steven b smith - philosophy as a way of life- the case of leo strauss

Philosophy as a Way of Life: The Case ofLeo Strauss

Steven B. Smith

Abstract: In this paper I consider Strauss’s case for philosophy as a “way of life.”Strauss’s case rests, I believe, on a view of philosophy first as a quest—an eroticaspiration—for knowledge of the whole and second as committed to a skepticalview of our ability ever to attain to such knowledge. Moreover, can the philosophiclife defend itself against its most powerful alternative, namely, the case for revealedreligion or does philosophy itself rest upon an act of faith of its own? I argue thatphilosophy has the resources to defend itself but only once it is understood as anopen-ended (“zetetic”) search for truth. Only by returning to a conception ofphilosophy as “skeptic in the original sense of the term” can philosophy avoid thetwin dogmatisms of faith and unbelief.

“The highest subject of political philosophy is the philosophic life: philos-ophy – not as a teaching or body of knowledge, but as a way of life –offers, as it were, the solution to the problem that keeps political life inmotion”.

—Leo Strauss

I

A generation ago, an English critic, Myles Burnyeat, wrote an excoriating attackupon Leo Strauss in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Among otherthings, Burnyeat declared that while Strauss’s writings contained much discus-sion of “the philosopher” there was “no sign of any knowledge, from the inside,of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”1 If true, this would be adamning indictment. The question, though, is whether it is true and whetherBurnyeat’s confidence in identifying what it means to be “actively involved inphilosophy” is justified.

To begin with, what does Burnyeat mean when he refers to being activelyengaged in philosophy? He does not say himself, but it is possible that he

I would like to thank Shawn Fraistat, David Belanich, and Catherine Zuckert fortheir very helpful comments on this paper.

1Myles Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32 (May 30,1985), 32.

The Review of Politics 71 (2009), 37–53.Copyright # University of Notre Damedoi:10.1017/S0034670509000047 Printed in the USA

37

means either one of two things. First, the idea of philosophy, at least in theAnglo-American world, was shaped to a large degree in the post-WorldWar II years by the “ordinary language” approach adopted by J.L. Austinand the later Wittgenstein. Philosophy meant here the analysis of conceptsfound in everyday language. The analytical movement, as it becameknown, assumed that all philosophical problems were linguistic in natureand that these problems could be solved with ever more careful scrutiny ofordinary usages. More recently and to some degree in opposition to the ordin-ary language approach, some philosophers have opted to engage in moreambitious, reconstructive attempts to address substantive moral and politicalissues. The work of philosophers like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas hasattempted to engage in a kind of public philosophy.

What is clear is that Strauss is not a philosopher in either of these twosenses. His work has not, on the whole, focused on the meaning of isolatedpolitical concepts such as justice, authority, freedom, or equality. Norhas he written philosophical treatises with titles like A Theory of Justice orA Theory of Communicative Action. Strauss’s work has taken the form not ofthe analytical treatise but of the commentary. His writings have remainedfirmly nested within the genre of the history of political philosophy, leadingsome readers—and even on occasion Strauss himself—to deny that he is aphilosopher at all. Nevertheless, Strauss himself speaks of the commentaryas a unique form of philosophic communication and even of the “specificimmunity of the commentator.”2

One reason that might explain this confusion is that Strauss’s understand-ing of philosophy is marked by a return to an older—a much older—meaningof the word. Philosophy in its oldest sense is philo-sophia or, literally, the loveof wisdom. But what does it mean to love wisdom? Long before philosophybecame a name for an academic discipline, it was associated by its prac-titioners with a way of life. To practice philosophy meant not necessarily toadhere to a specific set of doctrines, a method, much less to anything like asystem of ideas, but to live in a certain way. Philosophy was not just a theor-etical exercise, but a practical one designed to answer the questions “Howought I to live?” “What is the best way of life?” or simply “Why philosophy?”

There is some evidence that interest in the older conception of philosophyas a way of life is receiving renewed attention. In a book titled Philosophy as aWay of Life, the French classicist Pierre Hadot argues that the ancient philoso-phical sects—Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans—all understood philosophy first

2Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1952), 14: Strauss’s understanding of the commentary as a genre of philosophicalwriting is highly influenced by his reading of the Arabic philosopher Alfarabi: foran excellent account, see Remi Brague, “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca: Leo Strauss’s‘Muslim’ Understanding of Greek Philosophy,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 235–59; JoelKraemer, “The Medieval Arabic Enlightenment,” The Cambridge Companion to LeoStrauss, ed. Steven B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

38 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

and foremost as a “spiritual exercise” designed to liberate the mind and freethemselves from the grip of the passions.3 Their aim was to create spiritualcommunities in which the individual members could seek to live freely andin friendship with others who had chosen a similar way of life. In a similarvein Alexander Nehamas has sought to revive the idea of philosophy as“the art of living.” While denying that he is urging readers to return to a phi-losophical way of life, he wants to remind analytical philosophers in particu-lar that the type of philosophy one espouses affects the type of person one is.Philosophical discourse, like the great works of literature, shapes character,and the greatest proponents of philosophy as the art of living have beenSocrates, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.4

Only when we think of philosophy in this older sense as a way of life canwe begin to appreciate Strauss’s role in recent philosophic debate. For Strauss,though, philosophy is not the kind of “spiritual exercise” Hadot associateswith certain ancient ascetic cults; nor is the philosophic way of life a formof individual self-expression as Nehamas maintains. Philosophy as Straussunderstands it is less a constructive or architectonic activity than a skepticalone. Philosophy for Strauss is zetetic or, as he puts it, “skeptic in the originalsense of the term,” that is, knowing that one does not know or knowing thelimits of knowledge.5 The task of the philosopher is not so much to propoundanswers, but to indicate the problematic character of all answers. At themoment when the certainty of our solutions outweighs the awareness ofthe problematic character of the solution, the philosopher ceases to be a phi-losopher. This is in many ways a rigorous and demanding conception of phil-osophy. To use a modern category to express a Socratic insight, thephilosopher must be a practitioner of “negative dialectics.”6

This passage in which Strauss defines philosophy as “skeptic in the originalsense of the term” provides the key for his understanding of philosophy as away of life. The question is, what kind of life is it? What promises and respon-sibilities does it hold out for its followers? And, most fundamentally, what canjustify the choice of philosophy as a way of life?

3Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold I.Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

4Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

5Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Including the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondence, rev. ed. VictorGourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 196; seealso Strauss, “Progress or Return?” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed.Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 259–60.

6For the emphasis on Strauss as a zetetic or skeptical thinker, see Daniel Tanguay, LeoStrauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2007); the language of “negative dialectics” belongs, of course, toTheodor Adorno.

PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE: THE CASE OF STRAUSS 39

II

Strauss is, of course, most famous as a student of political philosophy, but hisunderstanding of political philosophy cannot dispense with some generalaccount of philosophy. Philosophy, he explains, is a quest for “universal knowl-edge” or knowledge of “the whole.”7 By the whole he does not mean some kindof encyclopedic inventory, a catalogue raisonee, of everything that exists, but aknowledge of “the natures of things,” that is, the basic categories of being thatallow us to ask “what is. . . ?” type questions. We know a thing by knowingits nature or the category to which it belongs. Philosophy strives for categorialknowledge, not knowledge of things in their particularity. Strauss gives asexamples of these categories the knowledge of God, man, and world.

Philosophy as a distinctive enterprise emerges because knowledge of thesenatures is not immediately accessible. We have a variety of more or lessreliable opinions about things, but these opinions often exhibit internal incon-sistencies, not to say contradict one another. Philosophy in Strauss’s famousformulation is “the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowl-edge of the whole.”8 But even as philosophy strives for knowledge of thewhole, the whole is fundamentally elusive. We may have knowledge of theparts, but the whole remains mysterious, and even knowledge of the parts,without knowledge of the whole, remains incomplete knowledge. Straussadmits that the discrepancy between the loftiness of the ambition and thepuniness of the results “could appear as Sisyphean or ugly,” but he thengoes on to affirm philosophy “is necessarily accompanied, sustained,and elevated by eros.”9 In other words, philosophy is first and foremost anerotic activity consisting more in the quest, the desire for knowledge, thanin the completion or achievement of wisdom.

On occasion Strauss associates philosophy with a certain type of causalknowledge. “The philosopher’s dominating passion is the desire for truth,[that is], for knowledge of the eternal order, or the eternal cause or causesof the whole.”10 Once again Strauss emphasizes the specific kind of desireor passion—eros—that characterizes philosophy. This passion is for knowl-edge of the causes of the whole rather than knowledge of any particularkind of thing. In fact this desire for knowledge leads the philosopher tolook askance at the human things that cannot but appear “paltry and ephem-eral” in comparison to the eternal order.11 Being chiefly concerned with

7Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (New York: Free Press,1959), 11; see also Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1953), 30–31.

8Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 11.9Ibid., 40.10Strauss, On Tyranny, 197–98.11Ibid., 198.


causes—with the form or eidos of things—philosophy seems to care littleabout things, including human beings, in their individuality.

Strauss is aware—deeply aware—of an obvious objection to this conceptionof philosophy. The ancient or Socratic conception of philosophy as “knowl-edge of the whole” or of an “eternal order” seems to presuppose an “anti-quated cosmology,” namely one in which the universe appears as anordered cosmos in which human beings and other species have their prede-termined roles. Such an idea is completely at odds with the modern notionof the infinitely expanding universe. The teleological conception of natureseems as obsolete today as the claims of creationism and otherpseudo-sciences. Strauss states the objection with admirable clarity in theIntroduction to Natural Right and History:

Natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of theuniverse. All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, whichdetermines what kind of operation is good for them. In the case of man,reason is required for discerning these operations; reason determineswhat is by nature right with ultimate regard to man’s natural end. Theteleological view of the universe, of which the teleological view of manforms a part, would seem to have been destroyed by modern naturalscience.12

He admits that “an adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannotbe found before this basic problem has been solved.”13 Strauss does notexactly say what such a solution would look like, but does he have ananswer to this very pointed objection?

Indeed, Strauss denies that the classical conception of human nature pre-supposes any specific cosmology or underlying metaphysics. The desire forknowledge of the whole remains precisely that, a desire; it does not dogma-tically presuppose, much less claim to demonstrate, one or another specificcosmology. Modern natural science has no doubt vastly increased ourpower over nature in precisely the way imagined by Bacon and Descartes,but this is scarcely a guarantee that science has provided anything like a com-prehensive understanding of nature, including human nature, unless oneequates power with understanding. Strauss even toys with the idea that theancients considered this idea of science but rejected it as “destructive ofhumanity.”14

Strauss addresses this objection in What Is Political Philosophy? wherein heclaims that ancient philosophy, unlike modern science, understood thehuman situation in terms of “the quest for cosmology” rather than anyspecific answer to the problem of cosmology. It is this very openness to or

12Strauss, Natural Right and History, 7–8.13Ibid., 8.14Strauss, On Tyranny, 178.


skepticism about knowledge of the whole that distinguishes the ancients frommodern natural science:

Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannotaffect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand manin the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understandman in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is whollyunintelligible. Classical political philosophy viewed man in a differentlight. It was originated by Socrates. And Socrates was so far from beingcommitted to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledgeof ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledgeof the elusive character of the truth, of the whole.15

Strauss’s understanding of philosophy begins with a desire for knowledgeof the whole and concludes with an awareness of “the elusive character of thetruth.” How does he arrive at this conclusion?

Knowledge of the whole is necessarily preceded by knowledge of the parts.Since we cannot achieve knowledge of the whole immediately as if “shot outof the barrel of a gun” (in Hegel’s famous metaphor), our access to the wholemust take the form of an “ascent,” a movement from the things most immedi-ate and known to us to those things that remain obscure and shrouded inmystery. Philosophy must proceed “dialectically” from premises that are gen-erally agreed upon.16 This ascent begins with the opinions we share aboutthose things that most closely approximate the whole, that is, about the foun-dations of the political community, the rights and duties of its citizens, therelation of law and liberty, and the imperatives of war and peace. It is the“political” that provides our clearest point of access to the whole. Why is this?

Political philosophy is not simply a branch of general philosophy likeethics, logic, or aesthetics. For Strauss, political philosophy is a kind of firstphilosophy. The investigation of political things requires that we begin withthe investigation of the opinions about the better and worse, the just andunjust, which give shape and meaning to political life. All politics is governedby opinion and political philosophy takes as its starting point the investi-gation of opinion—the often authoritative opinions as handed down inlaws, statutes, and other official documents—that govern a community.These opinions, while not philosophy itself, nevertheless share somethingwith philosophy, namely, a concern for the political good, the good of thecommunity. But what distinguishes the political philosopher from even thebest citizen or statesman is not knowledge or concern for the well-being ofthis or that political community, but a certain breadth of perspective: asearch for the “true standards” that shape “the good political order.”17

15Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 38.16Ibid., 93.17Ibid., 12.


The political community is from one point of view a category of being,merely one aspect or part of the whole, but from another it is the very micro-cosm of the whole. The political is the most comprehensive human groupingwithin the order of nature. As such, the political order provides the basicstructure or ranking of all other orders. Of all the perishable things, the het-erogeneity of the political order is the closest expression to the heterogeneityof the eternal order. Knowledge of the whole must begin and begin necess-arily with political philosophy. Whether political philosophy becomes anend in itself or a means to an understanding of metaphysics is a problemnot clearly resolved by Strauss.

Throughout his various writings Strauss emphasized that his approach tophilosophy was given its canonical expression in the writings of the classicalpolitical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. This was not simply because theirswas chronologically first, but because the ancients stood in a privileged pos-ition in regard to the political opinion that shaped their communities. Theseopinions—Strauss refers to them as forming the “natural consciousness” orthe “pre-philosophic consciousness”— form the horizon out of which the fun-damental concepts and categories of political philosophy arose and againstwhich they can be checked.18 Classical political philosophy was relateddirectly to political life, whereas all subsequent philosophies represent modi-fications of this tradition and hence could only experience their worldindirectly, viewing it, so to speak, through a glass darkly. Natural experiencehas become further distorted through a tradition of philosophy that hasbecome at various times intermingled with theology, science, and morerecently history. Consequently, we experience the world today through aprism of concepts that prevents access to the “original position”— apologiesto John Rawls—of philosophy vis-a-vis the city.19

How, then, can we recover these opinions, this “pre-philosophic conscious-ness,” that has been blocked or sedimented over by layers of theoreticalabstraction? Strauss’s project, to some degree like Rousseau’s genealogicalapproach, consists of peeling away, onion-like, the layers of congealed tra-dition that have succeeded in obscuring the natural consciousness that it pre-supposes. There have always been and always will be certain naturalobstacles to the philosophic life; Strauss mentions such things as naturalignorance, the imagination, and superstition. What blocks our access todayis a set of wholly artificial “pseudo-philosophies”—historicism, scientism—that have distorted our relation to experience. Strauss’s paradoxical answeris that only through historical studies carried out not in the spirit of the

18Ibid., 75–76.19The idea that there remains some primordial prephilosophic ground of experience

is indebted to Husserl, but is left undertheorized in Strauss; see Natural Right andHistory, 31–32; for some interesting comments on the problem, see Robert Pippin,“The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophic Fate of Modernity,”Political Theory 3 (2003): 335–58.


reigning academic historicism, but by reacquiring the art of careful readingcan we think ourselves back into the original situation of philosophy.20

Only through reading certain “old books” will we be able to begin the slowand painstaking ascent from the artificial cave we now inhabit back intothe “natural cave” that is the foundation for all later philosophy.21

III

All philosophy is political philosophy in another sense for Strauss. In the firstplace, the form or shape of the political community is the closest approxi-mation to the natural articulation of the whole that is the true object of philo-sophic knowledge. But philosophy is political in a much more obvious sense.Strauss puts this in the form of a syllogism. Philosophy is the attempt toreplace opinion, including opinions about political things, by knowledge;but opinion is the medium of society; therefore philosophy is necessarily atodds with society. Strauss drew from this the following conclusion: philos-ophy is necessarily a function of the “few,” an elite, that must conceal itsactivity from the hostility of the “many.”22 It is this tension between philos-ophy and society, given its most vivid expression in Plato’s Apology ofSocrates, which constitutes the political situation of philosophy. The philoso-pher’s way of life is forced to pay homage to politics.

Strauss’s most developed thoughts on the tension between philosophy andpolitics occur in his exchange with the Hegelian-Marxist philosopherAlexandre Kojeve over the nature of modern tyranny. Strauss’s On Tyrannywas an attempt to resuscitate the ancient concept of tyranny as presented inXenophon’s dialogue Hiero in order better to understand the phenomenonof twentieth-century totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin). Unlike many of his con-temporaries who emphasized the novelty of totalitarianism, Strauss some-what counterintuitively saw a continuity between ancient and moderntyranny. Strauss did not deny that modern tyrannies supported by thepowers of technology and ideology had become vastly more dangerousthan tyrannies in the past, but he wondered whether this changed the essen-tial nature of the phenomenon (“Tyranny is a danger coeval with politicallife”).23 Kojeve, by contrast, suggested that modern tyrannies could play a his-torically progressive role in the struggle to achieve the classless society of the

20For the philosophical importance of historical studies, see Strauss, “How to StudySpinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 142–201,esp. 142–62; “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” Review of Metaphysics 5(1952): 559–86.

21For the “second cave” image, see Strauss, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 155–56.22This is the central thesis of Persecution and the Art of Writing, 22–37; see also

Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 221–22.23Strauss, On Tyranny, 22.


future. In the course of their exchange, Strauss and Kojeve turned the debateover tyranny into a discussion of the philosopher’s responsibility to the city.24

Strauss begins by considering the philosopher’s motives, the peculiar desireor eros, that drives the philosophic quest. For Kojeve, it is recognition aboveall that intellectuals crave, desire to have their ideas “realized” by beingadopted in practice, whether it be by a court, a president, or a tyrant. Thetest of the truth of an idea is its success in the public sphere.25 For Strauss,however, it is not public recognition, but the satisfaction that derives fromphilosophy itself that is its own reward. The justification of philosophy isentirely internal to philosophy. “We do not have to pry into the heart ofany one in order to know that, insofar as the philosopher, owing to the weak-ness of the flesh, becomes concerned with being recognized by others, heceases to be a philosopher,” Strauss retorts. “According to the strict view ofthe classics he turns into a sophist.”26

Kojeve’s complaint is that Strauss’s understanding of philosophy remainsisolated from the life of the city, from political praxis, and the historicalprocess. This retreat has historically taken the form of the Epicureangarden, the Republic of Letters, or the academic ivory tower. These all rep-resent efforts to escape the judgment of history by retreating into the innercitadel of the mind. Strauss accepts that the philosopher’s quest is a lonelyone that requires liberation from “the most potent natural charm” of attach-ment to the city, but this does not render it absolutely self-regarding. Fullyaware of the fallibility of the mind, the philosopher must seek out others ofhis kind with whom to share, challenge, and test his ideas. The cultivationof friendship becomes one of the highest duties of philosophy.27

To be sure, Strauss agrees with Kojeve regarding the danger of self-referentiality that comes from “the cultivation and perpetuation of commonprejudices by a closely knit group of kindred spirits.”28 He appears to befully cognizant of all the dangers later associated with “Straussianism.” Butif one danger to philosophy comes from “the snobbish silence and whisperingof the sect,” an even greater danger derives from the desire to turn philosophyinto a mass doctrine (“propaganda”). The idea of a public philosophy is anoxymoron. “If we must choose between the sect and the party,” Strauss

24For some of the commentary on this debate, see Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophyand Politics, I and II,” Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968): 58–84, 281–328; NicolaChiaromonte, “On Modern Tyranny: A Critique of Western Intellectuals,” Dissent 16(1969): 137–50; Robert Pippin, “Being, Time, and Politics: The Strauss-KojeveDebate,” History and Theory 22 (1993): 138–61; Steven B. Smith, “Tyranny Ancientand Modern,” in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006), 131–55.

25See Strauss, On Tyranny, 162–63.26Ibid., 203.27Ibid., 194–95.28Ibid., 195.


writes, “we must choose the sect.”29 There will always be rival philosophicalsects—Platonists, Spinozists, Heideggerians—that check and balance oneanother. The true danger to philosophy is when it is turned into an ideologyadapted to the needs of political rule.

It is in this context that Strauss confirms the skeptical or zetetic nature ofphilosophy referred to earlier. Philosophy is a matter of knowledge, butknowledge of one’s ignorance, of knowing the limits of knowledge:

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems,[that is,] of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossibleto think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a sol-ution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet aslong as there is no wisdom, but only quest for wisdom, the evidence ofall solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems.Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment atwhich the “subjective certainty” of a solution becomes stronger than hisawareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that momentthe sectarian is born.30

This is Strauss’s boldest statement on the nature of philosophy and surelyrefutes the charge that there is “no sign of any knowledge, from the inside,of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.” Yet Strauss leavesmany questions unanswered. Strauss’s affection for Socratic moderation not-withstanding, where exactly does one draw the line between knowledge andignorance? Even if we accept the claim that the evidence of the problems ofphilosophy is greater than the evidence for the solutions, does this renderall solutions equally problematic? Are we not entitled to claim that some sol-utions are preferable to others even if they lack certainty? Is the only choicebetween absolute wisdom or zetetic skepticism? More seriously, Strauss’szetetic understanding of philosophy seems to undercut the ground of politicaljudgment. If, as he remarks above, one cannot think about the problemswithout becoming “inclined” toward a solution, on the basis of what is oneso inclined? If knowledge of the right or good political order remains funda-mentally problematic, what standard can be used for judgment in politicallife?

Strauss probably exaggerates philosophy’s radical detachment from theconcerns of the city. He recognizes that the philosopher “cannot help livingas a human being who as such cannot be dead to human concerns.”31

Among these concerns are the philosopher’s twin responsibilities to both phil-osophy and the city. The philosopher’s first and primary concern must alwaysbe to philosophy itself, to ensure its survival even in the most endangeredtimes. “The philosopher must go to the market place in order to fish there

29Ibid., emphasis added.30Ibid., 196.31Ibid., 199.


for potential philosophers.”32 These fishing expeditions will necessarily beseen by the city as an attempt to corrupt the young by weaning them awayfrom politics and business to philosophy. In this way the philosopher isforced to defend himself and his way of life, not only before other philoso-phers, but before the tribunal of public opinion.

In what does the philosopher’s responsibility to the city consist?Recognizing that philosophy can only take place within the context of thecity—how else to guarantee its continuation?—the philosopher must showa decent respect to the opinions on which the city is based. To be sure, the phi-losopher’s public responsibilities are entirely exoteric as the following admis-sion makes clear. It is sufficient to satisfy the city “that the philosophers arenot atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, thatthey reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, inshort, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens, andeven the best of citizens.”33 Knowing that true happiness is found only inthe activity of philosophy, the philosopher will find it easy to accommodatehimself to the nomoi of the city. Plato’s allegory of the cave always remainedStrauss’s Exhibit A for the intransigent hostility between philosophy andeven the best social order.

The philosopher may be convinced, may even believe he knows, that thephilosophic life is best. It is this very certainty that leads philosophy to enter-tain only modest expectations from politics:

Since he fully realizes the limits set to all human action and all humanplanning (for what has come into being must perish again), he does notexpect salvation or satisfaction from the establishment of the simplybest social order. He will therefore not engage in revolutionary or subver-sive activity. But he will try to help his fellow man by mitigating, as far asin him lies, the evils which are inseparable from the human condition.34

Strauss’s philosophical politics raises the troubling question of the limits ofthe philosopher’s accommodation to the city. Does this accommodationinclude acquiescence to tyranny as something “coeval with political life”?Must a tyrannical regime be tolerated as one of the evils “inseparable fromthe human condition”? How far must the philosopher maintain the fictionthat philosophy is not atheistic and reveres the gods of the city?

Strauss’s answer to these questions is best summed up in a phrase he uses inregard to Judah Halevi: “[T]he line of demarcation between timidity andresponsibility is drawn differently in different ages.”35 He might also haveadded “and according to the temperament and judgment of each individual.”This is clearly true for Strauss himself whose own philosophical politics

32Ibid., 205.33Ibid., 205–6.34Ibid., 200.35Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 110.


displayed a combination of inner resistance and outer conformity. Therewill always remain the lingering question of how far Strauss was recommend-ing such a strategy to his own readers. To what degree does esotericismremain an historical thesis about the interpretation of the thought of thepast or a responsibility of philosophy even in the present?36 This is a themeon which Strauss remained tantalizingly and, I suspect, deliberatelyopaque. It is certainly far from evident that a strategy adopted by Halevi,Alfarabi, and Maimonides, writing in times of considerable hostility to phil-osophy, remains applicable in a modern democratic age where thedemands for intellectual probity and “transparency” have become not justprivate but public virtues.

Strauss holds out the possibility that philosophy may yet be able to confercertain indirect benefactions on the city through humanizing its political andethical practices. The chief benefit that philosophy confers is a sense of limitsor moral restraints on politics, an awareness that not everything is per-mitted.37 Among the evils that philosophy can hope to mitigate are thedangers of utopianism (“idealism”), overly zealous forms of nationalismand patriotism, the excesses of group identity, and other “delusions bred bycollective egoisms.”38 But it is precisely because these evils are ineradicablethat our expectations from politics must be modest.

IV

The philosopher may believe—Strauss may even believe—that the philo-sophic life is best. The question is what makes it so. Strauss refers to thesense of satisfaction bordering on “self-admiration” felt by the philosopher.But this is not so much a proof as an expression of the philosophic life. It isalso less than clear how knowledge of one’s ignorance contributes to thesense of satisfaction or happiness experienced by the philosopher, but asStrauss would say, “be that as it may.” Can philosophy justify itself and itsway of life before the most serious alternatives? This is perhaps the centralquestion of Strauss’s philosophical writings.

The most serious alternative, in fact the only real alternative, to philosophyis the challenge posed by divine revelation.39 Other choices and other lifeplans—even the classical conflict between the philosophical and the political

36Strauss regards society’s hostility to philosophy as a danger “coeval with philos-ophy.” See Persecution and the Art of Writing, 21.

37Strauss, On Tyranny, 192; see also Strauss, Natural Right and History, 130.38Strauss, On Tyranny, 200.39For Strauss’s treatment of this theme, see “Progress or Return?” 227–70; “Preface to

Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books,1968), 224–59; “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections,” in Studies inPlatonic Political Philosophy, ed. T. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),


life—pale in comparison. The alternatives of reason and revelation or, inStrauss’s idiom, Athens and Jerusalem, remain the sharpest and most compre-hensive question that philosophy must confront in defending itself and itsway of life. The difference between Athens and Jerusalem centers on theirrespective views of the role of morality in the overall economy of humanlife. For adherents of Jerusalem, it is morality—the passionate quest for right-eousness—that represents the pinnacle of humanity, while for partisans ofAthens, morality is at most instrumental to the attainment of a kind of con-templative autonomy. This contrast, even more than the famous quarrelbetween the ancients and the moderns, remains the philosophic questionbecause if philosophy cannot defend itself against the adherents of revelation,then philosophy itself threatens to become just another faith based upon anarbitrary decision or an act of will.40

Strauss states this contrast nowhere more starkly than in the pages ofNatural Right and History:

Man cannot live without light, guidance, knowledge; only throughknowledge of the good can he find the good that he needs. The fundamen-tal question, therefore, is whether men can acquire that knowledge of thegood without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collec-tively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether theyare dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternativeis more fundamental than this: human knowledge or divine guidance.41

Strauss provocatively denies that a grand synthesis of reason and revel-ation like that imagined by Thomas Aquinas or Hegel is possible. In everysynthesis one side gets the upper hand and thus blunts the edge of theother. Philosophy and revelation necessarily conflict because each declaresitself “the one thing needful”:

For both philosophy and the Bible proclaim something as the one thingneedful, as the only thing that ultimately counts, and the one thingneedful proclaimed by the Bible is the opposite of that proclaimed by phil-osophy: a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight. In every attemptat harmonization, in every synthesis however impressive, one of the twoopposed elements is sacrificed, more or less subtly but in any event surely,

147–73; “Reason and Revelation,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and theTheologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141–80.

40The claim that the entire Straussian project rests upon a Nietzschean “will topower” has been argued provocatively by Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 107–23; see also Laurence Lampert, LeoStrauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) who treats Straussas a weak Nietzschean.

41Strauss, Natural Right and History, 74.


to the other: philosophy, which means to be the queen, must be made thehandmaid of revelation or vice versa.42

There seems, then, to be a standoff between philosophy and revelation. Caneither side refute the other?

In good Socratic fashion Strauss considers a variety of opinions on bothsides of the argument. Consider the matter first from the side of theology.Within the Jewish tradition what is called the Call of God is often said tobe verified by a long line of tradition.43 This Call was given to Moses onMount Sinai, handed down to Joshua, to the elders, and the prophets all inan unbroken chain of tradition to the rabbis. Is this tradition reliable?

Strauss questions the validity of this kind of historical proof. The Call ofGod cannot be distinguished from those who claim to have experienced theCall. In other words, the Call is only as reliable as the individuals whoclaim to have received it. But this makes the Call dependent on the interpret-ation of the believer, and such interpretations will inevitably vary fromperson to person and sect to sect. A believing Jew will interpret the Callvery differently from a believing Muslim. Furthermore, those who claimedto be witnesses to the revelation or the inheritors of this revelation are in allknown cases already adherents of their respective faiths. There are no impar-tial or neutral witnesses apart from the believers themselves.44

The same objections hold regarding the alleged existence of miracles. Noone who does not already believe in the possibility of miracles has ever testi-fied to their existence. “No miracle was performed in the presence of first-ratephysicists,” Strauss impiously remarks.45 He also considers the argumentfrom what he calls “the intrinsic quality of revelation,” namely, that therevealed law is the best of all possible laws. But if the revealed law is saidto be best, this can only be a judgment of reason. The revealed law wouldbe in this case subordinate to or at least answerable to the claims of reasonand not faith or belief.46

Strauss considers and rejects the various arguments used to defend theprimacy of revelation, but how do things look from the standpoint of philos-ophy? No better. Philosophy demands that revelation defend itself before thebar of reason, our human reason. But revelation resolutely refuses to do this.

42Ibid., 74–75; the term “one thing needful” is from Luke 10:42.43See Walter Sobchak from the Coen Brothers’ movie The Big Lebowski: “Three thou-

sand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you’re damn right I’mliving in the past.” The chronology may be slightly off, but the point is well-taken.

44Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 261–62.45Ibid., 264. Strauss may well have been thinking about the miracle of the sun stand-

ing still in the heavens as reported in Joshua 10: 12–14; this was discussed at length bySpinoza who offers his own “scientific” account of the alleged miracle inTheologico-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 26–27.

46Strauss cites Deuteronomy 4:6 as evidence for the possibility of a rational ortho-doxy; see “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” 256.


The argument that revelation must justify itself rationally is circular. It pre-supposes what it needs to prove, namely, that revelation is a rational experi-ence. At most philosophy can claim to have refuted the various theologicalarguments in defense of revelation; it has not disproved the possibility of rev-elation itself.

Strauss considers a number of more specific arguments against revelationdrawn from the historical and archaeological criticism of the Bible andothers from modern scientific theories (Darwinism), but he pays the greatestrespect to the claims of philosophical theology or what goes by the name ofnatural theology. According to the argument of natural theology, God’s attri-butes are in principle knowable and accessible to human reason. Theopening axioms and demonstrations of book one of Spinoza’s Ethics is theclearest proof text of this approach. According to Spinoza, we can knowthe attributes of God because God is nature, and the operations of naturecan be known through the application of unaided human intelligence. Justas everything exists within the ordered sphere of nature, so can everythingbe known according to the principle of sufficient reason. According to thisprinciple, there is a perfect unity between reason and nature and thisunity is God.

Strauss takes Spinoza’s argument with the utmost seriousness, but in theend finds it just as arbitrary as the assertion of revelation. The attributes ofGod proposed by Spinoza have all been pre-selected to prove God’s perfectrationality and intelligibility, to deny all mystery to the universe. WhetherSpinoza’s disenchantment of the universe represents a form of concealedatheism or a higher form of piety is not a question that concerns Strauss.His point is that the Spinozist conception of God as Deus sive natura maywell follow the criteria for clarity and distinctness, but clarity and distinctnessare not a guarantee of truth. A clear and distinct proof for the existence of Godis only clear and distinct from our point of view, from the standpoint of phil-osophy; it cannot begin to penetrate the existence of an infinite being whoseways may not be our ways. The Ethics remains a castle built on sand.

The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem seems to have concluded with adraw. Strauss writes: “All alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbe-lief in revelation, and all alleged refutations of philosophy presuppose faith inrevelation.”47 No common ground or neutral standpoint seems possible. Buta standoff between philosophy and faith would seem to tilt the balance infavor of faith. If philosophy cannot prove in the sense of rationally demon-strate its superiority to revelation, if every proof against revelation turnsout to be hypothetical, or to rest upon “unevident premises” no differentfrom the premises of faith, then one must accept that the philosophical lifeis itself based on faith, an act of will, or on a decision that cannot in the last

47Strauss, “Progress or Return,” 269.


instance be rationally grounded. In such a competition, the adherents of faithwould win on a technicality.48

Strauss goes out of his way to make the strongest case for revelation or,what amounts to the same thing, to create the highest possible hurdle for phil-osophy. He often seems to demand a much higher burden of proof from phil-osophy than from theology. Theology merely needs to hold open thepossibility of revelation, whereas philosophy is required to refute its very pre-mises. Anything less must be taken as an admission of failure. Strauss washimself a product of the early twentieth-century “reawakening of theology”associated with the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig who“appeared to make it necessary to investigate how far the critique of orthodoxtheology—Jewish and Christian—deserved to be victorious.”49 Straussclearly took it for granted that the critique of theology had not yet proveddeserving of victory.

At the same time that the reawakening of theology alerted Strauss to thefailure of the Enlightenment critique of religion, it would be a mistake, assome have tried, to place him in the camp of counter-Enlightenment politicaltheology, to turn him into a defender of faith. Through his dissatisfaction withSpinoza, Strauss fought his way back not to a reaffirmation of orthodoxy, butto a much older conception of philosophy as zetetic philosophy. This, I take it,is the meaning of his statement that a return to premodern philosophy is notan impossibility but only a very great difficulty.50

Strauss’s “return” to classical political philosophy—a return he alwaysdescribed as “tentative or experimental”—is not, as some have seen, anendorsement of natural hierarchy or any other form of ancient biology oreugenics.51 Strauss’s understanding of ancient philosophy has more to dowith the political problem of philosophy or the issue of the philosophic lifeand not a philosophy of politics as this is usually understood. This has cer-tainly not inhibited all manner of interpreters from attributing all mannersof doctrinal positions to him from neoconservatism to a nihilistic antimoder-nity. His concern was with the original position of philosophy as a mode ofquestioning and not with the defense of any particular philosophical schoolor sect, much less a political movement or cause.

Strauss makes clear that the philosophic life is to be understood as a form ofzetetic questioning. Even here zeteticism is not a return to the questions of the

48For the theistic interpretation of Strauss’s thought, see Kenneth Hart Green, Jew andPhilosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: SUNYPress, 1993); Susan Orr, Jerusalem and Athens (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,1995).

49Leo Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Jewish Philosophy and theCrisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 453.

50Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” 257.51For the provisional nature of Strauss’s project, see The City and Man (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1964), 11.


Stoa, but to a whole range of topics unknown to the ancients, mainly theproblem of Athens and Jerusalem or, to what he later called, the “theologico-political problem” (“the theme of my investigations”).52 Zetetic or skepticalphilosophy does not claim to have found an answer, much less the answer,to the reason/revelation problem, but rather to keep that problem alive forfuture investigation. Zetetic understanding is precisely what protects the phi-losopher from the twin dogmatisms of faith and unbelief. Neither of these canwithstand the test of rational justification. Only the philosopher who lives inconstant awareness of and engagement with the conflict between Athens andJerusalem, who is able to engage each side with the claims of the other, is in aposition to justify philosophy as a way of life.53

V

If Strauss is correct that we have lost sight of the question of the philosophiclife, then it is hardly surprising that many today fail to see him as a philoso-pher, often mistaking him for a commentator or a historian of ideas. Strauss’sinterests were not with the techniques or methods of philosophy, much lesswith advancing knowledge of concepts and propositions. Strauss’s interestwas with the prior question, “Why philosophy?” This is obviously not a ques-tion one would ask of activities like cookery or military strategy or businessenterprise where the ends in question are not fundamentally controversial.But the ends of philosophy are and will always remain an open question.More specifically, Strauss was concerned with what the philosophic life isand what value, if any, it confers on the life of the community. His single-minded examination of this question fulfills the offices of philosophy to thehighest degree.

52Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” 453.53Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 270; see also the following remark from Goethe

cited by Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 107n35: “The actual, only andmost profound theme of world and human history, the theme under which allothers are subsumed, remains the conflict between unbelief and belief.”


steven b smith - philosophy as a way of life- the case of leo strauss

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