What Was Political Philosophy? Or: The Straussian Philosopher and His Other

Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual
Legacy by Thomas L. Pangle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006). (LS)
The Truth About Leo Strauss by Catherine and Michael Zuckert
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). (TLS)

Cited Works of Leo Strauss:
The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). (CM)
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
(LAM)
Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1953). (NRH)
Philosophy and Law (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1955). (PL)
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1952). (PPH)
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989). (RCPR)

Do you remember when awareness and suspicion of
“Straussians”” were confined to the few political scientists
or, perhaps, historians or classicists who had an interest in
limiting the influence of Strauss’s teachings in their academic
departments, when we who respect Strauss’s writings would never
expect a person with no stake in these academic squabbles even to
recognize his name, much less have any reason to look askew at a
possible “”disciple””? Those days seem long ago now, as the
question of Strauss’s dark designs has been linked in a certain
educated public’s mind with that of the fearsome
“”neoconservatives,”” and through them, more specifically, to the
present Bush administration and its foreign policy. Perhaps this
political phase of the Straussian controversy will soon pass, and
we alleged “”Straussians”” will be able return to losing nobly in our
familiar academic turf wars. Or perhaps the question of Strauss’s
political influence will last as long as the questions surrounding
the Iraq war; perhaps future generations will revive it as we revive
debates about Vietnam, or, say, the causes of World War I.

In the meantime, the public flare-up of the “”Straussian””
question has at least helped, I presume, to create a market for
books on Strauss’s thought, and to ensure that these books
address the practical implications of his idea of “”philosophy.”” And
if we take at all seriously the “”political”” in the term “”political
philosophy,”” then that might not be all bad. Here I will consider
two very worthy examples among the recent books on Leo Strauss
with a view particularly to scrutinizing the relationship between
philosophy and political things.

The Zuckerts’ Exoteric Strauss
Given that the public stir over Leo Strauss’s influence has often
traded on simplistic ideological caricatures of Strauss’s thought,
when it did not descend into pure nonsense, it is understandable
that Catherine and Michael Zuckert, in their very expert, timely,
and readable The Truth About Leo Strauss ¹, are eager to point out
that Strauss “”said and wrote very little about American politics,””
but that, on the contrary, his “”chief concerns lay elsewhere, with
the question of the character and fate of philosophy.”” (TLS, 30)
Strauss’s “”philosophical project”” consisted essentially, they argue,
in an effort to recover classical philosophy (Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, etc.) and through this recovery to reconceive “”the entire
philosophic tradition.”” (TLS, 31) And they emphasize that Strauss
“”wanted to revive ancient political philosophy, not ancient politics.””
On attending further to the Zuckerts’ presentation of
Strauss’s project, however, it proves harder than may first appear
to separate what is “”philosophical”” in this project from what is
“”political.””

In a formulation of Strauss’s intention that may seem to
transcend or to be prior to the distinction between the “”philosophical””
and the “”political,”” the Zuckerts aver that “”Strauss
wanted to revive a truly noble form of human existence.”” Such a
revival was necessary because “”modern philosophy’s act of rebellion
against classical philosophy and biblical religion”” had led to
a flattening relativism and finally to a radical historicism, the denial
of “”any permanent realities whatever”” that is equivalent to nihilism.
Strauss may be said to share this aim of reviving nobility with his
youthful hero Nietzsche; but Strauss broke with Nietzsche as he
came to see that the latter’s project failed to liberate itself from
modernity’s polemical attempt to “”refute orthodoxy,”” that is, to
dispose once and for all of the biblical teaching concerning an
unfathomable God. (TLS, 33) Nietzsche, despite his noble desires,
thus remained in the grip of the very modern project that had
denied the reality of the noble and so had, “”via an almost inexorable
dialectic,”” produced the “”crisis of our times.”” (TLS, 36)

The essential mistake of the moderns, on the Zuckert’s telling
of Strauss’s story, lay in a transformation of the relationship
between philosophy and politics, or between “”theory and practice.””
(TLS, 48) The moderns directed theory or science towards
the satisfaction of bodily desires and thus “”dropped the distinction
between living and living well,”” whether “”living well”” is
understood in terms of the moral virtue of citizens or in terms of
the good of philosophizing itself. They “”lost sight of that form of
human life that is truly satisfying and did not sufficiently take
account of their own activity as philosophers.”” (TLS, 48-9) Thus
whereas “”the premoderns identified apolitical ways to transcend
the bounds of the ordinary, everyday life: the ways of philosophy
or religion,”” the moderns make transcendence “”a public matter.””
They convert the human interest in transcendence into a “”demand
for actualization”” and thus an impulse to transform the common,
political world. (TLS, 70) Under the guidance of modern philosophy,
humanity invests its transcendent impulses in the project of
a public and general mastery or actualization, and thus loses the
capacity to articulate and orient itself towards a reality that
transcends human power.

Our only hope for a recovery of the noble, which, in the
Zuckerts’ account, would seem to be equivalent to an orientation
of human existence towards that which transcends the human
power of actualization, Strauss concluded, lay in a return to
“”ancient political philosophy,”” a return made possible for Strauss
by the indications of the great medievals Maimonides and Farabi.
But just how is ancient philosophy supposed to provide an
alternative to the modern liquidation of nobility? The answer, the
Zuckerts point out, lies not at all in some settled metaphysical or
cosmological doctrine, but rather in the Socratic practice of
philosophy itself. Philosophy as “”the search for wisdom . . .
constituted a fully satisfying form of human existence that could be
enjoyed by private individuals in less-than-perfect regimes.”” (TLS,
38) This affirmation of the supreme happiness of the life of
“”zetetic,”” that is, skeptical or “”seeking”” philosophy, is clearly central
to Strauss’s response to the modern crisis. The satisfaction inherent
in the philosopher’s sense of “”making progress”” in the search for
truth is held to be enough to ground the claim that philosophy is
“”the only truly satisfying and happy way of life”” (TLS, 84), and
thus to provide an alternative to the modern reduction of reason
to the service of common human needs and desires.

We notice, though, that the question of nobility/transcendence
has somehow been answered in terms of happiness or
satisfaction, the happiness or satisfaction of philosophers. What,
if anything, is the connection? The Zuckerts are eager to affirm,
in answering certain reckless and moralistic critics of Strauss, that
the philosopher is no “”hedonist.”” “”‘[T]he Socratic formula for
genuine virtue is: virtue is knowledge.’ In seeking knowledge, the
philosopher cannot help, therefore, but seek to become virtuous
as well.””²(TLS, 52) But this nice formula, I suggest, will remain
hardly more than wordplay unless the relationship between the
two ideas can be satisfactorily specified. Without such a clarification,
we do not know, for example, whether the substantive
meaning of the equation involves transferring to the term “”virtue””
the meaning we already commonly attribute to “”knowledge,”” or
perhaps the reverse.

In fact the Zuckerts seem to show that for Strauss the formula
“”virtue is knowledge”” is to be taken in the first sense: true virtue
or human excellence is not what it is commonly taken to be (justice
understood as a positive interest in the common good, for
example), but is, rather, knowledge, or, more precisely, the
knowledge of ignorance possessed by the rare Socratic philosopher.
We moralists may be consoled, however, by the fact that the
philosopher is nonetheless virtuous in the common sense of the
term, that is, “”just,”” in that his devotion to progress in knowledge
of ignorance is perfectly compatible with the minimal definition
of justice as “”not harming others.”” (TLS, 53) The good news, then,
is that the interests of “”knowledge”” and the interests of “”virtue”” in
the non-philosophic sense are happily aligned. Thus the Zuckerts
describe Strauss as seeking to revive, on the one hand, as we have
seen, a Socratic understanding of philosophy, and, on the other,
an Aristotelian understanding of politics. Philosophy and political
science, theory and practice, are essentially distinct; Socratic
skepticism regarding cosmology does not undermine the observable
evidence that there are “”ends toward which man is by nature
inclined and of which he has by nature some awareness.”” Prudence
or practical wisdom governs its own self-sufficient sphere,
and does not need a further theoretical basis. Philosophy is not
needed to found the moral-political realm, but it is there to lend
a hand, “”primarily in clearing away false theories”” (TLS, 56), that
is, reductionist theories that would subvert a prudent confidence
in the naturalness of man’s higher ends.

Thus the Zuckerts describe what is essentially a “”good fences
make good neighbors”” settlement between philosophy and the
moral-political realm in Strauss’s thought: these neighbors, Socratic
philosophy and Aristotelian politics, get along because each
minds its own business, though the superior neighbor is happy to
lend the inferior a hand in a storm. And so, in answer to Strauss’s
moral and political critics, the Zuckerts are able to report that his
teaching in fact amounts to good news on every front: “”He strove
not only to support and defend the regime he thought was the best
possible under modern circumstances, but also and more generally
to remind his readers of the importance and dignity of
politics, not simply for the sake of philosophy or his fellow citizens
or the people of the West, but more broadly for the sake of
humanity as a whole.”” (TLS, 57)

But surely things cannot be quite so simple; surely the
goodness of philosophy and moral-political goodness cannot be at
once quite so evident in themselves and so conveniently distinct
from one another. To begin with, this fence between theory and
practice seems to have some holes. The Zuckerts have already
noticed philosophy’s service to politics in fending off “”false
doctrines,”” but how different is this really from supplying a true
doctrine?³ If man’s practical ends need to be protected from
subversive understandings of the whole, then do they not in fact
depend at least implicitly on a cosmology supportive of human
purposes? Is there not, then, something problematic on its face
with this convenient combination of a “”Socratic”” philosophy with
an “”Aristotelian”” politics, of unhindered skepticism with edifying
affirmation?

A gap in the fence between theory and practice cannot,
moreover, be open in only one direction. The philosopher’s
skeptical and open-ended interest in “”the whole”” is not wholly
insulated from the insights or judgments on the basis of which he
defends the integrity of the moral-political realm. Socratic ignorance
is not pure, but is “”structured”” and progressive (TLS, 85,
86); though the philosopher’s quest for knowledge of the whole is
never completed, he finds satisfaction in his substantial if provisional
attainments. Though he does not pretend to access the
“”roots”” or “”the cause”” of the genesis of the whole, he accepts the
evidence of “”the manifest articulation of the completed whole,””
the evidence that the mind is fundamentally “”at home”” in the
world. And this grounding, this fit between the mind and the
world, is said to attest at once the goodness of the world and the
dignity, not only of the mind, but more generally of man. This
sense of the dignity or worth of the mind as evidence of the
goodness of the whole and as the ground of the worth of humanity
seems clearly at least to qualify the teaching of a clear distinction
between “”theoretical”” and “”practical”” realms.

It is in a later chapter of the book (chapter 5), which defends
Strauss against the charge that he is a “”teacher of evil,”” that the
Zuckerts focus most closely on the question of the relation
between philosophy and morality. Here they present Strauss’s
“”theory of the two sources of morality.”” One source is philosophy
itself: “”Morality as practiced by the philosopher is cause, concomitant,
and consequence of the philosophic life itself.”” (TLS,
173) The philosopher is just in that the good of the rational soul
orders and satisfies the whole soul and thus causes it to despise
“”the things for which the non-philosophers hotly contest.”” (TLS,
171-172; CM , 1254) But there is also another, lower, source of
morality: “”the need of the city.”” (TLS, 173) This lower “”justice”” is
not by nature intrinsically good or satisfying for the individual; it
is rather the product of a “”habituation”” that shapes conduct
according to social utility but does not truly overcome natural
human inclinations to “”mastery, wealth, and sensual pleasures.””
(TLS, 173) Only for the rare philosopher, it appears, can justice
be said to be intrinsically good.

#page#

But this theory of morality’s two, apparently radically different
sources raises an obvious question, as the Zuckerts notice
Strauss acknowledges: how can we call the phenomena arising
from such “”radically different roots”” by the same name? And how
do we account for the remarkable coincidence presented by the
fact that these two moralities converge to produce “”more or less
the same moral code?”” (TLS, 174) In a word, are we talking about
a single phenomenon, that of morality, that is in some way shared
by philosophers and non-philosophers alike, or does the term
“”morality”” mask a fundamental difference that separates philosophers
from the rest of humanity?

The Zuckerts, following Strauss, are at pains to defend both
the unity of humanity and the radical difference of philosophy.
Both unity and difference are articulated in terms of the problem
of “”the part”” and “”the whole.”” Man is both a part and a whole; this
condition names the unity of humanity, philosophers and nonphilosophers
alike. “”Man is self-consciously or manifestly open to
the whole and erotically driven towards that whole.”” This openness
to the whole is not the exclusive preserve of the philosopher
but is revealed in the most distinctively human practices: “”philosophy,
religion, morality.”” (TLS, 174)

Strauss differentiates between philosophers and non-philosophers
in terms of the distinction between “”the whole simply,”” the
object of the philosophical quest, and “”society”” which stands as
the whole for non-philosophers. The Zuckerts further associate
“”society”” with the body and with individuality, and “”the whole””
with the (presumably, in principle, non-individualized) intellect.
This framing of the essential difference also makes possible an
articulation of a fundamental commonality: “”society and the
whole simply have this in common, that they are both wholes
which transcend the individual, inducing the individual to rise
above and beyond himself. All nobility consists in such rising
above and beyond oneself to something greater than oneself.””
(TLS, 175; “”Problem of Socrates,”” 164)

Now if we ponder the meaning of this common nobility or
“”rising above”” we will discover the fragility of the Zuckerts’ and,
in many cases, Strauss’s radical distinction between philosophic
transcendence and the religious and moral orientation of nonphilosophers.
The philosopher strives to identify himself with
“”pure intellect,”” and from the standpoint of this claim is pleased
to define the pre-philosophic life in terms of mere bodily need and
the love of “”one’s own.”” From this point of view, the city reveals
itself as a utilitarian function that subordinates individuals to its
material necessities by the mechanism of a habituation that
operates in large part through moral and religious delusions. But,
at least on the Zuckerts’ own reading of Strauss, this reduction is
too simple, for moral men are “”animated by the eros for everything
beautiful and graceful;”” their motives cannot be accounted for
without reference to the noble. At the same time, it is admitted
that “”individual embodiment restrains all forms of transcendence,
not only philosophy”” (TLS, 175), that is to say, including
philosophy. Note in this connection that the Zuckerts have
granted that wisdom is inaccessible, and therefore that the virtue
and the happiness of the philosopher must always remain imperfect.
(TLS, 46) Since the object of the philosopher’s quest remains
a “”noble”” intention and in no way a full possession, it seems clear
that the philosopher remains animated by the same elusive
notions of “”the beautiful and graceful”” that stirred his soul as a
moral-religious citizen, partially clarified as these notions may be.

The “”whole”” that occupies the philosopher and the “”whole””
that governs citizens cannot, then, be as radically distinct as
Strauss and the Zuckerts would have us believe. Philosophers
never access the “”whole simply,”” which must therefore remain in
some way and to some degree a projection from “”the whole”” that
forms the horizon of the city. At the same time, the social whole
is never determined wholly by material necessities, but is always
shaped by a natural human orientation toward something beyond
human need and human power. The idea of the social whole as
simply the realm of bodily need is in fact an abstraction that
appears from the standpoint of the philosopher’s noble pretensions
to a transcendent nobility. “”Society”” is the other of “”philosophy.””
Both of the “”two [distinct] sources of morality”” are abstractions
from the core phenomenon of morality or nobility, even
moral abstractions, one might well say.⁵

Consider now the implication of this reflection on the relation
between the whole simply and the moral-political whole for our
earlier discussion of the political-philosophical problem in terms
of the relation between “”Socratic”” philosophy and “”Aristotelian””
political science. It now appears that not only is philosophy
needed to defend the theoretical framework that shelters practical
wisdom, but that philosophy itself depends upon insights or
intimations that arise within the practical realm before they
become the matter of theoretical speculation. In chapter three,
devoted to Strauss “”as a postmodern thinker,”” the Zuckerts refer
to “”Socrates’ insight into the importance of recognizing that being
is divided into essentially different kinds (or ideas).”” (TLS, 112)
But Jacques Derrida accepted Nietzsche’s view, they argue, that
“”there is nothing that fundamentally distinguishes human beings
from other animals.”” Thus, “”[l]ike Heidegger, Derrida insisted
that ‘ethics’ is a subordinate part of the ‘metaphysical’ understanding
of the world.”” The Zuckerts seem to hold, then, that the
very noetic heterogeneity that is the fundamental correlate and
condition of philosophical intelligibility seems to be grounded in,
or perhaps coeval with, the deepest axiom of practical judgment,
namely, that there are “”observable differences between human
and non-human.”” (TLS, 56) And so the Zuckerts’ critique of
Derrida seems to belie their earlier effort to maintain a “”fence””
between theory and practice, for it at least suggests a kind of
priority of practice to theory. In defending the presuppositions of
sound practice, theory is also defending the conditions of its own
existence, not only the narrowly “”political”” conditions for the
survival of philosophy, but the very root of the heterogeneity
upon which intelligibility depends.⁶

Let us now return to the Zuckerts’ most extensive sustained
discussion of the meaning of “”Socratic”” philosophy in order to
scrutinize further the relationship between theory and practice in
Leo Strauss’s project. (TLS, 84-8) We now see that the claim that
the “”Socratic view of the whole as an order of essentially different
kinds ‘makes possible the study of the human things as such'”” can
at least as plausibly be read in the opposite direction (TLS, 86;
NRH, 123): the practical insight into the human difference makes
possible and meaningful an inquiry into the natural kinds that
make up the whole. Likewise, let us propose a reversal of Strauss’s
eloquent statement that the dignity of the mind grounds the
dignity of man, and that the world is man’s home because it is the
home of the mind. Does not the mind’s being at home in the world
presuppose a sense of meaning and order that precedes reflection?
Or if not a simple reversal of these formulae, let us propose
that man’s dignity and his awareness of being a special part of a
meaningful whole might be considered prior to the dichotomy
between theory and practice. Thus Strauss observes, as the
Zuckerts report, that man’s distinctiveness may be said to lie in
being “”the beast with red cheeks,”” that is, in his sense of shame.
(TLS, 88) Now the Zuckerts (citing here a helpful discussion by
Nasser Behnegar⁷) quite reasonably wish to translate this capacity
for shame into an argument for the primacy of “”reason.”” Shame
presupposes morality, or an “”awareness of how one ought to live,””
and “”this awareness cannot be clarified without the use of reason.””
Now nothing could be further from my intention than to disparage
the dignity of reason. My point is simply that reason can never fully
“”clarify”” the very moral awareness with which its own dignity is
bound up. I might even suggest that for “”reason”” again to recover
its proper authority it is necessary to experiment with yet another
reversal of Straussianism and consider the proposition that “”the use
of reason cannot be clarified without a moral awareness.””

This Straussian or post-Straussian reflection on the relation
between theory and practice ought to allow us or require us to
reframe the vexed question of the meaning and standing of
esotericism in Strauss’s writings. The Zuckerts offer a very
interesting and bold thesis on this subject, as readily conveyed in
the title of their fourth chapter: “”The Man who Gave Away the
Secrets.”” They propose that, by exposing the ancient practice of
esotericism to the broad daylight of modern scholarship, Strauss
in fact abandoned esotericism, implicitly denying it was an
appropriate or effective strategy in the circumstances of late
modernity.⁸ The Zuckerts’ ingenious explanation of a counterstrategy,
appropriate to a public atmosphere pervaded by the
Enlightenment, is the following: “”The only possible cure for the
ills of Enlightenment was a new kind of enlightenment.”” Conceding
to the Enlightenment the dubiousness of “”Platonic Ideas and
Platonic immortality of the soul,”” Strauss “”schucks [these] off”” as
“”mere exotericism”” in order to reveal in broad daylight “”the real
stripped-down truth about philosophy.”” The only truth that can
now possibly “”save us”” is the truth about the perfect satisfactions
of the imperfect search for truth. (TLS, 135)

Still, any Straussian worth his salt must immediately reply:
such a truth about the Socratic practice of philosophy might save
“”us ‘certified’ philosophers,”” but surely it is not available for
general consumption. In fact, must this zeteticism not threaten
and therefore offend the masses, thus endangering the lofty and
rare practice of philosophy? The Zuckerts have a ready answer,
which returns us to the tidy “”good fences”” policy we observed
above. Not only does Strauss’s strategy provide the inner truth of
philosophy to the few, it also supplies a “”new grounding for
“”‘values,’ . . . a doctrine of natural right to hold against the extreme
relativism . . . characteristic [of] . . . our post-Enlightenment age.””
(TLS, 134; my emphasis) Thus philosophy, as purely zetetic, is
nicely insulated from the uncertainties and conflicts of practical
life, while at the same time it is able to provide a doctrine [!] to
refute relativism.

Surely the Zuckerts are aware that this convenient disposition
of the relationship between philosophy and morality is too good,
or too bad, to be true.⁹ Most obviously, nowhere does Strauss
claim to provide a “”doctrine”” to counter relativism; rather, as the
Zuckerts emphasize, he is all about “”awareness of the problems.””
At the same time, from the moment this very awareness of the
permanent philosophical problems becomes satisfied with itself,
the problems are no longer real, living problems, and so no longer
really philosophical, and thus no longer satisfying. I conclude that
the Zuckerts must be tipping their hand when, after seeming to
have refuted any significant esotericism in Strauss, they hedge
decisively as follows: “”if there is [an esoteric doctrine in Strauss],
it is buried so deep as to be irrelevant for all practical purposes .””
(TLS, 137, my emphasis) Apparently the Zuckerts have their own
“”practical purposes,”” purposes that require a widely available and
unthreatening Leo Strauss.¹⁰

Pangle’s Purgatory
Thomas Pangle’s Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and
Intellectual Legacy ¹¹ is a compact, elegant, learned, often incisive,
and, we gather, intentionally puzzling introduction to the master’s
thought. Certainly it makes much more of Strauss’s esotericism
than do the Zuckerts, and just as certainly strives more to emulate
this art of writing than they do, at least on the surface. Pangle is
clearly more impressed than they by the permanent risks associated
with “”the unhappily pervasive presence of tyranny in political
life,”” by the fact that “”human aspirations to partake of the divine
. . . are susceptible to terrible perversions.”” (LS, 57) He thus is
clearly less impressed than the Zuckerts by the freedoms we owe
to the Enlightenment, and more alert to “”deeply rooted, moral
prejudices that pervade every time .”” (LS, 60; my emphasis)
Accordingly, he emphasizes even more than they the “”complete
. . . liberation”” of philosophers from these prejudices and thus the
“”vast gulf in wisdom”” that separates philosophers from the rest of
us. (LS, 61, 64) Professor Pangle’s work overall, and this most
recent book in particular, therefore provide us an eminent
example of what I propose to call the “”High Straussian””¹² position,
which we here intend begin to assess through a careful reading of
key parts of the present volume.

The main or most general purpose of esotericism, according
to Pangle, is to “”avoid the danger of a mutual contamination and
corruption of politics and philosophy.”” His aim, it seems clear, is
to build a much stronger fence between theory and practice than
the Zuckerts’. And although esotericism and its fundamental
intention are coeval with political philosophy, the need for this
fence is particularly acute in our times, since we are in the midst
of a crisis of the West that is essentially a result of just such a
contamination. Modern rationalism deformed philosophy, or
made it vulnerable to a deformation, by publicly advocating
human power over nature as the purpose of philosophy. This
advocacy issued eventually into “”a kind of tyranny that surpassed
the boldest imaginations of the most powerful thinkers of the
past,”” into “”the appalling alternative that man, or human thought,
must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or
else by slow and gentle processes . . . .”” (LS, 74; quoting OT, 27)
These “”slow and gentle processes”” are at work even or especially
within “”modern liberal republicanism,”” which “”by causing the
purpose of the philosophers, or more generally the purpose which
essentially transcends society, to collapse into the purpose of the
non-philosophers,”” thereby “”causes the purpose of the gentlemen
to collapse into the purpose of the non gentlemen,”” which in turn
portends the collapse of the idea of the intrinsic goodness of
virtue into a pure instrumentalism. (LS, 79; quoting LAM, 19-21)
Now, since Strauss (as reported by Pangle) avers that this modern
“”predicament . . . is the incentive to our whole concern with the
classics”” we are authorized to conclude that the whole intention
of Pangle’s Strauss is to resist this collapse of meaning. (LS, 68;
CM, 11) Moreover, Pangle is ever keen to insist upon the
“”‘tentative or experimental’ character of Strauss’s whole proposal””
(LS, 97), and even admits on Strauss’s behalf that “”the
crucial claimed insights of radical historicism might be in a
decisive sense sound.”” (LS, 67) Strauss’s “”Socratic”” quest is,
finally “”a late-modern quest.”” (LS, 31) One is therefore entitled,
even practically compelled, to categorize the governing purpose
of Pangle’s Strauss’s interest in the “”purpose of the philosophers””
as a practical, even a political purpose. Strauss is less sure of the
idea of philosophy than of its practical, indeed historical purpose.

Let us nevertheless attend to the idea, or the notion of
“”philosophy.”” What is the meaning of the “”classical philosophy”” to
which Strauss invites a return? Somewhat surprisingly, Pangle’s
most substantial, if also most discreet or elusive, account of the
meaning of philosophy comes before chapter 2 on “”The Revival of
Classical Political Philosophy,”” at the end of the first chapter,
entitled “”Relativism: The Crux of Our Liberal Culture.”” Strauss
argues here that relativism, or the belief that reason is impotent
to ground any principles concerning what is right and good, is a
direct and fundamental threat to “”the liberal and democratic
West”” (LS, 8), since our civilization is based on reason’s claim to
authority. Our publicly articulate goal, “”‘the universal prosperous
society of free and equal men and women’—does not adequately
capture what the West still experiences as morally sacred, as
placing sacred limits on human striving, even on the striving for
universal freedom and prosperity.”” (LS, 12-13) In our struggle
with communism we in the liberal West have been confronted
with “”a perverted or fanatic expression of this natural and
inevitable civic concern for the sacred, which includes a sacrificial
civic duty or call to identify and to fight, as evil, as devilish, that
which always threatens the sacred . . . .”” (LS, 13) Thus we have
been reminded (long before 9/11, I note), that “”the sacred and its
perversions”” are ever a factor in human life.

Through a discussion of Isaiah Berlin (LS, 18-20), Pangle next
illustrates the utter resourcelessness of liberalism in answering
the challenge of relativism. But then, lest we should grow too
eager to find a solution, he points up the “”Danger Lurking in the
Reaction Against Liberal Relativism,”” the danger of “”sectarianism””
that can only be avoided, Pangle is ready now to suggest, by
the Socratic idea of philosophy, according to which “”philosophy
as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e. , of
the fundamental and comprehensive problems.”” (LS, 23-4; WIPP,
114) Pangle indeed spares no pains in lowering or at least
unsettling our expectations in our quest for an alternative to
relativism. If, in our search for an answer to relativism, we risk
falling into fanaticism, it must be that there is something fearful
in “”the truth disclosed by reason. Precisely what is it about this
truth, about the truth, that makes it so profoundly disconcerting?
Is it really the truth that is bad and ugly?”” (LS, 26) One is tempted
to say that this invitation to philosophy might make one reconsider
whether relativism was really so bad. Pangle’s tone is nothing
if not (to use one of his favorite words) “”intransigent””: “”Strauss
offers no certainty and no promise””; the outcome of our inquiries
may be simply “”to understand that and why [the crisis of relativism
or radical historicism] cannot be overcome.”” We must therefore
at the outset be “”resigned to the knowable limits of our powers
. . . . Our discoveries must chastise our wishes.”” (LS, 28, 29) Even
before we know what philosophy is, we must know not to connect
it with our hopes. This, then, is Pangle’s propadeutic to Socratism:
be afraid, be very afraid.

Oddly, it is here that Pangle interjects his only sustained
treatment of the supposedly fundamental problem of reason and
revelation.¹³ “”To avoid misunderstandings,”” he wishes to explain
that this “”most profound contradiction at the heart of the Great
Tradition of the West”” is not really a critical problem, but is
something we can live with. (LS, 30) Indeed, living with this
tension is what the West is all about. (The more “”fundamental
tension,”” 54f., is in fact between philosophy and the city; “”the
sacred”” is a necessary dimension of the city.) Moreover, “”this
conflict . . . is at the bottom of . . . modern philosophy.”” (LS, 31)

To understand in what sense modern philosophy stems from
the conflict between reason and revelation, we must attend to an
inconspicuous parenthetical suggestion Pangle drops early in
chapter 3 on modernity: “”As for the deepest philosophic goal
motivating this [modern] movement, see PL, Introd.”” Ever
attentive to deep philosophical goals, we refresh our memories on
the introduction to Strauss’s early work, Philosophy and Law , and
find that the secret Pangle would have us discover for ourselves
(from Strauss) is that the Enlightenment was all about . . . atheism.
More precisely, the fatal passion of the Enlightenment seems to
be that “”it wanted to refute . . . the tenets of orthodoxy,”” whereas
it should have remained content with the (presumably classical)
strategy of “”dismissing the tenets of orthodoxy as not known but
merely believed.””¹⁴ The crucial error, the source of the compulsion
to refute, seems to lie in the fact that the enlightened ones had
“”been impressed by the claim of these [biblical] tenets.”” Thus, a
theoretical refutation being impossible, they adopted the “”Napoleonic””
strategy of creating a new world and a new systematic
science that would render religion irrelevant. The moderns were
somehow “”impressed”” by the Bible in a way that compelled them
to try to match it or outdo it, on its own turf, as it were, the turf,
I infer, of human hopes. And thus was philosophy, eventually,
prostituted to the propaganda of world mastery. To resist this
prostitution and the attendant Crisis of the West, it will thus be
necessary to remain, or to become, unimpressed by biblical
hopes. This is the safe way to live the excruciating tension of “”this
titanic controversy”” that defines the West.

The return to classical political philosophy or more precisely
to “”Socratic zetetic skepticism”” is of course the key to resisting, or
being purged of such hopes. (LS, 32) The first step in such a return
consists in a recognition of certain “”permanent characteristics of
humanity,”” especially “”the distinction between noble and base,
which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists.”” Now, since
there is no general agreement on the effective meaning of “”noble””
and “”base,”” these historicists (Heidegger, most notably, of course),
find this rudimentary distinction to be too slight to provide a
permanent basis on which to judge historical dispensations.
Strauss, for his part, does not seem to deny the slightness of the
permanent moral distinctions, but wants to show (in Natural
Right and History, most notably) that the so-called “”experience of
history”” that underlies historicism is itself merely an essentially
accidental interpretation (stemming ultimately, we note, from the
“”impression”” left by biblical hopes)—he wants, that is, to show the
historical relativity of the sensibility underlying radical historicism
itself.

#page#

Strauss intends this deconstruction of historicism, Pangle
explains, to clear the way for a reconsideration of “”philosophy in
its original, Socratic sense,”” “”knowledge of ignorance,”” an ignorance
which is by no means empty but consists in “”grasping”” the
“”fundamental problems, such as the problem of justice,”” problems
that can be shown to be permanent. Now here the essentials
of Strauss’s anti-historicist argument would seem to be in place,
but Strauss, in a move Pangle describes as “”enigmatic,”” throws the
question wide open again by acknowledging that “”if political
philosophy is limited to understanding the fundamental alternative
[sing.], it is of no practical value,”” since it would be “”unable
to answer the question of what the ultimate goal of wise action is.””
Philosophy as theory (knowledge of ignorance) must somehow be
translated into practice. That practice is just one step in the
argument away, it turns out, in “”the Socratic answer to the
question of how man ought to live: . . . by realizing that we are
ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time
that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is
quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for
wisdom.”” This realization, moreover, not only answers the fundamental
practical question for the philosopher, but is said to
provide a “”final solution”” [!] to “”the fundamental political problem.””
(LS, 35; my emphasis)

Pangle has certainly whetted our appetite to know of this
“”final solution,”” but from here on he declines (following Strauss’s
own example) to provide any further link in the chain of argument,
instead dropping a series of clues—along with the suggestion that
we master all of Strauss’s writings, though we are allowed also to
consult the writings of Christopher Bruell. (LS, 37) This is surely
good advice (which I indeed am in the midst of taking), as there
are doubtless many worse ways to spend one’s life. But for the
benefit of any reader who may not be able to take it, I propose now
to provide him the service of assembling these clues in the very
pages that follow.¹⁵

The first clue has already been dropped: the “”fundamental
question”” has been rendered in the singular, inviting us to attend
to the fundamental question. That would be the reason/revelation
question, of course. The next clue is the mention of “”the possibility
that [Plato’s] Socrates was as much concerned with understanding
what justice is, i.e. , with understanding the whole complexity
of the problem of justice, as with preaching justice.”” (LS, 36; my
emphasis) I trust there is no need, beyond my italicization, even
for a readership that has not yet mastered the whole Straussian
corpus, to point out the connection between the first two clues.
(Consider that remark a shabby vestige of pedagogic esotericism.)
Note, too, that we seem to have returned once again from practice
to theory: the final practical solution is somehow an understanding
of a problem.

In the next clue Pangle’s Strauss directly addresses the
“”perennial conflict between the Socratic and the anti-Socratic
answer (to the question how man ought to live)”” (LS, 37) via an
engagement with Max Weber, who takes reason to be morally
impotent because he believes that “”all devotion to causes or ideals
has its roots in religious faith.”” (LS, 38) Weber cannot entertain
the possibility of reason’s practical authority because he takes
modern science and philosophy to be the perfection of reason.
(And on the basis of the clue from a later chapter discussed above,
that is, the account of modern atheism in the introduction to
Philosophy and Law, we can say that the problem is that modernity
converted reason into a faith, the faith in human worldtransformation—
in order to address certain “”impressions”” left
over from the Bible.) The reason/revelation controversy appears
to admit of no solution—but only as long as we accept Weber’s
modern understanding of reason.

Next we are invited to penetrate through and see beyond the
modern abstractions that confined Weber’s notion of “”reason,””
and thus to access the “”pre-scientific world,”” the “”truly natural
human world and consciousness.”” (LS, 38) But since this world
is not immediately available to us moderns, we must rely on
classical philosophy’s report of its own origins, “”supplemented by
consideration of the most elementary premises of the Bible”” (LS,
39; NRH , 80), premises which, as Strauss helpfully points out in
passing, “”are not of course the theme of the Bible.”” These ancient
sources bring us back to “”the evidence of those simple experiences
regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the
philosophic contention that there is a natural right.”” And so we
find that Pangle’s Strauss seems to have led us back again to where
we started, about seven of his pages ago, back to the “”permanent
characteristics of humanity”” recognized even by “”thoughtful
historicists,”” the universal human distinction between noble and
base. But did not the historicists already blunt this strategy by
pointing out the slightness and indeterminacy of this awareness
of nobility, a point that Strauss seemed to admit? Is this not why
we were then directed away from any attempt to ground philosophy
on moral substance and towards a purely zetetic strategy, the
“”knowledge of ignorance””?

Mr. Pangle certainly seems to have returned us in some kind
of circle back to where we started. No doubt this was necessary
in order to prepare a re-launching of the argument, the reader
now alert to the truly fundamental alternative between reason
and revelation. We might otherwise have thought that the question concerned alternative understandings of justice or nobility,
but now we have been prepared to see (though of course we have
not been told directly, in a way that just anyone could understand)
that the real question is between the life of pious obedience and
the life of philosophic inquiry, or in other words, between the life
that cares about being just (or “”preaching”” about it) and the life
that cares about “”understanding what justice is,”” which itself, we
have been cued to anticipate, resolves into “”understanding the
whole complexity of the problem of justice.””

The task before us, then, is the “”painstaking clarification of
what is implied in these ‘most elementary experiences . . . [of] the
just and noble things.”” (LS, 39) Here, another clue: Pangle is at
pains to point out that classical political philosophy does not
begin “”from specific assumptions about human nature.”” Rather,
it begins with opinions or speeches, from “”what men say,”” and
from these “”moves to, or issues in, an account of human nature.””
“”But ‘what men say’ is contradictory .””

This contradictory state of the evidence of the most elementary
experiences would seem to land us in another impasse. And
rather than clearly indicating a route out of this impasse, Professor
Pangle chooses instead, somewhat surprisingly, to conclude
this chapter with a tangle of clues, more than two full pages
consisting almost entirely of a nearly continuous quotation from
the last chapter of Strauss’s early The Political Philosophy of
Hobbes , which Pangle describes as “”Strauss’s first sustained
adumbration of his decisive discovery concerning the nature of
Socratic philosophy.”” He praises these paragraphs as “”one of the
most illuminating statements in this regard that Strauss ever
penned,”” noting coyly as well that in it Strauss maintains his
“”meticulous sense of responsibility as a writer.”” (LS, 138) This
latter remark is of course a reminder that we are dealing with
clues, not arguments.

Out of respect for the author, and because we have every
reason to believe that Pangle has hidden the core of his argument,
if there is one, in this extended quotation from Strauss’s Hobbes
book, we have pursued the exercise, and will report briefly on the
outcome. But before this report, let us just notice that the author
has dropped one additional clue in this very footnote that
introduces the mysteriously pivotal quotation: he directs us to
and partially quotes a passage from Natural Right and History
concerning justice. (LS, 148ff.) There we learn that justice “”in the
full sense . . . is identical with membership in . . . and devotion to
. . . a society in which everyone does what he can do well and in
which everyone has what he can use well”” (Pangle’s italics). I
gather we are suppose to note a tension at the heart of justice: to
do what one does best is not likely to be identical with being
devoted to a society where everyone can do so, especially when
we note “”the conclusion of the argument sketched in this paragraph””
that Strauss draws (albeit, very responsibly, in a footnote),
but that Pangle chooses not to share (meticulously protecting our
piety, no doubt), namely that this definition implies “”that there
cannot be true justice if there is no divine rule or providence.””
(LS, 150) Pangle then assists us a little further by looking up one
of Strauss’s classical footnotes to reinforce the point that justice
is all about “”the utility of others,”” and then mentioning, but not
reporting on, another classical citation, the clues embedded in
which I will now share with all who are able to receive:

(1) The magnificent ones despise merely human life; and
(2) The beautiful ought to be understood as the useful.

Armed with this expert esoteric reading of the key footnote to
the key footnote to the curious extended quotation that stands in
for the core of Pangle’s argument, the reader is perhaps now
prepared to see the momentous¹⁶ point. The contradictions and
hence enmities of pre-philosophic experience center around “”the
just, the beautiful, and the good.”” So everything depends on the
proper understanding and arrangement of these notions. The key
to Pangle’s strategy is to liberate the good from the other
transcendentals and to make it supreme. The good, demystified
or stripped of entanglements with the just or the beautiful, is the
only possible basis, we are told, of internal and external agree
ment. Now we may think that people disagree about the good, but
this, Strauss thinks, is so only if we consider what people “”conceive
of as good”” (wealth, honors, etc.) and not what they “”say,””
that is, or what they “”mean.”” People may disagree and fight in
deed or “”conception,”” but they are in marvelous agreement in
what they say, namely, “”that the good is virtue and wisdom/
insight.””¹⁷ Thus agreement can be achieved (and, I note, philosophy
vindicated) for those who partake of this “”true external
transcendent good,”” to attain which requires a ‘divinely inspired
madness”” and “”a conversion of the whole soul.”” (LS, 40-1;
Pangle’s emphasis)

This, then, is the core of Pangle’s argument (expertly reconstructed
from his very civically responsible clues) concerning the
core of Strauss’s argument. Is it persuasive? Divinely mad or not,
I suppose we must find some way to judge. And it is hard not to
observe that there are leaps in the argument. Remember that the
case for philosophy is supposed to rely, not on any a priori
“”account of human nature,”” but to issue from a “”clarification”” of
what ordinary people actually say (and “”mean,”” but not “”conceive””).
Now everyone indeed seems to agree that they want what
is good—that seems reasonable enough. And people are known to
say (or were known to say, before nature was hidden by modern
abstractions) that “”the good”” is “”virtue and wisdom.”” But then we
leap to the identification of virtue with this transcendentally
purified and converted divine madness. Is this leap, this specific
leap to Socratic zeteticism as the transcendent “”insight,”” really
somehow inherent in what ordinary people say about “”virtue and
wisdom?”” What authorizes us, for example, to conclude that
virtue “”is essentially wisdom/insight?””

On this we still need to consider Pangle’s last paragraph taken
directly from Strauss’s Hobbes book. (LC, 41-2) Here the aim is
precisely to examine “”the antithesis . . . between true and apparent
or pseudovirtue.”” Everything, we are told, depends on focusing
this comparison on the virtue of justice, and not on courage, “”the
lowest virtue,”” and which Strauss here identifies, somewhat
surprisingly, with self-assertion, or “”man’s natural self-love, or
man’s natural hedonism.”” Justice, I interpret Pangle/Strauss to be
saying, philosophy can deal with: once we see that justice is about
the good of society, and the good of society only makes sense with
reference to the good of the individual, or of the best individual,
then we see clearly the subordination of justice to the good and
hence to philosophy. The just can fairly straightforwardly be
emancipated from the noble/beautiful and subordinated to the
good. But courage is more problematic, since it “”seems more
brilliant, more worthy of reverence ,”” than any other virtue (my
emphasis). Courage, or manly nobility, I infer, is more closely
bound up with—harder to extricate from—the mystery of “”the
beautiful”” than is justice. As Pangle himself notes in a later
chapter, to kalon (the noble/beautiful), closely associated as it is
“”with self-respect, with dignity, as a rational and thus free being
capable of dedication, devotion, and even sacrifice for the sake of
causes perceived as just and as thereby partaking of transcendent
or eternal value,”” is “”the spiritual core of the human as the
political animal.”” (LS, 93, 94) So, to isolate and purify philosophy
as “”the good,”” courage must be demoted, identified with the most
vulgar hedonism, despite the fact that it would seem to have a lot
to do with sacrificing one’s own life for some “”greater good,”” such
as one’s country.

Now a really subtle clue: in order to accomplish and seal this
isolation of the good from the noble, Pangle simplifies Strauss’s
argument by leaving out a crucial phrase. I here italicize this quite
remarkable omission:

The reason [courage is the lowest virtue] comes to sight when
one scrutinizes courage “”not in its archaic form, in which its sense
is, as it were, narrowed and limited by obedience to law, and in
which, for that very reason, it is hidden wisdom ,”” but rather,
“”apart from this limitation, in itself.””18 (LS, 41; PPH, 146)

Courage—that is, “”archaic,”” or let us say, “”primitive,”” perhaps
even “”primary,”” courage—is bound up with justice, transcendence,
nobility, even wisdom. Humanity’s deepest longing,
Pangle himself says elsewhere “”is encased in, penetrated and
molded by, a complex concatenation of more immediately felt
physical and spiritual needs, personal as well as social.”” (LS, 51)
Our orientation towards transcendence is embedded in politically
conditioned understandings of the noble. Now Pangle’s whole
purpose is of course somehow to sort out all this penetrating and
molding and to isolate the true end of our longing, ostensibly
found “”only in the life of philosophy,”” which requires that we be
“”intellectually and spiritually purified, or indeed purged.”” (LS, 50)
This statement is presented as a conclusion drawn from a long
quotation of Strauss’s perhaps most famous and eloquent paean
to philosophy. Therefore it is quite remarkable to note that in this
very quotation, Strauss does not at all counsel a complete “”purging””
of courage, but rather, “”the mating of courage and moderation,””
a mating characterized by “”highness and nobility.”” This
mating seems to consist in a sustaining of the “”charm of competence””
characteristic of mathematical “”homogeneity”” together
with a respect for the ineliminable “”heterogeneity”” associated
with distinctively human, that is political, purposes. The very life
of philosophy would thus depend, contrary to Pangle’s argument
or to his clues, not upon a radical purging of ordinary human and
political reverence for the beauty of a good it cannot fully grasp,
but on a respect for a pre-philosophic sense of the human
difference upon which depends the appearance of the real itself,
the manifestation of distinct beings or parts within a meaningful
if elusive whole.

It is surely out of concern for this heterogeneity that Leo
Strauss chose to emphasize the otherness, the “”transcendence””
and even externality of philosophy, choosing thus to risk misleading
ambitious students such as Professor Pangle or his students.
But to place this emphasis within the context of Strauss’s understanding
of the political conditions of philosophy is to see the
political character of this very claim to transcend the political.¹⁹
When Pangle assures us that “” human nature as understood by the
Socratics is animated by a profound, passionate longing for selftranscending
union with the eternal or divine”” he surely invites us
to recall what he wrote earlier: that classical philosophy is not
originally grounded in, but “”moves to, or issues in, an account of
human nature,”” via, as we have seen, a rather venturesome
“”clarification”” of what everyone says or means. (LS, 49; my
emphasis) There is no immediate, intuitive, univocal evidence
concerning the meaning of human longing. Political reflection can
surely bring to our attention the ways in which these longings are
entangled with practical necessities, a very great contribution to
self knowledge, for which we are grateful—but no “”clarification””
can provide us with some utterly “”transcendent”” philosophy as a
radical alternative to our practically embedded figures of transcendence.
To say that the good exists “”in speech”” is to say that it
is an interpretation —and therefore not final but eminently contestable,
though no doubt worthy and well intentioned.

It is only from the standpoint of this honorable High Straussian
interpretation, from the standpoint of “”philosophy,”” that it becomes
clear that courage and concern for “”honor”” are of a piece
with simple and vulgar hedonism, that what appears to be “”reverence””
is in fact mere “”selfishness.”” “”The relation of virtue to
human nature,”” Strauss writes, “”is comparable to that of act and
potency, and . . . the potency [only] becomes known by looking
back to it from the act .”” (NRH, 145; my emphasis) The virtue of
philosophy is this act, and “”human nature,”” including, most
notably, not the distinction between but the distinct definitions of
“”vulgar”” and “”real”” virtue, are its “”looking back.”” “”The City”” as the
realm of necessity is the Other of philosophy.

Let us try to imagine for a moment that we who consider these
weighty matters are not professors of Straussian “”political philosophy””
or their students, assigned by fate to sift through the
tangled paradoxes of Mr. Strauss’s deliciously subtle writings,
including his intriguing references to some primordial “”common
sense,”” or pre-philosophic ground of human awareness. Instead,
let us imagine that we are, say, phenomenologists somehow
oblivious to the tissue of modern abstractions that separates us
from our natures, attempting, directly to consult and “”read off””
human experience. Or even (if you will indulge a still more reckless
speculation) let us see if we can pretend that we are actual human
beings in the grip (as Strauss might say) of the challenge of being
human.

#page#

If we attempt such an experiment, we might notice that to
know that how one should live is the greatest question is always
already to know that one exists under some obligation or law that
is higher than oneself. One cannot dedicate oneself without selfdeception
to the life of “”theory”” or “”philosophy”” that might follow
from a pursuit of that question without recognizing the authority
of something above oneself, even if one cannot fully—perhaps
can hardly begin—to articulate the nature of this authority. The
structured ignorance of Socratic philosophy, understood as a
serious and deeply meaningful way of life and not merely as the
academic exercise of an esoteric sect, must have some content,
however provisional; this ignorance is not pure, but partakes of
an orientation towards and a gratitude for what is above and
beyond the activity of questioning. The sweetness of the activity
of questioning, which Strauss and his students have praised so
magnificently, seems to me inseparable from such gratitude,
from such “”grace.”” (WIPP, 40) In this way, the most lucid or selfknowing
“”theory”” and the most conscientious practice arise from
the same ground.²⁰ There is no pure, contentless starting point to
the question of the just and noble, and there is no final answer to
this question that is not an interpretation. (This is very far from
saying that all interpretations are equal.) It follows that philosophy’s
claim to a radical transcendence purged of all practical nobility
is itself an expression of such nobility.²¹

The deepest meaning of Strauss’s “”political philosophy”” was
the political responsibility of philosophy—the responsibility of
“”philosophers”” to represent, moderate, and direct the human
longing for transcendence. If enough would-be philosophers
could accept the notion of a non-religious or cosmological but
somehow apodictically eternal and supremely satisfying good,
Strauss seemed to hope, then without persuading masses of
people of this good they might affect the orientation of the
intellectual elite sufficiently to apply some brakes to the modern
projection of transcendence upon the post-Christian hopes of
human mastery, political and scientific. Unfortunately for Strauss’s
noble project, however, even would-be philosophers have trouble
believing in this absolutist form of zeteticism, and so they are
compelled to “”convert”” more and more youth in order to confirm
what they take to be their own conversions. (LS, 55) But this
proves not very productive philosophically, and perhaps more
importantly very annoying to people who actually find human
beings and their concerns (as expressed in politics, religion, art)
interesting, perhaps even loveable. And so, without for a moment
forgetting our immense debt to Leo Strauss’s unsurpassed elucidation
of the political-philosophical problem, we must forsake
once and for all his “”final solution,”” and rediscover or find other
ways to think the good of thinking together with the good of
humanity.

Though Strauss’s thought will continue to bear rich fruit as
long as people are concerned with the permanent questions, the
practical project of the theoretical supremacy of “”Political Philosophy””
has spent itself and must die, or, which is the same thing,
bore ever more deeply into its esoteric retreat, its cave that claims
to be absolutely beyond, and which must therefore lie beneath, all
real caves.

Ralph C. Hancock
Brigham Young University

NOTES

1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
2. The embedded reference is to Strauss’s “”The Problem of
   Socrates,”” in RCPR, 163.
3. Note in this connection the Zuckerts’ hesitation regarding
   the status of modern philosophy: whereas in chapter 2 they argue
   that for Strauss modernity is bad, not only for politics and
   morality but for philosophy, even that it is fundamentally irrational
   (TLS, 65), they later suggest more cautiously or ecumenically
   or zetetically that Strauss “”did not attempt to show that classical
   philosophy was simply superior to modern philosophy.”” (TLS,
   101)
4. A list of abbreviations for Strauss’s works appears at the
   beginning of this essay.
5. To follow this analysis a difficult step further, we begin to
   suspect that the very duality between transcendent-impersonalintellectual
   and immanent-individual-bodily is a representation
   from the standpoint of the philosopher’s claim. Strauss’s effort to
   revive a pre-modern and pre-Christian sense of transcendence
   requires the reduction of individuality to bodily necessity. But
   there is nothing obvious in this reduction. A part that is truly open
   to the whole would be open to the mystery of the very existence
   of a part, an individual, who is as such open to the whole; he or she
   would be open to the question of a being for whom the question
   of Being is an individual question, whose individual existence is
   open to such a question.
6. Thus it seems to me that the Zuckerts do not understand
   strongly enough the position they take against Stanley Rosen on
   the meaning of “”political philosophy.”” (TLS, 146) They rightly
   insist that “”political life is not only an element of the whole that
   philosophers seek to understand, but an especially privileged part
   of it,”” and they explain how this privilege leads to “”Socratic
   dialectical or conversational philosophizing.”” But they do not
   seem to see that the philosophy that “”begins in opinion”” can never
   outgrow the ground of all opinion, namely, the conviction concerning
   an essential human difference, the basis of all differences.
   In their discussion of postmodernism, they do not clearly notice
   the sense in which Strauss is the only author to see beyond
   modernity by grasping a certain priority of practice to theory, the
   only true postmodern. The status of Emmanuel Levinas’s claim to
   honor this priority will have to be considered elsewhere.
7. Strauss, Weber, and the Study of Politics , 164.
8. To be precise, they admit the limited use of something like
   esotericism, a certain “”pedagogical reserve”” (TLS, 137), but only
   for the purposes of philosophic education. That is, Strauss may
   have chosen not to “”dot all the i’s”” (TLS, 136), thus allowing his
   readers to achieve their own philosophic insights, but he did not
   mislead, or say things he did not believe. Let me here register a
   doubt that this distinction can be fully maintained. The achievement
   of phil
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