (“Should economic thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about an absolutely unpolitical condition of human society, the Church would remain the only agency of political thinking and political form.”)

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Schmitt alluded to in his genealogy of Ordnungsdenken.85 Indeed, perhaps the deepest problem of a ‘political science’ for Strauss would become precisely the fact that the ‘order thinking’ he inspired in his youth excluded his own people— that is, those who, as Schmitt put it, “without territory, without a state, and without a church, exist only in ‘law.’”86 The “Preface,” then, is important for understanding how Strauss’s early conception of ‘political science’ as the quest for “the right order of human life” related to contemporary juridico-political conceptions. However, according to Strauss, what mattered most to him—at least as he explained to his philosophical friends with whom he almost never mentioned Schmitt—was something else: “What matters for me above all [in the “Preface”] is to highlight the fact that the sole presupposition of today’s skepticism against natural right is the historical consciousness.”87 The discovery of the ‘historical consciousness’ is attributed to the early critics of modern natural right, and specifically to the ‘historical school’ of 85

C. Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, 43, 45.

86

Ibid., 45. In other words, the problem is this: What can political science, when it is conceived as the quest for “the right order of living together,” possibly mean for someone who has become apolis? (For the premise of such a definition of political science would seem to be that man belongs and ought to belong entirely to the ‘city’ or polis.) It is not surprising, then, that this definition of the problem of political science would begin to disappear from Strauss’s writings. Instead, in his American exile Strauss would insist that “all political life is necessarily imperfect” and that the human problem cannot be solved at the political level. See, specially, Strauss’s 1939, “Exoteric Teaching,” in Interpretation 14, n. 1 (January 1986): 51-59, 52, and Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, edited by V. Gourevitch and M. S. Roth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 182, 208. If this is true one would have to understand Strauss’s American political philosophy as (at least in part) a reversal of his own youthful views, and perhaps also as a response to Schmitt. 87

See the letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396.

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thinkers such as Carl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke.88 “Today’s skepticism,” however, is due to Heidegger, whom Strauss characterized at that

88

The Historical School was a broad movement with an all-important, though largely subterranean, influence. “According to Dilthey, it was the Historical School that ‘had recognized the historicity of human and of all the social order’ by defining the individual as an ‘essentially historical being’, a discovery that he termed ‘the emancipation of historical consciousness’.” Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 140. The new insight into historicity led “to a radical break with the 18th century notions of natural law, natural religion, abstract political theory, and abstract political economy” (140). Central to the reaction against modern natural law was the view that the enlightenment does not represent a radical break with the pre-modern but a ‘secularization’ of Christian and Protestant thought. Arthur M. Melzer, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism,” The American Political Science Review 100, no. 2 (May, 2006), 286. (See Strauss’s argument against this thesis in his letter to Löwith of August 20, 46 (in GS3, 667-668). Cf. also Natural Right and History, 1-2 and the reference there to Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (Cambridge UP, 1934), 201-22.) For our understanding of Heidegger as a political philosopher, it is important to note that the Historical School originated as a legal-political movement. Its leading representative was Carl von Savigny (1779-1861), who stood for a historical and systematic treatment of Right conceived as an outgrowth “of the most inner essence of the nation itself and its history.” The “historical method” in legal science consists, according to Savigny, in going to the roots of Right—i.e., German and Roman Right—in order to “discover an organic principle through which that which still has life can be separated and rescued from what is already dead and only belongs to history.” This historicism would then be adopted not only by historians such as Ranke and Niebuhr, but also by philologists such as Boeckh and Bopp, as well as by theologian-philosophers such as Schleiermacher. H.-P. Harstick, art. “Historische Schule,” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2007), Vol. 3, 1138-1141. Carl Schmitt’s Ordnungsdenken also traces its genealogy to (among others) Savigny. See Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, 77. For the influence of the Historical School on Heidegger see his “Wilhem Dilthey’s Research and the Current Struggle for a Historical Worldview,” in Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (eds.), Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 238-274. “The derivation of life-goals from history has been developed since the eighteenth century by Kant, Herder, Humboldt, and Hegel. Their basic conviction is in the end that humanity develops historically from a state of dependency towards a state of freedom… The way was thus cleared for genuine historical research, whereby the sciences disclose history theoretically and scientifically on the basis of sources secured in critical work (as in Wolff, Niebuhr, Savigny, Bopp, Bauer, Schleimermacher, and Jacob Grimm)” (244). See also Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie. GA 56/57 [1919], 134 (where Heidegger praises the German discovery of the historical consciousness and of communal life drawing on the experience of early Christianity, referring to Savigny, Niebuhr and Schleiermacher); 164 (“The awakening and emancipation of historical consciousness … is nothing other than the first true seeing of the growth that inheres in all spiritual realities [das erste echte Sehen des grundeigentümlichen Wachstums aller geistigen Tatsachen].” Cf. also Heidegger’s lectures on Schelling as well as his 1934 speeches on “the German university,” respectively in GA II, vol. 42, 83; and GA 1, vol. 16, 285-307 and esp. 28997, as referenced by Richard L. Velkley, “On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss’s Natural Right and History as Response to Heidegger,” The Review of Politics 70, 2008: 245-259, 248.

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time as the dominating historicist thinker.89 Indeed, no doubt influenced by the followers of the historical school, especially Dilthey, but going beyond them, Heidegger had proposed a radical historicism for which the very possibility of discovering truth depends on a form of attunement to the world that ‘lives temporality as such’ in the wakeful and anxious expectation of a transforming event. Heidegger was only the highest expression of the ‘historical consciousness’ that for Strauss dominated the “spiritual situation of the present”90—from philosophy and theology to the juridical thought of Schmitt, Kelsen, Bergbohm, and others. While for juridical thinkers the generally accepted historicist premise meant something rather more simple—viz., that “the standards with reference to which we pass judgment on the historical, positive law … are themselves absolutely the progeny of their time and are always historical and relative”91— Strauss considered it necessary to confront the more radical historicism of Heidegger—by turning Heidegger against himself. Whereas historicism considers the question of the right life to be naïve—given how much we know about the plurality of historical worldviews and cultures—it is historicism itself, Strauss argued, that makes the recovery of that question possible. “If the historical consciousness is no cabby that one can simply stop at will, so one arrives at a

89

See, especially, Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” GS2, 383.

90

Cf. Strauss, “Die Geistige Lage der Gegenwart” (1932), in GS2, 441-465.

91

Karl Bergbohm, Jurisprudenz und Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig, 1892), 450 n. Cited in Strauss, Natural Right and History, 10, n., 3.

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historical Destruktion of the historical consciousness.”92 Henceforth, Strauss would seek to show that historicism is itself “historically conditioned and limited to a particular situation.”93 Historicism, as we shall see, is conditioned by the modern fight against prejudice, which is, more specifically, a fight against the ‘onto-theological’ tradition that dominates western thought. By noting that it was Hobbes who pioneered the modern philosophical ‘Destruktion’ of ‘onto-theology’ we shall return to the connection between Hobbes, Heidegger, and the crisis of political philosophy.

Notes on Carl Schmitt’s ‘The Concept of the Political’ (1932) The Hobbes manuscript that Strauss sent to Schmitt fulfilled at least one of its aims. Thanks to Schmitt’s endorsement, by March of 1932 Strauss had been awarded the Rockefeller grant that enabled him to emigrate to Paris half a year later in September or October of 1932.94 During those final months in Berlin Strauss must have been busy working on his first—and only—direct engagement

92

Letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396.

93

Ibid.

94

On September 4, 1932 Strauss writes to Schmitt from Berlin. His first (preserved) letter from Paris was sent on October 8. The letters are collected in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss.

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with the thought of Schmitt,95 his ‘Notes’ on The Concept of the Political96 which were published in September of 1932, right before he left Germany.97 Strauss’s “Notes” respond together with Schmitt to the political situation of the time; specifically, to the crisis of the state, which “has become more questionable than it has been for centuries or more” and whose understanding requires a “radical foundation” of its basis, that is, a radical foundation of the political.98 Schmitt understands the political as the ever-present tendency of human collectivities to identify each other as ‘enemies’ in affirming particular forms of life if necessary by eliminating others. This orientation of the political “to the real possibility of physical killing” makes it “authoritative” (Massgebende) (222) over any other ‘province of culture’ such as the moral or the aesthetic or the economic. Schmitt’s affirmation of the political is aimed against liberalism 95

Strauss did refer to Schmitt on later occasions, but rarely if ever in his writings meant for publication. See, for instance, Strauss’s summary of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political in “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the TheologicalPolitical Problem, 127-28. 96

No letters of Strauss’s correspondence with Krüger or Klein are preserved from December 1931 to August 1932. From that period the only extant letter is the letter to Schmitt of March 13, 1932 in which Strauss expresses in the strongest terms his admiration of Schmitt (in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 123.) (The correspondence with Löwith and Gershom Scholem begins later.) 97

Strauss, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67, no. 6 (August-September): 732-49. In GS3, 217-238. (Hereafter cited in parentheses in the main text.) Strauss sent his “Schmitt-Rezension” to Krüger on August 19, 1932 with copies to “Klein, Frank and Gadamer” (GS3, 398). “Schmitt himself in 1932 had apparently seen to it that Strauss’s ‘Notes’ were published in the Archiv…” Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 8, n. 7. See also Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of September 4, 1932 where he supplements his review, referring interestingly to “an oral exchange” between them (in Ibid., 124). 98

Compare Kelsen’s pure theory of law which claims to be a “theory of the state—without state.” Such a theory is necessary because the concept of the state “lies epistemologically—just as the concept of God—on the same plane as the concept of the soul in the old psychology or the concept of power in the old physics.” Hans Kelsen, “Gott und Staat,” Logos 11 (1922/23): 261–284, 283284.

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insofar as it neutralizes and depoliticizes the questions for which one lives and dies: for liberalism, whatever those questions may be (to this it is indifferent), the end, to be achieved at any cost, is peace, understanding, and reconciliation.99 Strauss agrees with Schmitt’s critique of liberalism at least as to this: “in opposition to understanding at any cost, fighting is truer [ist der Streit wahrer];” nevertheless, as he immediately adds in a letter to Krüger of August 1932, “the last word … can only be peace, i.e., understanding in truth. That such an understanding on the basis of reason [Verständigung der Vernunft] is possible— firmiter credo.”100 The question is: reason-based understanding—but on what grounds, or what ‘reason’? Perhaps Hobbesian reason or Hobbesian natural right would first come to mind. Against this attests one of Strauss’s fundamental points in the ‘Notes’. Contrary to Hobbes who understood the political condition “in the sense of the specifically modern concept of culture … as the opposite of the natural condition” (223), Strauss seeks to recover the question of nature that Hobbes ‘misses’. Strauss therefore argues that the deeper problem with the liberal philosophy of culture is that it regards culture as an ‘autonomous’ whole, as the “sovereign creation, the ‘pure product’ of the human spirit,” (222) whereas in truth culture is 99

See Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick. Telos, 96 (1993): 130-142. 100

August 19, 1932, in GS3, 399. This is in line with Strauss’s earlier claims that “the true state— that is truthful living together,” or with his recollection that he had turned to the “true politics” and did not write about Hobbes as a Hobbesian. Cf. Strauss’s letter to Schmitt criticizing Schmitt’s identification of the Right with “bellicose nationalism.” September 4, 1932, in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und ‘Der Begriff des Politischen’. Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden, erweiterte Neuausgabe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 132-33.

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always culture of something: “culture is always the culture of nature” (222). This, either because it means “careful nurture of nature”—that is, the development of natural dispositions, if one understands nature as “exemplary order”—or because it means “conquering nature”—that is, “a harsh and cunning fight against nature”—if one understands nature as “disorder to be eliminated” (222). In either case, “‘[c]ulture’ is to such an extent the culture of nature that culture can be understood as a sovereign creation of the spirit only if the nature being cultivated has been presupposed to be the opposite of spirit, and been forgotten” (222). By reason-based understanding, then, Strauss presumably means an understanding that somehow takes into account the question of nature. But then, what ‘nature’? As suggested earlier, Strauss’s understanding of nature is not naturalistic, either in the Spinozistic sense for which in the end might makes right or in the Hobbesian sense—for, again, Hobbes misses the Socratic question because he begins “with … the question concerning the ‘nature’ of man.”101 Neither is Strauss’s ‘return’ to nature a naturalism in the Nietzschean sense that simply takes over the pre-philosophical, hence allegedly ‘natural’, Greek ideal of manliness or andreia and the accompanying virtues of courage and fortitude.102 Rather, Strauss’s aim is to Socratically raise the question of the idea (the ‘look’ or the ‘shape’ of man) beyond the ‘natural attitude’ that sees the world—and specially the human world—as always already given to me and—especially—as 101

GS3, 409; see also 407, 416.

102

See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of December 12 1932, in GS3, 415. See also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 167, 186.

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always already in order. 103 And yet, crucially—and again Socratically, Strauss would say—the insight into the fact that the human world is not naturally in order “is not tied to a previous knowledge of phusis” or, in other words, does not presuppose a naturalistic cosmology.104 We thus begin to approach a clearer understanding of the way Strauss responded to contemporary political-philosophical and theological conceptions through a Socratic turn. The specific meaning Strauss gives to this turn will be discussed in a later section. Suffice it here to note the movement of Strauss’s thought: it is towards what he considers to be a “truly critical philosophy” beyond moral, theological, or naturalistic understandings of the political.105 It seeks—at 103

GS3, 426; See also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, in GS3, 175; Natural Right and History, 145-6: “Human nature is one thing, virtue or the perfection of human nature is another. The definite character of the virtues and, in particular, of justice cannot be deduced from human nature….Whatever may be the proper starting point for studying human nature, the proper starting point for studying the perfection of human nature, and hence, in particular, natural right, is what is said about these subjects or the opinions about them.” See also Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964) where Strauss distinguishes between the “nature of man” and “the human things”: “‘the human things’ are not ‘the nature of man’” (13). Political philosophy is concerned with ‘the human things’, not with ‘the nature of man’. 104

As, for instance, that presupposed by a Sophist like Callicles. See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of February 7, 1933 (GS3, 426: “während die bekämpfte sophistische Ansicht naiv eine naturalistische Kosmologie voraussetzt.”). Cf. also the letter of August 18, 1934 (GS3, 440): Strauss’s model is what he calls Plato’s “critical philosophy” (“Die durch das Gesetz aufgerufene Philosophie fragt nicht nach dem Gesetz, sondern nach der richtigen Ordnung des menschlichen Lebens und darum sofort nach dem Prinzip der Ordnung. Aber diese Frage kann nicht zu der natürlich-theologischen werden, wenn man sich nicht in die Schwierigkeiten einer Begründung des Wissens auf den Glauben verwickeln will; sondern sie muss in der Weise der Kritischen Philosophie Platos gestellt und beantwortet werden.”) Or as he suggests on November 17 1932 (GS3, 407): “man muss (im Hegelschen Sinn) phänomenologisch vorgehen, die Geschichte des Menschen darstellen und die eigentlichen Voraussetzungen erst nach und nach hervortreten lassen.” 105

Cf. Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” 6: “In a century which was not considerably less ‘enlightened’ than that of the sophists and Socrates, where the very bases of human life, i.e., political life, had been shaken by Chiliastic convulsions on the one hand and, on the other, by a critique of religion the radicalism of which recalls the freethinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Farabi had rediscovered in the politics of

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least at this point in time—to rethink the idea of the state beyond theologicalpolitical (Schmitt) or anti-theological and anti-metaphysical conceptions (Kelsen)106 by going back to a horizon in which the question of nature had not

Plato the golden mean equally removed from a naturalism which aims only at sanctioning the savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master and the conqueror; and from a supernaturalism which tends to become the basis of slave morality—a golden mean which is neither a compromise nor a synthesis, which is hence not based on the two opposed positions, but which suppresses them both, uproots them by a prior, more profound question, by raising a more fundamental problem, the work of a truly critical philosophy.” (See also GS3, 440 on “Plato’s critical philosophy.”) 106

In the early 1920s, Kelsen and Schmitt had revived the nineteenth century debate on ‘political theology’ between counter-revolutionaries and anarchists by taking a position against Bakunin’s anarchism. (See Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 7th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 69-70; Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 36-39; Kelsen, “Gott und Staat,” 261–284.) Both agreed that the concept of the state is theological in origin. (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 43: “Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe.” Kelsen, “Gott und Staat,” esp. 272: there is a “complete coincidence” between the doctrine of the one God and the juridical concept of a sovereign state.”) So far, they also agreed with Bakunin, who claimed that no state could survive without religion. (M. Bakunin, Gott und der Staat (Glashütten im Taunus: Auvermann, 1974), 82, 22 f.) Yet, while Bakunin therefore called for the abolition of both state and religion, Kelsen and Schmitt sought new ways to reassert order and authority. Against the prospect of anarchy, Kelsen called for a pure (or normativistic) theory of law according to which a legal order is valid because it has been created in a specific way or because it has been established by a specific person that thus counts as the ‘authority’. (Kelsen, “Die Idee des Naturrechts,” in Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, 76 (1927/28), 224.) Schmitt proposed a decisionistic theory of law in which the order of the state rests on the sovereign decision of a collectivity (or, in an emergency, of a dictator) regarding its form of life. (E.g., Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, achte Auflage (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989), p. 81, and 75-76.) Neither of these conceptions solved the problem of ‘political-theology’ insofar as the authority of the state continued to rest on foundations or decisions that can hardly be distinguished from (groundless) divine intervention. In other words, normativism could not avoid decisionism (in emergency situations) while decisionism would not avoid political theology—indeed, it would positively embrace it (at least according to one interpretation) as a “a political doctrine that claims to be founded on faith in divine revelation.” For Kelsen’s justification of an ‘autocrat’s decision’ to suspend or change norms to establish a condition that is still according to Right (Rechtszustand), see his Allgemeine Staatslehre (Berlin, 1925), 335-36. (This is a passage omitted from the English translation published in 1949, as Strauss points out in Natural Right and History, 4.) The thesis that “‘[p]olitical theology’ is the apt and solely appropriate characterization of Schmitt’s doctrine” has been developed by Heinrich Meier in various writings. (It hardly needs to be said that that thesis has often been disputed.) See, inter alia, his “What is Political Theology?,” in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 81 (Schmitt’s political theology is “a political doctrine that claims to be founded on faith in divine revelation”), and, more generally, his The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, as well as Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss. For indirect evidence of Schmitt’s fundamentally theological position at the time, see his correspondence with Werner Becker; specially Becker’s letter of December 15

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been co-opted by theological (e.g. Thomistic natural right) or anti-theological discourses (e.g. Hobbesian ‘nature’). At the same time, such a return does not uncritically presuppose the possibility of a recovery of ‘the ordinary’ prescientific standpoint from which ‘natural’ philosophizing arises. In other words, the aim is not to repeat antiquity at the height of modernity. Rather, Strauss finds that Socrates’ critique of naturalism remains valid today, or that modern philosophy leads to the point where Socrates begins.

‘Some remarks concerning the political philosophy of Hobbes’ (1933) Strauss arrived in Paris in late September or early October of 1932. By the following month he was already well acquainted with Alexandre Koyré—“a jolly good fellow” and “the only human being with whom I can relate”—who himself introduced him to a “very smart and sympathetic Russian, a student of Jaspers (Koschevnikoff).” He had also met “two extraordinary men, both—naturally—not philosophers”: the geographer André Siegfried and the Arabist Massignon, “a

1933, in Piet Tommissen (ed.), Werner Becker. Briefe an Carl Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998), 54-60. In that letter Schmitt’s anti-philosophical position becomes clear (presuming that his student’s appreciation is correct): “whether one understands human nature as Hobbes does or as Rousseau did is actually more a matter of taste. Common to both is what you call the ‘antireligious this-worldly activism’. And this is in fact the enemy we are fighting against” (55). Cf. also Becker’s support of National Socialism against liberalism on the grounds that “Der Liberalismus, gegen den hier gekämpft wird, ist nicht marxistischer, sondern christlicher ‘Liberalismus’. D.h. aber, er ist Liberalismus auf Widerruf. Der Christ kann im Ernstfall nicht liberal bleiben. Daher finde ich auch unter meinen Frunden (und bei mir selbst) soviel ehrlichen Anschluss an den Nationalsozialismus.” (My emphases.)

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glowing soul, incredibly learned,”107 as well as other noted French scholars like Jacques Maritain.108 During this time Strauss worked on a review of Zbigniew Lubieński Die Grundlagen des ethisch-politischen Systems von Hobbes109 to which he gave the title “Some Remarks Concerning the Political Science of Hobbes.”110 This Hobbes publication which Strauss seems also to have sent to Schmitt, appeared in French, translated by Kojève, in Koyré’s Recherches Philosophiques.111 Strauss again underscores the actuality of Hobbes’ teachings in the face of the political crisis of the time, and specifically of liberal democracy which, says Strauss, “faces today for the first time a critique that is neither simply ‘reactionary’ nor ultimately immanent as is the socialist critique…” (243-244). Liberalism is “forced to ground itself as radically as ever in its history” (244). This situation arises from the fact that it can no longer appeal to “certain presuppositions that supported the religious tradition that it opposed, that united it with its opponent and therefore made that opponent a target of attack.” These presuppositions “are precisely as a result of the triumph of liberalism today no 107

Letter to Löwith of November 15, 1932, in GS3, 607-609. See also Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of July 10, 1933, in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 127. 108

GS3, 457.

109

Zbigniew Lubieński ’s Die Grundlagen des ethisch-politischen Systems von Hobbes (Munich: Reinhardt, 1932). 110

“Einige Anmerkungen über die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes,” in GS3, 242-261. Hereafter cited in the body of the text in parentheses. 111

See GS3, xi: the idea was to publish it in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung but because of the political situation it was published in French and sent to Schmitt very likely annexed to a letter of July 10, 1933 (in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 127).

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longer self-evident, so that liberalism could appeal to them to confront its new opponent” (244). If, then, the aim is to provide a radical foundation for liberalism—and that means one that does not borrow “openly or in a hidden manner” from the religious tradition—one must return to Hobbes, for it was Hobbes that first provided this foundation “with a never again achieved radicality” (244). Hobbes founded liberalism without being himself a liberal “in the true meaning of the word” (245). He was “‘absolutiste sans être théologien’” (243). He saw clearly the strength of the forces opposing liberalism “specially in human nature itself.” Thus his “absolutism is in the end nothing else than militant liberalism in statu nascendi and that means in its most radical form” (244-245). The central problem of Hobbes’ interpretation Strauss discusses in the review concerns the grounds of “Hobbes’ ethical-political system”—specifically, whether they are natural-scientific or whether they express a prior and more fundamental pre-scientific understanding of ‘the human things’. According to Lubieński, Hobbes’ ethical-political system is ultimately natural-scientific, and it rests on the two central postulates of “natural appetite” and “natural reason.” Human beings naturally strive for the “intensification of life’s … movement” (251), while natural reason restricts that movement to guarantee the preservation of one’s life (255). Strauss, to the contrary, suggests that “the deepest anthropological and political thoughts of Hobbes are concealed rather than clarified” by his later attempt to provide them with a natural scientific foundation (250). For a Hobbes correctly understood, Strauss argues, the natural striving of

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man is towards greater fame and is driven by human vanity, while the grounds of duty is the fear of violent death.112 Bracketing Strauss’s elaboration of this point that pertains to Hobbes interpretation,113 his deeper aim in the review seems to be to rediscover the roots of modern thought in order to reopen the ‘quarrel between the ancients and the moderns’.114 This he begins to do by arguing that vanity and fear, “the two

112

Within days or weeks of his first encounter with Kojève, Strauss writes to Krüger that one cannot understand Hobbes “if one goes about it systematically, that is, by first establishing that according to Hobbes man is a rational animal etc. etc.” Rather, “one has to proceed phenomenologically (in the Hegelian sense), laying out the history of man and only then letting the true presuppositions gradually come into the open.” November 17, 1932 in GS3, 407. By thus proceeding, it becomes clear that behind Hobbes’ mechanistic psychology of limitless desires leading to competition and distrust lies an understanding of human nature as vain, such that man’s natural desire is “to like himself in that others recognize him as superior” (“Einige Anmerkungen,” GS3, 258). As to the source of morality or the grounds of duty, it is not simply the result of a ‘logic’ of ‘natural reason’ commanding us to preserve our lives out of fear of death as the greatest evil. For Hobbes “knows that under certain conditions death may be counted as one of the goods” (Ibid., 255). He therefore sees in the fear of violent death the greatest evil, which in turn means that morality is not simply in the service of the preservation of life but of its preservation against possible attacks by others (Ibid., 255). 113

Briefly, Strauss uncovers certain presuppositions of Hobbes’ teaching without which it would be unintelligible or at least more inconsistent than it is. Thus, without the presupposition of man’s vanity, one cannot really explain why for Hobbes man is for man a wolf (253). Or, in other words, man is the enemy of every other man because “each desires to surpasss every other and thereby offends every other.” (Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 12.) That is also why the Leviathan is “King of the Proud”—because man’s natural appetite is not simply innocent animal competition beyond good and evil (Ibid., 13). In short, dismantling Hobbes’ system reveals that behind the postulate of ‘natural desire’ lies a particular morality. The same holds for his postulate of ‘natural reason’. Morality for Hobbes is in the service not of the preservation of life simply but of its preservation against attacks by others. That is why the norm of his ethics is not the fear of death but the fear of violent death; and that, in turn, is the reason why he denies the character of virtues to those dispositions such as courage and magnanimity that are not conditions of peaceful coexistence (“Einige Anmerkungen,” GS3, 255); or in other words, that is why the content of duty for Hobbes is nothing less but also nothing more than what is conducive to peace (Ibid., 256). See also The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 116: “…justice and charity…take the place occupied before by honor. These virtues, which in Hobbes’s view, are the only moral virtues, have … their ultimate foundation in fear of violent death.” 114

This is most evidently the case with regards to Kojève’s Hegel. On one level, Strauss shows that the foundational modern insight into what is taken to be man’s natural desire, namely “to like himself in that others recognize him as superior,” does not arise from pure contemplation of what man is or from a definition of the essence of man, but from the question concerning the principle

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opposed ways of human life”—which Hobbes presents as the two opposed movements of “natural appetite” and “natural reason”—“appear at first sight as the secularized form of the opposition between superbia and humilitas” (259260). They “appear at first sight” to be so. In the last instance, however, “the opposition vanity-fear is the modern transformation [Abwandlung] conditioned by Christianity of the classical Socratic-Platonic opposition,” between the political life and “the truly Good that is only accessible to reasonable insight” (260). Modernity, then, is not simply secularized Christianity. Rather it must be understood by starting from its confrontation and modification of the oppositions between forms of life that were first made in ancient thought—in this case, from the classical suspicion leveled against the political life from the standpoint of the

of evil in man which must be combatted (i.e., vanity). (See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of November 17, 1932, in GS3, 407.) This is to say that the origins of the modern philosophy of selfconsciousness must be traced back not only to Hegel and, before him, to Descartes, but to Hobbes—and ultimately to Hobbes’ moral-political project. Throughout, Strauss also points to certain key notions—upheld, for instance, by Lubieński —that are expressed in Heideggerian language. The aim seems to be to underscore the pervasiveness of Heidegger’s philosophy in the ‘spiritual situation of the time’. Some examples of Heideggerian (and also Hobbesian) notions are the views that human actions as such are not oriented towards the good; that life is first of all a movement that is not towards the good but towards death; that, in Lubieński ’s terms, the voice of conscience arises from ‘Sorge’ concerning one’s life as a whole (256); that reasonable consciousness of duty is constituded by ‘fore-sight’ (Vorblick) of something frightening (256); that human Dasein is guilty but in a way that is pre-moral; or that ‘intellectual honesty’ (242) requires that moral language be purged. See Strauss’s letter to Löwith of February 2, 1933, in GS3, 620-21 (“…mein Anfang ist genau wie der ihrige: die Situation der Gegenwart und d.h. zugleich unsere Zukunft….Ich sehe vor mir den Kampf zwischen Links und Rechts, und die Auslegungen dieses Kampfes auf beiden Seiten: die progressivistische und die marxistische links, und die Nietzsches, Kierkegaards, Dostojewskis rechts. Die Auslegungen der gegnerischen Ansicht ist je eine Karikatur. Ich versuchte mir also eine richtige Vorstellung von einer der Kampffronten zu verschaffen, und zwar, aus irgendwelchen Grunden, von der Linken. Also studierte ich die Aufklärung, insbesondere Spinoza und Hobbes. Ich sah dabei mancherlei, was ich sonstwo schwerlich gesehen hätte, und es wurde mir z.B. auch bei Heidegger und bei Nietzsche manches klarer, als es mir aus deren eigenen Schriften klar geworden war.” My emphasis.) For Strauss’s debate with Kojève see, inter alia, Michael S. Roth, “Natural Right and the End of History : Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, N. 3, 1991: 407-22.

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life of the philosopher. It is this suspicion, Strauss argues, that is “transformed” into the liberal and socialist fight against the political in the name of the economic; specifically by making of the political “the domain of vanity, prestige, and the will to dominate” against which the economic must assert itself as the world of “reasonable, pragmatic and modest labor” (259). (In simpler terms, in modern times liberalism and socialism debase political life just as the life of theoria did in ancient times.) Strauss concludes that “a radical understanding and a well-founded judgment of Hobbesian politics is in fact only possible if one confronts it directly with Platonic politics. Only in this way can it be ascertained whether the modification, intended by Hobbes and in fact determined by Christianity, of ancient ideas is actually based on a more profound understanding of human nature, and what this concern for ‘profundity’ actually entails” (260).

B. Political science after 1933

Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933) Strauss conceived his next project on Hobbes—“Hobbes’ Critique of Religion: A Contribution to the Understanding of the Enlightenment”—as a thesis for attaining a French degree in the Summer of 1933.115 By the end of that fateful

115

Strauss, “Die Religionskritik des Hobbes. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis der Aufklärung” (1933), in GS3, 263-373. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

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year the plan had been abandoned and the Diplomarbeit was left unfinished.116 This was to be Strauss’s first work post-dating Hitler’s rise to power and the Gleichschaltung of Christian philosophers and theologians such as Heidegger and Gogarten.117 At that time, Strauss was specially shocked by Heidegger’s inaugural address as rector of the university of Freiburg, and specifically, as a letter to Kojève written a year later suggests, by Heidegger’s blurring of the distinction between theory and praxis in Heidegger’s claim that theory for the Greeks constituted the “highest manifestation of genuine praxis.”118 Strauss begins by underscoring the centrality of the critique of religion for Hobbes’ project. Hobbes returned repeatedly to the critique of religion, and every time in one of his four attempts at developing a science of politics.119 Thus, notably, “more than a third of De Cive and about half of the Leviathan are dedicated to theological questions” (268). Why must political science deal with theology and be developed in the form of a theological-political treatise? Strauss explains this in relation to Hobbes’ historical situation:

116

See the letter to Krüger of July 17, 1933, in GS3, 431. The plan to attain a French degreee was given up in December of 1933 (GS3, 435). By October of 1934 two thirds of the project were finished (GS3, 523). 117

For Strauss’s reaction, see note 31 of chapter two.

118

Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin (ed), The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), 32. See Strauss’s letter to Kojève of January 16, 1934 (in Strauss, On Tyranny, 223), and generally David K. O’Connor, “Leo Strauss’s Aristotle and Martin Heidegger’s Politics,” in A. Tessitore (ed.), Aristotle and Modern Politics: The Persistence of Political Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 119

GS3, 275: in Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642 and 1647), Leviathan in English (1651) and Latin (1668).

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Due to the consequences of the Reformation, theological politics became as questionable as ever: instead of leading to order and peace, theological politics appeared to lead with necessity to the horrors of the wars of religion. Should it finally come to order and peace, one would therefore need, so it appeared, a politics based on independent human reasoning alone. Such a politics had been worked out by ancient philosophy. But the philosophical politics that rested on the foundations laid out by Socrates, had not only not renounced its connection to theology, but could not renounce that connection; in any case, it had given theological politics some of its most dangerous weapons. One therefore needed a new politics that was not merely independent of theology but that would make theological politics impossible for all future times … That is the reason why the critique of revelation is not merely a post factum if necessary supplement of Hobbesian politics, but much more its presupposition, indeed the presupposition of Hobbes’ philosophy simply (272). Strauss suggests that this relation of presupposition is analogous to the relation between the critique of Sophistry and Platonic politics, such that the critique of revelation is constitutive of Hobbes’ philosophy and indeed contains “its true foundation” (274-75). Hobbes’ critique of the tradition proceeds as a dismantling (Abbau) of “the whole religious tradition erected on the foundations of the Scriptures” (312). His aim is, first of all, “only destruktiv” insofar as “it is not guided by a positive,

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original understanding of Scripture” (312-13). Hobbes’ critique of religion is thus at first only a critique of theology.120 Theology, which is not to be confused with religion, “rests precisely on the mixing of philosophy and religion; it is the at once comical and atrocious [grauenhafte] result of the perverse attempt to bring together Biblical simplemindedness [Einfalt] and Greek speculation” (279).121 Theology, thus conceived as onto-theology, must be combated not only because it turns philosophy (understood as a way of life) into its handmaid but specially because it leads to religious wars (279). Hobbes’ critique is directed primarily against the beliefs in incorporeal substances and in a supra-temporal or otherworldly power beyond the sovereign power of the state. These beliefs have their origins in the ‘Kingdome of Darknesse’, by which Hobbes means the Roman and Presbyterian Clerus (303). 120

Indeed, theology must be combatted also in the interest of religion itself, of piety (312-13).

121

In a letter to Krüger of November 17, 1932 Strauss refers to this “perverse interweaving” (widersinnige Verflechtung) as a central cause behind the difficulties confronting philosophizing in our time. The problem arises from the fight against this linkage (of philosophy and theology, or ‘onto-theology’) which begins with Hobbes (and other modern thinkers) and reaches all the way to Heidegger. The aim of combatting revelation gives modern philosophy its two defining traits: the attempt to find a firm, unshakable foundation, and its becoming practical or ‘worldly’. The attempt to find final foundations and achieve absolute certainty—driven by philosophy’s competition with Christianity—leads to the suppression of fundamental questions insofar as it leads to the belief that, given the ‘triumph’ of modern philosophy over orthodoxy, the Socratic questions ‘how should I live?’ and ‘why philosophy?’, as well as the question of Being, have been answered (GS3, 406; “Political Philosopy and History,” in Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 76.) In other words, modern thought considers the elementary questions as ‘historically settled’: hence its unradicality. On the other hand, philosophy’s ‘becoming worldly and the world philosophical’ also leads to a form of forgetfulness insofar as through its influence on politics, morality, and religion, philosophy becomes part of the process which it aims to steer. Thus the quest for knowledge of the whole is supplanted by the quest for knowledge of the whole historical process: metaphysics becomes philosophy of history. (See Natural Right and History, 320.) See also Strauss’s letter to Klein of December 1, 1932, where Strauss declares to be “completely in agreement with the formulation that we today lack an Existenz philosophy in the strict sense and that the failure of ontology in modern philosophy and science has to do with their ‘practical’ character” (GS3, 457).

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More specifically, the dualism of powers has its origins in a false understanding of Scripture while the dualism of substances originates in Greek philosophy— particularly in Aristotle. Two errors were taken over from Aristotle. The first error is the belief that ‘ideas’ or ‘essences’ are more than products of the imagination or, in his words, that “there be in the world certain Essences separated from Bodies, which they call Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes.”122 The second error is the “complete misrecognition [Verkennen] of the importance and the essence of the law,” (306) or the practice of judging good and bad on the basis of our own appetites and passions instead of recognizing the law of the state as the only measure (307). These errors have a common origin. They stem from the failure to put into question the imagination and passions of “common men and therefore of natural man” (308), which itself is a consequence of the fact that ancient philosophy was academic philosophy, or leisurely discourse that was not concerned with the matter of “rigorous truth”—the matter of the geometricians— for which no school is needed. Now, the reason why men got together to philosophize was to “have a good opinion of oneself” or, in other words, vanity. This vanity, in turn, or the “Vain Philosophy” of the ancients which “disput[es] Philosophically, in stead of admiring, and adoring … the Divine and

122

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 463.

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Incomprehensible nature” is an expression of the will to be like God and hence an expression of pride (310-11).123 So far Hobbes’ critique is a critique of theology (or onto-theology), and not a critique of Scripture or religion themselves. Indeed, Hobbes relies throughout on Scripture to prove theology wrong. Hobbes’ final aim, however, is to undermine the authority of Scripture itself.124 In order to do this Hobbes proceeds by using an extreme argument for the belief in revelation—indeed for divine omnipotence—and then turning it against itself. The center of Hobbes’ critique of religion is the critique of miracles as these are the proof of the existence of God (367). To prove that God cannot perform miracles presupposes the possibility of making scientific statements about God (341). Natural reason can no doubt know that there is a first and eternal cause of all things, “in other words, that God is eternal, unlimited and allpowerful” (341). If, however, God is all-powerful, all natural occurrences can be his will. It follows that all natural occurrences, insofar as they are the work of an all-powerful God, are just as incomprehensible as wonders (342). Thus, “in order to refute his opponents, [Hobbes] goes from the presupposition of his opponents further towards the complete abandonment of the idea of nature as an intelligible 123

Ibid., 467.

124

“Exactly as Spinoza did later, Hobbes with double intention becomes an interpreter of the Bible, in the first place in order to make use of the authority of the Scriptures for his own theory, and next and particularly in order to shake the authority of the Scriptures.” Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 71. On this strategy of the modern Enlightenment, see, more generally, Y. Yovel, “Bible Interpretation as Philosophical Praxis: A Study of Spinoza and Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 189-212; and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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order” (345). The following predicament arises: “Hobbes’ makes at the same time revelation religion and natural reason questionable.”125 Hobbes liberates himself from this predicament by “retreat[ing] to a dimension that is beyond the reach of God,” namely the world of consciousness (345). The idea is that God can do whatever he wants with nature; as long as I remain, my representations of nature remain and with them the matter and foundation of science (345).126 Natural science will then gradually lead to the disappearance of belief in miracles (347). At first sight, then, Hobbes’ strategy appears to be Cartesian.127 Yet, despite all the parallels, Strauss argues, its true basis is not so much the world of consciousness but “the fact of the arts” (366), that is to say, the differentiation of beings into what is by nature and what is artificial (366). For Hobbes, the arts are an “essentially pre-scientific” capacity, a “matter of ‘smartness’, of ‘experience’… of sound commonsense [that] shows itself … above all in dealings with human beings as knowledge of the nature and interests of men” (366-67). In other words, Hobbes’ critique of religion seems ultimately to rest on the fact that, even if we cannot understand the works of nature, we can understand our own works. 125

This is the case because, insofar as nature is not intelligible and one cannot distinguish between miracles and natural occurrences, it is also impossible to discern what is a miracle—containing a divine message—and what is not. Hence the fact that both natural reason and revelation become questionable. 126

Cf. the restatment of this argument in NRH, 201.

127

For the commonalities and differences between Hobbes and Descartes and Strauss’s argument that the thought of “Hobbes, not Descartes, [is] the elementary presupposition of any philosophy of consciousness,” see the letter to Klein of October 10, 1934 (GS3, 523).

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This, however, does not mean that the critique of religion follows once this island of security, as it were, is discovered. The critique of religion is rather constitutive of Hobbes’ (and after him, of the modern) understanding of nature. Specifically, Strauss argues that “[his] idea of natural science can only be understood radically from his critique of wonders” (344). This critique of wonders, in turn, presupposes a particular understanding of God, not as logos or as ordained power (potentia ordinata) but as will or absolute power (potentia absoluta) (cf. 371); and not as wisdom, goodness and justice but as complete unboundedness that may even be the source of evil itself. It is as a response to the human condition that results from such an understanding of the ‘order’ of natural and human things that Hobbes undertakes an idealistic turn that becomes foundational for modern philosophy.128 Strauss concludes by situating this problem within the theme that constitutes the leitmotif of his Hobbes studies of the 1930s. It was not Hobbes, he claims, that first made ‘the fact of art’ the basis (Grundlage) of philosophical

128

Strauss, “Philosophie und Gesetz,” in GS2, 14: (“the polemic against the extreme possibility of miracles becomes the foundation of the ‘idealistic’ turn of philosophy”). One of the consequences of this turn is a debasement of theoria. This is due to “[t]he prejudice that being is beingcorporal…or that being is resistance [Widerständigkeit] and palpability” (GS3, 358, cf. 362). This means that “seeing…is actually no longer intelligible [verständlich]. ‘The fundamental sense is touch’, as Dilthey says with respect to Descartes. And optics has no other task than explaining seeing as analogous to touching…” (GS3, 496 f.) (See also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 29 (the fear of violent death is the beginning of wisdom because it can be felt (as against merely ‘seen’), as well as 188). Janssens refers to the following political consequence: “[Hobbes’] polemic against the traditional dualism of power precludes him from addressing a more fundamental question that Strauss calls the ‘primitive and principal theme of politics’: ‘for every discussion about dualism or monism of powers presupposes the clarification of the meaning of ‘power’ [Gewalt], the answer to the question of the meaning and the purpose of the state.” Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 170 citing Strauss, Die Religionskritik des Hobbes, in GS2, 270.

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orientation. “It was of the same authoritative meaning for Sophistic reflection on the one hand and for Socrates and Plato, on the other, and it therefore became authoritative for the whole philosophical tradition” (368). Still, there is a crucial difference between the understanding of art of Hobbes and the tradition. “The tradition discarded by Hobbes understands art as the imitation, or as the perfection of nature … it thus presupposes that nature is an (intelligible) order” (368). If, however, following Hobbes, one maintains that nature is unintelligible, art can no longer be the imitation of nature and becomes “sovereign invention” (369). More specifically, the altogether different sense in which art is authoritative for Hobbes in comparison to the tradition can be seen in the fact that “for the originators of the tradition, for Socrates-Plato, the knowing that is authoritative for the artisan is a looking-away-at-something, namely at a form, an order that he wants to fabricate.”

C. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1935)

Strauss’s Religionskritik ends with a problem.129 Strauss seems to suggest that sound political philosophizing follows the model of fabrication. This is exactly

129

Strauss would probably have addressed this problem if he had completed the Religionskritik. See the letter to Klein of October 10, 1934 where he reports that after finishing his first book on Hobbes (Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis) he wants to complete the last third of the Religionskritik (GS3, 523). Note in this letter also the reference to the first MS on Hobbes Strauss began to write “3-4 years ago,” viz., his “exposition and critique of [Hobbes’] political science” which Strauss had sent to Schmitt. This MS Strauss also plans to complete but apparently

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the idea that Heidegger had identified, already in 1922, as the fundamental mistake of Greek ontology, namely, that human being in the world is like any other being of the world producible in some ideal form.130 As noted earlier, however, Strauss did not believe that the Socratic-Platonic approach presupposes the possibility of grasping a natural order which could serve as a model for ‘fabricating’ a political order. Strauss indicates this in the parenthetical note with which the Religionsrkritik concludes: “Cf. Gorgias, 503-504a with Phaidon, Rep.” (369). Gorgias, 503-504a refers to what the true art of politics presumably would be: making citizens as good as possible by speaking “with regard to what’s best,” that is, “with a view to something, just like the other craftsmen, each of whom keeps his own product in view and so does not select and apply randomly what he applies, but so that he may give his product some shape” (503e). As Strauss indicates elsewhere,131 Plato’s Phaidon on the other hand stands for the Socratic limitation of philosophy to the examination of reasonable speech.132

in a radically revised way (presumably because of the events of 1933): “…eine Darstellung und Kritik der politischen Wissenschaft … die natürlich ganz umgeworfen werden wird” (my emphasis). 130

See, e.g., Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), 286 (“ancient philosophy interprets being in the horizon of production”; “the idea agathou is nothing but the demiourgos, the producer pure and simple.”) 131

See, e.g., Strauss’s letter to Krüger of February 7, 1933 (GS3, 426).

132

See Plato, Phaedo, 96a7-8, 99e3. Strauss also points to the mythic character of the Timaeus. See letter to Löwith of August 20, 46: “Plato and Aristotle never believed that the ‘stars, heaven, sea, earth, conception [Zeugung], birth, and death provided natural answers to their unnatural questions’ (I am citing your letter). Plato ‘escapes’ as is well known from these ‘things’ (pragmata) into the logoi, because the pragmata cannot give a direct answer, but are mute riddles” (GS3, 668). The reference to the Republic is left unspecified. Cf., however, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft where Strauss points to Republic 473 A as the passage from which Phaidon 99E-100 A is to be “radically” understood. “[Socrates:] Can anything be done as it is said? Or is it in the

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From this perspective, as Strauss puts it in a letter to Jacob Klein, “the question of the right life and the right state and the answer to these questions does not depend on answering the question of the Being of the ideas, or more exactly: on the Platonic answer to this question.”133 Strauss continued his search for a post-Heideggerian and pre-Platonic political science in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.134 Apart from the last chapter, which we shall consider separately, the book is largely a continuation and deepening, but also, apparently, a partial reversal of the theses that Strauss had developed in his earlier Hobbes studies. The first thesis concerns the foundational place of Hobbes’ political science (Wissenschaft) for modern thought in general. Hobbes’ political science has a “foundational meaning not only for political science as one philosophical discipline among others … but for modern philosophy as such” (13). According to Strauss, Hobbes was the only thinker who posed “the fundamental question of man’s right life and of the right ordering of society” in the decisive moment “in which the tradition stemming from antiquity [the classical and theological tradition] was shaken and a tradition of modern natural science had not yet been

nature of acting to attain to less truth than speaking, even if someone doesn’t think so? Do you agree that it’s so or not? [Glaucon:)] ‘I do agree’, he said. [Soc.:] Then don’t compel me necessarily to present it as coming into being in every way in deed as we described it in speech.” On the use of contradictions between speeches and deeds as a primary tool of the Platonic dialogues, see Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 2, 227. 133

To Klein, October 13, 1934 in GS3, 529. Cf. the letter to Löwith of June 23, 1935, in GS3, 650 (“So-called Platonism is only an escape from Plato’s problem”). 134

Leo Strauss, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis, in GS3, 3-192. Hereafter cited in parentheses.

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formed and established.” “This moment was decisive for the whole age to come; in it the foundation was laid on which the modern development of political science is wholly based, and it is the point from which alone modern thought can be radically understood” (17). The very ideal of modern civilization, “the ideal both of the bourgeois-capitalist development and of the socialist movement, was founded and expounded by Hobbes with a depth, clarity, and sincerity never rivaled before or since.” Likewise, “not only the morality of the Enlightenment— including Rousseau’s—but also that of Kant and Hegel would not have been possible without the work of Hobbes” (13). To illustrate Strauss’s point here it helps to recall Heidegger’s claim that to understand Nietzsche properly one should first study Aristotle for “ten to fifteen years.”135 What Strauss is saying, in effect, is that to radically understand Heidegger—and modern philosophy as a whole—it is necessary to study Hobbes;136 only then will one understand Heidegger’s critique of the tradition as developed in his confrontation with Aristotle.

135

“It is advisable…that you postpone reading Nietzsche for the time being, and first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years.” What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, [1951/52] 1968), 73. 136

See Strauss, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 155, where Strauss refers to the consequences of Hobbes’ philosophy reaching all the way to Nietzsche’s Will to Power, aphorisms 693 ff. (Strauss also refers to Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 20, § 6.) See also Strauss, “On the Basis of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in What is Political Philosophy?, 170-196, specially 172: “…Bacon and Hobbes were the first philosophers of power, and Nietzsche’s own philosophy is a philosophy of power. Was not ‘the will to power’ so appealing because its true ancestry was ignored? Only Nietzsche’s successors [i.e., Heidegger—R.C.] restored the connection, which he had blurred, between the will to power and technology. But this connection is clearly visible in the origins of that philosophic tradition which Nietzsche continued or completed: the British tradition.”

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Strauss’s premise is that Hobbes is the foundational thinker of modernity, for only Hobbes raised the Socratic question of the right life in the decisive moment when the traditions were shaken, and only the question of the right life is truly foundational and authoritative (13). One key implication of this claim is that one cannot understand modern thought as simply derivative from traditions initiated by the classics. Strauss refers to Dilthey, who argued that “the fundamental part of Hobbes’ political science, the theory of the passions, is decisively conditioned by the Stoa” (16).137 To see the broader significance of Strauss’s argument here we recall parenthetically that in SS 1924 Heidegger made the theory of the passions the central part of his interpretation of Aristotle, and that he pointed to Dilthey’s study as an essential reference.138 We also recall that it was Heidegger who in the 1920s made the strongest case to the effect that modern thought is derivative from the classical tradition, and specifically from an understanding of Being as presence. Strauss seems to be suggesting that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle is un-self-consciously Hobbesian; or, more exactly, that it is determined by the reaction of the Historical School (represented by Dilthey) to modern (Hobbesian) natural right. This is true in at least three respects: Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle gives to a historically neglected work, the Rhetoric, a

137

Wilhelm Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, ed. G. Misch (Leipzig, Berlin, 1914), 293. 138

Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 178.

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central place in the development of western thought;139 as we shall see, Hobbes too rescued the Rhetoric from his own condemnation of the ‘metaphysical’ Aristotle, and made it foundational for his thought.140 Within the Rhetoric Heidegger’s interpretation is especially concerned with Aristotle’s treatment of the passions—which were the fundamental part of Hobbes’ political science. Heidegger does not deal with every passion, but focuses on the passion of fear— the Hobbesian passion par excellence.141 We can now proceed with Strauss’s argument. Against the view that Hobbes’ thought can be understood as conditioned by Stoic teachings, Strauss argues that while this may be true for De Homine (1685) it does not hold for Elements of Law (1640). More fundamentally, however, Dilthey fails to 139

For a concise history of the reception of the Rhetoric see George A. Kennedy, “The Composition and Influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 416-425. “Although the Rhetoric was much read in the later Renaissance and although important scholarship on the text and the fine commentary of E.M. Cope appeared in the nineteenth century, real appreciation of the significance of the treatise is a phenomenon of twentieth-century interest in speech communication and critical theory” (423). Cf. Eugene Garver’s claim to have written “the first book-length philosophic treatment of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in English in this century.” E. Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3. Garver relies on Arendt to support some of his main claims, yet he also notes the omission of ‘rhetoric’ in her work (5: in The Human Condition “‘rhetoric’ and Aristotle’s Rhetoric are not mentioned”). As I shall try to show in the next chapter, however, the most important insights of The Human Condition concerning the role of ‘speech’ in political life are based on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, viz., through Heidegger’s reading. Something similar could be said of the work of Gadamer and Strauss. Daniel Gross makes this point with regards to Arendt and Gadamer in his “Introduction,” to Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), esp. 4-5. I shall point to the relation between Heidegger’s reading of the Rhetoric and Strauss’s understanding of political philosophy in the remainder of this chapter. 140

Hobbes prepared the first English version of the Rhetoric published in 1637. George A. Kennedy, “The Composition and Influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” 423. 141

See Nancy S. Struever, “Alltäglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program,” in Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 113-114: “Like Hobbes before him, Heidegger defines the passions as intrinsically social, interpersonal, rather than simply physiological.” For Heidegger’s analysis of fear, see his Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 256-263.

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investigate whether the traditional doctrines that recur in Hobbes’ writings are not merely residues of a tradition that had been expressly rejected by Hobbes. Dilthey, Strauss argues, does not take Hobbes’ opposition against the whole tradition seriously enough. Had he actually confronted the ‘material’ of Hobbes’ politics—his peculiarly modern disposition—with traditional politics—i.e., both the ancient and Biblical-Christian dispositions—he would have seen that the traditional theses and concepts in Hobbes acquire a completely non-traditional meaning (16). The second central thesis of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes is that Hobbes’ political science does not rest on a naturalistic basis but on a moral teaching, that is, on precisely the modern disposition (or attitude [Gesinnung]) that marks his break with the ancient and Biblical traditions. This thesis had been developed by Strauss a year earlier in his ‘Remarks’ on Lubieński’s study of Hobbes. However, there is a telling difference. Strauss underscores Hobbes’ break with the tradition, implicitly arguing against the secularization thesis he had partly endorsed in 1933 (41). The opposition between vanity and fear, he argued then, presents itself “at first sight as the secularized form of the opposition between superbia and humilitas. In any case, it has as its condition the Christian conception of life” (259-260). More concretely, Strauss had argued that the opposition between vanity and fear is the transformation of the Socratic-Platonic opposition between “the shining mirage of the ‘political life’ and the truly Good that is only accessible to reasonable insight” (260). Seen from this perspective, the

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modern disposition unknowingly takes the side of philosophy or theoria—to which alone the ‘good life’ of reasonable labor: the capitalist and socialist ideal reveals itself—against the political life, which appears as the life of vanity and prestige. Strauss had thus taken a stance against the primacy traditionally accorded to theoria as unproblematically disclosing ‘the Good’ and (together with Schmitt) for the seriousness of the political. This implicit critique of ancient theoria—which had been an explicit one in earlier writings—is absent in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.142 Instead we begin to see the opposite: the problem of modern philosophy as a whole beginning with Hobbes is its ‘practical’ character. This becomes clear in the third thesis that Strauss develops in the book: the idea that Hobbes’ political science is a repetition of the Socratic-Platonic quest for a techne politike. Strauss points to the repetition thesis already in the introduction—in the claim that Hobbes was the only one to raise the Socratic question of the right life and of the right order of society at the moment when the Biblical and classical traditions were shaken. But more substantively, Strauss devotes a central chapter to Hobbes’ humanistic—or, we could say, ‘political, not metaphysical’—‘Aristotelianism’. Specifically, Strauss sees himself as the first scholar to begin to draw the consequences of the fact that Hobbes’ condemnation

142

Strauss provides rather a critique of Hobbes’ debasement of theoria by pointing to the importance (for Hobbes) of the fear of death as that which alone gives man’s life a direction (29); as the “beginning of all knowledge of the real world” (36); as the grounds of conscience (38); and as the “necessary condition not only of human living together but of science” (39; and also 170). See also the letter to Klein of October 13, 1934 (now “I see the relation between the theme and structure of Hobbes’ theory of seeing and ‘vanity’”) (GS3, 527).

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of Aristotle did not include his “‘Politics’, i.e., ethics, politics and, above all the Rhetoric”; indeed, so much so that “the central chapters of the Hobbesian anthropology are nothing but free reworkings of [it].”143 Dilthey, himself drawing on Tönnies, had already noted that “Hobbes … began from the moral-political problems”; that “he was for long Politiker and humanist” before he turned in the direction of the natural sciences influenced by Euclid. And indeed, Hobbes only became acquainted with Euclid (and later with Galileo) when he was forty (in 1629), and up to that moment he was predominantly influenced by the humanism of the classical historians and poets (most notably Thucydides). However, to leave things at that, namely, at a biographical or historical peculiarity, Strauss argues, is not enough for a thinker of the rank of Hobbes (47). There must be a reason, a “philosophical motivation” behind Hobbes’ humanism (47). Strauss notes that at around age twenty-two Hobbes’ interest shifted from Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics to his morals and politics, “to his philosophy peri ta anthropeia” (philosophy concerning human affairs) (49). Hobbes’ turn from metaphysics to politics implied an appropriation but also a transformation of Aristotle’s teachings. Hobbes’ shift of interest to the philosophy of human affairs implies a “replacement of the primacy of theory by the primacy of praxis” (49). For Hobbes the justification of philosophy does not lie in the joys of knowledge but in the benefit of man, that is, “in the safeguarding of human life and the

143

Letter to Krüger and Gadamer of May 12, 1935 in GS3, 444.

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increase of human power” (49). Thus, contrary to Aristotle, Hobbes asserts that both prudence and wisdom have a practical aim (50).144 The implication is that “the difference between prudence and wisdom loses any relation to the difference between praxis and theory” (50). For indeed, according to Hobbes, “not he that hath skill in geometry, or any other science speculative, but only he that understandeth what conduceth to the good and government of the people, is called a wise man’” (50).145 Strauss argues that this contrast to Aristotle has its ultimate reason in “Hobbes’ conception of man’s place in the universe, which is [diametrically] opposed to Aristotle’s” (50). While for Aristotle “it would be strange to regard politics or practical wisdom as the highest kind of knowledge, when in fact man is not the best thing in the universe” (Nic. Ethics, 1141a22) for Hobbes man is “the most excellent work of Nature” (50).146 By comparing certain passages of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with their corresponding variations in Hobbes’ Elements (1640), Leviathan (1651), and De Homine (1658), Strauss shows that Hobbes studied Aristotle’s Rhetoric afresh each time he composed his systematic expositions of anthropology (57). This comparison points to the historical sources of Hobbes’ Aristotelianism, and indirectly of his privileging of praxis over theory. Strauss notes that Hobbes’ 144

To elucidate Aristotle’s understanding of theory—and to underscore the contrast to Hobbes’ interpretation—Strauss refers to Nic. Ethics, 1141a19ff: “…theoretical wisdom must comprise both intelligence and scientific knowledge. It is science in its consummation, as it were, the science of the things that are valued most highly.” He also suggests a comparison with Metaphysics Alpha 1, presumably because there the emphasis is more on the practical origins and ends of the quest for wisdom as Heidegger had stressed in SS 1922 (see chapter one). 145 In other words, we may say that for Hobbes “the politikos is the true philosophos.” See Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 93. 146

See Hobbes, Leviathan, 9.

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praise of heroic virtue, specially in his early work, was influenced by his reading of the Italian humanists. The characteristic tendency of the humanist reading of Aristotle is to replace the theoretical virtues by heroic virtue (63), and thus more generally to affirm the primacy of praxis over that of theory (63). This tendency is part of a larger movement towards the historical study of man that, in the end, would lead Hobbes away from the Aristotelian tradition altogether (97). Hobbes repeats ‘political science’ not only out of humanistic interest in man and in the right norms of human life, but out of an unprecedented concern with the application of these norms. Indeed, while Aristotle claimed that the precepts of reason have no influence on most human beings,147 he still thought that precepts do affect the conduct of at least certain (good) natures. Hobbes, by contrast, doubts the effectiveness of philosophical precepts as such. Accordingly, the lessons of history replace the precepts of philosophy as the primary tool for the education of the nobility (100). In doing this, Hobbes was following a general tendency that began in the sixteenth century towards the methodical study of history. Strauss refers to different motivations leading to this turn in thinkers from Machiavelli to Bodin to Bacon. Some of these motivations were: to extract from history certain teachings or concrete maxims for right action (102, 104); to study the ‘material’ on which virtue and right action may be realized—viz., what men do instead of what they ought to do (107)—thus, to study human tempers and

147

Cf. Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 1179 b 3 ff.

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dispositions, specially the passions;148 to find a popular ideal that can be realized that is not superhuman, as Aristotle’s ideal of the contemplative life;149 to suppress the morality of obedience, or to sidestep the problem of obedience altogether, for instance, by setting passions against each other “and to master one with another” (111); and to make History itself lead to the knowledge of norms (such that what is morally good is what has been successful and virtue is identical to smartness (113)). Specially this last motive points to a general development in the sixteenth century through which philosophy was substituted by history as magistra vitae (114). All of these motivations, Strauss argues, were ‘sublated’—that is, transcended and incorporated—in Hobbes’ ‘new political science’.150 The new political

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Strauss refers to Bacon: “And here again I find it strange, as before, that Aristotle should have written divers volumes of Ethics, and never handled the affections, which is the principal subject thereof; and yet in his Rhetorics … he findeth place for them…” (The Advancement of Learning, in Basil Montagu (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852), vol. I, 225); Descartes: “The defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions” (The Passions of the Soul, in John Cottingam, et. als. (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 328.) Spinoza: “…no one, so far as I know, has defined the nature and strength of the emotions…” (Ethics, III, Preface, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol. II, R.H.M. Elwes, trans. (New York: Dover, 1951), 128.) Hegel: “The question of the means by which Freedom develops itself to a World, conducts us to the phenomenon of History itself…The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents. …Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are … the most effective springs of action” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, 12 (Frankfurt, a.M., Suhrkamp, 1986), 33-34.) 149

Strauss refers to Bacon: “…men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and Angels to be lookers on” (The Advancement of Learning, 220); Bodin: “But civil life demands perpetual action; the whole state cannot be engaged in contemplation…” (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 34.) 150

“With the same argument which Hobbes himself, in the introduction to the translation of Thucydides, used to prove the need for studying history along with philosophy, he later argues the necessity for his political science: political science is necessary because ‘most men’ do not obey precepts” (117).

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science teaches a morality that can be applied (117). Rather than setting the passions against each other to realize certain given norms (as Bacon, for instance, attempted), Hobbes seeks to devise a politics that is already in harmony with the passions (120).151 And yet, crucially as we shall see, Hobbes’ political science qua science claims also to be beyond the passions, and indeed to contradict them.152 The result is a political science that both reflects and grounds the ideals of the bourgeoisie.153

151

Hobbes thereby opens the way to Hegel: “the passions work themselves and their aims out according to their constitution and produce the edifice of human society, in which they have provided law and order with power against themselves” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 42). 152

Hobbes’ doctrine is at once ‘realistic’ (in conformity with human passions, particularly the fear of violent death) and ‘idealistic’ insofar as it seeks to ground a new order of society in which permanent order and peace will become possible for the first time. See Natural Right and History, 169 and 200. See also GS3, 171. 153

“Not only does Hobbes not attack the bourgeoisie which is sensibly aware of its own interests, he even provides it with a philosophical justification, as the ideals set up in his political philosophy are precisely the ideals of the bourgeoisie. It is true that he condemns the desire ‘to grow excessively rich’, but ‘justly and moderately to enrich themselves’ is ‘prudence … in private men’. It is true that he condemns the exploiting of the poor, but he takes it for granted that ‘a man’s Labour also is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing’. For ‘the value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give’.” “Along with peace at home and abroad, freedom for individual enrichment is the most important goal of human living together.” Strauss, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 138. See, more generally, 31 (“continually to out-go the next before, is felicity”; “but this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost”), 138-141. The references are respectively to Behemoth, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), 44 (“grow excessively rich…private men”); Leviathan, ed. A. D. Lindsay (London: Dent, 1928), ch. 24, 130 (“a mans Labour…”), ch. 15, 78 (“the value of all things…”); Elements of Law, ed. Tönnies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), Part I, Ch. IX, 21 (“continually to out-go…”)

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Strauss’s Second Sailing (1935/36)

On October 10, 1934, Strauss announced to Jacob Klein that “at the latest in 14 days I will have finished my first work on Hobbes (‘Hobbes’s political science in its genesis’).”154 Seven months later, Strauss wrote to Gadamer and Krüger with the same announcement.155 During those seven months Strauss added a final chapter to The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. This final chapter is Strauss’s first sustained exposition of Socratic political philosophy.156 The core of the chapter is a confrontation between Hobbes’ political science as developed after his discovery of Euclid and Plato’s philosophy. Hobbes’ turn to an exact science of politics set him for the first time explicitly against Aristotle’s political science. For what Aristotle disputed was precisely that the objects of political science could be treated as exactly as the objects of mathematics.157 In doing so, Aristotle was opposing Plato who required that the most important subjects—the true and the beautiful but above all the Good—be

154

GS3, 523.

155

May 12, 1935, GS3, 443-447. Note that Strauss seems to have written the introduction to Philosophy and Law that spring as well. See the letter to Kojève of May 9, 1935, in Strauss, On Tyranny, Gourevitch and Roth (eds.), 230: “The introduction is very daring and will interest you if only because of that. … In my view it is the best thing I have written.” For the reactions of Löwith, Klein, Scholem, and Benjamin to the Introduction, see Meier’s preface to GS2, xxvi ff. 156

During those seven months Strauss began a study of Plato that he had had to delay (October 13, 1934, GS3, 528-29). He also read Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (more on this below). 157

Strauss refers to Nic. Ethics, 1094 b 12 ff. and 1098 b 5 ff. Cf. Rhetoric I 10 in fine (GS3, 159).

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treated with the greatest precision.158 Hobbes’ turn to Euclid thus brought with it a turn away from Aristotle to his master Plato.159 Whereas Aristotle philosophizes from what people say or from speech—from “the names of things”—Plato, according to Hobbes, philosophizes from “the ideas of things” (160). Insofar as it is oriented to speech, Aristotelian ethics is nothing but a “description of passions, and by no means what an ethics must above all be according to Hobbes, a fundamental critique of the passions” (160).160 By contrast, Plato, through his esteem of mathematics, manages to liberate philosophy from “the spell of words” and thus from their indefiniteness and ambiguity, which is the source of all strife and contradiction (161). Strauss argues that this is a caricature of Plato that results from Hobbes’ failure to engage in a thorough study of the sources. Such a study reveals that “in truth it is precisely Plato who originally ‘takes refuge’ in speech,” and that in that

158

Strauss refers to Rep. 504 d-e. (Discussing the four cardinal virtues—justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom (504 a5)—Socrates suggests that “for these virtues it won’t do to look at a sketch … but their most perfect elaboration must not be stinted.”) Compare also Rep. 484 c. (Here Socrates compares those legislators who do not act upon a precise contemplation of the “truest” to “blind men”; the exact reference is to those “unable—after looking off, as painters do, toward what is truest … referring to it and contemplating it as precisely as possible—to give laws about what is fine, just, and good”); Laws 964 d-965 c. (Athenian stranger: “Is there any way in which there would be a more precise vision and seeing of anything than that which is the capacity to look to one idea from the many and dissimilar things?” It is necessary to “compel … even the guardians of our divine regime to see with precision … what it is that we assert is one in courage, moderation, justice, and prudence, and is justly called by one name, virtue.”) (GS3, 159). 159 Indeed, whereas in his humanistic period Hobbes had nothing to object to the view that Aristotle is the classic philosopher, he later came to see Plato as “the best of the ancient philosophers” (GS3, 159). (The reference is to Six Lessons [1656], in English Works, ed. W. Mollesworth (London: Longman, 1845), Vol. VII, 346.) 160

“Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others of like authority … have given the names of right and wrong, as their passions have dictated; or have followed the authority of other men…” (Elements, II, ch. 8, 13) “Their Morall philosophy is but a description of their own Passions … they make the Rules of Good, and Bad, by their own Liking, and Disliking…” Leviathan, ch. 46, 366.

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respect “Aristotle was only his disciple and successor” (161). Indeed, if anything it is Plato, much more than Aristotle, that orientates himself by speech (162).161 Strauss’s explanation is as follows. “Plato ‘takes refuge’ from things in human speech about things as the only entrance into the true reasons of things which is open to man” (162). Anaxagoras and others had tried to understand the things in the world by tracing them back to other things in the world. The problem with such a naturalistic explanation is not only that it is not an explanation at all, but that the kind of physics it presupposes leads necessarily to the destruction of all secure and independent standards. It leads to the belief that in the human world everything is in order. How, then, can the order of the human world be discovered? Plato turns to the examination of human speech to find in it the proof of the existence of transcendent ideas. The proof is that “whenever we speak of virtue—whether we attribute virtue to a man, a woman, a child, or a slave—because in all of these cases we use the same word ‘virtue’, we also always mean the same thing” (162). But do we really mean the same thing when we speak, for instance, of courage as a virtue? Clearly not. In fact, neither do we mean the same thing, nor do we use the same word, nor do we agree that courage is to be regarded as a virtue. For example, for Aristotle courage is “a mean with respect to fear and confidence” whereas for Hobbes it is to be fearless and even “contempt[uous] of wounds and

161

This is exactly the opposite of what Heidegger suggested. See, e.g., Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 140, 137, as well as Plato’s Sophist, 234.

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death.”162 “[C]ourage is noble” for Aristotle, whereas for Hobbes—especially in his later works—it is not a virtue at all.163 Aristotle’s ‘courage’ (andreia) Hobbes occasionally calls ‘magnanimity’164 and we call manliness.165 And yet, precisely “[t]he fact that what men say is contradictory,” for instance with respect to courage, “proves that there is truth hidden in what they say” (163). Plato’s turn to speech is not a turn “to speech in itself, but to speech in its contradictoriness” (165).166 Perhaps a discussion of the essence of virtue or human excellence would end up dropping the question of courage, but it would be “sheer madness for someone to assert that he is not just” (Protagoras, 323b); and, granted that even justice could be seen as a matter of convention, we would not say of the good things that they are so only by convention.167 “All say of the good that they really wish it,” and they mean “the truly good and not merely the appearance of good,” and because “they desire it, they know, therefore, that they 162

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 1115 a 8. Hobbes, Elements, I, ch. 9, paragraph 4.

163

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 115 b 23. See GS3, 30-31, 67, 134, 186 for Strauss’s argument that courage disappears as a virtue in Hobbes. 164

GS3, 70. In Hobbes, Elements I, ch. 19, par. 2.

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Precisely this is the critique of Aristotle against the “seduction of speech,” that “the same word is used in multiple senses—that, for instance, ‘virtue’ said of a man means something other than ‘virtue’ said of a woman—and that that which in speech is ‘prior’—as, for instance, ‘good’ in speech, is ‘prior’ to ‘man’—is therefore by no means ‘prior’ in being.” Aristotle, Met. 1077b1ff. Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 101. 166

It is not a turn to “ontology” but to dialectics. Cf. David Lachterman, “What Is ‘The Good’ of Plato’s Republic?,” St. John’s Review, Vol. XXXIX, nos. 1 and 2 (1989-90): 139-167, 151: “Plato thinks there are forms because he thinks that the disputes and disparities set in motion when we engage in talk about our most serious concerns and desires both have a point and point us to something stable; in contrast, the modern Nominalist, Hobbes or Locke, for example, regards it as the philosophers’ most important task to bring such pointless disputes to a halt.” 167

Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 18. See Plato, Republic, 505 d.

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lack it” (164). This, in essence, is the proof of the existence of a transcendent good that orders our actions. What is Strauss’s aim in this apparent attempt to rescue a theory—Plato’s ‘theory’ of the ‘ideas’—from the refutations or ‘deconstructions’ it has been subjected to from Aristotle to Heidegger? In preparing the final chapter of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes Strauss studied a work by Jacob Klein that he would characterize as “the best work of our generation.”168 While we cannot discuss this work here, what seems to be Klein’s key accomplishment must at least be mentioned—namely, to show that ancient mathematical science, however ‘abstract’, was and remained a deepening or a perfecting of the common sense or ‘natural’ understanding of the world. This stands in sharp contrast to a modern science that is no longer a perfection but a modification of the natural understanding. Now, Hobbes’ turn to an exact political science and to Plato, as we saw, was inspired by his discovery of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid. Even though Strauss does not discuss Hobbes’ understanding of Euclid, his critique of Hobbes implies that, just as we no longer understand that ancient science did not conceive of numbers as “symbol generating abstractions,” so Plato’s ‘theory’ of ideas is not an abstraction from the commonsense understanding of things but a sharpening of that understanding.169 Strauss seems to be suggesting, then, that the modern understanding of Socratic-Platonic 168

Letter to Klein of December 7, 1934 (GS3, 533). See also “Preface to Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft,” in JPCM, 454. 169

GS3, 185; see also 536.

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political science is affected by a failure to grasp the pre-scientific, and, more specifically, dialectical, starting point of the Greek investigation into being. We recall that Heidegger’s basic objection against ancient (especially Platonic) ontology was that it remained precisely at the level of a ‘dialectics’ which Heidegger characterized as a ‘philosophical embarrassment’. It is necessary to keep this in mind in order to understand Strauss’s critical engagement with Hobbes. Strauss argues that Hobbes’ appropriation of a misunderstood Plato had “disastrous” or “fatal” (verhängnisvoll) consequences (165). In other words, Strauss suggests that ‘Platonism’—as the origins of the ‘metaphysics of presence’—is in fact a modern problem that originates in Hobbes’ repetition and reduction of the Socratic-Platonic techne politike. What does this repetition and reduction consist in? Hobbes repeats Plato insofar as both considered it necessary to develop an exact and paradoxical political science premised on a radical critique of opinion and appearance (as against truth), of the great (as against the right), and of passion (as against reason). Briefly, Plato’s political science opposes true virtue to pseudo-virtue. True virtue demands a turning of the soul towards the (precise) contemplation of the good; it is “essentially wisdom.” Pseudo-virtue, by contrast, lives from the reputation and honor that result from the appearance of virtue.170 Plato’s quest for the essence of virtue is paradoxical in the literal sense that it 170

True virtue and pseudo-virtue differ only in their grounds: true virtue is the consequence of “divine madness,” of a “purification” of the soul, or a turning of “the whole soul.”

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opposes prevalent opinion. This becomes clear in Plato’s critique of the most brilliant or shining virtue, namely, courage. Courage—“the standard ideal of the Lacaedaemonian and Cretan laws”–was “usually understood [as] the virtue of the man, his capacity, without fear or effeminacy, to help himself, to protect himself from injustice or injury, to assert and save himself. According to this ideal, the perfect man is the tyrant…” In the tyrant, who “in limitless self-love, in frenzied arrogance, seeks to rule not merely over men but even over gods,” the nature of courage becomes revealed: courage is in truth “nothing more noble” than a “disguised” expression “of man’s natural self-love, of man’s natural hedonism.” Courage, for Plato, is consequently the lowest virtue (167). And, insofar as “the unequivocal coordination of virtue with manliness is thus called into question, the equality of the sexes in the ideal State becomes inevitable in principle” (167). Not courage but prudence, and above prudence, wisdom and justice, are the highest virtues (168). Wisdom in itself is supreme, but “for man [from an exoteric point of view] it is nevertheless justice” that reins. Indeed, contrary to Aristotle, who asserts the superiority of the theoretical life to ethical virtue, for Plato the philosophers, while divinely gifted, remain human beings who “form only one species of humans among others, and are thus under allegiance to the laws of the State which has as its aim the maintenance of the whole and not the happiness of the parts” (168). For Plato, therefore, “there are only political virtues” (169).171

171

Strauss refers to Plato’s Letter VII, 335 d (“…no city nor individual can be happy except by living in company with wisdom under the guidance of justice”) (168).

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Hobbes’ repetition of the ideal of an exact and paradoxical moral philosophy leads him to follow the same chain of reasoning. The rejection of pseudo-virtues (which aim merely at reputation and honor) also becomes constitutive of his theory. For instance, as part of his quest for a new (bourgeois) morality, Hobbes ceases to affirm, as he did in Elements of Law, that “the only law of actions in war is honour” to suggest instead in Leviathan that “Force and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall virtues” (133).172 This example also illustrates the fact that, like Plato, Hobbes only recognizes political virtues, for indeed, great and ‘honorable’ actions are not necessarily just actions (133).173 As we have seen, Hobbes too “finds himself forced into a radical critique of the natural ideal of courage” (169), and “for him also the antithesis between the fitting and the great is of supreme importance…” (169). And yet, Hobbes also reduces Plato to the point that his turn to an exact political science “hides the deepest antithesis to Plato which can be imagined” (171). “In the same breath” that “Hobbes demands a completely passionless, purely rational politics – he also demands that the norm established by reason be in harmony with the passions” (171). This follows from the requirement that the norm be applicable in the extreme case. Thus in Hobbes, passion—and particularly the fear of death as a motivation that can be everywhere and at any time invoked in man—replaces reason. Indeed, it is the fear of violent death, that 172

Hobbes, Elements, Part I, ch. 19, section 2; Leviathan, ch. 13, 66.

173

“Honour consists only in the opinion of Power. Therefore the ancient Heathen did not thinke they Dishonoured, but greatly Honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their Poems, committing Rapes, Thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts…” Leviathan, ch. 13, 66.

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following the above example, moderates the “unchecked race of the state of nature in which force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues.” Fear moderates this race into “reasonable competition, into the regulated ‘play’ of bourgeois society”—a ‘play’ that is driven not by reason but by a reasonable selfishness kept within bounds, we could say, by our ‘being-towards death’. The further ways in which Hobbes repeats and reduces Plato—or, in other words, in which he remains caught in the Platonic tradition or in the polemics against it—can be mentioned more succinctly. First, following Plato and the Stoa, Hobbes came to conceive of the (Christian) opposition between vanity and fear—superbia and humilitas—as an opposition between passion and reason (thus replacing reason by fear in a most un-Platonic way) (170). Second, like Plato, Hobbes begins his political science from an examination of the ‘nature’ of man. Yet, unlike Plato who begins from the question concerning the ‘idea’ of man,174 or with the closely related question concerning the essence of virtue or the perfection of man (175), Hobbes begins from the ‘nature’ of man understood as “what falls to man’s share before all education” (151). Third, whereas for Plato (and, we could add, Aristotle) what is closest to us (such as our ‘nature’ in its possible perfection) is also what is most obscure and hence most in need of dialectical investigation, for Hobbes what is closest to us is simply the evident, ‘empirical’ grounds upon which the machinery of the state can be erected (174). Fourth, this shows that whereas for Plato the idea of a political science (conceived as the quest for the

174

Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, 403 a 29ff. 403 a 15.

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right order of human life as living together) was absolutely problematical, for Hobbes political science thus conceived was unquestionably possible and necessary (cf. 173).175 Finally, fifth, whereas Plato aimed at an exact political science in order to find “the undistorted reliability of the standard,” Hobbes aimed at exactness for the sake of its universal applicability (172). The consequences for modern politics with which Strauss concludes his analysis can best be understood by returning to the most important contrast between Hobbes and Plato, which according to Strauss is also what distinguishes ancient from modern politics as a whole. Whereas ancient politics was oriented by speech, modern politics fundamentally renounces this orientation (185). The reason for this renunciation is originally the same that also guided Plato, namely, “the problematic nature of ordinary speech, i.e., of ‘popular’ valuations, which one may with a certain justification call natural valuations” (185). “But whereas Plato goes back from the natural valuations to the truth hidden in them, and therefore seeks to teach nothing new and unheard of, but to recall what is known to all but not understood, Hobbes, rejecting the natural valuations in principle, transcends them and goes beyond towards a new, future, freely projected, ‘a priori’ politics” (185). In other words, Hobbes’ paradoxical moral philosophy “is destined sooner or later to change from paradox to an accepted part of public

175

Hobbes does not raise the “radical question of the meaning of science” (156). Cf. Strauss’s later more explicit description of what it means to take for granted that political science is “possible or necessary” (NRH, 167). Essentially it means not to take into account the “sophist” tradition of Protagoras, Epicurus, or Carneades which “was not dedicated to the concern with the right order of society as with something that is choiceworthy for its own sake” (NRH, 168).

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opinion” (185). Hobbes raises “an incomparably greater claim for his political science than Plato had done” (185). Thus “Hobbes travels the path that leads to formal ethics and finally to relativistic skepticism: the massive increase of the claims made on political science leads at last to the denial of the very idea of political science [namely, on the part Burke and other critics of modern natural right] and to the replacement of political science by sociology” (186). The “final stage” of modern politics, Strauss argues, must also be understood from this standpoint. Whereas Plato follows ordinary speech and therefore does not deny the virtue-character of courage, but simply opposes its overestimation, Hobbes, by contrast, denies that courage is a virtue. And “just as disdain of speech finally leads to relativistic skepticism,” the negation of courage leads to the polemical (re)affirmation of that “‘natural’ ideal of humanity” (see 415), “which becomes more and more acute on the way from Rousseau by Hegel to Nietzsche and is completed by the reabsorption of wisdom by courage, in the view [for instance, of Sorel] that the ideal is not the object of wisdom, but the hazardous venture of the will” (186).

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Concluding remarks

To begin to draw conclusions from this long chapter it is necessary to connect it with the considerations laid out in chapter two. There we suggested that Strauss’s quest for a political science or philosophy grew out of a confrontation with various philosophical and political discourses: neo-Kantianism and Hermann Cohen in particular, the critique of the western tradition undertaken by Nietzsche and Heidegger, the political thought of Hobbes, the pre-modern rationalism of Maimonides, and the neo-orthodox thought of Rosenzweig and Barth. I argued that to understand Strauss’s project one has to depart from Heidegger, who—in a way that this chapter has tried to specify—addressed fundamental questions with a self-consciousness of the problems involved that surpassed that of his contemporaries, as well as (though perhaps to a lesser extent) that of thinkers of the past. Heidegger confronted the problem of ethics which had been ‘silently dropped’ by neo-Kantianism. He recovered the problem of ontology largely ‘missed’ by the western tradition, or submerged in its ‘onto-theology’. He stressed that human being-in-the-world cannot be understood as one of the beings of the world; that, studying human nature theoretically, philosophy has failed to examine human existence or Dasein—i.e., that being for which its own being is always at issue and which comports itself to its being in a practical-moral attitude; that being for which, consequently, practical wisdom and self-knowledge is the one thing that matters; finally, that being which is transcendent or open to the whole

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of beings and pervaded by the relation thus established to beings. Heidegger attacks the ‘general domination of the theoretical’—the overriding concern to secure already known knowledge as universally valid and binding—without, however, embracing the ‘primacy of the practical’—viz. the foundation of theory upon mere practical faith and a will to truth. He thus avoids the abandonment of rationalism that led some of the greatest minds of the time, such as Franz Rosenzweig, to embrace orthodoxy. Finally, Heidegger may have pointed the way towards a completely atheistic philosophy that would have completed the project prepared by Hobbes. Around 1929 Strauss began to develop a critique of Heidegger as a thinker whose superior self-consciousness notwithstanding remained limited by the ‘spiritual situation’ of the time. That situation was dominated, first, by the ‘historical consciousness’—the belief that one can understand past thinkers better than they understood themselves, or that we know more because we have discovered that history is not simply a succession of events but a dimension of reality—and, second, by a new morality or intellectual conscience that constitutes ‘a kind of self-denial’ that forbids itself belief—or peaceful dwelling in contemplation of the highest beings—‘because truth has come to be believed to be repulsive’. In this chapter we see how Strauss attempted to begin to respond to the predicament described. We began in 1931 with Strauss’s engagement with the late Hermann Cohen, whom Rosenzweig had described as the master of twin

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disciples: himself and Heidegger. The late Cohen had abandoned the neo-Kantian view that religion must grow into ethics and turned to the pre-modern religious ethics of Maimonides. Confronting the possibility of a life guided by divine revelation, Cohen came to admit that philosophy is ultimately impotent when it tries to know the Good or the divine. Cohen’s late philosophy became explicitly anti-foundationalist (much like Heidegger’s position in the Davos disputation). That is, we lay it down as a hypothesis or we somehow know that every human pursuit aims at some good, and thus knowing the good becomes the one thing needful. But there is no foundation for this, or the foundation is a ‘nonfoundation’. This is the challenge of ethics as confronted by Heidegger, Lévinas, Strauss, and others who witnessed the disintegration of Kantianism in the 1920s. The link noted by Derrida (referred to in chapter three) between neoKantianism and Heidegger (and Strauss, we may add) now becomes clear. These are strands of thought for which ‘ethics’—variously understood as the question of the good as the ultimate foundation of knowledge, or of different ‘possibilities for life’, or of man’s place in the world and of his proper comportment—is the center of philosophy. Specifically, Strauss explores the idea of Socratic ‘political philosophy’ as ‘the first philosophy’ (though without yet using these terms). In Strauss’s early thought Socratic philosophizing aims at ‘mutual understanding and harmony’, the ‘truthful state’, and the ‘common good’; all virtues ‘are only possible and understandable from the State’. Socratic philosophizing finds an essentially political aim in the quest for the common good. It also begins from

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ethical-political considerations: to ask ‘why?’ radically means to ask ‘why is it good?’ Socratic philosophizing begins from the political as the site in which fundamental oppositions—concerning, for instance, good and right, just and unjust—become explicit. In 1931 Strauss takes a different stance on the crisis of political philosophy. The problem is not that ethics may not be able to articulate the phenomena that give rise to an ethical existence or that the spiritual situation of the time is dominated by an ‘absolutely honest atheism’ based more on fortitude or probity than the love of truth. Rather, the gravest threat is the rebirth of Aristotelianism. We find here an emerging opposition between ‘political philosophy’ and phenomenology as the force behind the Aristotelian revival. Strauss sides with other members of the Marburg school of Plato interpretation in opposing a form of philosophizing aimed at ‘pure contemplation of beings and understanding of Being’. The ‘conditionedness of man’ and history must not lead to the abandonment of an unconditional questioning after the good even if this questioning finds no answer. ‘Phenomenological intuition’ must not obscure the fact that our primary access to reality is through the ‘shared, public, or political’ conception of the good we hold. A further symptom of the crisis of political philosophy is the failure to confront the ‘theological-political predicament’ or, we could say, to consider that philosophy may not have originated in wonder at the fact that ‘there is something rather than nothing’ but in an ethical-political quest for an ‘invisible measure’ or a natural law after the collapse of a pre-philosophical

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nomos. Strauss thus points to the necessity of recovering the theological and philosophical traditions undermined by Nietzsche (and Heidegger)—the traditions of ‘good and evil and theorein’, ‘Plato and the prophets’—in a non-traditional way. To reach back to the traditions non-traditionally Strauss attempts a detour from ‘Jerusalem’—or the Judeo-Christian reception of classical thought—to ‘Mecca’—or its Jewish and Islamic reception. ‘Onto-theology’ is sidestepped by a tradition that does not engage in the rational exploration of the divine as practiced in Christian theology. This tradition preserves (or gives rise to) a form of thinking that begins and culminates in political considerations: first because it must justify itself before a revelation that takes the form of a divine law (and not of a mystery demanding faith—viz., the God-man) and, second, because, contrary to the experience of Latin Christendom where philosophy had to find a place alongside an already existing authority (the Church), in the Islamic world philosophy aimed itself to become the authority. There arises here a further meaning of political philosophy as the inquiry into the conditions for preserving philosophy ‘when it becomes confused or extinct’ and for achieving human perfection. Insofar as the ‘natural principles’ inherent in man are insufficient for that purpose, the knowledge of physics must be complemented by a science of ‘intellectual principles’: thus, physical science culminates in a ‘meta-physical’ ‘political science’.

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Strauss seems to have embraced Islamic political philosophy as a way to think the problem of the being of man beyond onto-theology and cosmology, or in other words, beyond the idea of a ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ human essence. In a way that seems to go back to the young Heidegger’s claim that an adequate account of a thing must not begin from physiology but from the way it is spoken about—the logos which ‘is very often identical with [its] eidos’—Strauss will argue that ‘Whatever may be the proper starting point for studying human nature, the proper starting point for studying the perfection of human nature … is what is said about these subjects or the opinions about them’. Drawing on Farabi’s reading of Plato, the perfection of human nature seems to lie for Strauss in ‘the golden mean equally removed from a naturalism which aims only at sanctioning the savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master and the conqueror; and … a supernaturalism which tends to become the basis of slave morality’.

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CHAPTER FIVE Arendt’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1950-1958) Chapter three described the context in which Arendt’s thinking developed. Its most important characteristic, I argued, is the fact that in it philosophy and theology, as Arendt put it, “belonged together.”1 The full significance of this fact shall become clear in what follows, as we trace her turn to political philosophy in the early 1950s. Despite having worked in Paris on her study of Rahel Varnhagen (where she completed the last two chapters in 1938) as well as on the project that would result in Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951), Arendt had stayed away from philosophy and dedicated herself, particularly during her first few years in America (from 1941 to 1945), to what she described as political journalism and history.2 Arendt returned to Europe for the first time in a three-month-long trip from November 1949 to March 1950. In that trip she met with Jaspers and Heidegger. As her correspondence shows, these encounters were decisive for Arendt’s return to philosophy,3 and in particular for her quest for a “new political philosophy.”4

1

Hannah Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 9. (Hereafter EU) 2

See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, edited by L. Kohler and H. Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 23. 3

For the movement from politics and history to philosophy see ibid., 31 (Jan. 29, 1946: “I have learned to think politically and see historically”; “I have refused to abandon the Jewish question as the focal point of my historical and political thinking”), 61 (Sept. 4, 1947: “…[I have] a genuine

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Arendt did not become the founder of a school, and even though there exists a worldwide community of Arendt scholars, few, if any, would claim, as Heinrich Meier does of Strauss, that we owe to her “the resuscitation and refounding of political philosophy after its apparent end.”5 And yet, Arendt’s ambitions in the early 1950s went in a sense even beyond reviving and refounding political philosophy: “the West,” she claimed “never really had a proper political philosophy.”6 For at least two decades, from the first entries in her notebooks in 1950 to the courses she taught in the late 1960s, Arendt was concerned with this problem.

fear … about getting into philosophy now”), 97, 129 (Jan. 28, 1949: continues to be “overwhelmed by a fear that philosophy would gobble me”), 142 (Sept. 29, 1949: still very critical of Heidegger), 158 (Oct. 4, 1950: taking up philosophy again). 4

See Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” EU, 433, 445; “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, 1990: 73-103, 103. See also Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, 2 vols. edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 15 ff. (=The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 93); 295, 465; HC, 299; Ich Will Verstehen, edited by Ursula Ludz, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 2006), 106; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed., rev. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), ix (on the need for a “new political principle” and “a new law on earth”). 5

Heinrich Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss: Die Geschichte der Philosophie und die Intention des Philosophen (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1996), 9. 6

Letter to Kurt Blumenfeld of October 14, 1952. Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, “…in keinem Besitz Verwurzelt.” Die Korrespondenz, edited by Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1995), 68. See also Denktagebuch, 15 (“theology and philosophy … have no valid answer to the philosophical question: What is politics?” (=Promise of Politics, 93)); 253-54 (“The great tradition itself led there [to totalitarianism], hence there must have been something fundamentally false in all of western political philosophy”); letter to Jaspers of March 4, 1951, in Arendt-Jaspers, Correspondence, 166 (“…Western philosophy has never had a clear concept of what constitutes the political”).

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Political philosophy in Arendt’s Denktagebuch

During the summer of Arendt’s return from her trip to Europe she began to keep a diary, which has recently been published in two volumes containing close to a thousand pages of annotations dating from 1950 to 1973. In them we find the central ideas that Arendt would develop at length in her published work. The diaries also record her study of what she considered to be the major thinkers of the western tradition. Most importantly, as I shall argue, they contain much that is left unsaid in her work that is key to understanding her ethical-political thought. The index of the two volumes provides an overview of the questions and themes that occupied Arendt over the decades.7 In order of importance as measured by the number of entries, these are: philosophy / political philosophy / philosophy-politics / action / acting / politics / the political / world / worldly / work / thinking / freedom / man / human / human world / will / willing / domination / ruling / God / plurality / the Greeks / Christianity / fabrication / truth / the true / love / evil / radical evil / otherness / the other / beginning / commonsense / violence / law / history / reason / necessity / the necessary / reality / religion / means / means-ends / appearing / Being / modernity / morality / moral / the moral / society / judgment / judging / capacity to judge / nature / power /

7

Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1201-1230.

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solitude / death / immortality / speech / dialogue / logic / idea / opinion / right / justice / measure / standard / meaning / common / event / public / public-private. Arendt’s interlocutors were almost exclusively the great thinkers of the western tradition: Plato, above all, followed by Kant; then Aristotle and Hegel; then Heidegger and Socrates. Marx and Nietzsche follow upon them—albeit with a considerably smaller number of entries. Arendt also returned repeatedly—yet again far less so than to Marx and Nietzsche—to Homer, Cicero, Augustine, Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau; and less often to Heraclitus, Pindar, Jesus, Descartes, Spinoza, Goethe, Lessing, Locke, and Kierkegaard. Very rarely did Arendt refer to contemporary thinkers except for Heidegger. Jaspers appears twenty times, Benjamin six; Faulkner and Kafka recur some five times; on not more than three occasions each does Arendt refer to other contemporaries such as Cassirer, Stalin, Sorel, Valéry, Jünger, Gilson, Bergson, Husserl, Jaeger, Schmitt, Rosenzweig, Krüger, Kojève, Koyré, Jonas, Berlin, Cochrane, Cornford, and Freud. One way to describe the movement of Arendt’s reflections is as follows. Arendt undertakes two deconstructions, respectively, of philosophy and theology or draws the consequences of their collapse as traditions. Her aim is, first, to answer the question why the western tradition lacks a political philosophy in the proper sense, and second to think of the possibility of an alternative—a ‘new political philosophy’. Thus Arendt’s engagement with the defining thinkers of the tradition is, on the one hand, ‘deconstructive’—notably in the cases of Plato,

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Hegel, and Aristotle—as well as ‘restorative’ or aimed at recovering their truly political insights—notably in her reading of Kant, Socrates, and Heidegger. The result is her own proposal to rethink some of the fundamental questions (and concepts) of politics, drawing, I shall argue, mainly on Socrates and Heidegger.

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Arendtian (Anti-) metaphysics

God is an ever-recurring theme in Arendt’s diary. ‘God’ appears in roughly the same number of entries as ‘plurality’. And except for ‘philosophy’ and ‘politics’, no other themes are discussed as often as ‘action’ and the ‘world’. Arendt thinks continuously, year after year, about God, the world, and man (or human action). What does Arendt have to say about these subjects? To set her answers in context, it must be recalled that God, the world, and man were traditionally the three central subjects of ‘special’ (as distinguished from ‘general’) metaphysics—namely, of theology, cosmology, and psychology. In spite of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, these subjects continued to occupy the minds of some of the most important theological and philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century. This was notably the case, as we saw in earlier chapters, of the Jewish neo-orthodox thought of Rosenzweig and of its Christian counterpart, specially as conceived by Bultmann. Neo-orthodox thought treated God, the world, and man ‘dialectically’ in order to respond to their character as impossible yet essential subjects of any discourse addressing the human situation. To recall only the surface problem, the ‘dialectic’ for Rosenzweig consisted in the fact that, on the one hand, “we know in the most precise manner, we know it with the intuitional knowledge of experience, what God taken by

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Himself, what man taken by himself, what the world taken by itself ‘is’,”8 and yet, on the other hand, “Of God we know nothing,” “Of the world we know nothing,” “Of man … we … know nothing.”9 That is, we know what God, the world, and man are—if taken by themselves, viz., “God is only what is divine; man only human; the world only world.”10 But of these subjects we know nothing when we miss the ontological difference and explain God or man in terms of nature, or nature and man in terms of a divine essence, or God and nature as a representation of the cogito. In a similar way, Bultmann insisted on the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of addressing God, the world, and man. All talk of God, he claimed, is either sin—viz., arguing whether He ‘Ought to have said?’— or meaningless—if God does not exist.11 This, however, means that we cannot talk about our existence either—about man—for “God is the reality that determines our existence.”12 Furthermore, any talk of the world, any ‘worldview’, necessarily misses those living relationships that hold ‘the world’ or

8

Franz Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’: A Few Supplementary Remarks on The Star,” in Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’ (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 77. 9

Franz Rosenzwig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 23, 42, 63. 10

Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’,” 76.

11

Rudolf Bultmann, “What Does it Mean to Speak of God?,” in Faith and Understanding I, trans. L.P. Smith, edited by Robert W. Funk (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 54, 65. 12

Ibid., 56-57.

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humanity together, such as love, gratitude, reverence.13 Yet, of course, Bultmann also devoted his life to talking continuously about God, the world, and man.

God Like Bultmann, Arendt denies that we can know anything about God: “Theology—the science of God […is] actually a blasphemy.”14 “God is the only [thing] I cannot think about. Theology tries to think about God” (277). We cannot know anything about God’s attributes or about his judgment: “The so-called Thou of God is only the blasphemy of absolutizing the Thou of the thinking dialogue with myself” (220). Ranke’s claim that “‘Before God all generations of humanity appear equally justified’” is an “outrageous, completely naïve blasphemy for a Christian” (266). “The … blasphemy that lies in all talk about the power … of God is grounded in the fact that power cannot be the property of an individual…” (167-168).15 We cannot know anything about God, but Arendt thinks continuously of God. Whether this is merely to dispel ‘God’s shadows’ is not clear. A 13

Ibid., 59.

14

Arendt, Denktagebuch, 261 (hereafter cited in parentheses). Compare, however, “Religion and Politics,” in EU, 371 for a different, more ‘reasonable’, definition: “Theology treats man as a reasonable being that asks questions and whose reason needs reconciliation even if he is expected to believe in that which is beyond reason.” 15

See also “A Reply to Voegelin,” in EU, 406 f. (on “the wide-spread and strictly blasphemous modern ‘ideas’ about a God who is ‘good for you’ … that is, ‘ideas’ which make of God a function of man or society. This functionalization seems to me in many respects the last and perhaps the most dangerous stage of atheism”). Cf. also “Religion and Politics,” EU, 369.

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characteristically ambiguous statement reads: “What is decisive about the socalled religious crisis of our time is not that we no longer ‘know’ who God is, but that in the collapse—in the justified collapse—of all piety it becomes apparent that we do not know and have never known how to think God” (Ibid.). This suggests that at least the question how not to think God is crucial: human judgment is only possible “when one has a conception of God that in all seriousness leaves everything open,” thus assuming “that God may not judge at all and may judge completely differently” (8). Why not change the subject, as perhaps Richard Rorty would suggest? Arendt, in any case, never did so. It could also be retorted that her belief in God is a private matter with little or no relevance for her political thought. My analysis of Arendt’s dissertation suggests otherwise, and this shall also become clear in the present chapter. Two statements suggest that such a dismissal of Arendt’s ‘religious beliefs’ would also be a dismissal of her very understanding of truth, which she shared with a lineage of thinkers that include Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger: “The truth of all revelation religions lies therein that truth announces itself to us only as revelation” (205); “this [is] the truth of revelation religions, that every thought and every truth open up only in a Blitz” (249).16

16

On truth, see Denktagebuch, 279-80 (on truth as Blitz in relation to Heidegger, viz., as revelation of what is not present); 420 (truth is essentially particular, namely that which shows itself to me in its unconcealedness); 469 (we expect truth from poets, not from philosophers); 489 (truth is not the result of but the origin of thinking: “Nobody even begins only to think who does not already hold a truth in their hands”); 600 (“where truth is experienced primarily as something seen—with the Greeks in the eidos—it must become arretos, ineffable; where it is experienced primarily as something heard—with the Jews as the Word of God—its depiction must be forbidden.” This explains why we tend to think of truth as something beyond the senses—in fact it

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The World Arendt’s understanding of the world manifests the same kind of ambiguity that one also finds in the theological thought of the 1920s. According to Bultmann, notably, “‘the world’ is not a constant” or “an ‘original’ reality”; it “is not conceived at all as an objective phenomenon.”17 The world is God’s creation but it is also what men make of it. We are in the world but not of the world; or, rather: this is our choice—to ‘fall’ to the world or be saved by grace.18 In her dissertation Arendt discusses Augustine’s conception of the world as a desert in which we

is because we lack a sense that connects the five senses); 684 (no argument reaches truth; at the most an argument follows truth). See also 18 (the only possible justification for natural law: man as created in the likeness of God has received the creative energy to organize men into the likeness of divine creation; hence the task of politics would be to “establish a world as transparent for truth as is God’s creation”); 39 (It depends on us whether there is truth in the world. Forgetting is the only actual sin because it extinguishes “truth that has been [gewesene Wahrheit]”); Cf. “Truth and Politics,” “while we may refuse even to ask ourselves whether life would still be worth living in a world deprived of such notions as justice and freedom, the same, curiously, is not possible with respect to the seemingly so much less political idea of truth. … no human world … will ever be able to survive without men willing … to say what is” (229). “Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us (263-64). See also DT, 46; 48; 142. Cf. “Christianity and Revolution,” 155: “Philosophy concerned with truth ever was and probably always will be a kind of docta ignorantia—highly learned and therefore highly ignorant. The certainties of Thomas Aquinas afford excellent spiritual guidance and are still much superior to almost anything in the way of certainties which has been invented in more recent times. But certainty is not truth, and a system of certainties is the end of philosophy.” On truth as revelation see, further, “Understanding and Politics,” EU, 317, 322; OT, 477; “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 31: “our traditional religion is essentially a revealed religion and holds, in harmony with ancient philosophy, that truth is what reveals itself, that truth is revelation…”; 37. 17

R. Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” in Bultmann, Faith and Understanding I, 166 (“not conceived at all as an objective phenomenon”). 18

See Ibid.

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thirst to go beyond to reach our proper source.19 In her diaries and in later writings, she uses this metaphor, now attributed to Nietzsche, to refer to the modern world.20 Arendt refers to the expansion of the desert in terms of “the withering away of everything between us.”21 This is an expansion that threatens to extinguish even those “oases” of worldlessness as “the isolation of the artist,” “the solitude of the philosopher,” “the inherently worldless relationships between human beings as it exists in love and sometimes in friendship,” or “the realm of faith.”22 We “are not of the desert though we live in it,” and it is our decision, we could say, whether to ‘fall’ and adjust to the desert, to feel at home in it, or to “transform it into a human world.”23 But what is a human world? Echoing Augustine’s judgment against making ourselves at home, Arendt argues that a human world is not a “man-made reality.” A ‘man-made reality’ is bereft of truth, for truth is an event, and precisely not reality (490). Neither is a human world a world in which each person is treated as an end and never as a means. For in a ‘kingdom of ends’ where each person is understood as an end in itself nature becomes a mere means, 19

Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, edited by Joanna V. Scott and Judith C. Stark (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 81-82. 20

Arendt, Denktagebuch, 44, 54, 217, 524, 539; The Promise of Politics, 201-2.

21

The Promise of Politics, 201. (From the conclusion to the lecture, “The History of Political Theory,” which Arendt delivered at UC Berkeley in the spring of 1955.) 22

Ibid., 202, 203.

23

Ibid., 201. Cf. Arendt, “What is Existential Philosophy?,” in EU, 186: “[W]e can [now] accept the ‘fragmentation of Being’ … and we can accommodate the modern sense of alienation in the world and the modern desire to create, in a world that is no longer a home to us, a human world that could become our home.”

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and “one could not go any further in the ‘de-divinization’ of the world [Entgötterung der Welt], in its vulgarization” (57).24 Indeed, in a world where each is an end, not only nature and the whole world become a means, but the other too becomes ‘worldly’, an “object of the will” (109).25 For “[i]n the encounter between two human beings, two ends (Selbstzwecke), the world opens up as an abyss that keeps the ends eternally apart separated by the sum of means that the world is.” Under such circumstances “the respect for the ‘dignity of man’ is like an impotent [ohnmächtiger] salute over an abyss” (109).

Man As her reflections on the world show, man for Arendt is a dweller in the world who is somehow not of this world. Man’s ‘unworldliness’ becomes manifest in the phenomenon of love. Love—understood philosophically as a power and not as a feeling—is among the most recurrent themes in Arendt’s diaries. Precisely as a power that manifests itself as an event (Ereignis) and not as a human feeling, love is something divine (“ein Göttliches”) (49). “I have feelings; love has me” (51). Love “takes possession of the heart, but it does not originate in the heart. Love is a power of the universe insofar as the universe is alive. It is the power of life, and 24

For Kant’s concept of a ‘kingdom of ends’, see his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83-88. On ‘dedivinization’ as a consequence of Christianity, see also DT, 144. 25

“Das Böse bei Kant ist … den Anderen in den Abgrund der Mittel zu reissen, ihn zu verweltlichen, zu ent-subjektivieren, ihn zu einem Objekt des Willens zu machen” (DT, 109).

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[it] guarantees its forward march against death” (372). “As a universal … power of life love is not really of human origins. Nothing integrates us as securely and inescapably into the living universe as love…” (373). And yet, love is a “world destroying principle” as it burns away “the between of the world and its space” (373). Love is thus “life without world.” As such it shows “that man without world still is, that he is ‘more’ than world” (373). Arendt finds in death a second phenomenon of man’s unworldliness. In the singularity of death, “man is in fact no longer of this world”; “[a]s such [the experience of death] corresponds to the solitude of God … we can only be close to God in death, because only then … do we become what he eternally is” (460). “Everything alive disappears in death; that through a process of passing away it dissolves into non-aliveness only means that it disappears as that which it was … while the rock survives … and outlasts all that is alive. Therefore there dwells in everything that is alive … something non-earthly, and hence one can perhaps determine life as dwelling” (314).26 Man’s unworldliness is one of the reasons why Arendt insists that of man we know nothing or very little. “Could it not be that precisely the essential ‘unknowability’ of man is his being made in the image of God?” (126). Another

26

See Arendt’s annotations of her reading of Heidegger’s, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” at DT, 144: “The way in which … we humans are on this earth, is … dwelling.” “The human being is ‘not from this world’, he is on it only in the mode of dwelling.” See M. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, revised and expanded ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993): 347-363 (Arendt’s reference can be found on page 349). For a superb analysis of Arendt’s mature work as a response to “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” see Jussi Backman, “Für das Wohnen denken. Heidegger, Arendt und die praktische Bessinung,” in Alfred Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2007).

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reason is the Augustinian notion that the human heart is too dark to be seen (125). A third reason is human freedom: “Both together, the freedom and the darkness of the heart, make the investigation of man impossible” (125-26).27 For Arendt, man is a creature that transcends the world. Yet precisely as creature (and not creator) man—or human life—is not, after all, divine (491). One central paradox of the modern world is that its atheism presupposes that man is divine. For “Marx-Nietzsche,” Arendt writes, “God may have created the universe, but man, insofar as he is man (and not an animal species), created himself – through work etc. …Insofar, then, as man created himself qua man, he is ‘over-man’ [Übermensch], that is, he is God.28 This form of atheism, the only adequate one and axiomatically … accepted by modernity as a whole, makes man more unearthly [unirdischer] than any Christianity ever tried” (454). Secularization does not make our existence more worldly; rather the opposite is true.29

27

See also DT, 537: man has no ‘nature’, even though he can only live under natural conditions. We can only recognize (erkennen) nature insofar as we are not nature (“…dass wir nur ‘Natur’ erkennen können … einzig darum, wiel wir nicht Natur sind”). See also DT, 734 f. 28

See also 139-40 on Nietzsche: the overman is, like God, an spectator of the eternal return.

29

Secularization does not mean that the plan of salvation is ‘secularized’ into the notion of progress, for example, but that the divine attributes are made worldly (verweltlicht). Arendt suggests the following example of this process: “As a working being [Engels: labor created man] and as a writer of history [Ranke] man has become his own creator and his own judge.” DT, 266. See “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 21 f. (on “Labor created man”).

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The ethical-political implications of Arendtian (Anti-) metaphysics

How does Arendt’s critique of secularism—that is, of a secularized understanding of man as worldly creator; of the world as a kingdom of ends or as a man-made reality; and of God as something we can talk about and whose judgments we can replicate—manifest itself in her political theory? Three aspects are particularly revealing.

Arendt’s critique of morality… The first manifestation of Arendt’s critique of secularism is her critique of morality on the grounds that it is anti-Christian. Indeed, according to Arendt, that for Kant the duty to do something implies that one can do it—since reason would not legislate anything unreasonable—is “the sharpest anti-Christian position or the ‘moral’ position taken to the extreme against all religious [positions] that by no means presuppose a ‘posse’ [a capacity to do] but even belie [such a capacity]” (163).30 Or to take another example: Kant’s claim that “[h]appiness contains all … that which nature provides us; but virtue contains what no one other than the human being can give himself…” shows the “gracelessness of all morality in the

30

That morality cannot require us to do anything ‘unreasonable’ or ‘ultra posse’—beyond what we can do—follows simply from the fact that “morality for Kant is nothing but the universal legislation of reason” (DT, 164). Arendt’s references refer to Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, in Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 338, and “On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice,” in Ibid., 280.

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face of all religion.31 Finally: “The will to power is nothing else than the will to live the life into which I have been ‘thrown’ as if I had chosen it. – One can never forget that Nietzsche was essentially a moralist” (308; my emphasis).32 Arendt’s critique (especially in the case of Kant) seems to be directed against the attempt to make human and divine normativity coincide, not because there is no such thing as divine normativity but because what is given to man, qua given, already exceeds the human (see 163). Whether there is a ‘measure’ or a ‘norm’ for the humanity of man is an open question to which, as we shall see, Arendt constantly returned. What is certain, though, is that a morality that goes out of its way to avoid any possible conflict between theory and practice (namely, by not demanding anything unpracticable) misses an essential aspect of the human condition: precisely that it is conditioned by what is beyond the human— the ‘natural’ or the ‘divine’. In contrast, a true ethics would not begin from what the human being ‘gives himself’ but from an understanding of that to which the human belongs, or that wherein it dwells.33 31

Ibid., 285 (my emphasis). See also DT, 68: the Kantian conception of action—pure spontaneity—is a revolt; it is the highest unthankfulness vis-à-vis that to which we owe our Dasein. Cf. 250: “Wie sehr überhaupt die christliche Religion, die als solche Moral werden konnte, römmischen Ursprungs ist.” (Arendt seems to be suggesting here that early Christianity, before it became ‘Romanized’, is pre-moral.) 33

For Arendt’s critique of morality see also: 73-74 (all morality can really be reduced to keeping promises (on promises see 73-4, and esp. 135: as promising is the central moral phenomenon, so is contract the central political phenomenon); 54 (“morality only reveals itself when life [i.e., inclination [Neigung] over duty] has been killed”; only once the heart has become deserted are we left with morality and duty as the only exit. “As long as the desert reigns, morality has its Right, and woe to us when it too no longer reigns. The rule-less desert is a greater horror than the ruled”); 140; 242-43 (“All morality is purely and simply Sittengesetz – a question of ‘mores’ – and nothing else. Because one looked for good and evil in morality and then naturally only discovered different prohibitions, tabus, etc. one thought that good and evil do not exist. Certainly not in morality”).

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…the Will Arendt’s critique of autonomous morality is closely linked to her critique of the will. “Since Kant [or] since Rousseau,” Arendt notes, “the will is the legislative organ.” And, indeed, for Kant “…the will is nothing other than practical reason…”34 What is wrong with this? Arendt suggests that the problem begins with the loss of an understanding of the law as a norm prior to the human will. The categorical imperative to will that the maxim of our actions become a universal norm,35 she points out, implies that the man of good will “is not in need of given laws since he can always find their principles in himself or can produce them out of his will – just as the mathematician does not need formulas since he can always derive them anew” (502).36 Is, then, a good will not unqualifiedly good, as Kant suggests?37 To see why Arendt would reject this Kantian premise one must consider her genealogical understanding of the will.38 Arendt links the will to the concept of sovereignty: “sovereignty becomes a reality in willing” (84). Sovereignty, in turn, is grounded in the notion of “the 34

“…the will is a capacity to choose only that which reason independently of inclination cognizes as practically necessary, that is, as good.” Kant, Groundwork, 66. 35

Ibid., 73.

36

See Ibid., 67.

37

Ibid., 49.

38

Arendt also develops a phenomenology of the will as determined by needs; as groundless; and as indivisible. See DT, 95, 101, 102, 244.

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uniqueness and absoluteness of the individual, of each human being, as it was understood in the Christian teaching of salvation” (158). According to this teaching, the “sovereign individual, whose relation to the other is determined and guided by the relation to himself—love your neighbor as yourself,” “does not need others, but only the help – grace, redemption etc. – of God” (158-59). In modern times, the secularization of this notion leads to Hegel’s view that “I am created as will, i.e., as ‘infinitum actu’ [and thereby] I can ‘overcome’ both death and my creatureliness” (84). Indeed, Hegel radicalizes the Kantian affirmation of the practicality of reason: not only is the will “practical spirit” (as it was “practical reason” in Kant), but “[a] will which resolves nothing, is not an actual will….”39 Thus, he becomes sovereign who has the power to will and the resolve to act. This, according to Arendt, implies that “man—and neither God nor nature—is sovereign on earth.”40 Further, it implies “that laws depend on the will and that specific bodies [Körperschaften] or men must be equipped with the power to will, to will for others” (141).41 39

G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7 (Frankfurt, a. M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), § 4, addition (p. 48), § 13, addition (p. 64). Cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1, 57 (“For Hegel, knowing and willing are the same, which is to say, true knowledge is also already action and action is only in knowledge.”). 40

On this absence of God and nature see also 244.

41

“Nietzsche’s will to power is only the inversion (Umkehrung) of this power to will as it was expressed in all sovereign states of his time. This was a typical idea of the nineteenth century. Namely, in order to have the power to will, there must be first of all a will that wills to will power [der die Macht zu wollen will]; or in order to be able to will, I must will to will. Hence Heidegger’s: will to will is will to power. This makes the problem of power the central political factum of all politics that is grounded in sovereignty – hence all politics excluding American politics: that I must have power in order to be able to will” (141). On Heidegger and the will to power see also 185. Cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991): “Nietzsche’s expression ‘will to power’ means to suggest that will as we usually understand it is

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A good will would then be for Arendt, in opposition to Kant, a kind of perversion of the idea of individual sovereignty that, far from being the foundation of autonomous law, breaks the ‘law’—whose substance or source, of course, is the question. Thus, Arendt argues that Kant’s good will would have to be interpreted as a counterpart to radical evil—namely, as the “radical good” (182). An example would be: “love your enemies” (181). This is a word meant by Jesus as “a maxim of radical good that surmounts all laws” (182). And yet, “it is clear that here injustice is immediately committed – who loves his enemies no longer defends his friends. … The injustice (Unrecht) committed by the enemies, since it is not persecuted, is not replaced by justice (Recht)” (182).

…and Justice Justice—together with law, right, and standard (or measure [Maßstab])—are themes that figure far more prominently in Arendt’s diaries than in her writings meant for publication. Just like God, the world, and man, they are part of our commonsense understanding of things that has been distorted—if not altogether rendered meaningless—by the philosophical and theological traditions, as well as by the secularizing responses to them. As the example above shows, Arendt understands human affairs in terms of right and wrong or justice and injustice (Recht/Unrecht). However, her political theory lacks a discussion of such actually and only will to power” (42). Willing is different from “sheer desire, wishing, striving, or mere representing.” Willing (as against mere wishing) is “the submission of ourselves to our own command, and the resoluteness of such self-command…” (40); it is (in contrast to “get[ting] wholly absorbed in … striving”), a “resolute openness to oneself, [which] is always a willing out beyond oneself.” “Willing itself is mastery over… [it] is intrinsically power” (41).

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questions, for as she boldly claims: “in no way can [justice (Gerechtigkeit)] have anything to do with politics” (20), or as she also suggests, “justice no longer exists as a category” (245). The main reason why Arendt refrains from discussing justice seems to be ‘the darkness of the human heart’. There cannot be “absolute justice on earth because no-one can look into the human heart—or, in other words, no-one can survey the whole reality of a deed or of an event” (20). “[T]he limits of human justice [are] based on the absolute impenetrability [Unerforschbarkeit] of the human heart” (38).42 The premise here—and the reason why justice has nothing to do with politics for Arendt—is that justice applies to individuals, and such an “absolute and absolutely required individualization to the singular and single-most,” would make justice fall out of “ta koina” (the common) (20).43 A different reason for the absence of justice in Arendt’s political theory is that it is somehow no longer possible. “Justice always presupposes a ‘consensus’” (244). For instance, the punishment of a criminal is an act of justice insofar as the

42

On what the darkness of the heart means, see DT, 721: we can only understand that which is expressed or told in a story (Geschprochenes, Erzähltes); the object of understanding is meaning, as against, for instance, trying to know how Orestes felt while he killed his mother—if that is because he hated her or loved the father, etc. 43

The result is a form of Arendtian an-archism (in the literal sense) which prevails, paradoxically, because “[t]here is in reality only religious authority,” such that “all else is an imposture [Schwindel]” (185). Then again, one may also be tempted to characterize Arendt’s position as a libertarianism of sorts. See, e.g., 150: “Laws should never be decreed for any domain except the strictly ‘political’. They protect me from the injustice [Unrecht] of others, they protect the others from the injustice that I can commit to them. But they should never pretend to protect myself from myself—as in all legislation against vice, game, dipsomania [Trunksucht]. Any irruption of the moral into the political, i.e., of moralistic reasoning … is always an attack on freedom.” Cf. 158: “The horrible thing about laws is not the punishment or the rigorousness of the legal demands, but that it implies judging and condemning.”

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criminal would himself judge his act as a crime, and “even the law of God requires a listening and approving and (only in the last instance) obeying human being” (244-45). But this consensus has broken down. Arendt suggests that international law during times of war used to rest on the implicit consensus—if not among states then at least within them—that murder should not occur, or that the civilian population should be distinguished from the military such that an unarmed person ceases to be an enemy. Since the First World War, however, this consensus no longer exists (245). Hence the fact that justice “no longer exists as a category” (245). Having considered Arendt’s critique—and recasting—of the traditional theological and anti-theological discourse on God, the world, and man and its political consequences, we shall now refer to what can be seen as the second branch of her ‘deconstruction’ of the western tradition, as it originated not in ‘Jerusalem’ but in ‘Athens’.

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Arendt’s Critique of Platonic Political Science

For a thinker who is often read as a “nostalgic” “neo-Aristotelian” or “Grecophile” who suffered from “polis-envy,” Arendt showed remarkably little interest in ancient Greece until late in her life.44 Even though Arendt famously knew ancient Greek as a youth well enough to conduct her own Graeca (or Greek Circles) when she was fifteen,45 the young “Pallas Athena” did not begin to study and write about the classics until she was about forty-four years old. Not surprisingly, then, when Arendt did turn to a sustained engagement with classical philosophy, it was largely—but by no means exclusively—for the sake of locating and confirming the origins of the ‘anti-political’ prejudices of western thought that had led to the crises that culminated in totalitarianism. Over the decades, Arendt returned to Plato more often than she did to any other thinker in her notebooks. The reason seems to be simple. As she explained in a letter to Kurt Blumenfeld in 1952, her project at the time was “[to read] philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche in order to find out why the West never really had a proper political philosophy; or the other way around, why the great tradition 44

For “Grecophile,” see Hannah Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), xxiv-xxv. For “neo-Aristotelian,” see Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 596. For “polis-envy,” see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 69. 45

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 32.

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falls mute when we ask our questions.”46 Plato, that is, had to be investigated in order to trace the origins of the failed political philosophy that the west inherited. Nevertheless, as I shall argue, her confrontation with Plato—especially insofar as it was informed by Heidegger—led to her discovery of Socrates. This means that Arendt implicitly saw that Plato points beyond him—back to Socrates. Her reading of Plato thus testifies to a deep fascination with what he saw—in spite of all that he missed or neglected. Arendt began her reading of Plato with three primordially political dialogues: Laws, Statesman, and Republic. Drawing on certain key passages, she began to articulate a critique which can be divided into the following five headings.

The question of a techne politike:

Its matter: classes or parts? In one of her first entries on Plato, Arendt notes that in raising the question concerning the difference between a ‘class’ (genos) and a ‘part’ (meros) Plato pointed to a “core question of the theme: What is politics?”47 “Politics does not have to do with gene [classes] but with mere [parts].” For, example, Arendt

46

Letter to Kurt Blumenfeld, October 14, 1952, in Arendt and Blumenfeld, “…in keinem Besitz Verwurzelt,” 68. See also “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 316: the crisis of the early nineteenth century came when a society “could no longer give an account of its categories of understanding and standards of judgment when they were seriously challenged.” 47

See Plato, Statesman, 263 a.

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suggests, it makes no sense to organize “women qua women.”48 “The mortal sin is to display the meros as a genos: the concept of race.” “What is it, however, that gives the meros its consistency without turning it into a genos?” (19) The “consistency” of the political community is elusive. Arendt notes that Plato correctly grasped the truth that the political community—“the ‘res publica’, the koinon”—does not exist “prior to or even for a moment independently of [the] mutual reliance [between human beings]” (26). “This truth,” Arendt claims, “was completely buried over by Aristotle’s zoon politikon” (25). Indeed, time and again Arendt would insist that one of the central prejudices of the western philosophical tradition is “the assumption that there is something political in man that belongs to his essence. This simply is not so; man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships” (17). The problem with Plato—as Arendt understands it in her reading of the Statesman—is that he sought to bridge the common and individual goods in his characterization of the statesman as the shepherd that gives each one his due.49 But such legislation, Arendt argues, is always inadequate “because it can never take into account the individual, and thus reality as it really is” (19-20). Yet, of course, Plato knew this, and in that sense he confirms Arendt’s point: “the nomos

48

This may be in reference to Statesman 262 e: “A better division, of course—one which forms a true division into two distinct classes—would be to divide the human race into male and female.” 49

Arendt refers to the Platonic definition of the political art (techne) in the Statesman (276 b7) as “care of the whole human community together … kingly rule over all human beings” (23).

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acts atechnos,” or “techne is better than nomos.” A techne politike is necessary— even if highly problematical—because, as Plato puts it in one of the passages Arendt extracts: “[legislation] could never accurately embrace what is best and most just for all at the same time, and so prescribe what is best. For the dissimilarities between human beings and their actions, and the fact that practically nothing in human affairs ever remains stable, prevent any sort of expertise whatsoever from making any simple decision in any sphere that covers all cases and will last for all time” (Statesman, 294 b1-b5).

Its principle (arche): beginning or rule? Platonic political science, according to Arendt, is affected by the prejudice that “there must necessarily be rulers and ruled in cities.”50 There is “always [an] incapacitation – i.e., a deprivation of the spontaneity of the other” (33). And yet, Platonic political science also allows us to see that the essence of rule is the capacity to begin. “Archai [is] not power, but: power to begin something, archein: to found a new beginning” (28). Plato mistrusts democracy “because in it the archai are dissipated among many” (28). Thus, according to Arendt, he also praises tyranny on the grounds that “the tyrant need only make the beginning – towards good or bad – and all will follow him” (33).51 Plato’s understanding of

50

Plato, Laws, 689 e. Cf. Plato, Protagoras, 226 d; Republic, 305 d; Aristoteles, Politics, III 13, 1283 b. 51 Cf. Plato, Laws, 711 b2 ff: “You’d see that if a tyrant wishes to change a city’s habitual ways, he doesn’t need to exert great efforts or spend enormous amount of time. What he has to do is first proceed himself, along the route he’d like the citizens to turn toward, whether it be toward the practices of virtue or the opposite.”

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beginnings reveals his autocratic understanding of action: the beginning, for Plato, is more than “half the whole deed”:52 “Beginning: as if one could determine the progress [of the action (Fortgang)] in a similar way as in an ergon [action] that one begins oneself” (36). Then again, Plato also understood that “the beginning, which among human beings is established as god, is the savior of all things (37).”53

Its origins: wonder at human affairs or all things? Arendt often remarked that, as Plato was the first to note, philosophy originates in admiring wonder “at that which is as it is.”54 However, this wonder has never been directed primarily at human affairs, for it has privileged the things that are by necessity over “the factual existence of disharmony, ugliness, evil.”55 This

52

Plato, Laws, 754 a.

53

Ibid., 775 e 2-3. See Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1993 [1961]), 18 (hereafter BPF); “Martin Heidegger at Eighty.” On the traditional understanding of acting as beginning from one, as against “act[ing] in concert,” see DT, 207. On the duality of archein as beginning and rule, see also DT, 206, 465, as well as Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 321. 54

H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Part II: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978 [1971]), 21. See also, e.g., “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 445; “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 40. See ibid. on the fate of philosophical wonder in modern society (“‘socialized men’… have decided never to leave what to Plato was ‘the cave’ of everyday human affairs, and never to venture on their own into a world and a life which, perhaps, the ubiquitous functionalization of modern society has deprived of one of its most elementary characteristics—the instilling of wonder at that which is as it is.”). 55 Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Part I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978 [1971]), 150 (no Platonic dialogue deals with the question of evil). See also Arendt, “Concern with Politics,” 445 (on the failure of philosophy to reflect on “the sheer horror of contemporary political events”); Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” (in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003)), 181: Neither Plato nor Socrates “knew what to do philosophically with this disturbing fact [that men can and do commit evil voluntarily].” Denktagebuch, 234 (referring to Republic, 486a7-9: “To an understanding endowed with

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view appears problematic in light of the fact that, at least, Socrates is said to have wondered primarily, if not indeed exclusively, about human affairs.56 As for Plato and Aristotle, one must also wonder, for it would seem that their inquiries began and culminated with the question of the good; and in particular with the question concerning the perfection of man, which is precisely not by necessity but rather presupposes certain political conditions and a certain science of politics or of human affairs.57 In her notebooks, far more than in her published writings, Arendt is brought closer to the truth—or, we could say, to the complexity of Plato’s position—by constraint of the ‘facts’ or of what Plato’s characters actually say. Echoing what is arguably the central concern of Plato’s dialogues—“We are discussing no trivial subject, but how a man should live”58—the Athenian Stranger in the Laws claims to be investigating “the outline of ways of life … and what characteristics we should incorporate if we are going to be carried through this voyage of existence on the best way of life.”59 Arendt points to this passage as indicative of “the philosopher’s basic approach to politics: he projects “the

magnificence and the contemplation of all time and all being, do you think it possible that human life seem anything great?”); 456. 56

See Xenophon, Memorabilia, I 1, 11 and I 1, 16; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987 b 1-3; Plato, Phaedrus, 229 e 5ff.; Phaedo, 99 e3. 57

See chapter four, note 51.

58

Plato, Rep., 352 d. Plato, Laws, 803 a8–b3.

59

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outlines of way of life” – and yet for him [as the Athenian Stranger goes on to note]: “the affairs of human beings are not worthy of great seriousness….”60 Arendt had notoriously little to say about ‘human affairs’ as they relate to ‘ways of life’. Yet her rejection of Platonic ‘soul-craft’ did not amount to political disinterest in the question concerning “the essence of man.”61 Anticipating Aristotle’s claim that students of politics must “know somewhat the facts about the soul,”62 Socrates suggests in the Republic that “it is necessary that there also be as many forms of human characters [anthropon eide] as there are forms of regimes … Or do you suppose that the regimes arise ‘from an oak or rocks’ and not from the dispositions [ethon] of the men in the cities, which, tipping the scale as it were, draw the rest along with them?”63 Arendt’s basic critique of this way of thinking about politics is that instead of speaking of “constitutions of the soul” as giving rise to different regimes or political orders, one should speak of “basic experiences in living together” (23536). Thus Arendt argues, for example, that kingship as well as social-contract theories generally rest on the experience of keeping promises (338), while, on the opposite extreme, totalitarian domination “bases itself on loneliness, on the

60

“…yet it is necessary to be serious about them.” Ibid., 803 b 3-4.

61

See, e.g., OT, viii; DT, 236; “Understanding and Politics,” in EU, 321 (man as a being “whose essence is beginning”). 62

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 1.13.

63

Plato, Rep., 544 d7- e2.

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experience of not belonging to the world at all.”64 Arendt drew support for this idea from Montesquieu, whose three forms of government—republican, monarchic, and despotic—she argues, corresponded to the regimes originally experienced by the Greeks, “namely: baseileia—polis—turannis,” which rested respectively on “promising … law … [and] the will of one over all” (338). Along with “basic experiences in living together,” Arendt would also draw on Montesquieu to argue that forms of government rest on certain principles “which makes [them] act,” or on certain “human passions that set [them] in motion.”65 Thus, republics depend on “virtue” or “love of equality”; monarchies on “honor” or “love of distinction”; aristocracies on “moderation” or “selfdiscipline”; and despotic governments on “fear” or “terror” (152). How is this explanation different from Plato’s? For Arendt the key difference lies in the fact that Montesquieu’s understanding of man presupposes plurality as the human condition—in other words, “not man but men inhabit this earth”—whereas Plato’s does not. Or at least, so it seems, for example, when Plato speaks of democracy as corresponding to a certain “aner demokratikos [democratic man]” or of tyranny as corresponding to a “psuche turannike [tyrannical soul]” (236). Thus, against what would seem to be Plato’s position,

64

OT, 475. See also DT, 350: the ruler-ruled relation rests on the experience of slavery (in reference to Aristotle). See also HC, 202 (on the relation between isolation and tyranny). 65

DT, 152: Arendt refers to Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III, I: “There is this difference between the nature of the government and its principle: its nature is that which makes it what it is, and its principle, that which makes it act. The one is its particular structure, and the other is the human passions that set it in motion.” Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited by A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.

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Arendt insists that “all state-building passions—‘vertu’ or ‘passion de l’égalité’, ‘Honneur’ or ‘Passion de distinction’, ‘Crainte’ or ‘Passion de déstruction’… never refer to human beings but to that which is common to those who live together in [a] state” (152).66 We recall here that the same point was stressed by Hobbes, Heidegger, and Strauss—namely, that the passions are intrinsically social or interpersonal, that they cannot be understood but ‘politically’. Whether this could be said to be yet another footnote to something Plato had already seen is hard to say exactly. Arendt acknowledges this difficulty. Thus she writes that “the fact that Plato speaks of the constitutions of the soul instead of the basic experiences in living together is all the more astonishing since in fact he had already found Montesquieu’s principle of ‘distinction’ as the principle of a monarchical aristocracy—namely, insofar as the basileus [monarch] is characterized as diapheron [outstanding or pre-eminent] among others, as Primus inter pares” (235-36).

Its essence: technological?

66

“Alle staatsbildenden Pasionen … richten sich nie auf Menschen, sondern was den Menschen, die zusammen in diesem Staat leben, gemeinsam ist” (DT, 152). On Montesquieu and principles of government, see also HC, 190-91 n.17; OT, 467; “Montesquieu’s Revision of the Tradition,” in PP, 63-70.

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Arendt’s interpretation of the Socratic-Platonic (and Sophistic) idea of politics as an art (or techne) begins from the equivalence of politics with rule and rule with technique: “Ruling=techne.” “Domination and technique [stand] in the closest possible connection” (206). The very idea of techne—art, skill, device, craft, cunning—Arendt suggests, is “from the beginning determined as dominating and ruling” (207). “Political action counts as a form of practical going-about with the world that is a knowing going-about when man proves to be master of things. This seems to speak completely for Heidegger’s thesis that the concept of domination is grounded in technology [in der Technik]” (206-7).67 Arendt’s version of the Heideggerian critique of technological thinking is worth quoting in full as it captures both her critique of politics as fabrication and of thinking as contemplation. 67

For the further development of these theses, see Arendt, “What is Authority?,” in BPF, 112 f., and 291, n.16 (where Arendt acknowledges her “indebted[ness] to Martin Heidegger’s great interpretation of the cave parable…”). Arendt derives her conclusions in this case from Socrates’ response to Trasymachus’ thesis that the just is what benefits those who rule. “But, Thrasymachus,” Socrates replies, “the arts rule and are masters of that of which they are arts.” And this means that “there is no kind of knowledge that considers or commands the advantage of the stronger, but rather of what is weaker and ruled by it” (Rep., 342 c8-9). (For instance, a doctor considers not his advantage but that of the sick man.) Socrates’ claim indeed links a “knowing going-about” with mastery and rule. But one cannot fail to note that at least in this case Arendt is not being constrained by the facts to actually see them. For it is not Socrates but Thrasymachus and Heidegger who (respectively) insist on the fact that politics is an exact science (Thrasymachus) that is dominated by a ‘technological’ going about with things modeled on the paradigm of production (Heidegger). As David Lachterman notes, “It is Trasymachus who uses the Greek word for science or true knowledge, episteme, for the first time in The Republic” (144). Through such a science Thrasymachus claims to show that “all rulers, under every sort of constitution, are seeking their own benefit” (144). It is also Thrasymachus who insists that “the legitimacy of the rulers’ authority derives from their supposed knowledge of what will genuinely benefit them” (145-46); and on the idea that one must specify “ruler in the precise sense” thus introducing the vocabulary of the crafts in the term “precision” (akribes) (147). Thrasymachus and Socrates hold very similar views (even on the essence of justice as doing one’s own business) but it is the task of the Republic precisely to inquire into these views dialectically. Here Arendt is content with remaining at the level of Heidegger’s opinion it seems. References to Lachterman are from his “What is ‘The Good’ of Plato’s Republic?,” St. John's Review 39 (1989–1990): 139–71.

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The Roman fundamental experience [Grunderfahrung] is to found and to preserve; this lead to tradition and authority in western politics. The Greek fundamental experience is beginning (archein) and carrying-through (or completing: zu-ende-führen; prattein). This had no consequences at all because from so early on, due to the extraordinary talent of the people, the experience of fabricating (poiein) suppressed all other experiences. Both archein and prattein are always judged in Greek philosophy from the experience of poiesis—either of [poiesis as] the fabrication of art, in which case politics is techne of ruling, or of [poiesis as] contemplation [namely, the contemplation that] sees the idea instead of realizing it, in which case politics is only what makes contemplation possible (364-65). The primary example Arendt discusses of Plato’s understanding of the relation between contemplation and politics is the “idea of the good” as “the cause of all that is right and fair in everything.” Of this “idea” Plato’s Socrates famously claims that “the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it.”68 According to Arendt, this notion illustrates, first of all, the technical conception of politics—in short: “Praxis under the idea of the good as production of the bed under the idea of bed.” Second, it illustrates how praxis is understood from an experience that is foreign to it (namely, that of contemplation or theoria): “Praxis in the cave under the view from something that does not exist in the cave.”69 Third, here “the same ‘idea’ [is used] for public and private! The

68

Plato, Rep., 517 c 4-5. Arendt adopts Heidegger’s commentary on this: “Whoever wants to act and has to act in a world determined by ‘the ideas’ needs, before all else, a view of the ideas.” Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s 69

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moralization of politics.” Fourth, this is the “emergence of omoiosis, of assimilation, because something outside the cave must be applied to conditions within it.” This leads to the “identification of aletheia [truth] with orthotes [correctness]” (455). Fifth, it shows the necessary transformation of politics into rule: “This idea turns then in the political realm into law that commands and that is executed by those who have power” (455).70

Its measure: the good, the beautiful? Arendt’s understanding of the Platonic techne politike as domination—ultimately of the philosophical few over the many—hinges on a particular interpretation of the Platonic forms or ideas, and in particular of the Platonic idea of the good. Arendt distinguishes between Plato’s philosophical understanding of the ideas and its political application. Philosophically, Arendt understands idea as “true appearance (eidos)” (465) or as “the real essences” of things (465). As for the idea of the good, Arendt understands it (with Heidegger) as “the expedient (das Taugliche),” and hence as an “always already ‘practically’ oriented idea” which is

Doctrine of Truth,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 155-182, 176. 70

For two brilliant studies that depart from the Heideggerian and Arendtian ‘destruction’ of the traditional understanding of theoretical rule as domination see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros and R. Schürmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), as well as Ernst Vollrath, “Politik und Metaphysik. Zum Politischen Denken Hannah Arendts,” Zeitschrift fur Politik,” XVIII, n. 3 (1971): 207-32. See also the important study of Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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also “morally indifferent” (457).71 From this perspective, the idea of the good would be “the idea of ideas” because it is the most capable of “making possible the appearing in all its visibility, of everything present.” “For this reason Plato calls the agathon also tu ontos to phanotaton ([Republic] 518 c9), that which most shines (the most able to shine of beings).”72 Arendt argues that Plato modified his philosophical understanding of the ideas for political purposes. “Plato wanted to establish the rule of the ideas, of true appearance (eidos) over perspectives [Ansichten] (doxa)” (465).73 In order to do this, “it appeared to him completely self-evident to place the ideas as causes (and not only as the real essences) of the real [des Wirklichen]” (465). Hence the notion that the idea of the good is the “cause” [aitia] of all that is right [orthon] and fair [kalon] in everything.” As causes of things, the ideas could then legitimately be elevated to the rank of measures, rules, or standards. This required a further and more specific transformation of the good from a morally indifferent and practical idea to the “idea of ideas” and “highest,” “most shining” idea. In so 71

See Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” 174: “In Greek thought to agathon means that which is capable of something and enables another to be capable of something.” Cf. Aristotle (Met. 1021 b 20) who speaks of “a good thief and a good slanderer.” 72

Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” 175: “The essence of every idea certainly consists in making possible and enabling the shining that allows a view of the visible form.” Idea or eidos means “visible form.” But this ‘visible form’ is not a mere ‘aspect’. “For [Plato] the ‘visible form’ has in addition something of a ‘stepping forth’ whereby a thing ‘presents’ itself … According to Plato, if people did not have these ‘ideas’ in view, that is to say, the respective ‘appearance’ of things—living beings, humans, numbers, gods—they would never be able to perceive this or that as a house, as a tree, as a god” (164). 73

What is decisive here, according to Arendt, is that the role of beginning no longer lies in man. “As one can see in the Nomoi, for Plato the rule of philosophers was an emergency measure [Notbehelf] which he gave up when he discovered in the laws an instrument through which one could bring the ideas to rule directly” (DT, 465).

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doing Plato gave to the good the attributes of the beautiful—namely, both what shines in itself and, above all, what is precisely not a measure of practical expediency but is completely independent and ‘without why’ (Zwecklos) (457).74 “Plato took the idea of the Good (instead of the beautiful) on political grounds and determined it then in the categories (phainesthai) that pertain to the idea of the beautiful on philosophical grounds. Thus he brought philosophy into politics and politics into philosophy. The result was: morality” (457).75

Platonic political science and modern nihilism

As we have seen, Arendt turned to the tradition of political philosophy to trace the origins of the modern crises that culminated in totalitarianism and to conceive of an alternative political philosophy. While she rejected the view that

74

Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, 80: “The ekphanestaton, what properly shows itself and is most radiant of all, is the beautiful.” 75

Compare Arendt, The Human Condition, 226. See also “Religion and Politics,” EU, 381 ff. For the further consequences, see DT, 500: “If Plato had determined the idea of the kalon as the highest idea out of the kalon kagathon, such as actually corresponded to the essence of the doctrine of the ideas, we would probably never have heard of standards [or measures: Masstaben] that are necessary to all judging and even of highest standards and then too of standards for judging the beautiful. For only the expedient [das Taugliche] is judged by standards, and not absolute but … functional [ones]. What is not good for something cannot be measured according to standards.” Instead the idea seems to be to base morality on ‘taste’: In moral taste I choose conduct, not acts, the principles of acts, not goals. I decide how I want to appear. Inwardly I am a coward, but courageous deeds please me (801). One can well think of a case of someone who has bad inclinations (Neigungen) yet good taste: he doesn’t follow his instinct because he does not like what he would do. This is to have a ‘bad conscience’: I did something that I do not like (794).

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totalitarianism could be explained as a result of a flawed philosophy,76 she did suggest that western philosophy was “not altogether innocent,” “perhaps” insofar as “[it] has never had a clear concept of what constitutes the political.”77 Arendt devoted several writings to the problem of tracing what she called the ‘high road’ to totalitarianism, specially in Marxist thought. From these inquiries what concerns us is not so much how traditional thought prepared or otherwise made possible the modern crises, but how it made visible a crisis in the very idea of political philosophy as it originated in Plato, thus requiring us to rethink its roots. The meaning of the crisis has already emerged from Arendt’s critique of modern secularism as leading to worldlessness—a condition she describes in such terms as “the withering away of everything between us”; the ‘dedivinization’ of the world; the absence of truth or the loss of faith in the truth-revealing capacity of the senses; the ‘blasphemy’ of conceiving ourselves as our own creators or as the judges of our own history. Throughout her writings and lectures Arendt also referred to the crisis in Nietzschean terms as a consummation of nihilism in which “no standards are possible, everything is permitted,”78 God has been sacrificed for

76

See, e.g., “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” EU, 405: “I proceed from facts and events instead of intellectual affinities and influences”; “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 26 f. 77

Letter to Jaspers of March 4, 1951, in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 166.

78

Courses---University of California, Berkeley, Calif.---“History of Political Theory,” lectures--Introduction---1955, p. 23952. Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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nothing,79 the quest for meaning has been given up,80 and everything that is given to us is denied.81 A nihilistic world is one in which the Platonic quest for standards and truth has been abandoned:

If there is no God that makes the ideai available, there is also no truth. The craftsman then no longer fabricates things according to their being-true [gemäss ihrem Wahrsein] but according to their use… (Here it becomes apparent that the consequential vulgarization of the world into a world of ends [Zweckwelt] can only arise when the Platonic worldview is no longer valid.) (133)82

Crucially, however, the Platonic worldview is no longer valid—paradoxically— because Platonism has triumphed or because it has become part of our commonsense understanding of things, or because—to use Strauss’s terms—the

79

DT, 140. For an early statement of the early 1930s to this effect see H. Arendt and Günther Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature, ed. by Susannah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-24, 23. 80

Promise of Politics, 204 (on anti-nihilistic questions, e.g., Why is there anybody rather than nobody?); “Understanding and Politics,” EU, 316-17; LMT, 62. 81

“Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 34.

82

For the opposite argument see Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 164: what is truly nihilistic according to Arendt (in Villa’s view) is the “investment in transcendent standards and ultimate grounds,” or the habit of legitimating action and judgment via the appeal to such standards (162). Cf. Arendt, Introduction into Politics, in PP: the modern crisis is not the nihilism that results from the “failure of standards”: this presupposes that human beings can render judgments only if they have standards (103). See also LMT, 176: The danger does not arise from the assertion that an unexamined life is not worth living, but out of the desire to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary.

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necessity and possibility of political philosophy has been taken for granted.83 This is a thesis which Heidegger developed in his lectures on Nietzsche first delivered in 1936-37. These lectures had a decisive impact on Arendt as well as Strauss.84 In order to see why it is necessary to briefly refer to them, specially insofar as they shed further light on Heidegger as a political philosopher.

83

See, e.g., Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” EU, 382: “Since the truth of the ideas is self-evident, the true standards for earthly life can never be satisfactorily argued out and demonstrated.” 84

Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche (1936-46) were only published in 1961. However, Arendt had access to (at least) the transcript of the WS, 1936/37 lectures which is preserved in the Marbach archives. (See the editors’ note at DT, 951.) For references to the lectures in her correspondence, see the letter to Jaspers of September, 29, 1949 (in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 142), and to Blücher of May 22 and 28, 1961 (in Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, Within Four Walls. The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, ed. Lotte Kohler, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Hacourt, 1996), 373; 375-76). Strauss apparently knew of the Nietzsche lectures through Löwith. In a letter of December 13, 1960 Strauss thanks him “for the information regarding Heidegger’s Nietzsche” and reports that “I myself feel now more strongly than before the attraction exercised by Heidegger.” On March 15, 1962, Strauss reports to be “reading Heidegger’s book while preparing myself for a seminar on Beyond Good and Evil” (GS3, 685-86). “The point which Heidegger learned from Nietzsche and which he could not have learned from any other philosopher is: ‘There is no Without;’ i.e., there cannot be ‘objectivity’ in the last analysis. From this point of view ‘nature’ is no longer possible except as postulated in the critical moment, and eternal returns as Nietzsche understands it primarily is nature qua being through being postulated” (GS3, 686). Strauss also claims that “I agree with Heidegger against you concerning the subordinate status of the issue of Christianity as distinguished from Platonism. I believe that the preface to Beyond Good and Evil is decisive in this respect” (GS3, 686). On April 2, 1962 Strauss writes that “I do not understand the ‘Seinsgeschichte’ but many things [Heidegger] presents under this heading are intelligible to me and some of them are in my opinion very profound insights. Especially he has cleared up wonderfully the relation between science, art and the will to power. On the other hand I believe that what he says about the apriori in Plato and particularly on the idea of the good is simply wrong” (GS3, 688). Finally, Strauss suggests that Heidegger is “infinitely superior to everyone else” in that he sees that the modern criticism of classical principles is “partly justified.” (The letter says “infinitely inferior” but as Meier points out, this is most likely a mistake of the secretary to whom Strauss dictated his letters.) (GS3, 688)

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Heidegger’s critique of Platonic political science in the Nietzsche lectures

In the mid-1930s Heidegger argued that our age is essentially determined by the consummation of Platonic metaphysics in Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power is nihilism proper85—and it is not a haphazard occurrence but a “gathering” or “completion” (I, 4) of the entire history of western thought that begins with Plato. Nietzsche’s thought finally exhausts “the essential possibilities of metaphysics” in a final reversal of Platonism (IV, 148). By metaphysics Heidegger means the differentiation of beings and Being (IV, 154 f.), and specifically the determination of Being as “the universal in beings” (IV, 156), which means that “of Being itself nothing further can be predicated” (IV, 157): “metaphysics always affirms that Being is the most universal and therefore emptiest concept.” Insofar as metaphysics is “the determination of the truth of beings as a whole and of the essence of such truth” (IV, 100), it is the grounds of an age.86 Our age, Heidegger argued, is determined by the metaphysics of subjectivity. Man is “the relational center of that which is as such.” To be means to be represented by a subject, and truth is the “certainty of

85

Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. IV, 203. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

86

See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115: “[m]etaphysics grounds an age” holding “complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age.”

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[this] representing.”87 Such a metaphysics culminates in Nietzsche—in the “absolute subjectivity of will to power” (IV, 147). For an age dominated by it, “nothing else is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions”; all beings are reckoned “according to the basic value of will to power”; “in general the being as such is interpreted after the fashion of human Being” (IV, 85). Nihilism reigns in the age of the metaphysics of subjectivity insofar as we are indifferent to ‘Being’ and take ourselves to be ‘unconditioned’ (IV, 195 f.) thus making man the measure, center, and ground of all being (II, 29).88 What does this have to do with Platonic political science? The answer is contained in the claim that “we today think exclusively in ‘ideas’ and ‘values’” (IV, 166), or that for us “appeal to ‘ideas’ and ‘values’ and their positing constitute the most familiar and most intelligible framework for interpreting the world and for guiding one’s life” (IV, 195). ‘Ideas’, of course, reminds us of Plato, and ‘values’ of Nietzsche (IV, 195). Heidegger argued that Plato took the decisive step of the history of western metaphysics by making the idea of the good the ruling idea. The Good in Plato’s Republic is literally “sovereign” in that

87

Ibid., 127. “What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth” (129-130). This modern understanding of the world stands in sharp contrast to the earlier medieval and particularly ancient Greek conceptions. Greek being-in-the-world, Heidegger argues, is dominated by a consciousness of the power and fullness of Being which remains concealed as a mystery: “That which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it. … Rather, man is the one who is looked upon by that which is … Greek man is as the one who apprehends that which is, and this is why in the age of the Greeks the world cannot become picture” (131). (German version in Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 3rd ed., 1957), 84.) 88

On ‘conditionlessness’, see also IV, 146.

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it is “‘above and beyond even Being in worth and power’” (IV, 168 f.).89 The idea of the Good, which takes the sun as its image, makes beings “come to presence into the unconcealed” (IV, 168). Indeed, the Good, which for the Greeks and for Plato means “the suitable, what is good for something and itself makes something else worthwhile … make[s] the being as such possible…” (IV, 169). Thus, even though Plato cannot be taken to be the first philosopher of ‘values’, he does prepare a form of thinking for which the condition of possibility of beings—and hence what is to count as ‘being’ at all—is made to depend on our (subjective and ‘valuational’) representing. Metaphysics—the differentiation of Being and beings—thus assumes several forms: from pre-Platonic physis to the Platonic idea to Aristotle’s energeia, the history of the progressive forgetfulness of the mystery of being leads through “Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to power,” to Nietzsche’s “Will to Will.”90 Nietzsche’s philosophy is the last act of the history of the modern subjectivization of metaphysics. In accord with this movement, his philosophy is a “conscious act of reversal”—“the only one that is real; that is, appropriate to subjectivity” (IV, 148). Nietzsche’s philosophy is (in his own words) “an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the

89

See Plato, Rep. 517 c. For an earlier statement of the same thesis dating back to 1929, see Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, 124. 90

Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 66.

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better it is” (I, 154).91 Having realized the subjective ground of all human order and meaning, “Nietzsche conceives the whole of Western philosophy as a thinking in values and a reckoning with values, as value positing” (IV, 69).92 What is most important in this analysis for our purposes is, first, the diagnosis of ‘European nihilism’ that Heidegger, Arendt, and (as one could also show) Strauss share as centered on its anthropocentrism or—we could also say— its humanism and the denial of the ‘given’—namely, not only of the ‘true world’ of God, Being, First Principles and Causes or Ideas but of the world of appearances, and of the difference between them.93 Of particular importance for us in Heidegger’s diagnosis is, secondly, the implicit critique of the idea of a political science or philosophy, which Arendt and Strauss also shared. This critique of ‘political science’ can be seen in two ways. Even though Heidegger does not make this explicit, there is in the philosophy of history he 91

“…during the last years of his creative life [Nietzsche] labors at nothing else than the overturning of Platonism.” “For Platonism, the Idea, the supersensuous, is the true.” For Nietzsche “The true is the sensuous. That is what ‘positivism’ teaches” (I, 154). 92

“Properly thought, the revaluation carried out by Nietzsche does not consist in the fact that he posits new values in the place of the highest values hitherto, but that he conceives of ‘Being’, ‘purpose’, and ‘truth’ as values and only as values” (IV, 69). “…Nietzsche’s metaphysics is nihilism proper. This implies not only that Nietzsche’s nihilism does not overcome nihilism but also that it can never overcome it. For it is precisely in the positing of new values from the will to power, by which and through which Nietzsche believes he will overcome nihilism, that nihilism first proclaims that there is nothing to Being itself, which has now become a value” (IV, 203). See also Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 251: “it is important finally to realize that precisely through the characterization of something as a ‘value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth … thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being.” 93

LMT, 10-11. Cf. L. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” in RCPR, 243-44 where Strauss refers to the “anthropocentric character” of modern thought for which “all truths, or all meaning, all order, all beauty, originate in the thinking subject, in human thought, in man.” Strauss refers to Hobbes: “‘We know only what we make’”; Kant: “‘Understanding prescribes nature its laws’”; and Leibniz: “‘I have discovered a spontaneity, little known previously, of the monads of the thoughts’.” On the modern idea that ‘we know only what we make’, see also NRH, 172-77.

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sketches in the form of a ‘history of Being’ an implicit history of philosophy as determined ‘politically’ in certain key stages—first in Plato’s elevation of the idea of the Good to sovereign status; second, in the claim that “‘power’ in its correctly understood modern meaning—that is, as will to power—first becomes metaphysically possible as modern history” “roughly since Machiavelli” (IV, 98)94—and finally in Nietzsche’s own understanding of philosophy as legislation or as will to power. The other way to see Heidegger’s implicit critique of political science relates to the actual development of philosophy as ‘political philosophy’ on the eve of the twentieth century.95 We recall here that one of the consequences of the rise of positivism in the nineteenth century was a turn to various forms of philosophizing that can be designated as ‘political’ insofar as their aim was to secure and orient the culture of the nation or to guarantee its autonomy from various forms of naturalism (e.g., materialism or Darwinism). Nietzsche’s philosophy, in other words, was not the only form of value philosophy, nor was it the only philosophy that understood its primary task to be legislation, or that understood itself to be grounded in practical faith and the will to truth. To see this somewhat more specifically, we must

94

See also IV, 165: where Heidegger refers to Nietzsche as a ‘Roman’ (and not Greek) thinker: for the thinker of the will to power the only essential figure among the Greeks was Thucydides; cf. also Vol. 1, 7 (on Nietzsche as Roman). 95

As Heidegger stresses, the fact that the talk of values and will and legislation (or man as a lawgiver) dominates not only Nietzsche’s philosophy down to his metaphysics but also the philosophy of his time is not a mere coincidence. In fact, value philosophy exerted the same power over Heidegger’s own thought as a youth (see chapter one).

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briefly refer to the goals of the main schools of philosophizing at the turn of the century.96 Neo-Kantianism in one of its variants saw its task as the teaching of “Weltanschauung” understood as an “orientation and goal for our position towards the world and for our willing and acting.”97 In another variant, it meant to “bring to light the norms which give value and validity to all thinking”98 in a quest for “normative thinking” (in science), “normative willing” (in ethics) and “normative feeling” (in aesthetics).99 In a third variant its aim was to work out and purify the unity of reason [logos] in the work of culture, in its different provinces of science, ethics, art, and religion.100 Husserl’s philosophy as ‘rigorous science’ was meant to “satisfy the highest theoretical needs and in regard to ethics and religion render possible a life regulated by pure rational norms.”101 Finally, Dilthey’s philosophy of life (at least in Heidegger’s understanding) engaged in 96

According to Strauss, “There existed at the end of the First World War three significant academic positions … neo-Kantianism of the school of Marburg, Dilthey’s philosophy of life, and phenomenology.” “Kurt Riezler,” in WPP, 241 f. 97

The essential means for this purpose was to be the study of history and specifically the history of culture which could provide the material for the knowledge of value, that is, of the ideal goals towards which humanity has striven and for which human beings have stood for. H. Rickert, “Vom Begriff der Philosophie,” Logos 1 (1910/11), 6. 98

Wilhelm Windelband, Immanuel Kant. Zur Säkularfeier seiner Philosophie (Vortrag) 1881, in: Präludien I, 5. Aufl., 139. Cited in Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1919] 1987), 144. 99

Wilhelm Windelband, Immanuel Kant, 139, cited in Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung Der Philosophie: 2, 145. 100

Paul Natorp, “Kant und die Marburger Schule,” Kant-Studien, 17 (1912):193-221, 196-197.

101

E. Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Quentin Lauer (ed.), Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 71.

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research into the history of cultural formations in order to attain “a consciousness of consciousness,” or “a knowing of knowing” ultimately also with the aim of giving norms to life.102 Heidegger’s project emerged as a response to the crisis of these forms of normative philosophizing, which, much in accord with the Platonic idea of a techne politike, understood philosophy as the art of giving rules to life.103 First and most importantly, Heidegger argued, this project is fundamentally deficient insofar as in seeking to secure and orient human existence philosophy from Plato to Husserl has forgotten to examine human existence itself, and hence precisely the being “from out of which and for the sake of which, philosophy ‘is’.”104 “There is no inquiry into what it is; instead, the idea

102

Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks: Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung. GA 59 (Frankfurt, a. M.: Klostermann, [1920] 1993), 154 (see also 153). According to Eduard Spranger: “All of us–Rickert, the phenomenologists, the movement associated with Dilthey—meet up with one another in the great struggle for the timeless in the historical or beyond the historical, for the realm of meaning and its historical expression in a concrete developed culture, for a theory of values which leads beyond the merely subjective toward the objective and the valid.” Cited in Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, GA 63 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1923] 1988), 33. (However, Heidegger adds that this is not true of Dilthey.) The being investigated is being-available, present, “cultural transformation and variation which are present” (ibid., 34). 103

Cf. M. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2, GA 56/57, 18. Heidegger’s early critique was already aimed against “the Gegensatzformel wissenschaftliche Philosophie – Weltanschauungsphilosophie,” which stands for the “Struktur der philosophischen Problematik, wie sie seit Plato die Philosophie … beherrscht.” See Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung, GA 59, 9-12. 104

M. Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 2.

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of humanity and the concept of the human being are left in a routine sort of contingency.”105 A techne politike is problematic, secondly, because of the ‘facticity’ and ‘historicity’ of individual existence:

Philosophy has no mission to take care of universal humanity and culture, to release coming generations once and for all from care about questioning, or to interfere with them simply through wrongheaded claims to validity. Philosophy is what it can be only as a philosophy of ‘its time’. For what Dasein happens to encounter itself … cannot be calculated and worked out in advance and is not a matter for universal humanity or for a public, but rather is in each case the definite and decisive possibility of concrete facticity.”106

A final problem is that, at least in the most extreme expression of philosophizing thus conceived (Heidegger has in mind Husserl), “…the possibility of a concrete ethical life is made dependent upon the presence of an ethics as an absolutely binding science…”107 “The theme is consciousness and, indeed, the lawfulness of every possible behavior … in such a way that a thoroughgoing and absolutely objective normative determination of the entire existence of humanity is attained.” Yet “[t]he sense of the norm and normative lawfulness cannot be established as long as one does not envision what type of being is meant by a normatively 105

M. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 66 (see also 68).

106

Heidegger, Ontology, 15.

107

Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 62.

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determined and determinable being. The possibility of normativity cannot be explained without being investigated as normativity for something…”108

108

Ibid., 63.

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Political philosophy: Out of the sources of Socrates and Heidegger?

Like Heidegger and Strauss, Arendt turned to classical political philosophy to find the origins of the metaphysical tradition that dominates western thought and to search for an alternative beginning. While the later Heidegger went back to the pre-Socratics and famously claimed that “[t]he tragedies of Sophocles … preserve the ethos in their sagas more primordially than Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics’,”109 the young Heidegger, as we saw, was a careful student of Aristotle’s ethical works. Insofar as Aristotle’s task was to complete the “philosophy of human affairs” pioneered by Socrates, I argued, Heidegger’s exceedingly careful reading of Aristotle led—albeit unintentionally—to a rediscovery of Socrates. Did Hannah Arendt see this? I shall argue that she did, and that her conception of an alternative ‘political philosophy’ grows out of a ‘Socrates’ that embodies the type of thinking that led Strauss to claim that modern philosophy leads (with Heidegger) to the point where Socrates begins. Perhaps the clearest indications of this are, on the one hand, her adoption of the Heideggerian premise that Socrates was “the purest thinker of the West”—a premise she would develop in her own political direction—and, on the other hand, her critique of Heidegger’s turn to the pre-Socratics.110 The consensus in the literature, however, is that, if 109

M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 256.

110

See LMW, 22-23: “It is as though at the very end, the thinkers of the modern age escaped into a ‘land of thought’ (Kant) where their own specifically modern preoccupations—with the future,

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anything, Arendt saw Socrates as a kind of antidote to Heidegger, and specifically to Heidegger’s Platonism. Before turning to Arendt’s understanding of Socratic political philosophy it will hence be necessary to refer to this critique. Margaret Canovan argues that Arendt wavered between two models “for the political implications of philosophical thought”—between Heidegger and Socrates.111 “When Arendt is focusing on Plato or Heidegger she is inclined to fear that philosophy is intrinsically solitary, anti-political and sympathetic to coercion, whereas when she concentrates on Socrates or Jaspers she is tempted to believe that true philosophy may be communicative and in harmony with free politics.”112 Canovan argues that to the extent that Arendt draws on Heidegger to think politically, it is the late Heidegger she relies on—namely a Heidegger for whom “thinking is as endless and inconclusive a business as political discussion itself” and for whom, more specifically, “philosophy does not establish or seek for truth.”113 Canovan’s argument is based on extensive familiarity with Arendt’s writings, but is lacking in evidence concerning Heidegger’s thought. To remain with what she says about Arendt, the fact is that while she indeed feared that philosophic thought as practiced by Heidegger is dangerously solitary, antiwith the Will as the mental organ for it, and with freedom as a problem—had been non-existent [viz the pre-Socratics], where, in other words, there was no notion of a mental faculty that might correspond to freedom as the faculty of thinking corresponding to truth.” 111

Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 270. 112

Ibid., 264.

113

Ibid., 268, 273.

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political and sympathetic to coercion, she also said that Heidegger’s thought could serve as a response to such problems.114 As for Arendt’s reliance on the later Heidegger whose thinking does not “seek for truth,” this too is an overly general claim that can be confirmed or refuted without any clear consequences.115

114

Concerning the solitariness of philosophical thinking and its political dangers, see, e.g., “What is Existenz Philosophy?,” in EU, esp. 181: “what emerges from this absolute isolation [of authentic existence as conceived by Heidegger] is a concept of the Self as the total opposite of man”; “the concept of the self is a concept of man that leaves the individual existing independent of humanity and representative of no one but himself—of nothing but his own nothingness. If Kant’s categorical imperative insisted that every human act had to bear responsibility for all of humanity, then the experience of guilty nothingness insists on precisely the opposite: the destruction in every individual of the presence of all humanity.” See also “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 157: “In its essential isolation from the world, thinking always deals only with what is absent.” “Seen from the vantage of the residence of thinking, the ‘withdrawal from being’ or the ‘oblivion of being’ do in fact reign around it in the ‘usual order of everyday human affairs’. It is the withdrawal of what thinking (which, in accordance with its nature, pays attention to what is absent) has to deal with. The sublation of this ‘withdrawal’ always means a withdrawal from the world of human affairs, even when thinking thinks about such affairs themselves in its own secluded silence (158). Yet a few years later Arendt would also argue the opposite—viz., that Heidegger’s thought makes it possible for the first time to think plurality, and in a way, ‘political philosophy’. See, e.g., “Concern with Politics,” in EU, 443: “…because Heidegger defines human existence as being-in-the-world, he insists on giving philosophic significance to structures of everyday life that are completely incomprehensible if man is not primarily understood as being together with others.” Concerning the anti-political bias of philosophy see Ibid., 432-33: the new philosophical concern with politics “does not proceed unequivocally. Thus we find the old hostility of the philosopher toward the polis in Heidegger’s analyses of average everyday life in terms of das Man … in which the public realm has the function of hiding reality and preventing even the appearance of truth.” Then again: “[Heidegger’s] phenomenological descriptions offer most penetrating insights into one of the basic aspects of society and, moreover, insist that these structures of human life are inherent in the human condition as such, from which there is no escape into an ‘authenticity’ which would be the philosopher’s prerogative.” Finally, as regards the coercive character of truth, it must be recalled that, according to Arendt herself, it was Heidegger who saw this problem most clearly in his critique of “Plato’s doctrine of truth.” Arendt’s judgment of Heidegger changed radically over the years. To understand her response it is necessary to take a broader view of the movement of both Heidegger’s and her own thought—as well as of alternative responses—as this study attempts to do. Perhaps the clearest evidence of Arendt’s inconsistent judgment on Heidegger is what she once said to a student of Paul Tillich who was doing research on Heidegger: “I have to warn you from my Existentialism essay, especially from the part about Heidegger, which not only is inadequate [unangemessen], but also in part simply false. Please simply forget about that.” See Antonia Grünenberg, Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger: Geschichte Einer Liebe (Munich: Piper, 2006), 267. 115

As Arendt points out, Heidegger “has laid out quite a network of … thought paths … [and] understandably, only one immediate result was heeded, and it led to a school of thought: he caused the structure of traditional metaphysics, in which nobody had felt at ease for quite some time anyway, to collapse. … This is a historical matter, perhaps even of the first order, but it need not

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Jacques Taminiaux makes a more compelling case which probes deeper into Heidegger’s early thought and Arendt’s response. Since a discussion of Taminiaux’s studies of Arendt and Heidegger which extend over various writings is impossible here, it will have to suffice to refer to the following three points he makes with regards to Arendt’s Socrates as a response to Heidegger. First, whereas the young Heidegger Arendt knew from the 1924/25 lectures on Plato’s Sophist “supports the [Platonic] opposition aletheia-doxa [truth-opinion], Arendt’s whole effort is to contest its pertinence.”116 Thus, Arendt argues that Socrates’ impulse was radically different from Plato’s: “[t]he opposition of truth and opinion was certainly the most anti-Socratic conclusion that Plato drew from Socrates’ trial.”117 Socrates’ impulse was to “make the city more truthful by delivering each of the citizens of their truths … not by destroying

concern those of us who are outside all past and present guilds” (153). The claim that Arendt was closer to the later Heidegger presumes Arendt’s affinity with ‘anti-foundationalism’ or ‘postmetaphysics’, but, as our discussion has shown, this is too simple a way of characterizing her thought. Cf., e.g., Canovan’s view that “[Arendt] was an ‘anti-foundationalist’ long before the term came into use, doing her thinking ‘without a bannister’, convinced of what Rorty has called ‘the priority of democracy to philosophy’” (278). (This is not to deny that Arendt’s statements make possible such characterizations. See, e.g., LMT, 212: “I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics…” (212).) 116

J. Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres à Heidegger,” in Sillages phénoménologiques: Auditeurs et lecteurs de Heidegger (Bruxelles; Paris: Editions Ousia, 2002), 69-90, 74. In the 1924/25 lecture on Plato’s Sophist Heidegger argued that the “genuine impulse of the spiritual work of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle” was the conquest of a life dedicated to aletheuein, that is to say, to “disclos[ing], to remov[ing] the world from concealedness and coveredness,” against a life guided by doxadzein or the formation of opinions which when “repeated over and over…[have] the consequence that what was originally disclosed comes to be covered up again.” M. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 12; 11. 117

H. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, 1990: 73-103, 79: “In the process of reasoning out the implications of Socrates’ trial, Plato arrived both at his concept of truth as the very opposite of opinion and at his notion of a specifically philosophical form of speech, dialegesthai, as the opposite of persuasion and rhetoric. Aristotle takes these distinctions and oppositions as a matter of course…”

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doxa or opinion, but on the contrary [by revealing] doxa in its own truthfulness.” Socrates’ method was “dialegesthai, talking something through,” and thus to the extent that “the quintessence of the Sophists’ teaching consisted in the dyo logoi … Socrates was the greatest Sophist of them all.”118 Second, Heidegger “considered that … the ‘spiritual work of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle’ consisted in one and the same task: ‘the struggle against rhetoric and sophistry’.”119 For Arendt, by contrast, Socrates was not only “the greatest Sophist of them all”120 but his Apology was “one of [the] great examples [of rhetoric],” that is to say, of “the art of persuasion, the highest, the truly political art.”121 Third, Heidegger “would not cease to repeat” the thesis that “the true philosopher is the best politician.” Specifically, in 1924/25, Taminiaux argues, he does not fail to “make it appear that he pacts with the Platonic notion of the philosopher-king.”122

118

Ibid., 81, 85.

119

Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 74 citing Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 11.

120

Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 85.

121

Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 76, 74.

122

Thus, in a statement that sums up Heidegger’s attempt at debunking the prejudice that sophia (or philosophical wisdom) is the highest expression of knowledge (as against phronesis, or practical wisdom) we read the following: “Phronesis in itself claims, as we said, to be the highest mode of human knowledge, namely insofar as one can say that it is the gravest of all knowledge, since it is concerned with human existence itself …. Sophia may indeed deal with the … highest beings; but these beings are not ones that concern man in his existence. What concerns man is Dasein itself … namely eudaimonia. And for this phronesis provides direction. Phronesis is supposed to render Dasein transparent in the accomplishment of those actions which lead man to the eu zen [or good life]. If, accordingly, phronesis is the gravest and most decisive knowledge, then that science which moves within the field of phronesis will be the highest. And insofar as no

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For Arendt, in contrast to what Taminiaux takes to be the position of PlatoHeidegger, “the role of the philosopher … is not to rule the city but to be its ‘gadfly’, not to tell philosophical truths but to make citizens more truthful.”123 More specifically, while “Heidegger pretends that the Platonic doctrine of aletheia as it is summed up in the allegory [of the cave] justifies the right that the philosophers have to govern the polis, Arendt deconstructs the allegory step by step ‘[i]n order to comprehend the enormity of Plato’s demand that the philosopher should become the ruler of the city’.”124

man is alone, insofar as people are together, politike (…) is the highest science. Accordingly, politike episteme is genuine sophia, and the politikos is the true philosophos; that is the conception of Plato.” Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 93. Taminiaux also refers to Heidegger’s 1931-32 lecture on “The Essence of Truth,” and specifically to the following passage which he reads as a philosophical justification for Heidegger’s political involvement a year later: “…Plato maintains as his first principle that the authentic guardians of human association [Miteinandersein] in the unity of the polis must be those that philosophize. He does not mean that philosophy professors are to become chancellors of the state [Reich], but that philosophers are to become phulakes, guardians. Control and organization of the state is to be undertaken by philosophers [philosophierenden Menschen], who set standards and rules in accordance with their widest and deepest freely inquiring knowledge, thus determining the general course which society should follow [Bahnen der Entscheidung erschliessen]. As philosophers they must be in a position to know clearly and rigorously what man is, and how things stand with respect to his being and ability-to-be.” M. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 72-73. 123

Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 81.

124

Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 75. According to Taminiaux the parable of the cave for Arendt is a condensed biography of the life of the philosopher which serves as a “preemptive demonstration that the philosopher in the Platonic (or Heideggerian) sense is the least qualified to deal with human affairs.” From the very beginning, the parable “suspends the two dimensions of the human condition that are the raison d’etre of the political … In contrast to the inhabitants of the common world of appearances, the inhabitants of the cave do not act or speak” (77). “[E]ach of [the] steps [of the parable] goes together with ‘a loss of direction and orientation’…” (77). Indeed, the very experience that ignites the ascent, the experience of wonder, is apolitical as it is “speechless” and prompted first of all by “ ‘the experience of the nothing’.” In its highest reach, when the light is finally seen, it remains ineffable (77). Worst of all, if the philosopher decides like Heidegger to dedicate his life to enduring the “pathos” of “speechless wonder” “he cannot as he returns to the cave but be inclined to tyranny for

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Taminiaux’s analyses point to serious problems at the heart of Heidegger’s thought. Each of the points he makes can be further corroborated not only on the grounds of Arendt’s critiques of Heidegger but of those of other students. As I have attempted to show, however, the main impulse of such critiques was, ironically, Heidegger’s thought itself. Strauss expressed this most clearly when he referred to the movement of Hans Jonas’ thought as aiming “in the same direction [as his own and Jacob Klein’s], beyond and also back to Heidegger.”125 To understand Arendt’s response to Heidegger it is hence important to situate it in the broader context of the critiques attempted by some of his other students, for only then will her own distinctive approach come to light. With regards to Taminiaux’s first point, Heidegger indeed failed to raise the difficult and perhaps impossible question of the relation between Socratic and Platonic philosophizing—even when his own observations required that such a question be raised. As Francisco Gonzales points out, one is confronted in Heidegger’s writings with the strange fact that “the figure who normally bears the name ‘Plato’ … is a dogmatic metaphysician and thus the complete antithesis to the figure Heidegger himself names ‘Socrates’.”126 Gadamer, Strauss, Arendt, Krüger, and Klein, by contrast, all pointed to the necessity of ‘re-Socratizing’ the reason … that having founded all his life in such a pathos ‘he has destroyed the plurality of the human condition within himself’.” Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 78; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 98, 101, 100. 125

“In den Gesprächen mit Jonas war mir interessant, dass auch er … in derselben Richtung über Heidegger hinaus bzw. zurückstrebt wie wir” (GS3, 494). 126

Francisco Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Sara AhbelRappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006), 431.

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Plato to understand the fourth-century, pre-philosophical context from which Socratic-Platonic thought emerged. Gadamer and Strauss also objected to Heidegger’s way of opposing truth to opinion. Thus, as we saw, Strauss’s response to Heidegger in the early 1930s seems also to have been targeted against Heidegger’s privileging (in the Sophist lectures and elsewhere) of “original intuition” over “what is merely said”;127 of “substance” over “semblance”;128 and generally of phenomenology over dialectic, or, as Heidegger would also put it, of “silent questioning [as] an openness to the self-concealing, self-withdrawal of being” over “distracting chatter.”129 As for the solipsistic and hence anti-political bias of Heidegger’s philosophy, this too was a common critique made by Strauss and others.130 What according to Taminiaux is an Arendtian critique of Heidegger can thus be shown to be an expression of a broader wave of opposition to the antipolitical biases of the German ontologist. More importantly, this opposition was made possible by Heidegger’s own capacity to show what the classics “really 127

Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 137.

128

Ibid., 148.

129

Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics,” 432. See also LMT, 118 where Arendt quotes Heidegger’s lecture on the Sophist as a case in point of the privileging of speechless intuition over dialogue. 130

See, e.g., Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” RCPR, 32, 37 (“existential philosophy is subjective truth about subjective truth”). Cf. Strauss’s letter to Klein of December 1, 1932, GS3, 457: “we today lack an Existenz philosophy in the strict sense.” Strauss, “Kurt Riezler,” WPP, 260 (on Heidegger’s silence about love, charity, laughter); “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” 233 (“It was obvious that Heidegger’s new thinking led far away from any charity as well as from any humanity.”); “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in SPPP, 30 (There is no room for political philosophy in Heidegger’s work; it is perhaps occupied by god of the gods.)

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meant, which phenomena Plato and Aristotle had in mind when talking of whatever they were talking [about].”131 As other scholars have argued, Taminiaux’s critique of Heidegger can be proven wrong on the grounds of Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle.132 Indeed, it seems to me that what Arendt had to say—allegedly against Heidegger—concerning the relation between truth and opinion, (Socratic) philosophy and sophistry, and rhetoric as “the truly political art” was said by Heidegger with greater precision and depth in those early lectures.133 To understand Arendt’s response to the challenge posed by Heidegger one has to take a broader view. One has to go beyond what are taken to be the core theses of an Arendtian ‘political philosophy’ conceived with and against Heidegger—for instance, that political thought, “reveal[s] doxa in its own truthfulness”;134 that “the deep structure of human action is interaction”;135 that, contra Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s ‘thrownness’ and being-in-the-world, Arendt elucidates freedom as a mode of being-of-the world;136 that in a “supremely un-Heideggerian” way Arendt locates “authentic disclosedness … in

131

Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in H. Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem,” 135. 132

See, e.g., Robert Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles. 133

See chapter 1 as well as Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric.

134

Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76.

135

S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 112.

136

Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 119.

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a realm of opinion and talk”;137 or that, contrary to Heidegger who regards praxis as a form of theory, Arendt reestablishes the dignity of praxis as an end in itself.138 Arendt attempted to think philosophically, or, in her words, to ‘save’— even if not necessarily to explain—such political phenomena as action, new beginnings, power, violence, speech, promising, evil, natality and mortality, worldliness and unworldliness, authority, and the quest for meaning in a way that followed upon, expanded, and radically revised Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses of human being-in-the-world.139 However, as I have tried to show, Heidegger’s thought represented an even greater challenge, first insofar as it was always concerned with matters of thought rather than objects of scholarship, worldviews, or theories; second, insofar as these matters of thought, as Arendt put it, were “concerns of thinking men … from time immemorial”; and third, insofar as—at least in the eyes of Arendt or Strauss—no one at the time, or perhaps ever, had addressed such matters with the self-consciousness attained by Heidegger. This—and particularly the last point—implies that beyond the already formidable

137

Ibid., 140.

138

Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 133 ff. 139

Cf. S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism, 51: Heidegger’s concept of the world “opens up and yet also closes down philosophical access to the phenomena of the political.” For Arendt’s understanding of theory as a means of ‘saving the phenomena’ by a theory that is adequate to what appears (versus a hypothesis upon which to go to work—this being the modern understanding of theory), see her lecture notes for the 1969 course delivered at the New School on “What is Political Philosophy?”: Courses---New School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.--“Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?” lectures and seminar---1969, 24417. Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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challenge of responding to Heidegger by ‘saving’ the phenomena of the political for the most part neglected by Heidegger, Arendt (like Strauss) would have to think through the matters of thought or the fundamental problems addressed by Heidegger. Among such fundamental problems discussed in this dissertation, we recall here two. The first concerns the relation between theory and practice. Is the modern understanding of practical and theoretical reason as different forms of consciousness meaningful? Does it correspond to the phenomena? Is not theory itself a practical comportment? And is not genuine human praxis—for instance the praxis of friendship—always already ‘theoretical’, namely insofar as it presupposes a capacity to see the other?140 The second and more fundamental problem concerns the proper ‘work’ of man, or the most ‘radical’ possibility of human existence. Is it political life, as Heidegger suggests it was for the Greeks— if “man is truly man insofar as he lives in the polis”?, if man is a living being for whom “being-in-the-world is determined in its grounds by speech”?, if, finally, the “fundamental character of the Dasein of man [is] being-with-one-another … in the sense of … sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-with”?141 Or is faith the most radical human possibility—if the grounds (or non-grounds) of existence are

140

As Gadamer puts it: “Is [praxis] not, when it is human, a looking away from itself and an attending and listening to the other?” Is it not a “seeing beyond oneself [Absehen] von sich] to what is [Hinsehen auf das was ist]?” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Lob der Theorie. Reden und Aufsätze (Frankfurt, a. M: Suhrkamp, 1991), 49-50. Cited in Walter A. Brogan, “Gadamer’s Praise of Theory: Aristotle’s Friend and the Reciprocity Between Theory and Practice,” Research in Phenomenology, 32 (2002): 141-155, 142. 141

Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 56, 18, 47.

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only grasped in the experience of finitude as lived paradigmatically by the early Christians?, if “[t]he way in which … we humans are on this earth, is … dwelling”;142 if, finally, we may only know of the indebtedness of life, of our openness to (revealed) meaning, of truth-revealing anxiety, and of the existential possibility of rebirth through faith? Or is it science or philosophy through which we grasp these things such that we would have to say that the best human life is spent in philosophizing? Is not theory the possibility for existence “to stand exclusively on its own,” to “break through … to the matters themselves,” “to remove the world”—and ourselves—“from concealedness and coveredness”?143 This reference to some of the fundamental problems raised by Heidegger’s thought should suffice to show that Arendt’s response cannot be grasped when the aim of her project is expressed in such terms as giving “existential supremacy” to political action over all human activities;144 as effecting “a systematic renewal of the Aristotelian concept of praxis”;145 as “reasserting the Aristotelian notion of koinonia”;146 as “celebrat[ing] ancient practice … [while] denigrat[ing] ancient theory”;147 or as giving “priority [to] democracy [over] philosophy’.”148 For at the

142

Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 349.

143

Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 6, 11, 17.

144

Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 11.

145

Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 174.

146

Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 7.

147

Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue,” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 2. (May, 1990): 238-254, 239.

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very least on the decisive questions of theory and practice and of the highest realization of the human condition, Arendt was a genuine political philosopher who faced these fundamental problems Socratically, that is, in a way prior to the bifurcation of thinking into questions of theory and practice or metaphysics and ethics—let alone ‘democracy and philosophy’ or ‘individualism and communitarianism’. We shall now take a closer look at the meaning of Socratism for Arendt.

Arendt’s Socrates We begin by noting the central characteristics of the Arendtian Socrates. Arendt’s Socrates is the discoverer of an ethics in which “what is fundamental are neither divine nor human commands, but the Socratic ‘being in harmony with oneself’” (437).149 Socratic ethics presupposes plurality as “the law of the earth,” first insofar as being alone is always already a being with myself resulting in what Arendt called the ‘two-in-one of thinking’,150 and second,

148

Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 278.

149

See, e.g., Plato, Gorgias 482 b-c and 474 a-b. See also Plato, Hippias Major, 304: at the end of the dialogue, “Socrates tells Hippias… ‘how blissfully fortunate’ he is compared with himself who, when he goes home, is awaited by a very obnoxious fellow ‘who always cross-examines [him], a close relative, living in the same house’.” Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 185-86. 150

LMT, 19, 187. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 88: “Men not only exist in the plural as do all earthly beings, but have an indication of this plurality within themselves.” Cf. Plato, Sophist, 263 e: “Are not thinking and reasonable speech the same, except that the former, which takes place inside as a voiceless dialogue of the soul with itself is called by us thinking.” Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 185: “What thinking actualizes in its process is the difference given in consciousness.”

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insofar as being is appearing such that a core ethical precept becomes to be as you want to appear.151 Socrates, according to Arendt, “withdraws from the polloi on one side and from the sophoi on the other! That is his and only his position. The many rest satisfied with the semblance of opinion, the wise with the Being of truth; only Socrates can have no rest [Ruhe] because he thinks and thinking brings no results” (590).152 The Socratic quest to “know thyself” points beyond the semblance of opinion and the knowledge of being. “It means first: recognize that you are only one and can only have particular knowledge [Erkenntnis], know that you are a human being and no God; second: follow this particular and find its [truth] and therewith your truth. –Maintaining both at the same time, you will have truth, human truth, without forcing it on others” (413).153 The Socratic way sees in doxa or opinion a political expression of the fact that we cannot know (432). Doxa is not unfounded opinion (only “Plato turns it 151

DT, 443: be as you want to appear (drawing on Cicero referring to Xenophon, Memorabilia II, 6, 39). Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 74: The relation to oneself in the ‘two-in-one’ is formally identical to the phenomenal relation of every individual to the plurality of the world. 152

Arendt refers to Plato, Euthyphron, where “Euthyphron is against the polloi, not Socrates” (DT, 590). Euthyphron argues that “the pious is to … prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone else…” He cites “powerful evidence that the law is so,” referring to the gods and to Zeus in particular who “bound his father because he unjustly swallowed his sons, and … castrated his father for similar reasons.” The many are “angry with me because I am prosecuting my father for his wrongdoing” but they agree with what Zeus did. “They contradict themselves…” Plato, Euthyphron, 5 d – 6 a. Socrates wants to bring to the many what is only for the few, he is keen on teaching [lehrlustig] (DT, 592, referring to Euthyphron, 3). 153

Arendt draws attention to the characterization of Socratic wisdom in Plato’s Apology as “anthropine Sophia” (DT, 585, referring to Plato, Apology, 20 d).

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into that”) but the expression of what “seems to me.” Doxa only shows one aspect of the phenomenon as a whole, but this aspect is “not at all semblance” (391). There is “in fact [in doxa] an orthotes [which is] not correctness but adequacy or appropriateness: concerning that which appears to me doxa speaks appropriately or inappropriately. However, that does not settle anything concerning the question whether there is in an appearance truth or untruth, being or non-being, on or me on” (532). From a Socratic standpoint, “[t]he ‘goodness’ of the polis depends upon the adequacy of ‘expressing’ my doxa, or upon the rightness with which I translate the visual appearance into logos: phronesis. This [is] the Socratic view of truth as opposed to Plato, where orthotes appears as adequacy of measurements” (532).154 Therefore, according to Arendt, “[t]he true techne politike,” Socratically conceived, “is not the art of ruling but of convincing, peithesthai.” This “is the original connection between rhetoric and politics” (391). But how exactly does a techne politike proceed? When Plato’s Socrates claims that he is the only Athenian who possesses the true political art, does he mean that he possesses the art of persuasion (cf. 387f.)? A closer look at the task of the Socratic political art or science as Arendt understands it reveals the following.

154

On phronesis see also Arendt, Introduction into Politics, 168 where Arendt refers to phronesis as “the [Greek] standard for an aptitude that is specifically political.” It means having “the greatest possible overview of all the possible standpoints and viewpoints from which an issue can be seen and judged.” Arendt claims that “over the ensuing centuries, hardly anyone speaks of phronesis” until Kant referred to it as a form of “‘enlarged mentality’” defined as “the ability ‘to think from the position of every other person’” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 40).

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First, the Socratic art, we can say, establishes plurality as “the law of the earth.” That in a Socratic ethics “neither divine nor human commands” are fundamental means, as Arendt puts it in another context, that “[n]either is man the measure of things, nor is God the measure of human things, nor are things [Dinge] the measure of man. What conditions us [was uns bedingt] is the fact of plurality as such” (392). This train of thought developed throughout Arendt’s diaries is an answer to Heidegger elaborated in ‘Socratic’ terms. According to Heidegger, “[i]n the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the be-thinged, the conditioned ones [Be-dingten]. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness” (195).155 Arendt sees this as a failed attempt to invert the saying that man is the measure of all things. “When man is seen as the measure of things, the question arises: And what is the measure of man who of course cannot be his own ‘measure’…? [W]ithin a way of thinking that avoids all transcendence [viz., Heidegger’s], the only answer is: things are the measure of man” (338-39). That not things but the fact of plurality conditions us means in Socratic terms, as we have suggested, that the measure of my actions is how they appear in a world constituted by a plurality of standpoints, as well as how I myself relate to those actions in the silent dialogue of thinking. The Socratic techne politike establishes plurality as a measure of human things, but it also individuates: Socrates’ questioning “dissolves the many again into individuals!” (587). Contrary to the Platonic cave allegory in which the many 155

Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collings, 1971), 178-79.

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do not give to the philosopher the calm that he needs, Socrates’ “philosophizing thinking does not let either himself or the others rest.” Thus “the initiative has switched. The philosopher needs calm, with Socrates it is the opposite: He does not even have the necessary schole [leisure, rest, ease] for the public affairs” (586-587).156 The Socratic political art individuates by igniting the silent dialogue of thinking through which we remove ourselves from the common world.157 Thus the Socratic political art liberates judgment: thinking has a “corrosive” or even “destructive” effect on “established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil.” It “dissolves accepted rules of conduct.” Particularly—or perhaps exclusively—“when the chips are down,” when “everybody is swept unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes,” thinking makes us stop—and think (188).158 But what exactly does thinking think about? Thinking thinks what is beyond common sense or indeed beyond reality.159 “[T]hinking always deals only with what is absent”160—for instance with the Being of being (158). Thinking is not about “what something is or whether it exists at all—its existence is always

156

Arendt refers to Plato, Apology, 23.

157

See “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 166.

158

Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 175-6, 188. See Dana Villa, “The Philosopher Versus the Citizen: Arendt, Strauss, and Socrates,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 155-180, esp. 166. 159

LMT, 52-53.

160

Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 157; DT, 725-726.

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taken for granted—but what it means for it to be.”161 Thinking is a natural activity “whereby men, since time immemorial have tried to think rationally beyond the limits of human knowledge.”162 Beyond the limits of knowledge we seek meaning. Thinking is driven by “the appetite for meaning” and not by the desire to know or to escape ignorance. It is not because “all men by nature desire to know” but because of wonder, and the need for meaning, that thinking and philosophy arise.163 But thinking and philosophizing are not the same. Thinking is an activity without results, like taking a walk. Philosophy understood (for instance, with Hegel) as thinking about thinking is a special case of thinking; as such, it wants to achieve results and is not pure activity (727; see also 786). Thinking is a passion that one endures; it is an entirely uncontemplative activity; it is literally delf-destructive: any results it obtains it undermines in order to begin again. Is this the Socratic political art? Arendt suggests, for instance, that “the Socratic” consists in this, that “the more I think justice, the less I know what it is and the more just I become” (735). This would seem to be an answer to the question concerning the Socratic political art as a means of making human beings better. But it seems to be a non sequitur, for, as Arendt herself notes, thinking as

161

LMT, 58-9.

162

Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in BPF, 231.

163

Cf. Arendt’s critique of the growth of philosophy into science which she finds already prefigured in Aristotle at LMT, 114. Arendt cites Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983a14-20: “‘all men begin by wondering … but one must end with the opposite and with what is better [than wondering], as is the case when men learn’.”

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an activity that “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil” may just as well lead to “license and cynicism” and indeed to nihilism.164 Moreover, the element of dialogue or dialectic is missing, and one could argue that precisely the point of the Socratic way is that it does not think, for instance, justice in itself—or at least does not begin by doing that—but what people say about it.165 As Dana Villa has argued, Arendt did not provide a consistent account of the Socratic art.166 However, one can hardly hold this against her. Indeed, a consistent account of Socrates would arguably miss what is specifically Socratic—for, contrary to his own assurance that he always said the same thing about the same things, Plato’s Socrates contradicts himself. Still, an effort must be

164

Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 175-76, 177.

165

See chapter four.

166

See Dana Villa, “Arendt and Socrates,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 204-219. According to Villa, Arendt developed at least three versions of Socrates: in “Philosophy and Politics” (1954) Socrates is a citizen among citizens; maieutic serves the function of beautifying the world, of ‘finding the truth in one’s doxa’, of multiplying and sharpening individual perspectives, and thus of making the common world richer. Here the purpose of political philosophy is decidedly political; the life of the mind becomes the servant of ‘common sense’ (215); Socrates appears as a soldier of Pericles helping people fall in love with Athens. In “Civil Disobedience” (1970), by contrast, the Socratic care of the soul is characterized as ‘unpolitical’ (209). Finally, in “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971), Villa argues, Arendt’s life-long defense of the bios politikos is inverted (211): maieutic has the function of purging opinions, and of deciding if they should live at all; it paralyzes and suspends action. Socratic thinking appears as ‘a dangerous and resultless enterprise’ (210). What is puzzling, argues Villa, is that Arendt only saw the necessity of thinking ‘in those rare moments when the chips are down’. This is due, first, to her fear that individualism and subjectivism go hand in hand (she approves and then damns the Socratic injunction to be in harmony with ourselves above all); second, to her insistence on the conflict between philosophy and politics as different ways of life in a kind of ‘inverted Platonism’ which leads to a portrait of a ‘civic’ Socrates (218) that may not be “genuinely Socratic—that is to say, philosophical—at all” (9); and, third, to her “strange insistence that the world can be beautified through political action,” which blinded her “to the possibility that care for the world may take a variety of forms” (218).

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made to explain the contradictions and tensions in the work of serious thinkers— in this case in the work of Arendt. Arendt seems to have followed Heidegger when in 1951/52 he suggested that Socrates was the purest thinker of the west.167 Over the years, Arendt began to conceive of a Heideggerian Socrates that embodies the idea of pure thinking. As we have seen, pure thinking deals with invisibles and with what cannot be known; it is an unending and resultless task; and it is not concerned with truth but with meaning. Strikingly, the invisible realm of pure thinking is the field of at least one of Arendt’s conceptions of political theory or ‘political philosophy’— namely, the “unending” quest for understanding which “transcends … facts and figures” and whose ‘result’—never final for we are never quite at home in the world—is meaning.168 Political philosophy in this understanding deals with questions such as these: “Why is there anybody at all and not rather nobody?”169 “What is thinking? What is action?” Why do we think or act at all?170 What is radical evil? “What is politics? Who is man as a political being? What is freedom?”171 What is the measure of human things?172

167

Arendt visited Freiburg in May of 1952 and attended Heidegger’s lecture “What is Called Thinking?” on May 23 and 30. See DT, 973 f. See Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 17, where Heidegger refers to Socrates as “the purest thinker of the West.” Cf. LMT, 174. 168

Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” EU 308, 316-17.

169

Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 204.

170

Arendt, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 24418, 24419.

171

Arendt, “Concern with Politics,” EU, 433.

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Ironically, these questions of ‘political philosophy’ are not the questions of the common citizen, and in that sense they can hardly be designated as ‘political’. Indeed, the variation to the question of Leibniz, Schelling, and Heidegger—“Why is there anything at all and not rather nothing?”—presupposes “the conditions of worldlessness that first appeared in the modern age,”173 and thus—we may surmise—it would also have struck Socrates as odd. If “no one can think when he is with others”174 then ‘Socrates’ cannot stand for both ‘pure’ and ‘political’ thinking. However, we also find in Arendt another meaning of Socratic ‘political philosophy’ as an art or method that, far from taking leave of the common world, invariably adheres to opinions in order to understand or see the essence of things. “Socrates’ method: … let us consider what we say: always starts from logos as what is spoken” (594).175 An opinion or “doxa in its true form … in contrast to phainesthai [to bring to light, make to appear] only shows one aspect, not the whole…” But this aspect, as noted earlier, is not at all mere semblance (391). For example, “a description of the [concentration] camps as Hell on earth is more ‘objective’, that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely 172

Arendt, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 24428.

173

Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 203.

174

Arendt, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 24445.

175

Arendt refers to Plato, Euthyphron, 9 e4-7: “[Soc:] Then shall we examine this again, Euthyphro, to see if it is correct, or shall we let it go and accept our own statement, and those of others, agreeing that it is so, if anyone merely says that it is? Or ought we to inquire into the correctness of the statement [σκεπτέον τί λέγει ὁ λέγων]?” (Arendt cites the last part of the statement in Greek. Schleiermacher translates: Or must one first ponder what he says who says something? [DT, 1085: Oder muss man erst erwägen, was der wohl sagt, der etwas sagt?”].)

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sociological or psychological nature.”176 Similarly, Arendt suggests that in order to understand the essence of religion one must take seriously “what people say,” for instance, about God. Generally, it is advisable to look at “history as it reveals itself in the utterances of great statesmen, or the intellectual and spiritual manifestations of a period,” and take them at face value.177 A good example— except for the fact that it does not involve great statesmen, or indeed intellect or spirit—is what Arendt did with the opinions of Adolph Eichmann, which for her revealed the essence of evil in the twentieth century.

176

Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in EU, 404. “The ‘phenomenal differences’, far from ‘obscuring’ some essential sameness, are those phenomena which make totalitarianism ‘totalitarian’, which distinguish this one form of government and movement from all others and therefore can alone help us in finding its essence” (Ibid., 405). Cf. Strauss’s similar argument in On Tyranny, 177, 192. 177

Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” EU, 374 f.

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Concluding remarks

This chapter’s search for the Arendtian understanding of Socratic political philosophy has remained inconclusive. Arendt’s ambition, as we saw, was to think of a ‘new political philosophy’ since the west ‘never really had a proper political philosophy’. Given the complexity of her thinking, which was both theological and philosophical, Jewish and Christian, political and apolitical—in a way, moreover, that transcends these labels—I attempted in this chapter to follow its movement towards ‘political philosophy’ without prejudging its content. I tried to show thereby that the core of Arendt’s thought is fundamentally missed when it is understood as ‘post-metaphysical’, ‘Grecophile’, ‘neo-Aristotelian’ or ‘antiPlatonic’ as is commonly done in the scholarly literature. Instead I proposed to designate her thought as ‘Socratic’, thus implying a fundamental coincidence with the path followed by Leo Strauss—as Dana Villa, for instance, has done—while probing deeper into the sources of such Socratism in Heidegger’s thought as well as in her strong attraction (shared by the young Heidegger and Strauss) to the possibility of a life that is anti-political insofar as it is guided by divine revelation or by faith. The logic leading Arendt to Socrates is perhaps readily apparent: ‘Socrates’—the political philosopher par excellence who allegedly had nothing to learn from nature but only from what speech reveals about human nature; the

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person torn between divine conscience and the laws of the state; the ‘purest thinker’ and the ‘prototype of the theoretical optimist’ who nevertheless ‘knew nothing’ and wrote nothing. Arendt was a Socratic, we could say, first of all, insofar as her thought expresses similar tensions. On the one hand, for her (as for Socrates) physics or the study of nature would seem to be uninteresting: physics settles nothing with respect to the space in-between human beings—hence it is literally uninteresting (‘inter-esse’); this is all the more so since for Arendt we cannot really know anything about human nature. Rather than physically, we would seem to be conditioned by human experiences, by the passions that we share (e.g., fear, love of distinction, or love of equality), and by the way we reveal ourselves through action and speech. Physics for Arendt appears to be uninteresting, furthermore, insofar as it is not quite true that ‘all men by nature desire to know’. Rather, we desire to ‘see’ and be seen, to understand, and to give meaning to the misery and greatness of human life (for example, through storytelling). On the other hand, however, Arendt is concerned, like Socrates seems to have been, with things other than human. Thus in her thought human experience is pervaded by the nonhuman—by the divine or the natural or by the ‘truth’ that ‘we cannot change’ or that is a ‘revelation’. We found the same kind of tension between the centrality of ethics and a persistent concern with ontology (or the question of Being) in Heidegger; and in Strauss—between his concern with understanding ‘the human things’ as different from ‘the nature of man’—or ‘the perfection of human nature’

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as different from ‘human nature’—without, however, abandoning the discourse on ‘nature’. There is a second Socratic perplexity in the thought of Arendt. On the one hand, man is apolitical, and all would seem to suggest that human realization is possible without others: thus, we are not quite of this world (or ‘man without world still is’); truth is beyond reality (or it is an event that ‘breaks into’ reality); conscience is activated in the ‘silent dialogue with myself’; phronesis (or prudence) depends on an adequate translation of what (visually) ‘seems to me’ into logos. Indeed, Arendt often seems to come close to the Christian view that the ‘sovereign individual … does not need others, but only the help—grace, redemption etc.—of God’. (We recall here her young attraction to Christian possibilities of existence.) On the other hand, however, a life guided by a sovereign morality that we prescribe to ourselves—by the virtue which ‘contains what no one other than the human being can give himself’ or by the life that I choose—represents for Arendt a rebellion against what is given to us that results in the ‘de-divinization’ of the world, in the world becoming a ‘desert’, and in the transformation of the world into a mere means for the realization of our will. Arendt, in other words, reproduces in a novel way the tension we find in Socrates between a life guided by divine conscience and the conditions with which life is given to man. The result—to turn to a final affinity to Socrates—is a way of thinking that is deeply concerned with ‘ethics’ (i.e., with the question of man’s place in the

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world and his relation to the other or with the human ‘conditionedness’) that nevertheless, in a sense, teaches nothing. Indeed, with the important exception of her private diaries and her lecture notes, we find in the work of Arendt ironically little philosophizing concerned with the traditional normative questions of ethicspolitics (e.g., justice and standards, measures and norms). This is in part to suggest that Arendt was a political philosopher more concerned with fundamental problems or questions than with their solutions— e.g., What is the highest human capacity?, What is the measure of human things? What is the relation between thinking and action? In this, I think, she closely resembles Strauss. That is, one meaning of political philosophy upheld by the work of both thinkers is ‘genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems’ without ‘succumbing to the attraction of solutions’, and specially of those solutions that have long been traded over in western thought. And yet, there is a telling difference: Arendt was far more reluctant than Strauss to develop a worldview which, however provisionally, could provide an answer to such questions in order to articulate a ‘system to live by’. There seem to be three reasons for this. First, Arendt seems to have been more lastingly affected by the theological and philosophical Destruktion of the ‘gods’ of this world—e.g., Nature, History, the Will, culture, ‘good and evil’, theoria—undertaken by Heidegger and neo-orthodox theology, which means that she considered the traditional language of political philosophy (good and evil, just and unjust, etc.) to be unavailable. Furthermore, she seems to have drawn more

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radical conclusions from the loss of common sense that characterizes the modern age. That is, contra the Straussian view that just and unjust, good and evil, noble and base, right and wrong are ‘natural’ valuations or valuations that arise from ‘common sense’, Arendt would hold that this common sense somehow no longer exists (because of such phenomena as the inward turn and subjectization characteristic of the modern age or the collapse of the traditions manifested above all in the Holocaust). Second, contrary to Strauss, Arendt did not intend to develop a ‘political theory’ for edifying or pedagogical purposes. A final and related reason is that for Arendt—ironically, given her reputation—political philosophy, or, more generally put, thinking about the human condition as a political condition, has an aim that is far less practical than the aim of Strauss’s own political philosophizing (specially his mature, American thought). Indeed, thinking for Arendt deals with what is absent, with unanswerable questions, and satisfies the quest for meaning, not truth. However much Arendt stressed the importance of developing a political philosophy out of political experiences (and not the experience of the thinking ego), there is—again, ironically—surprisingly little in Arendt’s work that manifests an interest in practical deliberation or political argument. Arendt’s work, then, does not manifest a concern with the traditional questions of political philosophy, even if it is clear from her unpublished writings that she was (personally) deeply concerned with such questions. One conclusion I draw is that her thought, following Heidegger and in a way similar to Strauss,

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represents a return to elementary problems as apparently first confronted—more or less secretly insofar as he claims not to have taught anything—by Socrates: is nature the key to understanding human being-in-the-world? That is, can one understand the human being as other beings of the world, or must naturalism be rejected? If so, how can the human ‘conditionedness’ be accounted for, i.e., the fact that the human world is pervaded by natural or divine manifestations—to the point, indeed, that for Arendt a human world is ‘not a man-made reality’? What follows from this for any possible ‘humanism’ or any possible ‘ethics’? Are we to make ourselves at home in the world, or is true responsibility for the world only thinkable when we understand our condition as beings that are not quite of this world? There is very little to be gained for ‘systematic’ purposes from discovering this dimension of Arendt’s thought. And one may be tempted to dismiss her whole endeavor as a ‘stream of metaphysical associations’ (Isaiah Berlin) or to enlist it in the service of one or the other causes favored by contemporary political theorizing—deliberative, agonistic, post-modernist, neo-Aristotelian—in order to make it more ‘useful’ and palatable. I have taken a third approach in which I have tried to do justice to her ‘metaphysical’ thought about God, the world, and man while also enlisting her in a cause—namely, what I have called neo-Socratic political philosophizing. The conclusions that follow are an attempt to elucidate this concept in light of the historical and philosophical trajectory delineated in this dissertation.

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CONCLUSION

In writing this dissertation I have been guided by the conviction that ‘philosophy is not the construction of a system, but the resolution once made to look naively at the world and into oneself’ (Bergson). Along with this anti-systemic—or, one could also say, Socratic—conviction, I have been guided by the impulse to contribute to a cause, or, academically speaking, to participate in an existing conversation and propose a ‘theory’ with a certain ‘intent’. This conviction and this impulse do not go easily together. I have tried to combine them in the idea of a neo-Socratic political philosophy. If this could be said to constitute a ‘theory’, it is a theory about theory, and its intent is theoretical. That is to say, I have tried to take seriously the claim that Socrates was the prototype of the theoretical optimist and that his most important achievement—for good or bad—was to discover the uses (and perhaps abuses) of theory for life. Following that Socratic intent I have attempted to recover certain possibilities of political theorizing as they emerged in the early twentieth century in the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss. These possibilities have either been missed by the literature or they have not been understood in their proper context, that is, as responding to certain historical necessities and as enabling certain ways of existence. The first possibility of neo-Socratic theorizing that I have tried to recover stems from the early work of Heidegger. Heidegger was responding to the exhaustion of ethico-normative theorizing in neo-Kantianism and generally to the

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failure of systems—theological or philosophical—to speak to life or to concrete historical existence after the ‘death of God’, that is, after the highest values had been rendered incredible thanks especially to the advance of the positive and historical sciences. Heidegger sought to refound philosophy on its existential genesis. This means to begin from elementary experiences or from simply human things like words, or opinions, or the passions that give rise to them. If it is true that, as Heidegger suggests, the theoretical always points to such a pre-theoretical dimension, the following possibilities arise for political philosophy.

Socratic history of political philosophy A major achievement of the work of Leo Strauss is that it has made possible a new way of reading the history of philosophy as political philosophy. Thus Heinrich Meier, for instance, has argued that on the basis of Strauss’s work one would have to supplant (or perhaps complement) Heidegger’s guiding question for understanding the history of western thought, viz., what is metaphysics? with the question, what is political philosophy? This would mean, in effect, to rewrite the canon of foundational thinkers by shifting the focus from ‘pre-Socratics’ to ‘Socratics’, that is, from thinkers that did not engage in a critical evaluation of political, moral, and religious opinions—especially their own—to thinkers who did. The reason for this can be illustrated with the case of Hermann Cohen discussed in this dissertation. Cohen, we could say, forced himself as a matter of

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intellectual conscience or honesty to renounce his early neo-Kantian convictions—moral, religious, political—and particularly his early understanding of God as an idea of reason. The case of Cohen would seem to be paradigmatic of a way of thinking that begins from moral, religious, and political convictions (or prejudices) as a necessary starting point in the quest for truth—to ultimately take leave from them. Or one could also refer to the case of Nietzsche as an even more extreme example of a truly critical philosophy in which the idea of ‘intellectual honesty’ leading to ‘absolutely honest atheism’ was itself subjected to critical scrutiny and partly transcended as a consequence of ‘long moral training’ in Christianity. Meier refers to Heidegger, Frege, and Wittgenstein as examples of contemporary ‘pre-Socratics’, and to Aristotle, Machiavelli, Alfarabi, Maimonides, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Strauss as paradigmatic ‘Socratics’. This dissertation complements but also revises Meier’s thesis as follows. First, the guiding question of the thought of Strauss seems to me to be both the (Socratic) question of the right life and the (Platonic-Aristotelian) question of the meaning of Being, which were recovered respectively by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Neither was Heidegger a ‘pre-Socratic’ for Strauss—Heidegger did confront the problem of ethics—nor was Strauss an anti-metaphysician unconcerned with the question of Being or the whole. Thus, Heidegger was important for Strauss because he saw that there is a ‘revolting disproportion between ethics and the phenomena it seeks to articulate’, or in other words: it is at

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least an open question for Strauss whether what we refer to as ‘good’ is in fact morally good or points to something stable that we can agree to be good, or, differently put, whether our understanding of good does justice to the phenomenon (which could perhaps just as well be described as ‘fit for’ or ‘beautiful’). (The same, I think, could be said with respect to the phenomenon of evil and the need to conceive ‘radical evil’ beyond moral categories.) Second, the merits of the thesis that a Socratic ‘turn’ to a critical scrutiny of moral, political, and religious standpoints clears the way towards a more truthful account of the nature of things must be evaluated in light of the fact that Strauss himself seems to have undergone such a turn. Indeed, this dissertation shows that Strauss’s early thought is radically different from his mature American ‘political philosophy’. Apart from the obvious difference between Strauss’s early support of a politics that is ‘fascist, authoritarian, imperial’ and his later embrace of liberal democracy as a regime that receives ‘powerful support’ from ancient thought, one has to consider the evidence of Strauss’s early atheism—and his quest for a ‘conscientious, scientifically unobjectionable’ interpretation of religion—which conflicts with the later view that ‘the new intellectual probity is something different from the old love of truth’; his early critique of the ‘supremacy of theory’ which would turn into an opposite affirmation of ‘the superiority of contemplation as such to action as such’ and of the ‘radical detachment from human concerns’ that philosophy requires; as well as, finally, his early conviction that political science could provide an answer to the question

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of ‘the right order of human life as living together’ which contrasts with his later insistence that ‘all political life is necessarily imperfect’ and that the human problem cannot be solved at the political level. The fact that Strauss seems to have undertaken a turn away from early Heideggerian positions—the critique of the supremacy of theory, the attempt to explain the Bible atheistically, the quest for Bodenständig (or autochtonous) thinking and acting—to their opposite extreme—the primacy of theory, the irrefutability of revelation, the praise of the life of the philosopher in exile—may say more about Strauss’s own philosophical politics—or what Rosen calls ‘philosophical propaganda’—than about the inherent deficiencies of forms of thought that fail to address the moral, political, and religious question of the right life. Then again, if that is true—that is, if Strauss engaged in such propaganda as a means of averting the pitfalls of his own early Heideggerian convictions—this may say more about the continuing relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy for the mature Strauss than about his apparent embrace of exoteric writing for a moral-political cause. (And indeed, reading Strauss’s mature works and correspondence in light of his encounter with Heidegger shows that, with Heidegger, Strauss remained committed to an unbelieving standpoint (though not to atheism), that he did not regard detached contemplation as sufficient for grasping the truth, and that he remained convinced that a life that belongs entirely to the city—or to a closed political community— remains morally-politically the best.)

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Thus, this dissertation sheds light on the motifs that may have led Strauss—and scholars of Strauss like Meier—to suggest that a confrontation with moral, political, and religious standpoints is essential to understanding the development of western thought. One of the reasons, I have suggested, is that Strauss found himself compelled to confront his own early moral, political, and religious convictions. Does this make Socratic self-examination less important in general (i.e., beyond Strauss’s own case)? By no means. To see this it is necessary to refer to a second way in which this dissertation confirms and expands on Meier’s thesis. The fact that Strauss made important contributions to our understanding of the history of philosophy as political philosophy has been recognized by thinkers of the rank of Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, Michael Oakeshott, Gerhard Krüger, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Rémi Brague—to refer only to non-Straussian scholars who have studied Strauss’s readings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and classical and medieval political philosophy. What remains to be explored is the way Strauss may also have shed light on the thinker he considered to be the greatest of his time, namely Heidegger. This dissertation suggests that Strauss must indeed be counted as an important source for our understanding of Heidegger. Strauss pointed to the connection between the thought of Heidegger and Rosenzweig in the early 1930s, almost two decades before Löwith’s seminal study and seven decades before the reappraisal of Rosenzweig by post-modern scholars such as Bonnie Honnig and William Connolly. Perhaps less originally, also in the early

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1930s, Strauss proposed a critique of Heidegger as a neo-Aristotelian who favored ‘phenomenological intuition’ over ‘dialectic’ in a way that complements the critique of Gadamer and others. This critique was based on Strauss’s acquaintance with an earlier expression of Heidegger’s thought—his interpretations of the Metaphysics and Rhetoric—which led Strauss to the view that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle was the most important intellectual phenomenon which emerged in Germany after the First World War. This view, expressed in the 1940s, has now received support—especially since the publication of Heidegger’s early lectures beginning in the late 1980s—from scholars such as Franco Volpi, Thomas Sheehan, Theodore Kisiel, and Stanley Rosen. Finally, and most importantly, Strauss also pointed early on to the kinship between Heidegger’s and Martin Luther’s Destruktion of the tradition as has lately been emphasized by John Van Buren, Jacques Derrida, Otto Pöggeler and others. More specifically (and more originally), however, Strauss pointed to the pervasiveness of the ‘deconstructive’ project in modern thought by studying the foundational work of Thomas Hobbes. That is, one central contribution of Strauss was to point to the genealogy not only of (Heideggerian) ‘deconstruction’ but of the modern mind generally through his studies of Hobbes. The fact that Strauss turned to Hobbes for primordially ‘Heideggerian’ reasons—that is, first, to somehow combine Heidegger and Hobbes and then to ‘deconstruct’ Heidegger through Hobbes—has been missed by the literature.

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John McCormick has hinted at the first possibility by suggesting that, using Heidegger, Strauss may have attempted a ‘Germanization of Hobbes’, that is, a politicization of ‘the significance of anxiety over death’ recast in Hobbesian terms as the fear of violent death. It is this fear, McCormick argues, ‘that brings an other into proximity with a being and thus raises the question of the social and political in Schmitt’s sense of the terms’. Strauss’s interest in Hobbes and Heidegger can be made clearer as follows. Before 1933 Strauss emphasized and praised the radicality of both thinkers, meaning that both confronted in a nontraditional way the question of the best life by putting into question the view that it is the life of theoretical contemplation. Both also sought to provide an atheistic justification of human existence. Drawing on Heidegger, Strauss attempted an immanent critique of Hobbes which objected to Hobbes’ ‘missing’ of the question of the essence of virtue—thus assuming that the end of social life is necessarily peace, which in turn implies that ‘Hobbes’ philosophy remain[ed] before death: it is a philosophy of averageness’. After 1933—and, particularly, after Heidegger’s inversion of the meaning of ancient theoria from ‘awed perseverance in the face of what is’ into ‘completely unguarded exposure’ to the questionable—Strauss began to trace the blurring of the traditional distinction between theory and praxis back to Hobbes. More generally, Strauss pointed to the fact that Heidegger’s philosophy must be understood, if not as a consequence, at least as a manifestation of the same spirit that dominates the philosophy of Hobbes.

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This spirit is pervaded by Christianity, and particularly by the reaction against it. Both Hobbes and Heidegger engage in a critique of (Christian) theology that is, at first, ‘only destruktiv’ insofar as ‘it is not guided by a positive, original understanding of Scripture’. This critique is, more generally, a critique of onto-theology or the belief that ‘there be in the world certain Essences separated from Bodies, which they call Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes’. Such beliefs arise for Hobbes and Heidegger because of idle speculation (or, in Heidegger’s terms, because of the ‘care-less’ looking of theoria). For both, rather, it is only through the fear of death that man comes to his senses. However, this rejection of the Aristotelian tradition is coupled with a strange—highly original and ‘extreme’—dependence on it. Indeed, Hobbes and Heidegger are perhaps unique in the history of western thought for regarding and using Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a foundational work. Strauss shows that every stage in the development of Hobbes’ ‘political science’ was preceded by a reading of the Rhetoric. Heidegger too, as we have seen, developed a ‘political philosophy’ based on his reading of Aristotle’s ethical-political works and especially his Rhetoric. Following Hobbes and Heidegger the Rhetoric can be read as a culminating work in the Socratic-Aristotelian project of developing a ‘philosophy of human affairs’ or a ‘political science’ which includes an ontological account of the passions and the virtues. The thought of Hobbes and Heidegger seems to have been thoroughly pervaded by this project: in a sense, they thus ‘repeat’ the Socratic project of a techne politike. But they also ‘reduce’ it by taking an

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extreme of the tradition—in this case, Aristotle’s account of fear—and making it foundational—ironically, in order to find (in the fear of death) an unshakable ground to reject the tradition (the fear of violent death is the passion everyone can agree on, as Angst is the basic experience in light of which everything must be understood). Among the peculiarities of this repetition and reduction of the tradition is that, as a consequence of the critique of theoria, ‘the difference between prudence and wisdom loses any relation to the difference between praxis and theory’. This is true of Hobbes, for whom ‘only he that understandeth what conduceth to the good and government of the people, is called a wise man’, as well as for Heidegger who in 1924/25 argued that wisdom (or sophia) ‘does not settle anything as regards human Dasein’ (in contrast to phronesis which he elevated to the rank of conscience). Another peculiarity is the fate of the virtue of courage. Hobbes negates that courage is a virtue, insofar as he regards the end of social life to be necessarily peace. The ‘Destruktion’ of theoretical wisdom and the critique of courage would lead to various attempts to restore the meaning of theoria (e.g., Hegel and Nietzsche) as well as to a reaffirmation of the ‘original’ virtue of ‘manliness’ (or andreia) which in one manifestation would become the philosophical ‘courage [or fortitude] … to look one’s forsakenness in its face’ or to see the ‘abyss’ at the grounds of reason (Nietzsche and Heidegger). Thus, theory and praxis become fundamentally confused, such that ‘praxis ceases … to be actually praxis and transforms itself into ‘existence’, while theory is reduced to

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a radically individual and particular moment of vision (the ‘Augenblick’ or look of an eye in the blink of an eye). This seems to me to be a better account of the reasons that make it necessary to study the history of philosophy Socratically as the history of political philosophy, namely, as requiring a critical examination of the moral, political, and religious presuppositions of any system of thought.

Comparative political theory A further possibility of neo-Socratic theorizing must be treated more succinctly since it was merely hinted at in this dissertation. One of the distinctive traits of the thought of Arendt and Strauss is a certain kind of conservatism for which a philosophy of the human things or of the human condition would seem to be (quite literally) the one thing needful. The insight behind such a view can only be expressed inexactly with claims such as that ‘Man is generated by man and the sun and not by society’, ethics is ‘the all-encompassing’, or ethics is ‘the first philosophy’. Both Arendt and Strauss suggest that there is a natural awareness of limits that grows out of an understanding of the fact that we are creatures and not creators; that we are conditioned by what is ‘given’ to us; that man cannot be his own measure. More exactly, it could be said that their thinking is characterized by the affirmation of the ethical as a sphere irreducible both to the natural and the supernatural. In Strauss’s terms naturalism amounts merely to ‘the sanctioning of the savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master

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and the conqueror’, while supernaturalism ‘tends to become the basis of slave morality’. In Arendt’s terms, the natural stands for sheer metabolism which is not quite human while supernaturalism would amount to an escape from the world and the renunciation of responsibility. Strauss and Arendt both seek to affirm the autonomy of an ethics that is beyond any naturalism and supernaturalism, but also beyond any humanism (that is, beyond the belief that the humanity of the human can be explained in its own terms). As is well known, Heidegger too embarked on a quest for an ‘original ethics’ beyond naturalism, supernaturalism, and humanism. This dissertation does not provide any further insights into the substantive core of the understanding of ethics of the three German Sokrates. However, thanks to its comparative approach, it enables us to see the historical-political reasons behind at least the type of ethical understanding that Strauss and Arendt attempted to articulate due to their extraordinary awareness of the problem of ethics. Certainly this awareness has to do with their experience of statelessness and exile. Indeed, one must ask: what can ‘political science’ understood (in the young Strauss’s terms) as ‘the quest for the right order of human life as living together’ be for those who are ‘apolis’? Or what can it be for someone like the young Arendt whose life and thought was pervaded by the awareness that we can never be quite at home in the world, or that we are in the world but not of the world? The lasting importance of the thought of Arendt and Strauss seems to me to derive from such insights as can only be gained through ‘lived experience’.

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Insofar as man is ‘‘more than world’ (in Arendt’s terms) and ‘generated by man and the sun and not by society’ (Strauss) he is compelled to find a law (or an ‘ethics’ understood as dwelling) beyond the political community. Arendt and Strauss were well aware of the most radical alternatives. To live ‘only in the law’ as a ‘people in exile’ ‘numb to the concerns, the doing, and the struggling of the world’ as Rosenzweig suggested was out of the question (if only for reasons of sheer survival). Similarly, Cohen’s masterful attempt to extract the ethical core of Judeo-Christian religion to lay the basis for a synthesis of Deutschtum and Judentum resulted in a philosophical—and, especially, political—dead-end. Finally, Heidegger’s attempt to ground philosophy and human life on the ‘soil’ of a political community—such that ‘man is truly man insofar as he lives in the polis’ and the ‘fundamental character of the Dasein of man [is] being-with-oneanother … in … sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-with’—would also result in an exclusionary political project. Again, what exactly was the response to this predicament proposed by Arendt and Strauss cannot be further discussed here. However, the course that they charted seems to me of great potential insofar as it points to the possibility of conceptions of ‘political science’ that reject naturalism and supernaturalism as well as the premise that man must be completely at home in the world; and that are, as a matter of historical circumstance, beyond the metaphysical and antimetaphysical traditions that dominate Western thought as transmitted through Christianity. In that respect, a further characterization of the ‘ethics’ of Arendt

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and Strauss could make possible a better understanding of non-Western, specially Islamic, understandings of ‘political science’.

New political philosophy A strange fact about the current state of the art in political theory is that almost everyone would agree that studying the history of political philosophy is necessary to understand our present condition, to learn about the past and even from the past, as well as to expand our conceptual horizons and thus shed light on current predicaments and alternatives. And yet, even if all agree that political philosophy is necessary, very few, it seems, actually believe that it is possible. That is, apart from Rawls (especially in A Theory of Justice), it is hard to think of systematic attempts at providing comprehensive answers to the question of the right or the good society as political philosophers from Plato to (at least) Marx attempted to do. Arendt and Strauss, it seems to me, must be counted among those few who believed that if political philosophy is treated as necessary it must also be treated as (at least potentially) possible. Two misconceptions prevent us from seeing this. The first is that especially Arendt made it clear that for her the tradition of political philosophy ended in disaster and is over. The second misconception is that, again especially for Arendt, we stand on safer grounds when—as it is believed to be the case now—‘political philosophy’ is no longer ‘philosophical’ (or ‘metaphysical’) but ‘political’. (The idea, as expressed more bluntly among ‘Arendtian’ circles, is that Arendt called upon ‘us Arendtians’ not

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to be philosophers.) But the truth is that Arendt and Strauss were both concerned for decades with the question, ‘What is political philosophy?’ and with the possibility of a new political philosophy. In fact, Arendt considered Strauss (together with Kojève and Voegelin) to be among the few who kept political philosophy alive, thus implying a fundamental kinship between them (even though Arendt faulted Strauss for remaining a traditionalist, and, specifically, an Aristotelian). The truth, admittedly, is complicated: both were deeply concerned with the necessity and possibility of a new political philosophy; however, they also thought that contemporary political thought was ‘more philosophic than ever in a sense’ (as Strauss put it) or too ideological (as Arendt suggested). I have tried to point to their unique standpoint by suggesting that they were neo-Socratics— and not, as Catherine Zuckert, for instance, has argued with respect to Strauss, ‘Postmodern Platos’, or, as is commonly assumed with regards to Arendt, preSocratics in the quest for the pre-philosophical and truly political polis. NeoSocratics, more exactly, means: against the Sophistic standpoint—as well as what the young Strauss apparently took the Platonic standpoint to be—not to assume that ‘political science’ is unproblematically possible, but neither, on the other hand, to assume with postmodernism that ‘the time of Socratic man is gone’. This, indeed, seems to be the most learned and profound reading of the political consequences of Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Reiner Schürmann argues that the philosophical and political revolution effected by the thought of Heidegger leads from an era of principles to a new era of anarchy. The era of

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principles lasts from Socrates to Heidegger: ‘The opening moment and the closing moment of epochal history provide the framework for the genealogy of principles. These are born with the Socratic turn and they wither with the Heideggerian turn’. Specifically, the era of principles ends when ‘the ancient procession and legitimation of praxis from theoria comes to exhaustion. Then, in its essence, action proves to be an-archic’. The legitimating role of theoria comes to exhaustion once it is recognized that ‘Western man has incurred his tutelage by endowing some of his representations with ultimacy’. We recognize this by ‘win[ning] back the originative experiences of metaphysics through a deconstruction of representations that have become current and empty’. In turn this enables a genealogy of principles, e.g., ‘of morals, of the scientific mind, of the democratic ideal, etc.’ Thus, at certain moments in history, ‘in the divide between one era and the next anarchism appears, the absence of an ultimate reason in the succession of the many principles that have run their course in the west. It may be that as this absence becomes apparent, human practice, notably political action, becomes thinkable in a way that it is not when life and thought obey the order made for them between two reversals’. For, after all—and this is perhaps the central Heideggerian principle—‘higher than actuality stands possibility’, thus ‘higher than arche and telos stand an-archy and a-teleocracy’. The young Strauss stood for a similar view: ‘the traditions have ceased to be authoritative’, hence ‘we are completely free; we do not know what we are free for, what we live for, what the right and the good is’. ‘We must start completely

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from the beginning’. Arendt too often repeated that the traditions no longer hold any authority, or that they have been handed over to us without a testament. But their (existential) condition and their fate made them see things differently—and better. Thus Strauss began to see with increasing clarity that ‘without Biblical belief one … does not arrive in modern philosophy’—that is, in the fight against prejudice (initiated because of the existence of revelation religions), in the Destruktion of theoria, and in the affirmation of the primacy of praxis. The genealogy of the problem of theory and praxis that Strauss thereby made possible certainly casts doubt on the Heideggerian conclusions drawn by Schürmann. More importantly, Schürmann (as many others) reads Heidegger from the perspective of his late work. Reading Heidegger from the start, it seems to me, makes clear that his early project was sound—even politically. His fundamental point was that western philosophy had missed existence: precisely the being ‘from out of which and for the sake of which, philosophy ‘is’’. The question was: what would philosophy be if it arose and remained within the limits of existence alone, that is, if it remained always a quest for the truth and never an attempt to secure the truth—or, simply, a way of life committed to the highest possible wakefulness? This project led perhaps naturally to the question of political existence. Hence the project of political philosophy: in Arendt’s terms, to think what we are doing or to confront anew the elementary problems of human livingtogether. To begin philosophy as it arises from political experience alone. In Schürmann’s terms the focus on political existence is necessary because the

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political is ‘[t]he arena where an epochal constellation most obviously displays its principle’ or ‘the correlation in broad daylight of speech, of acting, and of a state of affairs. This correlation produces the order into which the code obeyed by an epoch concretely translates itself’. This insight seems to me to be correct, but it still seems to be an insight won not from political experience but from the experience of the thinking ego. Thus the project of Socratically founding a political philosophy that does not rely on ‘constructive concepts’ or on philosophies of history, but on the concepts and experiences inherent in political society remains an open one.

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