The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss 9780226039510

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the enduring importance of leo strauss

the enduring importance of leo strauss

laurence lampert

the university of chicago press chicago and london

laurence lampert is emeritus professor of philosophy at Indiana University– Purdue University Indianapolis. He is the author of several books, most recently How Philosophy Became Socratic, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13    1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-03948-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03951-0 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lampert, Laurence, 1941–, author.   The enduring importance of Leo Strauss / Laurence Lampert.     pages ; cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-226-03948-0 (cloth : alkaline paper)—isbn 978-0-226-03951-0 (e-book) 1. Strauss, Leo.  2. Philosophy—History—20th century.  3. Philosophy, Ancient.  4. Enlightenment.  5. Political science—Philosophy.  I. Title.   b945.s84l36 2013   181'.06—dc23 2013000530 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

List of Abbreviations

1.

ix

Introduction

1

Part One. Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism

5

Exotericism Exposed: Letters to Jacob Klein

7

2. Exotericism Embraced: “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari”

32

Part Two. The Socratic Enlightenment

73

3. The Peculiarly Socratic Philosophizing: Xenophon’s Gynaikologia

75

4. Socrates, the Real Real Man: Xenophon’s Andrologia 5.

Platonic Political Philosophy: “Ministerial Poetry”

109 128

6. Extending the History of Philosophy Back to Homer: Seth Benardete’s Odyssey

156

Part Three. The Modern Enlightenment

187

7. Attacking the Enlightenment on Behalf of Orthodoxy: The Introduction to Philosophy and Law

189

8. Attacking the Enlightenment on Behalf of Socrates: “What Is Political Philosophy?”

227



vi

contents

9. Advancing the Enlightenment: Strauss’s Recovery of Nietzsche’s Theological-Political Program

268

Epilogue: Strauss’s Farewell

311

Works Cited Index

315 323

At the very least the observations I have made will force historians sooner or later to abandon the complacency with which they claim to know what the great thinkers thought, to admit that the thought of the past is much more enigmatic than it is generally held to be, and to begin to wonder whether the historical truth is not as difficult of access as the philosophical truth. —Leo Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing” (1954)

vii

abbreviations

AAPL:

The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws

CM:

The City and Man

ET:

“Exoteric Teaching”

EW:

Early Writings

GS:

Gesammelte Schriften

HPP:

History of Political Philosophy

JPCM:

Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity

LAM:

Liberalism Ancient and Modern

NRH:

Natural Right and History

OPS:

On Plato’s Symposium

OT:

On Tyranny

PAW:

Persecution and the Art of Writing

PL:

Philosophy and Law

PPH :

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes

SA:

Socrates and Aristophanes

SCR:

Spinoza’s Critique of Religion

SPPP:

Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy

TM:

Thoughts on Machiavelli

WIPP:

What Is Political Philosophy?

XS:

Xenophon’s Socrates

XSD:

Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse

ix

introduction

T

he purpose of this book is to identify what is of enduring importance in the work of Leo Strauss and to sever it from the politics in which it threatens to be lost. Strauss’s enduring importance rests on a monumental achievement: he rediscovered the art of writing practiced by all philosophers prior to the modern Enlightenment; he helped make possible the new history of philosophy that recovers the genuine teaching of the greatest thinkers and poets of our tradition. The politics that threatens the loss of Strauss’s great achievement is, in large measure, Strauss’s own practice of elevating ancient or classical political philosophy at the expense of modern political philosophy. That practice or politics led him to a rhetoric of praise of the ancients and blame of the moderns that misrepresents the true greatness of each, a greatness that becomes accessible with Strauss’s guidance to the beautiful intricacies of the writing art employed by ancients and moderns alike. For what ancient and modern thinkers of the first rank share far outweighs in importance what makes them different: both understood and acted upon the difference between philosophy and poetry, combining understanding with action by adding to philosophy political philosophy. In Strauss’s words, thinkers both ancient and modern came to see the necessity of developing a “theologicalpolitical program” in the service of true understanding. Strauss recovered that shared greatness and made it visible for us; with his help the true and continuous greatness of political philosophy from ancient Socrates to modern Nietzsche can be seen to merit the same response: gratitude for instruction on what matters most, a rational view of things. In smaller measure, the politics that threatens Strauss’s enduring contribution is the politics of the school he founded. Nietzsche gave the fitting reminder to that school: “whispered to conservatives . . . No one is free to 



introduction

be a crab.” Understanding philosophy’s art of writing in its consistencyin-difference from Socrates, no, from Homer to Nietzsche equips us to see that philosophy’s genuine past makes it an instrument not of return but of informed and grateful advance of the sort Nietzsche described: “We are Hyperboreans, we know the road, we found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth,” an exit that passes through an understanding of the art of writing. Strauss rediscovered the art of writing in the long aftereffects of the modern Enlightenment or, as he believed, in the crisis of its waning. And he came to practice his own form of the art he rediscovered, a form that proves highly instructive in teaching the subtleties of the writing art even to readers unpersuaded that it is still necessary in the old way for the old reasons. Strauss said of the writings produced by this art: “all [such] writings would have to be, strictly speaking, exoteric” (PAW, 35). I follow Strauss’s usage in this book: the artfulness that covers yet conveys the esoteric thinking of the philosophers produces texts that are exoteric writings. Strauss can thus say, “An exoteric book contains then two teachings: a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines” (PAW, 36). My book celebrates Strauss’s recovery of exotericism partly through exegetical studies of selected examples of his matchless commentaries on monuments of philosophy, and partly through exegetical criticism of his exoteric teaching on modern philosophy. Strauss is an exoteric guide to exoteric writings, but I feel freed to expose the rhetoric of Strauss’s writing because the perspective of my book is derived not from Strauss but from Nietzsche. Strauss’s discoveries can lead to an unexpected conclusion: true understanding of the classical writings advances the modern Enlightenment broadly understood, the enlightenment Nietzsche worked to advance. The esoteric truth preserved in the exoteric writings of the great thinkers of our past can serve as a millennialong argument on behalf of the Enlightenment. The continuity of truth, of the consistent human attainment of a truer view of the world and the human, attests to the possibility of philosophy as a true understanding of the world and the human within the limits of reason that philosophy recognizes. It was Nietzsche—Nietzsche!—who spoke of “the deep and fundamental happiness” science brings through its power to grasp things that hold their ground against the constant flux of human laws and concepts— . Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes,” aph. 43. . Antichrist, aph. 1.



introduction



and Nietzsche was speaking here of the science of nature and human nature that stretches back to Epicurus and Democritus. The modern Enlightenment broadly understood—as having its crucial origins in Francis Bacon and René Descartes, as grounded in the new science of nature of which they were the most powerful spokesmen, as aiming at a new social order free of rule by religion and ruled instead by reason and its handmaid religion—that modern Enlightenment has had singular achievements: a public science that displays to all the world dependable knowledge of the universe and the human, a technology that improves the human estate, and a political order leading to ever more comprehensive units of allied human beings united under a modern banner. Those singular achievements make the modern Enlightenment irreversible in the sense that only its advancement is desirable—presupposing fundamental alterations in its moral foundation that Nietzsche saw as part of his task. Strauss’s recovery of Nietzsche shows that Nietzsche repeats what the greatest thinkers and actors in our millennialong tradition exemplify: a three-step odyssey in which the primary drive to understand nature entails the consequent need to understand “the spiritual situation of the present,” which in turn entails the need to act in order to advance understanding through a theological-political program. Strauss’s recovery of exotericism, so far from being a tool for the restoration of preEnlightenment practices or beliefs, can be a tool for the advancement of learning that Nietzsche advocated; the recovery of exotericism can aid in carrying forward the great modern experiment, the “experiment with the truth” that aspired to ground a social order on the true view of things and for which Nietzsche discovered the appropriate poetry. h Two chronologies compete in the unfolding structure of my book, the chronology of Strauss’s development as a thinker and the chronology of the history of philosophy on which Strauss’s work is a continuous reflection. Part 1, “Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism,” begins with the decisive moment in Strauss’s career, his recovery of exotericism, and moves to its consequence for Strauss, his choice to practice his own version of exotericism. Parts 2 and 3 suspend the chronology of Strauss’s own development in order to follow

. Gay Science, aph. 46—whose affirmations follow directly from aph. 45. . The title of an unpublished manuscript by Strauss written in 1932 (GS, 2: 441–56). . Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, volume 11, notebook 25, entry 305; subsequent references to this edition will be given as follows: KSA, 11: 25 [305], spring 1884.



introduction

the chronology of the history of philosophy and treat serially the two focuses of Strauss’s work, ancients and moderns. Part 2, “The Socratic Enlightenment,” treats the Socrates of Xenophon and Plato and ends with a chapter on how it all began, with Homer. Part 3, “The Modern Enlightenment,” reverts to the chronology of Strauss’s work in order to trace his response to the modern Enlightenment in three pivotal essays spread across almost four decades of his thinking. One figure, Nietzsche, rises to crucial importance as Strauss’s assessment of the necessary response to the modern Enlightenment deepens. This book too, then, with its theme of Strauss’s understanding of the history of philosophy, is what all my books are, an installment in the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche.

part one

Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism

L

uckily for us Strauss left a record of the great event of his rediscovery of exotericism. In letters to his friend Jacob Klein he set out the chief items of his rediscovery on the very days of their occurrence. The letters are fresh, excited, compact, and anxious about the future: how will he ever report such discoveries to the wider world? Strauss showed how he settled that question in an essay written a few years after the event of recovery: he too would be an exoteric writer modeled on the great masters he had been privileged to recover. The two chapters of part 1 consider first Strauss’s letters to Klein and then his first great work of exegesis recovering the exotericism of a philosopher, a work in which he also provides the reason for practicing his own brand of exotericism.

chapter one

Exotericism Exposed: Letters to Jacob Klein

S

trauss’s studies in the history of philosophy were already well advanced in December 1937 when he traveled to the United States to find a teaching position. He had completed his Ph.D. seventeen years earlier with a dissertation on Friedrich Jacobi. He had written a book on Spinoza in 1925–28 that contained a history of atheism in Western philosophy. He had been an editor of the works of Moses Mendelssohn, which required close acquaintance with the debates of the German Enlightenment involving Jacobi, Lessing, Kant, Leibniz, and others. In the 1930s he made himself a specialist in Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophy, publishing a book in 1935 on Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors. And he made himself an authority on Hobbes, on whom he wrote two books, one of which he had translated into English and published in 1936. In all three published books, classical philosophy played an important role, with Plato serving as a standard in the Maimonides and Hobbes books. In this work on the history of philosophy Strauss had often encountered the fact and vocabulary of exoteric writing, and after writing Philosophy and Law he had learned still more about it, especially in its appearance in Maimonides and the Islamic philosophers. But January 1938 marks a turning point in the life of an already established scholar in his thirty-ninth year, for only then did Strauss recover exotericism in its full radicality—and report it with complete candor in the outspoken,

1. Strauss’s intellectual development as a young thinker has been usefully charted by Meier, GS, 2: ix–xxxiii; Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem; and Zank, Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, who translates many essential pieces and provides well informed and instructive commentary.





chapter one

unvarnished detail of private letters spread across almost two years to his best friend who also shared his intellectual interests, Jacob Klein. Strauss’s letters to Klein on the recovery of exotericism deserve to become famous. They surge with the exhilaration, yes, the hilarity of serial revelations spread across twenty-two months of precarious living. They contain, in Heinrich Meier’s metaphor, “a whole series of philosophic supernovas” that can now serve Strauss’s reader as orienting points for renewed study of his writings and of the figures in the history of philosophy they mention. More than anything else Strauss wrote, these letters, taken collectively, provide indisputable evidence of his mastery as a reader and of his own practice of exoteric writing: the letters show what he learned, the later writings show how he chose to present it. Strauss and Klein had been friends since meeting at the University of Marburg in 1920 when both turned twenty-one, and they continued their friendship in Berlin after Strauss was hired as a researcher at the Akademie der Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1925. After Strauss left Germany in 1932 they maintained an extensive correspondence. Strauss’s letters on exotericism begin with his first letter from New York, on January 20, 1938. He had traveled alone from Cambridge, England, in late 1937 to scout firsthand the opportunities in the United States for an almost-forty-year-old German Jewish scholar who had published many books and articles but never held a teaching position at a university. Amid the rigors of travel and failure to find encouraging leads for a full-time position for himself and also for Klein, Strauss reports that “Maimonides is getting more and more exciting.” Maimonides had been a subject of Strauss’s study at least since his focus on Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, beginning in 1922, had taken him back to Maimonides; but a different Maimonides now comes to light for him. In his first book Strauss called Maimonides “a believing Jew” (SCR, 185), but now he can say, “He was a truly free mind . . . The crucial question for him was not world creation or world eternity (for he was persuaded of world eternity); instead, it was whether the ideal lawgiver must be a prophet.” The crucial question had become political because the ontological issue of the eternity of the world had been settled, and the necessity of the ideal legislator’s being a prophet “he—denied, as Farabi had before him

. GS, 3: 544–87. The relevant letters are written in German with some Greek, Latin, French, and English. The long prehistory of Strauss’s acquaintance with exotericism, which alone made possible the great discoveries recorded in his letters, is laid out by Janssens (Between Athens and Jerusalem, esp. 123–33); see also n. 7 below. . Meier, GS, 3: xxxiii.



exotericism exposed



and Averroes did in his own time.” Strauss then adds something almost poignant, given the difficulties his own eventual art of writing would hand his readers: “It’s very difficult to prove that because he discusses the question in an exegetical form.” Strauss’s next letter (February 7), a brief report on his attempts to secure Klein (and himself) a position at the New School for Social Research, ends, “Now I have to go to Maimonides.” He reports the results a little over a week later (February 16): “With Maimonides I’ve gone a good bit further—I mean in understanding the Guide—but I haven’t written a line.” A joking little preface to his report betrays his giddy mood: he refers to a book that bibliographers had sought in vain, On the Three Imposters, a rumored book about the three founding imposters, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. It had been assigned to various authors but Strauss says it could not be found “simply because it was sought even though it was in everyone’s hands: it’s the Guide (or as the case may be, the works of Averroes and Farabi).” Then comes his discovery: “You can’t imagine with what infinite refinement and irony Maimonides handles ‘religion’ . . . One misunderstands Maimonides simply because one does not reckon with the possibility that he was an ‘Averroist’: consider it and all the difficulties in principle just dissolve.” Before stating his actual discovery Strauss looks to its consequences: “If in a few years I explode this bomb (in case I live so long), a great battle will be kindled.” Strauss suggests the destructiveness of the bomb by relating what an acquaintance said to him: “for Judaism Maimonides is more important than the Bible.” Therefore: “to pull Maimonides out of Judaism is to pull out its foundation.” Strauss comments coolly: “This will yield the interesting result that a simply historical determination—the determination that Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew—is of considerable present-day significance: the incompatibility in principle of philosophy and Judaism (‘clearly’ expressed in the second verse of Genesis) would be demonstrated ad oculos.” The thinker more important to Judaism than the Bible was absolutely no Jew; he was a philosopher, and philosophy and Judaism are incompatible—that’s the bomb. How will Strauss explode it? “For now,” he says, he’s a long way away “from such important matters”; what concerns him meanwhile is “collecting a lexicon of secret words”—the patient piecework that will always be foundational to his actually writing a line on such matters. But “secret words” is misleading: “An essential point in Maim.’s technique is of course that he says everything completely

. Nahum Glatzer, who became a noted scholar of Judaism.

10

chapter one

openly, if in the places where an idiot doesn’t look.” Maimonides’s exotericism is not a matter of secret depths or curtained enclosures: everything essential is hidden in plain sight. What is needed is the proper perspective for viewing the surface of the text in its planned complexity. From the beginning, then, Strauss knew that exotericism was not a matter of arcane, occult mysteries. He ends his account of his initial entry into Maimonides’s exotericism: “The reading is an unbelievable pleasure that compensates me for so much.” He signs off but he can’t let go, adding a note that confirms how his discovery burdens him: “There’s an aphorism in N.: when I hold the truth in my fist, dare I open my fist?” Alone in New York, missing his wife, burdened by fears for his future and that of his family and dearest friends, Strauss begins making the discoveries that transform his view of philosophy and assign him his lifework. He knows he holds a bomb in his fist, and he thinks of Nietzsche, who said, “I am dynamite.” Back in England five months later, Strauss refers on July 4 to “the mystical treatise known to you”; then, on July 23, preparing his permanent move to the United States, he reports being “deeply immersed in my work, that is, in the completion of that mystical treatise which you partly already know. Yesterday I finally finished it.” The mystical treatise is the essay on Maimonides that he published in 1941 and republished in 1952 as the third or central chapter of Persecution and the Art of Writing: “The Literary

5. I have not found any such aphorism in Nietzsche; the thought, however, is thoroughly Nietzschean. 6. “Without Mirjam’s calming nearness, jawohl!, I’m only half myself,” January 20, 1938, GS, 3: 545. . Two essays published after Philosophy and Law record important advances in Strauss’s appreciation of Maimonides’s exotericism: “Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maimonide et de Fârâbî” (1936, written August–October 1935; see esp. pp. 138–44, 152–56) and “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency” (1937, written April–August 1937); in this last essay to be published before the discoveries in the letters, Strauss refers to Maimonides’s “thoroughgoing rationalism” (203) and describes his distinction between “an exterior, literal meaning, addressed to the vulgar . . . and a secret meaning of a purely philosophical nature” (199; see also 200). A little fact noted by Heinrich Meier shows just how decisive the advance recorded in the letters is for Strauss’s own view of his past. In the first sentence of his 1963 essay “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” Strauss refers to “the plan of the Guide as it has become clear to me in the course of about twenty-five years of frequently interrupted but never abandoned study.” Meier reports that on the manuscript Strauss struck the number that would have dated the beginning of his study of the Guide in 1924 (the year he published “Cohens Analyse der BibelWissenschaft Spinozas”) and replaced it with twenty-five, which put the beginning in 1938: fourteen years of work on Maimonides recorded in two books and many articles are erased in order to place the beginning of his understanding of the Guide at the time of the letters (GS, 2: xxiii).



exotericism exposed

11

Character of the Guide for the Perplexed.” Strauss briefly describes this first writing after discovering Maimonides’s exotericism: “There are six little chapters from which the exacting reader will understand everything and which will give the superficial reader a sheaf of useful information.” He thus holds two audiences in view, those who will understand and those who can profit without understanding—he has already seen to it that his own writing will bear the single most important feature of the writing by Maimonides that he has just learned to understand. He continues: “The view I succeeded in coming to in N.Y. has confirmed itself even more: the Guide is the most amazing book that I at least know. What N. had in mind with his Zarathustra, namely, a parody of the Bible, succeeds in the Guide in far greater measure.” The idea of imposter still pleases him: “The paradox is that the very people who present the three imposters doctrine are themselves exactly what they imagine the founders of religion are: they themselves dupe the populace.” Strauss describes precisely what Maimonides aims at: “The guide of the perplexed, or the instruction of the perplexed, is a repetition of the Torah (= instruction) for the perplexed, i.e., for the philosophers—i.e., an imitation of the Torah with ‘little’ ‘additions’ which only the expert notices and which imply a radical critique of the Torah.” And Strauss confirms his reading of the Guide by finding that Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah has the same character, “no less a satire of genius.” The rest of this letter betrays Strauss’s mix of feelings about his discoveries in Maimonides and his own “mystical treatise,” speaking first with a modesty that hardly fits what he knows is a historic advance: “I could actually be a bit proud that I’ve solved this riddle.” But personal pride pales at the thought of what he holds in his fist: “But maybe my nerves aren’t strong enough—or I lack ‘scientia’—or both are the case. In short, at times I shudder in the face of what I may cause by my interpretation.” His shudder can’t extinguish his high-spirits: “The upshot will be that I, poor devil, have to spoon up the soup in which this diabolical sorcerer of the twelfth century landed me. But, as the heathens say, fata nolentem trahunt. Esto!” The heathen quoted by the Jew who entered Maimonides’s non-Judaism is Seneca, whose complete thought runs: “the consenting fate leads, the resisting she schleps along with her”—Strauss counts himself a consenter together with the heathen Seneca.

. PAW, 38–94. First published in Essays on Maimonides, ed. Salo W. Baron, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 37–91. In “A Giving of Accounts” over thirty years later, Strauss reports that Klein said, after reading this essay, “We have rediscovered exotericism” (JPCM, 463).

12

chapter one

In the next letter to refer to exotericism, on October 15, Strauss is back in New York and reduced to what will become a depressing ritual, asking Klein for small loans that he pays back punctually after a few weeks. Strauss reports: “I’m starting to work.” And what work it is, for the gains made with Maimonides Strauss now begins to make with Maimonides’s ultimate teacher, Plato.10 His report is laconic: “I’m starting to work: Nomoi!” Plato’s Laws has begun to open itself to him: “Above all, understanding the meaning of ‘ambiguous speech’ polynoia in the work.” He adds in parentheses what will become a frequent lament in his reports on Greek matters: he’s reading the scholarly commentators, but to a reader making discoveries in Greek exotericism, the superficiality of the scholars coupled with their conviction that they already know everything is almost more than he can bear. But he has help in reading Plato:11 “I’m now reading Herodotus, who— I swear it as a Catholic Christian—is also an esoteric writer and one in perfection. In short, it’s happening again.” What happened with Maimonides is happening with Greek authors and will happen repeatedly until Strauss has the whole tradition of Greek exotericism in view. After puckishly describing his and his wife’s life in the United States as a continuation of their En­

. Klein had arrived in the United States in April 1938, and he had a salary: in September he took a position at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD, where he would spend the rest of his life. 10. Strauss learned Greek and read Plato as a teenager at the classical Gymnasium Philippinum in Marburg. Late in life he reported that “[w]hen I was sixteen and we read the Laches in school, I formed the plan, or the wish, to spend my life reading Plato” (“A Giving of Accounts,” JPCM, 460), a plan or wish he in fact fulfilled. Strauss took seminars on Plato from Paul Natorp in Marburg, and there are reports of him tutoring friends in Plato’s Greek texts such as Gorgias (Udoff, Leo Strauss’s Thought, 27). But Plato does not enter his writings (aside from his 1921 dissertation on Jacobi, see GS, 2: 246, 248, 271, 275) until quite late. The earliest references to Plato in the “Frühe Schriften” collected in the Gesammelte Schriften occur in the December 1930 lecture “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” and the 1931 lecture “Cohen und Maimuni.” Janssens gives an informed account of how Cohen’s judgment that Maimonides “was ‘in deeper harmony with Plato than with Aristotle’ ” led Strauss to consider the Platonic roots of Maimonides, thus opening up what became the most important element in Strauss’s lifework (Between Athens and Jerusalem, 109). The Platonic themes of particular importance to Strauss in the 1930s are the cave image of the Republic, whose account of the natural impediments to philosophy becomes the basis for his understanding of the additional or historical impediment added by revelation and by modern philosophy, the second cave; Socrates’s question of the right life; and the philosopher king as the foundational teaching for the prophetology of Maimonides and his predecessors. See “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” December 1930, GS, 2: 385–89; “Cohen und Maimuni,” May 1931, ibid., 411–13, 426; “Die philosophische Begründung des Gesetzes,” Summer 1931 (later republished as the final part of PL); and “Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart,” February 1932, GS, 2: 455–56, 461–62. See also the later remarks on Plato in PL, 73–78; “Quelques remarques,” 128–29, 136–37, 152–56; and “On Abravanel,” 196–99. 11. Strauss seems not to be reading Alfarabi on Plato; he never mentions him and he presents all his discoveries as his own.



exotericism exposed

13

glish life—“except boosted by the invasion of wurst, pickles, and grapefruit juice”—he signs off his brief letter with a fine little joke: “Cordially greeting you, also in the name of his wife, your friend, Leo Strauss.” A superscript affixed to Frau leads to a footnote, three lines of Greek from the first full story in Herodotus, Candaulus’s offer to Gyges to view his wife naked to confirm that she is the most beautiful of women.12 Strauss explains the esoteric meaning of the “clever story that greatly pleased M. [Mirjam, his wife]”: “the wives are the ‘patriarchal laws’ which everyone holds for the most beautiful. Woe to Gyges, who views a ‘wife’ who is not his own. Therefore: esotericism.” Now there’s a letter fit to be sent on Nietzsche’s birthday. Five days later (October 20), Strauss reports further on Herodotus: “I’m really stunned, and prostrate myself before such artistry (= capability).” Bowled over as he is by Herodotus, his focus lies elsewhere: “My lucky star wants it that his work is really the single model for Plato known to me.” But that singleness may stem from his own ignorance: “(But then maybe all we learned about the tragedians, for example, is completely false).” What Herodotus points Strauss to in Plato is by any measure a supernova: “I can therefore show that what is nearest my heart about Plato is independent of the specifically Platonic philosophy.” Plato is separable from Platonism, and it is that separated Plato who is dear to Strauss. He makes one HerodotusPlato connection explicit: “Herodotus: a book of logoi (histories, stories) with the antidote to logoi. Nomoi: a book of nomoi with the antidote to Nomoi.” He then adds a parenthetical remark that reveals how he now reads Plato: “(Besides, the Phaedrus passage on Egyptian logoi was certainly not written without an express relation to a very particular paragraph in Herodotus.)” Esoteric Plato is fully aware of esoteric Herodotus and responds in kind. Strauss expresses his great pleasure: “With my customary naiveté and modesty I declare that the riddle of Herodotus is solved!” He can go on: “The unitary ground for (a) history of the Persian wars, (b) short stories, ‘novellas,’ (c) ethnography has been found—wait, more on that orally.” This unfortunate halt can serve as a reminder that we’re lucky Strauss couldn’t afford a telephone, as he says in his letter on December 15. He signs off in English: “I am perfectly happy in spite of the great financial troubles.” Two weeks later (November 2), there’s more: “I find myself in a state of frenzy that’s consuming me: after Herodotus now Thucydides too!” Strauss’s frenzy involves Plato: Pericles’s funeral speech is “a pure parody— exactly like the Protagoras speech in Protagoras.” Thucydides’s exotericism includes conveying his meaning through silences: “the word sôphrosunê 12. Herodotus, Histories, 1.8.1–2.

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does not appear in the funeral speech: that is Thucyd.’s critique of Periclean Athens and of Pericles himself.” Thucydides’s exotericism is systematically present in his mix of speeches and deeds: “His history is no ‘history’ but an attempt to show by deeds those who are unteachable by speeches just where ignorance of sôphrosunê leads.” Strauss is certain about where the “historian” Thucydides stands: “but it’s settled for Thuc. that the speeches are more important than the deeds.” Strauss inserted Plato parenthetically into his sentence—“(a completely Platonic theme – cf. Apology and Crito)”—and he expands the thought: “Spoken Platonically, the deeds are only paidia, and therefore they are . . . essentially comedies.” He appended a footnote to his comment on Plato: “Pay attention to the titles: no heroes! Only 4 titles indicate the theme: Politeia, Nomoi, Politikos, Sophistes— that already says everything!”13 Strauss shows how he reads Plato esoterically: “Moreover, the Apology ends with the word theos, i.e., with the word with which the Laws begins. I.e. the problem intentionally conjured away in the Apology—the gods in which the city believes—becomes the theme of the Laws. The Laws are Plato’s greatest work of art.” He adds a sentence after signing off, “It’s beginning to dawn on me how misunderstood the ancients are.” Three weeks later (November 27), Strauss reports that he has started a new essay, “On the study of classical political philosophy.” He intends it to show that “Herodotus, Thucyd., and Xenophon are no historians—of course not—but authors of exoteric, protreptic writings.” Thus does Xenophon enter Strauss’s letters on the misunderstood ancients, and he will soon occupy a favored place, though always in a way that points to Plato’s still greater importance. “Their history books,” he says of all three Greek historians, “are exactly those readings for youths that Plato recommends in the third book of the Republic: prose writings in which what is between the speeches (i.e., the presentation of deeds) is outweighed by the speeches (i.e., the logoi which are inserted into the historical-works).” He offers a parenthetical remark: “(The Platon. dialogues in which the author fully hides himself belong after Plato to a higher plane.)” The whole history of exotericism is starting to come into view with Plato the crowning figure; Plato’s art of philosophic exotericism, his dialogues, surpass all previous Greek efforts at esoteric communica-

13. Twenty-four years later Strauss repeats this in his introductory considerations to “On Plato’s Republic” in CM: “There are only four dialogues whose titles designate the subject matter: the Republic, the Laws, the Sophist, and the Statesman. There is no Platonic Nature or Truth,” and he draws the explicit conclusion: “The subject matter of the dialogues as it is revealed by the titles is preponderantly political” (55–56).



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tion. Strauss then reports just what Xenophon aimed at in The Education of Cyrus. Calling it “a wholly great book of sublime irony,” he says that “what Socrates is is shown through his caricature of Cyrus. Only through that medium does Xenophon show the true, hidden Socrates, whereas he shows the manifest Socrates in his Memorabilia.” Distinguishing this way among Xenophon’s writings leads Strauss to one of his greatest insights into the Socratic circle: “His Socrates image is therefore not fundamentally different from that of Plato.” This insight will lead Strauss to his history-making recovery of the true Socrates passed on through both Xenophon and Plato, surely the greatest of all recoveries given Socrates’s singularity as “the vortex and turning point of so-called world history.”14 Five days later (December 2), Strauss can say that “the history of Greek political philosophy still remains most highly exciting.” Beginning from Aristotle, he can see that “the ‘inferiority’ of ethics and politics . . . was of course shared by Plato, who . . . wrote only ironically about politics.” Then comes the first notice of what will become the most explosive bomb of all: “Socrates too was no ‘ethicist’: he simply replaced the myths (Herodotus’s) and the history (Herodotus’s and Thucydides’s) with dialogues about the human things.” Strauss does not elaborate his stunning insight into Socrates except to say, “One can prove this from—Xenophon’s Memorabilia”—that is, from the very book that seems most to prove that Socrates was an “ethicist” and nothing but. Strauss wants to know more: “I’m curious about what is hidden in Sophocles who, according to tradition, was a friend of Herodotus—I’m afraid that here too it’s philosophy and not the city and the ancestors.” “I already wrote you that the correct translation of daimonion is: nous [mind].” The Socrates who is not an “ethicist” piously called what guided him a personal “daimonion” while guiding himself by mind alone. Strauss expands on this Socrates: “science is the true Mantik [art of divination], the true knowledge of the teleutê [end] because [it is] of the archê [principle or cause or beginning].” Ten days later (December 12), Strauss reports that he’s working on the problem of the dialogue “as the ideal form for the disguised presentation of the truth.”15 Strauss offers capsule interpretations of four of Plato’s dialogues to support his claim, the Symposium, the Apology, Phaedo, and the Laws. His comments on the Laws show how he now views the Platonic

14. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, aph. 15. 15. Strauss opened this letter with a grateful acknowledgment of how “very instructive” Klein’s book is on reading the dialogues, and he asked if he had understood Klein correctly on the basic question of the relation of deeds to speeches in the dialogues.

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corpus as a whole. “The Laws rests on the fiction that Socrates escaped from the prison! The opening for the Laws (the opening through which Socrates slipped off to Crete) is clearly shown in the Crito!” A short sentence draws the necessary conclusion, and it is that sentence that most demands an exclamation mark: “There is therefore no ‘earlier and later’ in Plato’s authorship.” Strauss thus suspends the greatest preoccupation of modern Plato scholars, arranging the dialogue chronologically into early, middle, late in accord with some scheme of Plato’s “development.” Strauss now sees that in the so-called early Crito, the laws present Socrates with the options for his escape, but the disjunction that persuaded Crito that Socrates had to stay was not exhaustive; it left unspoken a possible escape to a law-abiding place far away, an escape to Crete, say, as portrayed in the so-called late Laws. An “early” dialogue sets the scene for a “late” dialogue—Strauss’s refusal of scholarly orthodoxy, the now pervasive prejudice, allows him to view the Platonic corpus as a unified whole in which one dialogue can silently illuminate another. A second indispensable item about Socrates appears as an aside in this letter: “Socrates teaches peri phuseôs [on or about nature],” Strauss says parenthetically, and he adds a footnote: “Aristophanes was completely right—he just didn’t know what the difference was between Anaxagoras and Socrates.” Here is a Socrates completely lost to modern scholarship, which understands the defensive rhetoric of the dialogues too literally: the dialogues, Strauss sees, intimate that Socrates continued, if with the greatest discretion, to study the things aloft and the things under the earth, the totality of the beings. This Socrates, the philosopher of nature, of cosmology, is the Socrates discreetly present in Strauss’s mature commentaries on Plato and Xenophon. More than two months pass before Strauss again mentions his work in his letters, but the letter in which he does (February 16, 1939) is the most explosive of them all. He announces first an intention to write the essay on Xenophon that appeared nine months later as “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon”:16 “I plan to prove in it that his apparent praise of Sparta is in truth a satire on Sparta and on Athenian Laconism.” “Xenophon is my special Liebling,” he says, “because he had the courage to clothe himself as an idiot and go through the millennia that way—he’s the greatest con man I know.” The clothing, the con that so endears Xenophon to Strauss, leads him to conclude that what Xenophon does, his teacher did: 16. Strauss chose never to republish this outspoken article after its 1939 appearance in Social Research.



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“I believe that he does in his writings exactly what Socrates did in his life.” Socrates was a great con man who taught his best students to be con men. About what? Strauss here elaborates the most radical, one could even say shocking, aspect of his recovery of exotericism, and he revels in it: “In any case with [Xenophon] too morality is purely exoteric, and just about every second word has a double meaning.” Socrates and his circle stand beyond good and evil. Strauss gives two examples of words with double meanings: kalokagathia, the word for “gentlemanship” that joins “beautiful” (or “noble”) to “good” in order to name the model of aspiration for young Greek males; and sôphrosunê, the word that gathers the total of Greek virtue into thought-guided sound-mindedness or wise self-control. Together, these two words name the pride of the Greek gentleman, that pillar of civic rectitude and public-spirited generosity who made the polis both possible and great—the gentleman for whom Xenophon is customarily taken to be the tedious spokesman, the Colonel Blimp, the idiot for whom he wanted to be mistaken. Strauss supplies the esoteric meaning of the two words: “Kalokagathia was, in the Socratic circle, a swear word, something like ‘philistine’ or ‘bourgeois’ in the nineteenth century. And sôphrosunê is essentially selfcontrol in the expression of opinions.” Socrates’s sôphrosunê is his exotericism, his self-control in hiding what he meant in words of praise for what he judged socially necessary. Morality was merely a means for an immoralist who understood society’s need to believe in morality. Strauss adds a final clause: “—in short, there’s a whole system of secret words here exactly as in Maimonides, therefore a found feast [Fressen] for me.” Strauss’s recovery one year earlier of the exotericism of Maimonides put him in a position to recover—feast on—the exotericism of Maimonides’s great Greek teachers: what Maimonides did, Socrates had done. The “secret” words are no hocus pocus; they’re the most honored words of everyday use supplied by artful speakers like Socrates or Xenophon or Maimonides with a meaning very different from their everyday sense, turning them ironic. There’s more than an artful practice here. If Maimonides carried into his setting of the one true revealed religion the ironic or exoteric practices that Socrates generated in the different context of Athens, then the differences between Athens and Jerusalem with respect to religion are not essential differences. Socrates/Xenophon/Plato stood beyond morality and gained insight not only into morality but into religion’s support of morality. To move from the exotericism of Maimonides back to the exotericism of the Socratic circle is to see that they gained insight into the nature of the revealed religions or the monotheisms without direct experience of them. The Maimonides bomb thus leads to another, still more deadly bomb about

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Socratic philosophy as a whole, the moral teaching that came to be foundational for a whole civilization. Xenophon may be Strauss’s Liebling, but Plato is the massive presence offering him the greatest challenge and greatest reward. In this same letter he reports to Klein that the first book of the Laws contains a hidden reference to the closing scene of Phaedo, in which Phaedo narrates that Socrates “covered himself” as the effect of the poison moved up his body. Treating Plato’s corpus as a unified whole again offers insight, because to explain this event in Phaedo Strauss refers to Laws 1.648d5–e5 together with 647e. The whole passage that Strauss refers to is relevant, but the decisive words are “fear of the defeat inflicted on all men by the wine cup”17 —“the fear drink,” Strauss says, “is of course death!” Therefore, Strauss can conclude that “even Socrates fails in the face of death, all humans suffer defeat in the face of death.” Turning to the Laws to understand Socrates’s desire in Phaedo to cover his face as death approaches allows Strauss to see Plato’s artfulness in making Phaedo a narrated dialogue and to voice a truly capital gain in studying Plato’s dialogues: “it characterizes Phaedo as narrator that he didn’t notice this and for that reason also accepted the proofs of immortality.” Plato dared to assign the memory of Socrates’s last day to a devotee incapable of fully understanding what he devoutly memorized and loved to recite—Phaedo is Plato’s record of Socrates’s last day transmitted through a literalist disciple. And that narrator is the fit narrator because of what he did not notice. Almost every hearer and reader of his narration will not notice; he transmits Socrates’s speeches and deeds to a posterity that will resemble him in the essential respect. But there will be rare auditors and readers capable of measuring the validity of the proofs of immortality and capable of doing what Strauss is doing, reassembling what Plato so artfully scattered between Phaedo and the Laws. Strauss can conclude with every confidence that Socrates’s proofs of immortality were exoteric: sufficient to persuade Phaedo and almost all readers but logically deficient. Socrates’s fear of death required that he cover his face in the presence of those he had encouraged, made courageous, by his arguments for immortality. Strauss ends his report on the Laws: “The Laws are now, I believe, clear to me (the theology of the 10th book is part of penal law!).” That exclamation mark is well deserved: theology is part of politics, the part that concerns itself with the laws administering punishment; punitive gods guarantee obedience to mere laws. Belief in immortality with different fates for good and wicked,

17. I translate Strauss’s translation of the passage.



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secured by the mortal Socrates on his dying day, is an especially effective part of penal law. If the Laws is now clear to him, “the Republic is beginning to become clear to me.” This growing clarity yields results: “My suspicion from last year that its actual theme is the relation between the bios polit. and the bios philos. and that it is dedicated to a radical critique and rejection of the political life has been fully confirmed.” That allows Strauss to add a third indispensable word with a double meaning for Socrates’s circle, dikaiosunê, justice; again he gives its esoteric meaning: And [my suspicion] has gained precision in this, that it is dedicated to a critique of dikaiosunê: the Republic is an ironic justification precisely of the adikia [unjust], for philosophy is adikia—that comes out beautifully in the Thrasymachus discussion—dikaiosunê loses the trial, it wins it only through the myth at the end, that is, through a kalon pseudos [beautiful lie], that is, through a deed that is strictly speaking adikon.

The whole of the Republic from book 1 through the final myth lies open to Strauss: it is an exoteric defense of justice with the aim of sheltering philosophy, philosophy by its very nature being unjust, the judge and critic of justice that, with Socrates, learns to speak well of practical life and the justice it requires.18 Strauss isn’t finished: in beginning to come clear to him, the Republic offers another primary insight with a fourth primary word, thumos, the spirit or heart that is the key word for the Republic’s new teaching on the soul: “And thumos too is purely ironic! The distinction between epithumia [desire] and thumos is permissible only exoterically, and with that ‘Glaucon’s’ kallipolis breaks apart.” It’s Glaucon’s beautiful city, not Socrates’s; Socrates built it in speech for Glaucon and his thumotic like, built it to control their thumos through a new belief about the nature of their thumotic, Homer-formed souls. Here are whole slabs of Strauss’s mature interpretation of the Republic published in less explicit language in The City and Man and the Plato chapter of the History of Political Philosophy. After these stunning sentences, Strauss collects himself: “But now back to so-called life.”

18. A forerunner of this discovery can be read in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (147) (completed in German in 1935), where Strauss outlines Plato’s account of virtue as presenting a hierarchy in which “wisdom stands supreme, but justice stands supreme from an exoteric point of view.” The whole of chapter 8, “The New Political Science,” casts light on Strauss’s view of Plato before the discoveries in 1938–39.

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Two weeks later (February 28), under the stress of his wife’s sickness, money woes, the fate of his father in 1939 Germany, and the need to finish his Xenophon essay in two weeks, Strauss can report that “there’s no question anymore that Xenophon’s Socrates is identical to the Platonic—only Xenophon shows Socrates still more disguised, still more as he visibly was than Plato. And besides, he’s far more aristocratic (= more obscene) than Plato.” His discoveries allow him to add, “The philologists are indescribable idiots!” Six months later Strauss and his wife were in Wiccopee near Fishkill, New York, where they were spending their vacation. On July 25, Strauss reported to Klein that his temporary employment at the New School had ended and that his itinerary for the coming academic year, 1939/40, would take him to five colleges, six weeks each at Hamilton, Middlebury, and Union, three weeks at Wesleyan University, and the rest of the year at Amherst. Then he reports on his work. He has withdrawn his Xenophon essay to rewrite it, and he is Socratically defiant about it: “As far as Xenophon is concerned, I have not, by Hera, exaggerated: he’s a very great man, not inferior to Thucydides and even Herodotus. The so-called deficiencies of his histories are in the end the result of his sovereign contempt for the laughable erga [deeds] of the kaloikagathoi.” And he adds about Xenophon’s exoteric writing: “Furthermore, he says all of that when one takes the trouble to open one’s eyes, or as he calls it, when one is not satisfied with hearing but is also willing to see.” Strauss adds to a judgment he has already expressed, “The identity of the Xenophonian and Platonic Socrates is beyond doubt, it’s the same Socrates-Odysseus in both, the teaching too.” He elaborates his claim by stating that “the problem of the Memorabilia is identical to that of the Republic: the problematic relation between justice and truth, or between the practical and theoretical life.” Moreover, The technique of Plato and Xenophon is largely identical: neither writes in his own name; the author of the Memor. likewise of the Anabasis is not Xenophon but an anonymous ego; in the Memor. Xenophon is the single associate whom Socrates labels “Wretch.” As for ne kuna [by the dog], Xenophon treats it this way: he lets Socrates tell a fable in which a dog swears by Zeus! This example shows most clearly what a dog Xenophon is. In short, he’s completely wonderful and from now on my undisputed Liebling.

“We’ve got three dogs here,” Strauss says in his next sentence to open his next paragraph.



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Two week later (August 7), Strauss reports that he has begun to make notes on the Memorabilia, and he states “the greatest problem” he’s finding with it: “in what sense the principle that Socrates concerned himself only with the ethical things—in what sense this thoroughly false principle is nevertheless also correct.” Strauss’s reading of exoteric texts thus requires that the false be in some sense true, true from a perspective different from that of the typical reader. Most readers will be pleased to read that Socrates concerned himself only with the ethical; but some few will want to learn in what way this esoterically false statement can be true. Strauss uses Greek words to say that the general answer is clear: “anthropos— logos—on” (human—speech—being). And adds: “Of special significance is the problem of philia, insofar as the understanding of what philia is des­ troys the theology of mythos: the higher can not be ‘friend’ to the lower; ergo: denial of providence. This is, I believe, the central thought of the Memor.” The truth in the false claim that Socrates concerned himself only with the ethical resides in the ontological/theological implications one can draw from that claim. Strauss can therefore end saying, “I believe I’ve essentially understood Xenophon’s Socratic writings, also Anabasis, Hellenica, Cyropädie, and some of the shorter writings.” Strauss is spending his vacation moving ever more deeply into Xenophon. On August 18, he reports that despite the heat that keeps him from his “Xenophonstatistik,” his counting words like dialegesthai and philoi, “I have in the meantime understood the Memor. completely, if to completely understand with such books is identical with understanding the plan. The agreements with Plato are simply astounding, at times so astounding that one asks oneself astounded: are Xenophon and Plato at all different people?” He draws a conclusion about Socrates: “The relatedness is doubtless connected with the fact that a considerable part of the teaching as also of the tricks goes back to Socrates himself.” This teacher-trickster Socrates is not the moralist of the “Socratic dialogues or the Memorabilia” but a Socrates immeasurably more radical, strategic, and great than all but the fewest have imagined. Strauss does not exclude the possibility of mutual influence between Xenophon and Plato within the Socratic circle, and “the most fabulous” aspect of that “is that Xenophon (in Symposium) comments on Plato! If you can call something like that ‘comment.’ ” Strauss finds Plato and Xenophon caricatured in Xenophon’s Symposium as the Syracusan and Philippos. When Philippos defends Socrates against the accusations of the Syracusan, Socrates says to Philippos (Xenophon) about the Syracusan (Plato): “You would abuse him if you would claim to be better than him in any respect.” Strauss:

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“If this is not the most sublime praise ever written, I don’t know what would be.”19 Strauss opens his next letter (from Hamilton College, October 10) with a “poetic” phrase anticipating what’s coming in the letter, for it reports that he has traced Greek exotericism back to the founding poets of Greece, the last great advance in the recovery of exotericism that these letters record.20 Strauss enters Hesiod’s Theogeny through Plato, through the cosmology of Timaeus.21 The poem is “of course no theogeny as the title already proves (for what good author shows the theme in his title instead of letting his reader find it).” Strauss reports the theme in three laconic judgments: instead, it is an answer to the question of what the first, the unborn things are; further, an illumination of the Olympian through this question; and finally, an enlightenment of what this question and answer, that is, what wisdom, means. The first things are not the gods but such things as earth, sky, stars, ocean which at one place are expressly distinguished from the gods simply.

Strauss has again found “the key” to a fundamental Greek book by reading its meaning in its exoteric details: “The key to the book are—the Muses.” The “twofold genealogy” of the Muses shows the book’s exoteric and esoteric character: “(1) exoterically [the Muses] stem from Zeus and Mnemosune; (2) esoterically they are the progeny of Ocean. How this hangs together you will guess immediately on the basis of the opening of the Odyssey, as from the remarks in the Theaetetus and the Metaph. about the origin of Thales’s principle.” With this list Strauss makes evident how his discoveries in exotericism led him to an overarching insight into the unity of Greek thought: the esoteric meaning of Hesiod’s Muses springing from the ocean can be read in Homer and in the comments of Plato and Aris­ totle on Thales’s principle that water is the element from which everything springs—each of the great Greeks knew what the others were saying and each responded in kind. Strauss then offers a summary judgment: “That the

19. This reading seems not to have survived in Strauss’s late commentary on the Symposium; see XS, 167–69. 20. On this important theme, see Janssens, “The Philosopher’s Ancient Clothes: Leo Strauss on Philosophy and Poetry,” in Armada and Gornisiewicz, Modernity and What Has Been Lost, 53–71. 21. He had invited and received a long letter from Klein in which Klein gave a reading of Timaeus (GS, 3: 577–79, August 14, 1939). This is the only letter from Klein preserved in the period here covered.



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whole is a mix of truth and lie is clearly said in the revelation to Hesiod.” Strauss cites only the line numbers of the Muses’ identification of themselves to Hesiod (ll. 26–28): first they berate him; then they say they know how to tell many lies like the truth and know how, when they wish, to tell the truth.22 Strauss turns to Hesiod’s other main poem: What Hesiod himself really thought of the first things, I don’t know: Plato says in the Cratylus when he comes to speak about this question: “I think.” But what I know with certainty is what Works and Days has to do with. You once raised the question of what the title means. The answer: merely replace each element with its provable opposite from the poem itself: words and nights, that is, disguised speech. The theme is: an agon between nightingale and falcon, that is, singer and king, with an exoteric morality for hoi polloi (the last point, the exoteric character of the praise of work lies almost on the surface). And Hesiod is expressly the singer.

As always, Plato is present: “what Plato in the Theaetetus says about the poets of the past age, namely, that they disguised philosophy in poetry, can, as far as Hesiod is concerned (who also appears in the Republic somewhere in the middle of a story),23 be actually proven.” Strauss looks beyond Hesiod: “I’m convinced it’s not different in Homer. Just read the shield of Achilles! And the self-identification with Odysseus in the Odyssey and the remarkable fact that Thersites speaks the truth.” Finally, Strauss turns to Parmenides, remarking on just how he fits into the esoteric whole Strauss is discovering Greek wisdom to be: “the relationship to Hesiod backward and to Plato forward jumps to the eye.” Noting the role of the female in Parmenides and the fragment that says that “women are ‘warmer’ (that is, more light-like) than men,” Strauss calls it “a milestone in the criticism of

22. For Strauss’s most extended comments on Hesiod’s Works and Days, see LAM, 36 (1959); for his reading of Hesiod generally, see the context of the remarks on Works and Days, LAM, 34–37. See also the important article on Hesiod by Seth Benardete, “The First Crisis of Philosophy,” Argument of the Action, 3–14. 23. Does Strauss mean what Socrates calls “the biggest lie about the biggest things” (Republic 377e)? Socrates says about Hesiod’s tale of origins in which gods overthrow gods: “best would be to keep quiet” about them, but if it were necessary to speak of them, then “as few as possible ought to hear them as unspeakable secrets” (378a). Or perhaps “Hesiod’s races” in Socrates’s account of the decline of the city in speech (546e)?

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the andreia [manly spirit].”24 Plato again: “The sentence is as ironic as what is said in the Rep[ublic] about the equality of women—the background is in both cases the same. And yet something one can see only when one believes not in ‘the Greeks’ but in philosophy.” Maleness and femaleness combined with a critique of manliness: here is a theme of Strauss’s maturity that received its most impressive statement at the center of his late commentary Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, as will be shown in chapters 3 and 4 below on Gynaikologia and Andrologia. Strauss ends his report with a parenthetical remark: “(Don’t laugh at your little friend who has in the meantime stepped into Schwabenalter.)”— into age forty (three weeks earlier on September 20), when according to an old Schwabian ritual one entered the age of wisdom. Strauss is joking but he’s not wrong: at age forty he has stepped into the most breathtaking wisdom, the wisdom gained by Homer and Hesiod and passed on in an esoteric way to the future generations of Greek wise men they schooled. Recovered and repeated in a different way by Herodotus and Thucydides, it was recovered and repeated in a still different way by Socrates and the two greatest writers of the Socratic circle. Secured in the writings of Xenophon and Plato, Greek wisdom was passed on to non-Greek peoples.25 Not evident in this letter but present in the ones that follow is Strauss’s gathering despondency at his situation. Two weeks after his letter on Hesiod, he reports, again from Hamilton College (October 25), that his “work is advancing very very slowly.” Still, “I have sufficient indications from Xenophon of the Pythagorean background of the Socratic philosophy. He is truly great.” He’s also been working on Plato: “Moreover, I’ve now understood the Symposium in principle: it’s the ‘authentic’ enlightenment about the profaning of the mysteries by Alcibiades; not Alcibiades but Socrates blabbed the secret of the mysteries. It’s a case of the famous fact that the actual ‘accuser’ of Socrates is Plato.26 Decisive is the replacement of Ge in the

24. Two and half months earlier (July 25, 1939) Strauss appended a seemingly unattached remark after his signature: “allusion to the problematic character of the andreia-ideal.” 25. This letter of October 10 ends with a reference to Julius Guttmann, whose Maimonides interpretation Strauss attacked in Philosophy and Law in 1935. Strauss’s brother-in-law, the gifted Arabist Paul Kraus, had spoken to Guttmann in Jerusalem. Strauss says, “Guttmann told him that he was writing an article against me, to which K. answered that it was too late since I had in the meanwhile a new Maimonides interpretation.” Had Strauss repeated to Kraus his discoveries in Maimonides’s exotericism that he had reported to Klein a year and a half earlier, or perhaps sent him a copy of his completed but not yet published essay on Maimonides? 26. Strauss’s letter of August 18 had also referred to Plato as “the accuser of Socrates,” there in the character of the Syracusan in Xenophon’s Symposium.



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Pluto myth by Penia: that’s the blasphemy.”27 Another letter (Novem­ ber 7) ends with an uncharacteristic, deeply despondent statement: “I’m doing poorly—nothing but cares (my father, Mirjam’s health, no job, no money), no possibility to advance my work—write soon.” Three weeks later his mood has lightened and he writes a long letter from Union College of further discoveries (November 28). His article “The Spirit of Sparta and the Taste of Xenophon” has appeared: “you can easily imagine the suspense with which I await your stance toward the daring piece”—daring, yet as Strauss adds, “I present only a part of the argument.” He also expresses concern about the reaction of the broader learned audience, knowing that his “distance from the ruling opinion grows greater from week to week.” Week to week is literally true. Three weeks after reporting on Hesiod, he reports on Plato’s Letters: I’m convinced that all the Platonic letters (also the first) are genuine: they’re the Platonic counterpart to Xenophon’s Anabasis: they’re meant to show that the author was not corrupted by Socrates: while the author constantly disguises himself in the dialogues, it’s the goal of the Letters as of the Anabasis to show that the one disguised is absolutely harmless, absolutely normal.

Plato’s letters, Strauss holds, were intended as a coherent whole, thirteen in number, with the seventh or central letter dealing with the central matter. “How I can make this believable to anyone but you—that I certainly don’t know.” Strauss ends: “Johnson formally struck me from the list of faculty members of the New School. So I again stand right there where I stood in January of 1938. Do you know of any opportunities?”28 With that uncanny mention of January 1938—the date of his arrival in New York seeking a position but also the date of the first letter reporting his discoveries in exotericism—this letter, the last letter reporting on those discoveries, comes to an end; his last letter refers back to the date of his first letter and reports his conviction that Plato’s letters are a completed whole. This unnerving coincidence can help highlight the chief point conveyed in these letters on exotericism: the great

27. Penia—Poverty—is the mother of Eros in Diotima’s myth of the birth of Eros; in Strauss’s posthumously published commentary on the Symposium, Penia is the source of all the attributes of Eros (OPS, 192–97), implying that Eros has no parents or that Eros “is the nature of nature” (196). 28. Alvin Johnson was president of the New School.

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authors control coincidence in their writings in order to convey what they know to be true clothed in what they know to be necessary. Such exotericism was a dominant feature of the wisdom of the Greeks that allowed it to be passed on far beyond its Greek homeland, and Strauss had, in the past two years, made himself the latest grateful recipient of the Greek originals. His remark that he stands now where he stood in January 1938 puts an accidental closing exclamation mark on his letters reporting his recovery of exotericism. Strauss stands where he stood almost two years before in all respects but the essential respect: in the intervening months he recovered the esoteric riches of Western philosophy and poetry in its Greek origins.29

HOW STRAUSS CHOSE TO OPEN HIS FIST Strauss’s letters to Klein are a permanent treasure. Their explicit statements of the explosive secrets of exotericism—their revelry in those secrets—can be found nowhere else in his published or unpublished writings. Yet as rich as these letters are in tracing Strauss’s recovery of exotericism, their limitations must be recognized. The gains reported in the letters have a long prehistory that can at least partially be traced in Strauss’s published and unpublished writings. But more important than that longer trajectory of discovery is the fact that the letters themselves do not even mention the greatest theoretical gain implied in the recovery of exotericism. In the face of the most powerful prejudice of the present age, the belief that philosophy itself is bound to its time and place in what it thinks—that philosophy in its classical sense is impossible—Strauss’s recovery of the philosophers’ exotericism helps prove philosophy possible by showing it to be actual. Insight into the philosophers’ exotericism begins to make evident that the great philosophers, aspiring to transcend their time and place in thought, gained perspectives that can be seen to be shared by other such thinkers and that can plausibly claim to be verifiably true—always within the limits of knowledge that philosophers also came to know. Having made these gains, philosophers then descended, as it were, reporting their gains exoterically by accommodating them to the

29. In the correspondence of Strauss so far published, there are no letters from him to other correspondents during the period of these letters to Klein; there is therefore no way of knowing whether he reported his discoveries to anyone but his closest friend, himself a specialist in Greek writers, who, Strauss later said, “convinced me of two things. First, the one thing needed philosophically is in the first place a return to, a recovery of, classical philosophy; second, the way in which Plato is read, especially by professors of philosophy and by men who do philosophy, is wholly inadequate because it does not take into account the dramatic character of the dialogues” (“A Giving of Accounts,” JPCM, 462).



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prevailing prejudices of their time while communicating between the lines to their potential like. For the past two centuries, however, those necessary accommodations have been read all too literally, as if they expressed the philosophers’ settled views. As a result, the history of philosophy has been taken as a millennia-long demonstration of historicism, of the greatest thinkers’ inability to transcend their time in thought. What Strauss’s recovery of exotericism represents is nothing less than the recovery of the possibility of philosophy, a true understanding of the world and humanity.30 Strauss continued writing and publishing in the midst of his discoveries and immediately thereafter, and if all of the resulting essays speak of exotericism, they do so very differently from the way the letters do. The first, “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” the “mystical treatise,” was completed in July 1938 but did not appear until 1941. It contains a section called “A Moral Dilemma” in which Strauss discusses the “pangs of conscience” felt by one who attempts to explain the secret teaching of a writer who entreated “the reader in the most emphatic manner not to explain any part of it to others” (PAW 55, 54). Strauss quieted the pangs by imitating the Guide, which presents itself as an esoteric interpretation of a secret teaching: his interpretation takes “the form of an esoteric interpretation of an esoteric interpretation of an esoteric teaching” (PAW 56). In his next section, “Secrets and Contradictions,” Strauss describes some of the practices Maimonides used to convey the truth to his desired audience, but nothing there directly betrays Strauss’s conclusion that Maimonides “in his beliefs is absolutely no Jew.” His next essay is the one on his Liebling that he wrote during his discoveries in 1939 and was published in November 1939, just before his letters on exotericism end.31 “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon” is more outspoken than anything he wrote later on Xenophon, stating for instance that “philosophy is the denial of the gods of the city” (532) and that it “is essentially incompatible with acceptance of the gods of the city” (534). Still, he refrained from saying explicitly that this holds for Maimonides’s God.

30. This philosophic gain is the theme of Meier, “The History of Philosophy and the Intention of the Philosopher” (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 55–73); see also Melzer, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism,” and Melzer, “On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing.” 31. Strauss gave a version of it as a lecture at St. John’s College with its published title in early May 1939 (letter to Klein, April 13, 1939, GS, 3: 571; see also the letter of May 9). Meier says this writing was “the first publication in which Strauss set before our eyes a concrete example of the art of careful writing . . . It was at the same time the first essay Strauss wrote on an ancient philosopher” (Denkbewegung, 15 n. 4).

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Then, in December 1939, his correspondence on exotericism just over and recently turned forty, Strauss began an essay he titled “Exoteric Teaching.” Beginning with Lessing, whom Strauss never mentioned in his letters to Klein, it reports Lessing’s discovery of exotericism “when he was about forty” (ET, 57 n. 29). “I return to Lessing,” Strauss says to open its last paragraph, and his sentence is a declarative: I, Leo Strauss, return to Lessing, the Lessing who recovered exotericism in stages and embraced the practice himself. The stages of Lessing’s recovery are set out within the frame of Strauss’s paragraph, whose opening question receives the closing answer: “It was precisely his intransigent classicism . . . which had led him, first, to notice the exotericism of some ancient philosophers, and later on to understand the exotericism of all the ancient philosophers” (59). The move from noticing to understanding included a pivot point: “If I am not mistaken, he rediscovered the bearing of that distinction [between exoteric and esoteric] by his own exertion after having undergone his conversion, i.e., after having had the experience of what philosophy is and what sacrifices it requires” (57). The experience of philosophy led to the distinction between “the philosophic men and the unphilosophic men, and therewith to the distinction between the two ways of presenting the truth.” Insisting on the continuity of Lessing’s “intransigent rationalism” and noting his remark that “I have thrown away” “certain prejudices” “that I shall have to get back again,” Strauss arrives at the point where “the political problem”—“even the absolutely best civil constitution is necessarily imperfect”—“gave Lessing’s thought a decisive turn away from the philosophy of enlightenment” and “toward an older type of philosophy” (58). Strauss emphasizes that Lessing’s turn away is not a turn “toward romanticism of any sort—toward what is called a deeper, historical view of government and religion.” Yet Lessing “apparently came” near “to certain romantic views on his way from the philosophy of enlightenment to that older type of philosophy.” A “political remark” that Jacobi said Lessing made to him tells how near he came to certain romantic views: “According to Jacobi, Lessing once said that the arguments against Papal despotism are either no arguments at all, or else they are two or three times as valid against the despotism of princes” (58). Strauss asks, “Could Lessing have held the view that ecclesiastical despotism is two or three times better than secular despotism?” 32 Strauss does not answer di-

32. The empirical aspects of the question of the relative severity of ecclesiastical and secular dogmatisms can be settled by the historical record; Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, sets out a massive summary of that record that demonstrates the greater cruelty of ecclesiastical regimes.



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rectly but continues with Jacobi: “Jacobi elsewhere says in his own name but certainly in the spirit of Lessing, that that despotism which is based ‘exclusively’ on superstition, is less bad than secular despotism” (58–59). Strauss notes how each kind stands to exotericism: “secular despotism could easily be allied with the philosophy of enlightenment, and therewith with the rejection of exotericism strictly speaking,” as the teaching of Hobbes showed. “But ‘despotism based exclusively on superstition,’ i.e. not at all on force, cannot be maintained if the nonsuperstitious minority does not voluntarily refrain from openly exposing and refuting the ‘superstitious’ beliefs.” Such refraining was inimical to Enlightenment practice, and as for papal despotism, it can hardly be said to be based “not at all on force.” And Lessing? Having turned away from the philosophy of enlightenment, he recognized one generation before Robespierre’s secular despotism “the relative truth of what the romantics asserted against . . . a political solution to the problem of civilization.” But he rejected “that relative truth”—rejected returning to ecclesiastical despotism—“in favor of the way leading to absolute truth, or of philosophy.” “The experience which he had in that moment” enabled Lessing “to understand the meaning of Leibniz’s ‘prudence,’ ” for Leibniz was the “link in the chain of the tradition of exotericism which is nearest to Lessing.” There were other links, “the prudent Descartes,” even the less prudent Spinoza. “But Lessing did not have to rely on any modern or medieval” links because he was familiar with the “sources” of the exoteric tradition; Strauss can therefore end his paragraph on Lessing’s “intransigent classicism” which led him “to understand the exotericism of all ancient philosophers” (59). Lessing was the nearest link for Strauss, himself a diligent and thinking man as he characterized Lessing, familiar with the sources of medieval and modern exotericism. Strauss too first noticed and finally understood the exotericism of all the ancient philosophers, and he intended his essay to go on to show that. Its posthumously published version ends with the final sentence of the last paragraph, but Strauss did not end there. Heinrich Meier reports that he ended with a “II,” a heading for a second part that was never written but for which an outline exists: 7. Aristotle’s “exoteric” writings. 8. Cicero. 9. Xenophon. Cyneg. 10. Plato’s Letters. 11. Plato’s Dialogues. Phaedrus, Rep., Timaeus. 12. Plato on

The theoretical grounds for that cruelty lie in the eschatological purpose of ecclesiastical despotism plus its appeal to absolute authority and the eternal destiny of the soul that raised the stakes infinitely for all the participants.

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the poets and Hesiod on the Muses. 13. Herakleitus. 14. The big exceptions: Epicurus and Sophists. Cic. Rep. III.33

Just after ending his letters to Klein on exotericism, then, Strauss projected that his first account of exoteric teaching would begin with a section reporting the experience of Lessing at forty that paralleled his own experience at forty and would then go on to do what Lessing never did, what no previous exponent of classical exotericism ever did, report on what his own “diligent and thinking” study of the classics had shown about “the exotericism of all the ancient philosophers.” Strauss chose not to publish or even to complete his essay on exoteric teaching. It stands as an indication of an early way he considered for opening his fist, with its second, unwritten part doing in miniature what the rest of his career did in large, write a history of exotericism. But he decided against an essay on Lessing and a capsule history of exoteric teaching. Instead, he wrote two pivotal essays, one an introduction to the topic, the other an exegesis and declaration. The first, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” appeared in the November 1941 issue of Social Research, the intellectual journal of the New School for Social Research, where Strauss had finally been given a permanent position in the fall of 1940. He republished it in 1952 as the second chapter of the book to which he assigned the same appealing title, a book that helped make him famous and controversial. While setting out in brief form the conditions and motives dictating exoteric writing, the essay is an exercise in moderation when set against the explosives contained in the letters to Klein, when judged by what Strauss could have said had he chosen to. In the second, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,”34 Strauss opens his fist on the explosives in the exegetical way that became his characteristic mode. That the essay has singular importance its topic proves: “ ‘what a

33. Meier, Denkbewegung, 15 n. 4. I modified items 9 and 12 to accord with what Meier now holds to be the correct transcription. Do the numbered entries stand for paragraphs? The first part contains eight paragraphs. In “A Giving of Accounts” Strauss states that “Lessing had said everything I had found out about the distinction between exoteric and esoteric speech and its grounds” (JPCM, 462). Lessing’s influence is evident in the introductions Strauss wrote to the works of Mendelssohn, especially his 1937 “Einleitung zu ‘Morgenstunden’ und ‘An die Freunde Lessings’ ” (GS, 2: 525–605). The tribute to Lessing at the end of Strauss’s 1948 lecture “Reason and Revelation” is particularly important (Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 178–79). Meier ends his valuable essay “How Strauss Became Strauss” (“a revised and expanded English version” of his “Vorwort” to GS, 2: ix–xxxiii) with two paragraphs showing the crucial role of Lessing in that becoming. 34. Between the end of the letters on exotericism and that essay, Strauss also published eight book reviews in Social Research. See Meier’s “Bibliographie,” Denkbewegung, 54–55.



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philosopher is,’ viz., the relation of philosophy to social or political life” (PAW, 95). His essay is a stunning example of his artful adoption of the artful writing of his forebears. But it is more than that. While showing how he chose to open his fist on the treasures he reported to Klein, he concludes declaring his reason for his choice.

chapter two

Exotericism Embraced: “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari”

Y

ehuda Halevi, a Jewish poet of the twelfth century (c. 1075–1141), is remembered only by his fellow Jews. Though commonly described as a poet and philosopher, his chief prose work, the Kuzari, a “Book of Argument and Demonstration in Aid of the Despised Religion,” is an attack on philosophy. Strauss’s essay, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” is the only work he ever published on what he called “the other classic of medieval Jewish philosophy” and the only time he discussed Halevi in print. His essay appeared in 1943, four years after his letters on exotericism stopped, and it occupies a special place in his writings, for here Strauss announces—if that word can be permitted—that he, the scholar who recovered the exotericism of the great philosophers, will embrace exotericism because the reason for exoteric writing, and for Halevi’s innovation in it, are still valid.

. A small portion of Halevi’s poetry survives as part of the liturgical tradition of Judaism. His life and poetry are illuminatingly treated in a biography by Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Halevi. Strauss cites a biographical essay on Halevi by the Columbia University historian whose assistant he was on his first employment in the United States: Salo Baron, “Yehudah Halevi: An Answer to an Historic Challenge.” . “Plan of a Book Entitled Philosophy and the Law: Historical Essays,” JPCM, 469. In Philosophy and Law Strauss called Maimonides and Halevi “the two leading spirits of medieval Jewish philosophy” (68). . Strauss’s essay appeared first in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 13 (1943): 47–96; he republished it as the fourth of five chapters in Persecution and the Art of Writing. At least two typos were corrected; the internal page references in footnotes were changed; in paragraph 10 “could not be imagined” replaced the original “is not even imaginable,” and “par excellence” was no longer italicized; in paragraph 12 commas were set around “however”; in paragraph 17 “face” was changed to “forehead”; in paragraph 27 “places the main emphasis on” was changed to “is chiefly concerned with”; at least one typo was added, “Kusari” (para. 10). Such slight changes highlight what Strauss did not change: British spellings (e.g., defence), mistakes in English (e.g., “we are used to read philosophy books,” “informations,”

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“The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” is an exacting exegetical exercise demanding all of one’s attention. But it is also a theatrical performance of high rank: a mature thinker long practiced in writing, having recently learned the covert practices of the greatest thinkers and writers and gained possession of the most explosive and easily displayed truths about the whole tradition of philosophy, here mounts the stage costumed as a mere commentator with mostly tedious things to report on matters that in fact prove thrilling to the reader for whom it is intended. The explosives are just for him. The exoteric nature of Strauss’s essay is nicely signaled by its epigraph, first by its being in Hebrew, then by its content: “ ‘The wisdom of his gentle tongue saved [him] from the strivings of his people.’—Halevi on R. Baruch.” Halevi applied to Rabbi Baruch what was true of Halevi. Mutatis mutandis Strauss does the same. The Kuzari is a dialogue. It opens with the Kuzari, king of the Khazars, having dreamt that an angel told him that God was displeased with his religious practice. To determine what to do to please God, he consults a philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim; dissatisfied with each he turns last to a Jewish scholar who persuades him that the Jewish religion that he despised is the true religion for him and for his people. In his first paragraph Strauss states the theme of his essay: “what a philosopher is” or “the relation of philosophy to social or political life.” The way Strauss uses the term law of reason permits his title to be read as “The Philosopher’s Relation to Society in the Kuzari.”

STRAUSS’S PREFACE Strauss’s essay starts where “[e]very student of the history of philosophy” starts, with a “necessarily confused notion” of philosophy. The movement or plan of his essay does what a good beginning student does: work to trans-

“inacceptable,” “as” used as a conjunction without a verb, German punctuation, including numerous cases in which a comma separates a subject from its verb). He also did not change footnote numbers 7a and 103a. Subsequent references will be to paragraph numbers in parentheses in the text. . Translation by K. H. Green in “Religion, Philosophy, Morality,” 264 n. 30. . The dialogue is a dramatic representation of a possibly historical event, the conversion to Judaism of the Khazar king, Bulan II, “sometime between 782 and 838” (Brook, “Brief History of the Khazars,” 35). When Halevi wrote his dialogue, the event had legendary and iconic status for Jews: Halevi chose a famous event of Jewish religious triumph for his dialogue on philosophy and Judaism. Written in Hebrew-lettered Arabic in Andalusia in the 1120s or 1130s, The Kuzari was translated into Hebrew in 1167 in Provence by Judah ibn Tibbon and “[i]t was in Ibn Tibbon’s translation that The Kuzari entered the Jewish canon” (Halkin, Yehuda Halevi, 244).

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form a confused beginning “into a clear notion of philosophy.” In doing that work, Strauss asserts, one naturally moves from the question of “what a philosopher is” to “the relation of philosophy to social or political life.” This relation “is adumbrated by the term ‘Natural Law,’ a term which is as indispensable as it is open to grave objections.” Strauss does not indicate immediately what those objections are, nor does he indicate how “Natural Law” stands to the “Law of Reason” in his title. Instead, he begins like a beginning student, following authority: “If we follow the advice of our great medieval teachers and ask first ‘the philosopher’ for his view, we learn from him that there are things which are ‘by nature just.’ ” Aristotle viewed “the crucial question” to be “not the existence of a ius naturale, but the manner of its existence: ‘is’ it in the sense in which numbers and figures ‘are,’ or ‘is’ it in a different sense?” Philosophy’s initial question is ontological, what sort of being ius naturale has. The one sort Strauss mentions is that of a construct of the intellect, like numbers and figures. He thus seems to use his first paragraph to indicate how his essay moves: he follows the authority of his great medieval teachers; like them he follows a Greek philosopher, a Socratic; like them, he concludes that natural law is a mental construct without independent being. The final sentence of the paragraph is also a prelude: “The question can be reduced, to begin with, to this more common form: is the ius naturale a dictate of right reason, a set of essentially rational rules?”—an ontological question gets “reduced” to a moral or practical question that asks about the rational status of natural law. Strauss’s reduction indicates that a concept that is a mental construct can be rational in a practical or moral sense. Strauss’s second paragraph sets out the clear judgment of Marsilius of Padua, who interpreted Aristotle as holding ius naturale to be “a set of conventional rules” accepted “ ‘so to speak by all men’ ”; “dependent on human institution,” they “can only metaphorically be called iura naturalia.” Putting Aristotle on Marsilius’s side, Strauss separates “the Christian Aristotelian Marsilius” from “the Christian Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas,” who defined natural law as the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.” “To return to the Jewish Aristotelians . . .” But return here at the opening of Strauss’s third paragraph is odd because he has not yet named any

. Strauss’s use of an untranslated Latin form of “natural law” is consistent with the forbidding density of his brief preface, four paragraphs of close reasoning on Aristotle and his medieval interpreters supplemented by eight footnotes with more text than the text and citing untranslated Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts. Strauss does not make the beginning easy for beginners.



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Jewish Aristotelians. Return makes sense only if his earlier statement about following “the advice of our great medieval teachers” already meant Jewish Aristotelians. They are the ones Strauss follows. Maimonides preferred to discuss “this fundamental question” of the manner of existence of natural law in “this form: are there rational laws in contradistinction to the revealed laws?” And Maimonides held that “those who speak of rational laws, are suffering from the disease of the mutakallimûn (the students of the kalâm).” Strauss takes that to be “tantamount to a denial of the rational character of the Natural Law,” for what the mutakallimûn call “rational,” “are called by the philosophers, the followers of Aristotle, ‘generally accepted’ (ε’΄νδοξα).” Strauss draws a conclusion from his authorities that describes “Marsilius’ interpretation of the ius naturale as the philosophic view, and Thomas’ interpretation as the view of the kalâm or, perhaps, as the theological view.” The fourth and final paragraph of Strauss’s preface sets up his essay: the impression that the philosophers “denied the rational character of the Natural Law, is apparently contradicted by Yehuda Halevi’s discussion of this question.” How did Halevi express his apparent contradiction? “Distinguishing between rational laws and revealed laws, and using the terms ‘rational laws’ and ‘rational nomoi’ synonymously, he asserts that the philosophers have set up rational nomoi.” He asserts? Not exactly: “a philosopher whom he introduces as a character of his dramatic prose-work, the Kuzari, admits such rational nomoi as a matter of course.” Strauss makes Halevi assert what a character in his dialogue admits. Does Halevi hold the view of this character? Wanting to follow his great medieval teachers, Strauss sets out to discover from a dialogue what one of them holds on the question “what a philosopher is.” How does one discover from a dialogue what its author actually holds?

THE REASON HALEVI OMITTED THE GREATEST JEWISH VICTORY IMAGINABLE (“I. THE LITERARY CHARACTER OF THE KUZARI”) Strauss opens this first of five numbered sections speaking of safety: “It is not safe to discuss any topic of the Kuzari before one has considered the literary character of the book.” The first section sets out that character in a way that establishes the safety required in discussing “what a philosopher is” in the final four sections. Strauss’s discussion of the literary character of the Kuzari is his first public effort in what became basic to his enterprise, how to read a dialogue,

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Xenophontic or Platonic, and recover from it what a Socratic philosopher taught and held. “To understand the Kuzari,” one has to distinguish between content and form, the statements and their “conversational setting” (7). “To understand any significant thesis of the work . . . one has to translate the ‘relative’ statements of the characters . . . into ‘absolute’ statements of the author, i.e., statements which express the author’s views directly.” This act of translation must treat the characters as characters and read “the statements made by them according to their peculiar moral and intellectual qualities and their peculiar intentions in a peculiar conversational setting and possibly with a view to that situation.” Strauss discusses many statements by the characters but emphasizes here the setting Halevi chose for his defense of Judaism, making that the main topic of the rest of the section. The setting is the item of the literary character of the Kuzari on which Strauss makes everything hinge in recovering Halevi’s view. Simply given for Strauss is “Halevi’s rank”: because he belongs to the highest rank of thinkers and writers, “it is safe to assume” that he “must have chosen the peculiar form of the Kuzari because he considered it the ideal setting for a defence of Judaism” (8). Is it ideal? Strauss moves through the considerations that make it ideal and judges that “his choice of the story of the Kuzari was absolutely rational and hence perfect.” But the next paragraph identifies “what seems to be at first sight the strongest objection to the thesis that the setting of the Kuzari is the ideal setting for a defence of Judaism” (9), the Kuzari himself. He’s not “the most exacting adversary”; in fact he’s hardly an adversary at all but instead “easy prey to the superior knowledge, and the superior conversational skill, of the Jewish scholar.” So Halevi, a thinker and writer of the highest rank, chose a less than ideal setting for his defense of Judaism. Why did he do that? Strauss has been building to this dramatic question, and it can be no accident that he sets it in the central paragraph of the section (10), the sixth of its eleven paragraphs. That Strauss places the central matter in the central paragraph is a first indication that his essay too is an artful construction like those of his medieval teachers, for centering the most important matter is a little device of writing, trivial enough in itself, that had been employed, Strauss noticed, to powerful effect by writers of the highest rank. The cen-

. In an important footnote appended to this sentence (no. 17) Strauss engages in a little dialogue with an objector in order to establish the conclusion that the “relative” statements of Halevi’s “spokesman, the Jewish scholar,” are not to be simply identified as “absolute” statements of the author’s views.



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tral issue of the literary character of the Kuzari is the setting Halevi chose for his defense of Judaism: why did he choose a less than ideal setting? “To make a first step toward understanding” that choice, “we have to mention the fact that the adversary par excellence of Judaism from Halevi’s point of view is, not Christianity and Islam, but philosophy.” Strauss does not bother saying that in Halevi’s time Jewish communities throughout the world ruled by Christianity and Islam were threatened by mounting religious wars between Christians and Muslims, wars that were driving these two ruling religions into increasing religious fanaticism and therefore intolerance of the Jewish communities within their realms. Despite this crisis Strauss can say that philosophy is the chief adversary, and that understanding that is a first step in understanding the literary character of the Kuzari. The steps to follow lead the reader inexorably to the very end of Strauss’s essay, his indication of just what this chief adversary represents or “the deepest reason why philosophy is so enormously dangerous” (45). Strauss interprets the Kuzari “primarily as a defence of Judaism against philosophy” (10). He asks at the center of his section on the literary character of the Kuzari: Is the setting Halevi chose fit for such a defense? Philosophy is discussed twice in the Kuzari, once between the king and the Philosopher, once between the king and the Jew. There is no discussion between the Jew and the Philosopher, and Strauss’s footnote at this point (no. 25) suggests that the Kuzari hints at a “subterraneous relation between the Jewish scholar and the philosopher.” What is that relation? Strauss keeps it subterraneous but basic. The king differs from the scholar and the Philosopher on the most important point: he has only a superficial knowledge of philosophy, whereas the other two are thoroughly familiar with it. “This means: there is no . An essay cited by Strauss (Baron, “Yehudah Halevi”) makes this the chief reason Halevi wrote the Kuzari: it is, Baron’s subtitle states, “An Answer to an Historic Challenge.” Baron describes in detail the challenge faced by Jews in “an age of extreme religious intolerance” (271) that followed a long period in which “the position of Jewry” (257) especially within Islam and most especially in Andalusia, Islamic Spain, gave Jews a “general feeling of security” (246) that allowed their community to flourish both materially and intellectually. Halevi spent his youth in that period of relative security, but during his maturity conditions increasingly changed for the worse as ever more extreme Islamic fundamentalists took political control in Spain. European Christians were meanwhile mounting the Crusade in the Holy Land and retook Jerusalem in 1104, an event of extreme importance for Halevi because it led to his forming the idea, represented in the Kuzari, that every true Jew must return to the Holy Land. Halevi undertook that return in his old age and it cost him his life. Halevi is regarded as an early proponent of Zionism within a rabbinic tradition that taught that exile was a permanent condition until the Messiah came. . For clarity’s sake, I capitalize Philosopher when I refer solely to that character in Halevi’s dialogue.

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discussion of philosophy between intellectual equals.” This central sentence of the central paragraph bears a footnote that for the first time in Strauss’s essay and on a “most important” point acknowledges shared characteristics between Halevi’s dialogue and Plato’s: “In this most important respect the form of the Kuzari agrees with that of the Platonic dialogues”—both refrain from portraying a discussion of philosophy between philosophers. Because the discussion of philosophy in the Kuzari “takes place on a level decidedly lower than that of a genuine philosophic discussion,” Strauss can judge initially that the setting of the Kuzari “appears therefore to be singularly unsatisfactory” for a defense of Judaism against its prime adversary. This judgment “is all the more justified” because Halevi could easily have avoided this defect: “Nothing indeed would have been easier for the poet Halevi than to arrange a disputation between the scholar and the philosopher before the king.” The poet Halevi. Halevi is famous for being a poet,10 but Strauss emphasizes his being a poet only in this paragraph. The effect highlights the creative or imaginative aspect of Halevi’s work and links him more closely to Plato, who has just been introduced, that greatest of all poet-philosophers, creator of imaginative dialogues in which philosophy is defended at least in part against religion and not religion against philosophy. Strauss describes the setting that the poet Halevi could have chosen for his defense of Judaism; it peaks at a crescendo of persuasive achievement in which the Jewish scholar would not only defeat the Philosopher in argument but do so in a way that “would culminate in the conversion, not merely of the king, but above all of the philosopher himself.” How supreme would this imagined achievement by a poet be? “[A] greater triumph for the scholar, for the author, for Judaism, for religion could not be imagined.” Strauss’s footnote at this peak of poetic triumph addresses the poet Halevi’s actual inventions: he added a philosopher to the two extant versions of the story of the Khazar conversion, and he subtracted disputation before the king. The poet’s liberties suggest that he imagined the triumph for religion than which no greater could be imagined but “refused to take this easy way.” Strauss ends his paragraph on the question he worked to make necessary: “What was his reason?” The rest of his section on the literary character of the Kuzari is his relentless pursuit of the answer. Over the rest of this section hangs the question, What was his reason?

10. Baron calls him “the greatest Hebrew poet since the conclusion of the Bible,” “Yehudah Halevi,” 243.



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Strauss gives two possible reasons. The consideration governing both begins bluntly: “Halevi knew too well that a genuine philosopher can never become a genuine convert to Judaism or to any other revealed religion. For, according to him, a genuine philosopher is a man such as Socrates who possesses ‘human wisdom’ and is invincibly ignorant of ‘Divine wisdom’ ” (11). Thus is Socrates introduced: he is the genuine philosopher for Halevi, the one from whom he took his understanding of what a philosopher is and what his relation to social or political life is. Strauss attaches to his first reference to Socrates the central footnote of this section ( no. 29) and allows it to express a central matter of what philosophy is. Philosophy is less a set of dogmas than “a method, or an attitude” whose classic representative is Socrates. The footnote also instructs the reader on how to study the Kuzari to discover “the primitive and precise meaning which ‘philosophy’ has in Halevi’s usage”: study a short paragraph late in the Kuzari that contrasts “the adherents of the law” and “the adherents of philosophy”; look at what Halevi put at the center of that paragraph, “a saying of Socrates” that addresses “the problematic relation between philosophy and law (viz., Divine law), or between human wisdom and Divine wisdom.” Strauss’s instructions call attention to Halevi’s use of centering and do so in a central footnote: the reader learns to read Strauss while taking instruction on how to read Halevi. Strauss does not quote Socrates’s saying but speaks only of Halevi’s words “going back to Plato’s Apology of Socrates (20d6–e2),”11 and he refers to a second use of it, “with some modifications,” later in the Kuzari. Strauss’s final sentence in the footnote calls attention to a matter completely crucial for his essay, a possibility alluded to in another passage of the Kuzari, “ ‘adherents of philosophy who belong to the adherents of the religions.’ ” This possibility “is, to begin with, unintelligible rather than that truism which it is supposed to be today.” “To begin with” is a little phrase that can wreak miracles (PAW, 78): Strauss works to show a genuine philosopher choosing to appear to be an adherent of a religion in which he does not believe. Strauss’s paragraph continues in a categorical vein: “It is the impossibility of converting a philosopher to Judaism which [Halevi] demonstrates ad oculos by omitting a disputation between the scholar and the philosopher.” But if the scholar’s converting a philosopher is impossible, what about a disputation between them? “Such a disputation, we may say to begin with,

11. Strauss later spoke of Halevi’s use of this statement by Plato’s Socrates while discussing reason and revelation; see “Progress or Return?” (1952, JPCM, 121) and “Jerusalem and Athens,” (1967, SPPP, 170).

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is impossible” because the philosopher denies in principle “the premises on which any demonstration of the truth of any revealed religion is based.” What are the grounds of that denial? Strauss’s first answer is an assertion that was made defensively by the philosopher Socrates. The denial “may be said to proceed from the fact that he, being a philosopher, is untouched by, or has never tasted, that ‘Divine thing’ or ‘Divine command’ . . . which is known from actual experience both to the actual believer, the Jewish scholar, and the potential believer, the king.” The believer claims superior knowledge, direct experience, and “the king was from the outset, by nature, a pious man,” for “he had been observing the pagan religion of his country with great eagerness and all his heart.” Taking up what he must regard as Halevi’s implicit invitation to contrast the believer and the philosopher, Strauss contrasts the king with Socrates, whose treatment by Halevi Strauss discussed in his central footnote. Strauss allows Halevi to disappear as he makes the contrast his own: “something happened to [the king] which offers a striking similarity, and at the same time a striking contrast, to what happened to the philosopher Socrates.” Strauss, like Halevi, looks to Socrates’s report to the jury of citizens judging him as recounted in Plato’s Apology. He moves from the “saying of Socrates” that Halevi placed at the center of his paragraph to Socrates’s story of the Delphic oracle, which that saying introduced. Socrates’s story becomes Strauss’s opportunity to consider the similarities and contrasts between a philosopher and a believer on an event that proved a turning point in each of their lives. The similarities and contrasts arise from three things: the event, an initial discovery made in response to the event, and finally a settled way of life taken up as a consequence of the event and the response. First, being “set in motion.” “Socrates is said to have been set in motion”—Plato, who says he was there, says what Socrates said—“by a single oracle which the priestess of the Delphian god had given to an inquiring friend of his.” The king, by contrast, “was awakened out of his traditionalism by a number of dreams in which an angel, apparently answering a prayer of his, addressed him directly.” The event touches the issue of direct experience: the king experienced more than once in dreams a direct address by an angel; Socrates heard a friend report what an oracle had said about him to the inquiring friend. Second, the examination that discovers “the secret.” Socrates examined “representatives of various types of knowledge.” The king examined “representatives of various beliefs, and, more directly, [was] tutored by the Jewish scholar.”



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Third, the “attempt” and its consequence. Socrates attempted “to check the truth of the oracle.” The king attempted “to obey the angel who had spoken to him in his dreams.” Attempting to know the truth, Socrates was “led . . . to the philosophic life.” Attempting to obey what he believed were words of an angel, the king was “made . . . at once immune to philosophy and ultimately led . . . into the fold of Judaism.” Two different ways of life, a life of inquiry and a life of obedience, follow the different responses to somewhat similar events.12 Strauss then leaves Socrates in order to draw one conclusion only from his contrast, a conclusion about Halevi’s intentions as author or about the literary character of the Kuzari: “By indicating the facts mentioned which adumbrate the character of the king, Halevi makes clear the natural limits of his explicit arguments: these arguments are convincing, and are meant to be convincing, to such naturally pious people only as have had some foretaste of Divine revelation.” Only a reader tracing the “facts mentioned” can see that the character Halevi assigned his king indicates that he had limited intentions for his explicit arguments: to persuade only the naturally pious. A reader not by nature pious but inclined to pursue the indicated facts can find Halevi intimating implicit arguments for him, meaning him not to be simply convinced but to be initiated into a process of inquiry into types of knowledge. Strauss is explaining why Halevi chose not to stage the disputation that would have been the highest imaginable triumph for religion: such a disputation is impossible owing to a philosopher’s ignorance of what a believer experiences. But his next paragraph opens, “This explanation is, however, not fully satisfactory. For it is not true that a discussion between the believer and the philosopher is impossible for the reason mentioned” (12). An untrue reason can be satisfactory but not fully satisfactory, for some will want the true reason. Before giving the true reason, Strauss states why the first one is false: it is impossible that the philosopher acknowledge utter incompetence with respect to “that vast realm of specific experiences which is the domain of faith,” a realm that claims infinite importance for itself. Claiming ignorance is a “merely defensive attitude” and cannot be the philosopher’s complete response. His “alleged ignorance is actually doubt or distrust.” Strauss appends a footnote (no. 33) to this remark that refers back to the central footnote and to Socrates’s statement at his trial “that he does

12. Strauss added a footnote here (no. 31) to list parallels between Plato’s report and Halevi’s that suggest that Halevi wrote with precision in order to aid in drawing the very contrast Strauss drew.

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not grasp the Divine wisdom of the people to whom he is talking.” Again, Strauss entrusts a crucial point to a footnote: Socrates’s statement “is evidently a polite expression of his rejection of that wisdom.” Socrates’s politeness is defensive; he chooses not to say to those sitting in judgment of his life that he rejects their supposedly divine wisdom. Strauss then divides his readers into two camps; one camp, “[t]hose who do not think that Halevi noticed Socrates’ irony, are requested to disregard this paragraph which is based on the assumption, in itself as indemonstrable as theirs, that he did notice it.” Strauss’s amusing little politeness acknowledges that he would prefer that not everyone hear what he is about to say about Halevi. Some will want to hear most what Strauss prefers that others not hear at all: his politeness is an invitation to them. Do not disregard this paragraph, it says; by giving the true reason Halevi did not present the disputation, it illuminates Halevi’s defensive attitude. A final sentence to the footnote draws an inference from Halevi’s first use of Socrates’s statement: “the attitude of the philosophers is not altered if the people of Socrates’ time are replaced by adherents of revealed religion.” A philosopher’s relation to society is not essentially different in societies ruled by revelation; there too philosophers practice defensive politeness. Strauss said before that the philosopher’s alleged ignorance is “doubt or distrust.” Now he makes it stronger. “[T]he philosophers whom Halevi knew, went so far as to deny the very possibility of the specific experiences of the believers as interpreted by the latter, or, more precisely, the very possibility of Divine revelation in the precise sense of the term” (12). The footnote added here (no. 34) invites a comparison of passages that show “that the philosopher as such is a ‘sindik,’ an ‘apikores,’ ” two Greek words in Jewish form that name apostates who turn against Judaism, most typically because of philosophy. The philosophers Halevi knew not only denied the possibility of revelation but presented their denial “in the form of what claimed to be a demonstrative refutation” (12). No fanfare accompanies this claim of refutation, but its quiet entry into Strauss’s essay marks a matter of the highest importance. Can reason refute revelation? This old question of the relation between “the science of the Greeks” and the alien tradition it later confronted in Judaism and Christianity, and still later in Islam, is a question that occupied Strauss from his intellectual beginnings onward. His dissertation touched that question in the form of Jacobi’s attack on the Enlightenment, which argued that the limits of reason combined with the inscrutability of an allpowerful God made revelation irrefutable, immune to reason’s judgments. Strauss employed that position against Spinoza in his first book, Spinoza’s



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Critique of Religion (completed 1928, published 1930), where he argued that Spinoza’s attempt to refute revelation failed in the face of an insistence like Calvin’s that reason is fallen and God’s ways are inscrutable. And Spinoza’s failure is supposedly critical: it is the fatal crack in the supposed foundation of the modern Enlightenment, its critique of religion; if religious orthodoxy stands untouched by rational critique, the Enlightenment’s alleged foundation washes away. And Strauss outfitted his next book, Philosophy and Law (1935), with a thrilling introduction that looked not to the beginning of the Enlightenment but to its end or outcome in Nietzsche and after. Barely naming him but having him in mind throughout, Strauss seemed to attack Nietzsche for extending Spinoza’s failure: in Nietzsche, Strauss encourages his general reader to believe, the Enlightenment marched to its self-refuting end in an atheism based on mere Redlichkeit, intellectual probity, based on morality, on an act of will and not of reason. Can reason refute revelation? This great issue for Strauss enters his essay on Halevi at the point of his explaining the true reason why Halevi omitted the disputation between the Philosopher and the Jewish scholar, an explanation of Socrates’s irony that you should disregard if you don’t think Halevi read Plato this way. Philosophers in Halevi’s time claimed to be able to do what Strauss had long argued could not be done, refute revelation rationally. Their denial of divine revelation took “the form of what claimed to be a demonstrative refutation.” What is the refutation? Strauss does not supply it. Instead, he keeps to the disputation. Given the demonstrative refutation by the philosopher, the “defender of religion had to refute the refutation by laying bare its fallacious character.” Is this disputation that the poet Halevi pointed to but failed to supply at all important? “On the level of the refutation and of the refutation of the refutation, i.e. on the level of ‘human wisdom,’ the disputation between believer and philosopher is not only possible, but without any question the most important fact of the whole past.” Halevi composed a dialogue on a historic debate in religion, added a philosopher to the historical record of that debate, and chose to omit the disputation that is the most important fact of the whole past.13 To confirm the importance of this issue Strauss calls in high authority: in a footnote (no. 35) he quotes in German a statement by Goethe, 13. Strauss supplied a refutation in a talk to theologians five years later, “Reason and Revelation,” that he chose never to publish. It is printed in Meier, Leo Strauss and the TheologicoPolitical Problem, 141–67; see esp. 166–67. Meier’s book is especially good in addressing head-on the question of philosophy’s refutation of revelation. He shows that Strauss made revelation’s position seem stronger than it is and philosophy’s weaker, and he shows why. In addition, Meier shows four approaches to refutation to which Strauss invited the reader (3–28).

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introducing it with what amounts to an exhortation, “One cannot recall too often this remark by Goethe: ‘The genuine, single, and deepest theme of world history and human history, to which all the others are subordinate, remains the conflict between unbelief and belief.’ ”14 And Halevi chose to omit it. But he did not simply omit it, he omitted it while drawing “our attention most forcefully to the possibility of such a disputation by inserting . . . into the actual dialogue between the king and the scholar what almost amounts to a fictitious dialogue between the scholar and the philosopher: the scholar refutes an objection of the philosophers by addressing the philosopher directly.” In a footnote (no. 36) Strauss quotes the scholar’s “O philosopher” and refers to “the almost identical expression with which the king took leave of the real philosopher . . . In a sense, the philosopher is always present in the Kuzari.” Halevi omitted the disputation in order to make the philosopher present, imaginatively present, present in the reader’s effort to imagine him present for every disputation in the book. And the scholar’s refutation of the philosopher’s refutation of revelation in his fictitious dialogue—would it have persuaded the philosopher? It “evidently satisfies the king,” Strauss says, “but perhaps not every reader,” and his footnote (no. 37) approves the remarks of an unsatisfied reader that show these arguments on behalf of an outdated cosmology to be unpersuasive. Why omit the most important disputation of the whole past while giving a defective, fictitious version of it? Strauss states the decisive reason as a conditional: “If Halevi were a philosopher, the absence of an actual conversation between scholar and philosopher could be accounted for precisely on the ground of the doubt just expressed” (i.e., the uncertainty Strauss stated in the preceding sentence as to whether and how far a philosopher would have been impressed with the scholar’s argument). If Halevi were a philosopher he would aim to kindle uncertainty and doubt in one kind of reader: his omission of the disputation would “compel the reader to think constantly of the absent philosopher, i.e., to find out, by independent reflection, what the absent philosopher might have to say.” This reader remedies the absence of the philosopher by making him present in a substitute, his own reasoning on behalf of the absent reasoner. Halevi omitted the disputation in order to have a reader supply it, taking the philosopher’s part as a 14. What Goethe said next serves Strauss’s argument: “All epochs in which belief dominates, in whatever form it will, are brilliant, uplifting and fertile for its present and posterity. All epochs on the other hand in which unbelief, whatever kind it might be, claims a miserable victory, even if they should for a moment flaunt an apparent glory, vanish for posterity because no one wants to busy himself with knowledge of the infertile.” Noten und Abhandlungen zum besseren Verständnis des West-östlichen Divan; cited by Zank, EW, 210–11 n. 11.



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disputant in order to test the refutation offered by the spokesman of revelation. So it is that Strauss suggests that Halevi, author of a dialogue opposing philosophy, was a philosopher: in a dialogue meant to persuade naturally pious people of the truth of Judaism, he omitted the disputation that matters most in history in order to invite the philosophically inclined reader to enter the conflict between unbelief and belief prepared to settle it by reason alone. “This disturbing and invigorating thought [this thought that gives life by stirring up] would prevent the reader from falling asleep [from being prey to dreams], from relaxing in his critical attention for a single moment.” Skip this paragraph? Only if you fear disturbance. Calming disturbance in the fearful, Strauss ends by saying: “But Halevi is so much opposed to philosophy, he is so distrustful of the spirit of independent reflection, that we are obliged not to lay too strong an emphasis on this line of approach.” Not to lay too strong an emphasis on this approach is to take this approach. It is the literary character of the Kuzari to address two audiences, the naturally pious that it persuades to Judaism and the naturally philosophic that it trains to philosophy.15 The latter, drawn into the disputation than which there is no more important in history, thinks constantly for the absent philosopher, thinks of the response of a person inclined to measure every issue by reason alone. Invited by Halevi to take the side of philosophy, such a reader is purposefully launched on a long process meant to lead him to treat philosophy with the same refinement his teacher does, the refinement displayed in Strauss’s essay. But Strauss is the author of private letters to Jacob Klein in which he treated philosophy with complete openness, knowing he held a bomb in his fist and wondering just how and when to explode it. The Strauss of those discoveries about the Socratic philosopher’s genuine conclusions regarding religion and morality is the author of this essay: “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” is the pivotal essay that reports the education of Leo Strauss; he holds the bomb but opens his fist only as Halevi did, selectively, for that one reader. Obliged, Strauss “return[s] to safer ground” (13). There, he shows how philosophy worked its “influence” on Halevi. For almost all, influence is ever only partial and is ruled by one’s “previous notions.” “In the case of a man such as Halevi, however, the influence of philosophy on him consists in a conversion to philosophy.” Strauss uses Plato’s word from the

15. In Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile Eugene Sheppard makes a common mistake by regularly referring to Strauss’s “multilevel” writing. There are two levels, the apparent and what the apparent invites the reader to infer by what it says and leaves unsaid. Meier speaks of the “exoteric-esoteric double-face” (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 63–65).

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Republic where Socrates’s lesson after his cave image describes the genuine education of the cave dweller as a conversion (periagôgê).16 Strauss is spared being too explicit about what conversion means for Halevi because he just stated what influence is not for almost all: Halevi would “be induced by the influencing force to take a critical distance from his previous notions [his Judaism] to look at things, not from his habitual point of view, but from the point of view of the center, clearly grasped, of the influencing teaching [philosophy] and hence he will be [capable] of a serious, a radical and relentless, discussion of that teaching.” Strauss injects himself into the judgment on Halevi’s conversion: “for some time, we prefer to think for a very short time, he was a philosopher.” Acting as if the conversion of a man like Halevi could just be reversed (cf. 11), Strauss utters the most amusing phrase in his whole essay: “After that moment, a spiritual hell, he returned to the Jewish fold.” Spiritual hell amuses because it tells the lie about philosophy that is true for the nonphilosophical: the highest possible human happiness, philosophy, discovers truths that can evoke horror and despair. The most sober relative statement in Strauss’s essay translates into the most amusing absolute statement of its author’s view. Safer ground obliged Strauss to follow his great medieval teacher and slander philosophy, or seem to, from a believer’s point of view. But because of “what he had gone through,” ascent to philosophy that can look like descent to a spiritual hell, Halevi “could not help interpreting Judaism in a manner in which only a man who had once been a philosopher, could interpret it”—radically and relentlessly from the point of view of the center of the influencing teaching. Strauss does not say the converted philosopher converted back to Judaism: he “returned to the Jewish fold,” returned irremediably different, viewing Judaism from the perspective of philosophy. Why return? Because “in that moment he had experienced the enormous temptation, the enormous danger of philosophy.” Footnote 39 is helpful: separating the danger from the temptation, it puts the danger first, puts the fruit before the blossom where it cannot in truth be. The danger of philosophy lies in its “pernicious” fruit, the doctrine of the eternity of the world that contradicts the Jewish teaching of God’s creation of the world; the temptation of philosophy lies in its blossoms, which are “evidently beautiful ones.” Converted to philosophy, drawn by its beauty and persuaded by reason of the eternity of the

16. Strauss defined “conversion” in his 1939 unpublished “Exoteric Teaching” and cited the Republic passage (518c–e): “according to Plato, philosophy presupposes a real conversion, i.e. a total break with the attitude of the beginner: the beginner is a man who has not yet for one moment left the cave, whereas the philosopher is the man who has left the cave” (56).



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world, Halevi returned to the Jewish fold having experienced the enormous danger of its greatest adversary. After articulating in his footnote Halevi’s double experience of beauty and danger, Strauss says: the “manner in which [Halevi] defends Judaism against philosophy, testifies to this experience.” Halevi omitted the disputation between the philosopher and the scholar because his experience of philosophy’s beauty led him, over time of course, and not the imagined very short time, into knowledge of philosophy’s enormous danger. Silence speaks: the reader learns that the Halevi of the Jewish fold put on sheep’s clothing because his experience of the beautiful temptation now luring that reader led his teacher to respect its enormous danger. Had Halevi staged the disputation, “he would have been compelled to state the case for philosophy with utmost clarity and vigor, and thus to pre­ sent an extremely able and ruthless attack on revealed religion by a philosopher”—the case for philosophy just is a ruthless attack on revealed religion. Having imagined Halevi supplying the disputation he in fact omitted, Strauss repeats himself: There can be no doubt, to repeat, that the arguments of the philosopher could have been answered by the scholar; but it is hard to tell whether one or the other of the readers would not have been more impressed by the argument of the philosopher than by the rejoinder of the scholar.

This repeats the passage in the previous paragraph that noted that no philosopher was present to answer the scholar’s refutation of an objection of the philosophers.17 The “hard to tell” and “one or the other of the readers” in the second passage replace the “exceedingly hard to tell” and “perhaps not every reader” of the first. Comparison clarifies the reason Halevi omitted the disputation—and confirms Strauss’s capacity to do what Halevi did. What is exceedingly hard to tell is in one respect not hard at all: of course the philosopher would not be reduced to silence by the scholar’s unsatisfactory refutation; but supplying the absent philosopher’s reasoning is exceedingly hard. And what is hard to tell is not hard at all: the king himself was “impressed” by an “unimpressive sketch of philosophy,” though not at all able to supply independently the philosopher’s argument. The perhaps not every reader of the first passage soon became the singular reader capable of thinking constantly of the absent philosopher and supplying what he would

17. Paragraph 12, page 108 top. Two years earlier, in the essay on Maimonides that immediately precedes the Halevi essay in PAW, Strauss showed the uses of repetition in exoteric writing as one of the devices of “intentional perplexities” (62–64).

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have to say. In the repetition, one or the other of the readers, any old reader who reads as the king hears could, as the king was, be more impressed by the philosopher’s argument than by the scholar’s rejoinder without being capable of the independent reflection to reconstruct the philosopher’s reasoning. Omitting the disputation compelled one special reader to engage in philosophy and supply by independent reflection the reasoning to refute the scholar. Supplying the disputation would have made the Kuzari “an instrument of seduction, or at least of confusion.” Absent the disputation, the Kuzari is an instrument of seduction but not of confusion; the sole reader seduced, thinking constantly of the absent philosopher, reconstructs his exceedingly hard argument. Having supplied his illuminating repetition, Strauss can state: “Nothing is more revealing” of the danger of philosophy than an exchange between the scholar and the king late in the dialogue, where “Halevi demonstrates ad oculos the danger of philosophy”: the king, “in spite of all that men and angels had done to protect him,” finds an “unimpressive sketch of philosophy” deeply impressive, and the scholar “has to repeat his refutation of philosophy all over again.” The last sentence of the paragraph is the last act of Strauss’s repetition because understanding it depends on bringing back the reader from the first statement. “Only by elaborating the philosophic argument which Halevi, or rather his characters merely sketch, can one disinter his real and inexplicit objection to, and refutation of, that argument.” The reader’s task is to elaborate by independent reflection the merely sketched philosophic argument; he thereby digs up Halevi’s buried, real, inexplicit refutation of the philosophic argument. Because the potential philosopher alone can elaborate the sketched argument and dig up its real and inexplicit refutation, that refutation comes from philosophy itself, not from its adversary—the refutation can be nothing other than the enormous danger of philosophy, its leading to doubt and anarchy. Strauss’s exercise in repetition allows his two paragraphs to be viewed in their complementarity. The first takes Halevi to be a philosopher; the second moves to the safer ground of a Halevi returned to the Jewish fold; together they show Halevi’s reasons for omitting the disputation: tempt the philosophically inclined and avoid confusing the rest, intimate the beauty and keep the danger at bay. That Leo Strauss of all people should call philosophy a spiritual hell is a lovely comedy, comedy that completes the argument flowing out of his central paragraph—What was his reason? Strauss can thus begin his next paragraph: “The explanation suggested” (14). The explanation for the omission of the disputation between the philosopher and the scholar is that Halevi



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was a philosopher who recognized philosophy’s danger and learned how to sustain philosophy’s lure. That explanation forces a question: Why was Halevi so timid about philosophy? Defending Halevi against the charge that he lacked courage allows Strauss to end “The Literary Character of the Kuzari” defending exotericism. He invokes a “line of demarcation between timidity and responsibility,” a line “drawn differently in different ages,” and makes his defense rely on what “most people today would readily admit,” that “we have to judge an author according to the standards which prevailed in his age.” Halevi’s seeming timidity befits the standards of an age in which “the right, if not the duty, to suppress teachings, and books, which are detrimental to faith, was generally recognized,” and philosophers “did not object to it.” They took over “the traditional distinction between exoteric and esoteric teachings, and they held therefore that it was dangerous, and hence forbidden, to communicate the esoteric teaching to the general public. They composed their books in accordance with that view.” Strauss refers explicitly only to the danger of philosophy to faith. But his model philosopher is the Socrates of the defense speech preceding his conviction and execution for not believing in the gods the city acknowledged: Strauss also means the danger of faith to philosophy, a situation not altered, to say the least, if the people of Socrates’s time are replaced by the adherents of revealed religion. Halevi returned to the Jewish fold an unbeliever measuring belief from the point of view of Socratic philosophy and therefore deeply aware of the danger philosophy faced from belief. Halevi stands with the philosophers who adopted exoteric writing out of responsibility toward philosophy in an age in which the duty to suppress teachings detrimental to faith was generally recognized. Halevi drew the line between timidity and responsibility where responsibility to philosophy dictated. That was his reason. Reason was his reason. Strauss concludes his section by expanding an earlier statement: Halevi’s defense of Judaism against the philosophers “is addressed to naturally pious people only” (15; cf. 11 end), those not “naturally faithful” but prey to doubts that can be settled only by arguments. “Halevi refrained from refuting the argument of the philosophers on its natural level out of a sense of responsibility”—responsibility to philosophy but, as Strauss here indicates, also to Judaism. For in making the converted gentile king the naturally pious man prey to doubts, Halevi refrains from portraying a doubting Jew, an anomaly given a main line of persuasion insisted on by the Jewish scholar: Judaism is singular among the revealed religions in being founded on God’s revelation to six hundred thousand witnesses in Sinai. The original revelation to that multitude plus a supposedly unbroken line of transmission down to today’s faithful descendants guarantees Judaism’s immunity to

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deception or error. Strauss repeats Halevi’s restraint about unfaithful Jews: he refers only in a footnote and only by page numbers to another author to indicate that Halevi wrote in a time when many Jews were abandoning the faith under great pressure from Christians and Muslims. Halevi’s dialogue, like Strauss’s commentary, is an act of responsibility toward philosophy while being at the same time an act of responsibility toward Judaism. The literary character of Strauss’s essay is to take to safer ground out of responsibility to philosophy and therefore secondarily to faith.18

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STANCE TOWARD RELIGION (“II. THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS LAW OF REASON”) Strauss can speak with relative unrestraint about the stance toward religion taken by the Philosopher, the king’s first interlocutor, for the same reason Halevi could: the Philosopher is obviously wrong because the king rejects his advice and the scholar refutes his arguments. Using a rejected and refuted character to say what he really means is Halevi’s variant on a practice Strauss described in his 1941 essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” “using as mouthpiece some disreputable character,” one of those “interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans and buffoons” who enliven “the greatest literature of the past.” Using his refuted Philosopher frees Halevi to state the truth while showing at the same time “how much [he] disapproved of pronouncing the truths in question” (PAW, 36), for the advice the Philosopher offers the king is “the only authentic declaration, occurring in the Kuzari, of the intentions of the philosophers” (19). Strauss notes two things about the Philosopher’s manner of speaking (17): he begins with a negation that repudiates something, and every time he speaks in the first person he has to add, “I mean to say.” The repudiating Philosopher therefore uses “religious terms [but] in a sense very different

18. Leora Batnitzky misunderstands Strauss in the most basic way possible when she announces that Strauss “contends that the basic philosophical question . . . is what is the relationship between philosophy and society” (Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, 121). In fact, this question became philosophy’s most basic political question when, with Socrates, the philosopher came to understand himself in his difference. Batnitzky’s misunderstanding colors her use of philosophical throughout her book. It permits her to prefer Halevi to Maimonides as a model for contemporary Jewish piety and to imagine that she is following Strauss when she says Halevi left philosophy (254 n. 77). Batnitzky can embrace Strauss’s strategy as a promising basis for a modern Judaism only by downplaying the fact that he is (as she acknowledges) an unbeliever and by ignoring the fact that what he offers theology is a strict Orthodoxy that simply insists on what it believes.



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from their ordinary, religious meaning.”19 The Philosopher places “the life of contemplation” highest; every other way of life places action highest (18). Contemplation is a religious term requiring an “I mean to say”: only a philosopher seeks understanding for its own sake and not for some other end; he therefore chooses that form of religion which best serves his way of life as a passionate pursuit of understanding. The Philosopher’s “theological assumptions” (19) lead him to a practical conclusion about the religion he would choose, one of three alternatives Strauss lists by number.20 (1) To be indifferent as to the manner of his worship and his belonging to a particular religious group. (2) “[T]o invent for himself a religion for the purpose of regulating his actions of worship as well as of his moral guidance”—a philosopher would not stop with himself when founding a religion for its utility for understanding, because what he invents for himself he invents also for “the guidance of his household and his city.” That means to say that a philosopher, inventing his city’s understanding of the highest to best serve his own unique way of life, would rule through religion for the good of philosophy.21 (3) A philosopher may choose to “take as his religion the rational nomoi composed by the philosophers and to make purity of the soul his purpose and aim.” What to do with those compositions, the philosophers’ rational nomoi, is Strauss’s theme for the rest of his essay. The Philosopher, Strauss says, presents these alternatives to the king as conditional advice, the condition being “the king’s becoming a philosopher.” His advice then is what a philosopher king would do: “decide the religious question on grounds of expedience alone.” Preparing to elaborate a philosopher’s actions regarding religion, Strauss calls “for some attention” and makes an attention-getting start: the “religious indifference of the philosopher knows no limits.” The actions a philosopher’s indifference permits him help specify a philosopher’s relation to social or political life: first, “he does not oppose to the ‘errors’ of the positive religions the religion of reason”—he does not engage in spiritual warfare of the frontal variety. His second action touches Halevi’s situation: “he does not demand that a

19. Francis Bacon described this practice while using it: “men of judgment [will see] that in this and other particulars . . . my conception and notion may differ from the ancient, yet I am studious to keep the ancient terms.” Bacon, Advancement of Learning 2.7.2. 20. Regarding a philosopher’s theological views, Strauss notes that in response to the king’s question, the Philosopher said that “God has no likes or dislikes, no wish or will of any kind, and that God has no knowledge of changeable things” (18). 21. Strauss’s use of city, anachronistic for Halevi’s time of universal religions, suggests the Greek or Socratic origins of Halevi’s Philosopher’s understanding of the alternatives regarding religion.

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philosopher who as such no longer believes in the religion of his fathers, should reveal his religious indifference, proceeding from unbelief, by openly transgressing the laws of that religion”—Strauss names two famous apostate Jews who did what the philosopher did not demand they do. The third action is the positive side of the second: he considers it perfectly legitimate that a philosopher who as such denies Divine revelation, adheres to Islam for example, i.e., complies in deed and speech with the requirements of that religion and therefore, if an emergency arises, defends that faith which he cannot but call the true faith, not only with the sword, but with arguments, viz., dialectical arguments, as well.22

Finally, Strauss states what the Philosopher “certainly” neither says nor implies: that “a genuine philosopher would necessarily openly reject any other religion or law in favor of the rational nomoi composed by the philosophers . . . although he does admit that under certain circumstances he might.” Halevi’s Philosopher, dismissed so early, refuted so often, proves an authentic guide to what the philosopher Halevi did. Strauss opens his next paragraph by asking, “What have we to understand by these rational nomoi?” (20). Pursuit of that question, relentless inquiry into just how Halevi presents the “rational nomoi,” structures the rest of Strauss’s essay: what begins here ends only in the final paragraph. For Strauss found that Halevi chose to build an “ambiguity” into his Philosopher’s presentation of the religious nomoi. They cannot be identical to the lex naturalis, which is simply binding for all, because how could “such dictates . . . be exchanged” for some other order of life? Nor can they be identical to “the ‘rational laws’ . . . those elementary rules of social conduct which have to be observed equally by all communities,” because what the Philosopher “has in mind are not merely the framework of a code, but a complete code: they are identical with ‘the religion of the philosophers.’ ” (To illustrate “all communities,” Strauss states two extremes of the totality of communities, using terms that will play crucial if slippery roles in his essay: “the most noble community as well as . . . a gang of robbers.”) What are the rational nomoi then? As the “religion of the philosophers,” they are not “in any way obligatory” but, “being emphati-

22. See Strauss’s later essay on Spinoza included in PAW: “The typical philosopher, as presented in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, considered it perfectly legitimate for the philosopher to adhere in his speeches as well as in his actions to a religion to which he does not adhere in his thought” (182).



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cally ‘rational,’ they have been set up by the philosophers with a view to the unchanging needs of man as man; they are codes fixing the political or other conditions most favorable to the highest perfection of man.” Because that perfection is philosophy, “rational nomoi” names something else as well: the rules of solitude for the philosopher whose way of life is essentially asocial. This then is “[t]he ambiguity of the term ‘rational nomoi’ ”: on the one hand, “it might designate an essentially political code,” a complete code containing “a political theology”; on the other, it might designate “an essentially apolitical rule of conduct destined for the guidance of the philosopher alone.” From the philosopher’s point of view it is preferable either to be a member of a community governed by the rational nomoi or to live a completely private life; “but their being preferable does not make these ways of life indispensable and hence obligatory: Socrates led the philosophic life although he was an active member of a political community which he considered very imperfect”; Socrates is the model of a philosophical hermit living a social life. With the Philosopher’s views thus set out, Strauss can turn to Halevi’s Jewish scholar and his stance toward philosophy. It turns out to be a veiled stance but one that Strauss can penetrate because the scholar himself employs an ambiguity regarding the rational nomoi, a different one, it seems, from the Philosopher’s ambiguity. But first, Strauss ends his account of the Philosopher by noting a feature of “the religion of the philosophers” that was stated in the Philosopher’s single-sentence second speech: that religion “does not approve of, or command, the killing of adherents of other religions as such” (21). This “quiet and clear assertion with which the philosopher leaves the stage” contrasts sharply in its moderation or tolerance with the religions to which the king now turns, the complete codes of the three Abrahamic monotheisms.

WHY THE JEWISH SCHOLAR OPPOSED THE PHILOSOPHERS’ RATIONAL NOMOI (“III. THE LAW OF REASON AS A THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL CODE”) How does Halevi’s Jewish scholar stand to the philosophers’ rational nomoi? He opposes them and he approves of them (22). “This ambiguity,” Strauss says, “could easily have been avoided”; it was due “to deliberate choice, to the author’s wish to indicate a grave question.” Another ambiguity. Within the space of three paragraphs Strauss chose to use ambiguous ambiguously; it designates two important and seemingly distinct ambiguities that Halevi built into his presentation of the rational nomoi. The first ambiguity

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is the Philosopher’s: a political code and an apolitical rule of conduct for the philosopher alone (20). The second ambiguity is the scholar’s: he opposes the rational nomoi and approves of them (22). Why was Strauss ambiguous on ambiguity? Reading on with both ambiguities in mind, one learns that resolving them is Strauss’s way of ordering the rest of his essay. Sections III and IV sort out the ambiguity in the scholar’s opposing and approving them: he opposes the philosophers’ religion (III) but approves the rational nomoi that are rules of conduct for the philosopher (IV); his ambiguity is simply his split judgment on the two parts of the Philosopher’s ambiguity. Section V can then open (42) by explicitly reaching back to the statement of the scholar’s ambiguity (22) to begin the argument that ends the essay: Halevi’s reason for his historic innovation, his replacing the philosophers’ political code or political theology with the revealed religion to which he returned.23 By putting the scholar’s opposition to the philosophers’ rational nomoi in section III, Strauss put it at the center of his essay, its third of five sections. And he put the particulars of that opposition at its very center, its twenty-third of forty-five paragraphs. And he put the actual indictment at the center of that center, the sixth of the eleven sentences in its central paragraph. Why would Strauss so relentlessly employ this old device of exotericism for this particular issue? The answer rises out of this central paragraph, out of the precision of its movement. Just before, in his opening paragraph (22), Strauss had noted the scholar’s ambiguity on the philosophers’ rational nomoi and isolated the single occasion on which he opposed them (1.81): it occurred before the king’s conversion to Judaism. After his conversion the scholar can adopt a positive attitude toward them. In the final sentence introducing his center, Strauss had stated the ground of this before/after “ambiguity,” and it is nothing less than the foundation of Halevi’s view of the place of reason in his world: “only on the basis of faith can allowances be made for reason, or . . . it is hazardous, if not futile, to make reason the basis of faith.” This is the view Strauss is now embracing. In the first sentence of his central paragraph (23) Strauss secures the importance of the rational nomoi for the scholar: he almost began with them, raising the topic in his second speech (Kuzari 1.13). The first sentence also characterizes the scholar’s stance: attack identifies what is attacked (“ ‘the

23. It is worth noting at the start of this long and dense process of resolving the ambiguities that Strauss speaks of “the author” in paragraph 22 and again in paragraph 42 while invoking the ambiguity of paragraph 22; in both cases it makes perfect sense to read “the author” as Halevi or as Strauss.



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religion . . . to which speculation leads’ ”) and the attacker’s view (“the right kind of religion or law”).The second sentence confirms that “speculative ‘religion’ . . . regulates both ‘actions’ and ‘beliefs,’ ” it is “the same thing as a ‘law’ or a ‘nomos.’ ” The third sentence begins a series of five that start, staccato fashion, with what “He” does: “He calls that religion ‘syllogistic’ with a view to its basis: it is based on demonstrative, rhetorical and other syllogisms”—it is partly based on merely rhetorical arguments. “He calls it ‘governmental’ with a view to its purpose,” governmental in two senses: political rule and rule by an individual’s reason over his passions. Strauss adds a footnote to “governmental” that gives the Arabic original of “governmental” and connects the religion the scholar attacks to its source, Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue Plato presented his great innovation for government in both senses: the philosopher king he placed at the very center while also introducing in that dialogue the three-part soul, reason ruling the passions with the aid of spiritedness. After the two sentences beginning “He calls” comes a “He implies” that connects what is attacked to the philosophers. The sixth and central sentence begins: “He objects.” It states first the exact reason for objecting: “He objects to [the religion of the philosophers] because it leads to doubt and anarchy.” That religion, the rational nomoi of the philosophers, aimed at certainty and order, but the scholar accuses it of causing the opposite of what they intended. The second half of the sentence gives the ostensible ground of his reason for objecting (in Kuzari 1.13): “the philosophers do not agree as to a single action or a single belief.” This cannot be true. The philosophers are a class or kind by virtue of an agreement: they alone agree to measure everything by reason alone. Still, the ground is true in one sense: it is the condemnation of philosophers that nonphilosophers commonly make. Strauss’s central sentence is beautifully odd: its judgment against the philosophers’ religion states a true reason and grounds it on a lie that is a commonly held prejudice against philosophers. The oddness is easily accounted for. Halevi’s scholar is the spokesman of an author who is a philosopher of a particular sort, an adherent of the Jewish religion. Halevi’s spokesman can make a true judgment against the philosophers’ religion while grounding it, seeming to ground it, on the untrue judgment against the philosophers that is already the prejudice of his audience, the king. Strauss’s central sentence is up to its centrality: it is a masterful miniature of the Jewish scholar’s treatment of philosophy; its genuine criticism of the philosophers’ religion is based on a common criticism of the philosophers that is merely rhetorical and can instantly be seen through by the reasoning reader. Strauss comes forward in his central

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sentence as what he became by following the advice of his great medieval teachers.24 The seventh sentence of the central paragraph is the last of the series beginning with what “He” does: “He traces that deficiency”—its leading to doubt and anarchy—“to the fact that the arguments supporting the philosophers’ assertions are only partly demonstrative”; he thus opens a space for similar arguments of his own. The eighth sentence does not begin with a “He” does, but it contains a “he refrains” within it: “It is probably with a view to this fact that he refrains from calling that religion, or nomos, rational.” Strauss’s next sentence leaves what the scholar did and says instead what his doing leads one to suspect: “that each philosopher, or at least each philosophical sect, elaborated a religion of that kind.” So what would the philosopher Halevi do? After converting to philosophy, Halevi saw good reason not to elaborate a religion of that kind but to choose an alternative that the Philosopher himself did not forbid because he “considers it perfectly legitimate that a philosopher who as such denies Divine revelation, adheres to [Judaism] for example, i.e., complies in deed and speech with the requirements of that religion” (19). Strauss then goes back to the scholar’s statements to consider what “He does not say,” and that too leads him to suspect something. The scholar did not say if the philosophers were aware of the rhetorical or sophistical character of some of their arguments. But of course the philosophers knew which arguments were demonstrative and which rhetorical: they are “the very men who have taught mankind the difference between syllogisms which are demonstrative and syllogisms which are not.” Strauss is the exemplary reader: exercising suspicion about what the scholar says and does not say, he infers what Halevi did about religion by sorting his arguments into demonstrative and sophistical. Strauss’s final sentence summarizes his paragraph and makes clear to the reader drawing inferences that the religion the philosopher Halevi defends is governmental and rules in a way that does not lead to doubt and anarchy.25 Thus does the arc of Strauss’s central paragraph brighten to a commanding centrality. Arguments both demonstrative and sophistical on behalf of the religions of the philosophers that led to doubt and anarchy herald argu24. As regards doubt, the first of the two items in the scholar’s indictment, Strauss quoted Nietzsche to indicate its positive side in his 1948 lecture to theologians: “whoever fails to know that ‘doubt is a good pillow for a well-constructed head,’ cannot be a philosopher” (Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 171–72; Nietzsche, Daybreak, aph. 46). 25. Here and in paragraph 28 Strauss says, “however this may be.” The sense seems to be “he who will understand will understand”; his own reader will do with his text what he did with Halevi’s.



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ments both demonstrative and sophistical on behalf of a revealed religion that promises to remedy those failures. The arguments persuade the king and those like him, the naturally pious, but when studied by the reader who wants to find out by independent reflection what the absent philosopher might have to say, the arguments will be seen to be worthy of a philosopher. Not meant to persuade that reader to Judaism, they persuade him of the reasonableness of Halevi’s return to the Jewish fold, an individual return instantiating the historic turn for which the philosopher Halevi argues. Halevi is not trying to persuade the reader that past philosophers were wrong. He is trying to persuade him that changed circumstances demand changes in the philosophers’ stance toward a now existing religion that claims to be the revelation of the only god. The prospective philosopher, made indifferent to which religion rules by conversion to philosophy and now being educated by Halevi, is required by his indifference to consider Halevi’s argument in favor of a religion that leads to belief and order. In his next paragraph Strauss corrects the lie against the philosophers that he dared place at the center of his essay: while seeming to nonphilosophers not to agree on a single action or belief, philosophers agree on “the most fundamental point,” the necessity and purpose of an exoteric teaching (24). Strauss arrived at his explicit discussion of exotericism by comparing the scholar’s remarks on the philosophers’ religion to the Philosopher’s own remarks. The religion of the philosophers comes to light as prescribing beliefs that “cannot be identical with the philosophic teaching proper” because they are exchangeable with any other beliefs. It can then be concluded that “the religion of the philosophers is identical with, or at least partly consists of, the exoteric teaching of the philosophers.”26 It is exoteric because some of its arguments are “dialectical or sophistical.” And its purpose is rule, “ ‘government’ of the lower by the higher, and hence in particular the guidance of political communities.” The scholar’s disapproval of the philosophers’ rational nomoi has this positive result: it shows that while the religion of the philosophers now “leads to doubt and anarchy,” it was based on the necessity of exotericism and served the purpose of rule. In the next paragraph, the central paragraph of section III (25), Strauss uses a statement by the scholar about governmental laws (Kuzari 1.35) to show the precise sense in which the rational nomoi can be called rational: they are products of practical reason, not theoretical reason. The legislator

26. In footnote 75 Strauss had already intimated this by referring to “the invariable ‘belief’ of the philosophers,” where belief already refers to what philosophers know, the necessity of an exoteric religious teaching.

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uses a “governmental religion” to strengthen “the people’s willingness to obey the purely political laws.” Such a religion “would not be rational at all from the point of view of theoretical reason”; it is “based on arguments of doubtful validity” but is rational in a practical sense “because its tenets are of evident usefulness.” Having emphasized the distinction between practical and theoretical reason, Strauss returns (26) to the scholar’s first use of the term “religious nomoi” (Kuzari 1.81) in order to compare that use with his first description of governmental nomoi (1.13). Strauss judges Kuzari 1.81 to be a “repetition” of 1.13, though “not an identical repetition.” Out of the differences he isolates two kinds of rational nomoi, “one being the work of philosophers, and the other being the work of superstitious people.” “From the point of view of Halevi [as an] adherent of . . . revealed religion,” both kinds belong to a single genus: “codes [that] are of human origin and . . . consist partly or wholly of rules regulating religious beliefs and actions” (27); they are “the work of practical reason” whether of philosophical or superstitious origin. They share a third feature: “their authors explicitly deny Divine revelation.” “And, last but not least,” the possibility exists that “the authors of some of the superstitious codes, were themselves philosophers addressing the multitude.” This is truly not least, and its possibility leads to a paragraph by Strauss devoted exclusively to philosophers other than Halevi. Strauss turns to Maimonides’s Guide (28) to settle the suspicion that philosophers wrote some of the books of the superstitious nomoi. Maimonides indicates that the author of well-known superstitious nomoi “presented his ridiculous nonsense in order to cast doubt on the Biblical miracles.” That suggests that they could have been written “by adherents of the philosophers.” Strauss voices “the suspicion that at least some of the superstitious nomoi . . . were rational, not so much from the point of view of practical reason, as from that of theoretical reason.” He brings in Avicenna to support this suspicion, literally going out of his way to force the reader to wonder if philosophers opposed revelation on the basis of theoretical reason. Did theoretical reason conclude that a religion based on divine revelation is less advantageous than a superstitious religion that divinized the heavens? If so, it would seem to belong to “the point of view of the center, clearly grasped, of the influencing teaching” (13) from which the philosopher Halevi judged revelation. Yet his Jewish scholar opposed their rational nomoi as causing doubt and anarchy and argued for a revealed religion. In section II Strauss said that “the religious indifference of the philosopher knows no limit” (19). That statement must be understood intelligently: philosophers came to recognize that religion ruled society and inwardly



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ruled the passions. While they had no religious preference whatever, their knowledge of religion’s rule led them to consider which religion would rule society and soul best and to develop their own religion or rational nomoi. In section III Strauss considered the scholar’s opposition to those rational nomoi. With its central judgment against the philosophers’ religion, its central emphasis on the judgments of practical reason, and its ending judgment that theoretical reason may have judged a religion based on revelation less advantageous, section III heightens the complexity of Halevi’s reasons for adopting the theological-political code he adopted by returning to the Jewish fold. Section IV considers the other side of the scholar’s ambiguity and finds out the rational nomoi he affirmed. Only then can section V complete—and endorse—Halevi’s argument for returning to a religion based on revelation despite the pause theoretical reason causes.

WHAT THE JEWISH SCHOLAR APPROVED IN THE PHILOSOPHERS’ RATIONAL NOMOI (“IV. THE LAW OF REASON AS THE FRAMEWORK OF EVERY CODE”) There is an intricate plan or movement to section IV as Strauss takes up that prong of the scholar’s ambiguity that approves the philosophers’ rational nomoi. The movement would be almost thrilling were it not so very dense, for it is a hunt pursuing exegetically what Halevi scattered for his reader to find out, the core of the philosopher’s relation to social or political life. To begin, Strauss locates those approvals, finding the first two (Kuzari 2.48 and 3.7) in a critique of asceticism that is the central part of the scholar’s critique of the philosophic life as “essentially asocial” (29). Making use of his extreme case, “a community of robbers,” Strauss defines his quarry in the hunt: “the sum of rules which describe the indispensable minimum of morality required for the preservation of any society” (30). Putting the scholar’s first and second approving mentions together, he is “led to think that the rational nomoi of which the scholar approves are but the framework of any code, and not a code.” Turning to the first approving mention (31), Strauss lists some features that do not surprise him. But, as a reader who can be surprised, a reader with expectations, he is surprised that the scholar seems to include duties toward God among the “minimum obligations which even the smallest and lowest society” must perform; this is a “difficulty” with “the content of the Law of Reason as the framework of any code.” He is also surprised that the scholar seems to approve of what he earlier disapproved of, the rational nomoi advocated by the philosopher; this is a “difficulty” with “the apparently close relation

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between that framework of any code and the complete code elaborated by the philosophers.”27 “Do duties toward God belong to the moral minimum required of any society however low?” Framing the content difficulty this way (32), Strauss examines the scholar’s first approving mention (Kuzari 2.48) and finds an “illuminating order.”: It shrinks the moral minimum from three items, to two, to one: justice. “When speaking explicitly of the community of robbers, he mentions the obligation to justice only, while when speaking of the smallest and lowest community, he mentions justice, goodness, and recognition of God’s grace”—so Halevi separated the community of robbers from the smallest and lowest community and made justice alone obligatory for it. The second mention (Kuzari 3.7) lists no duties toward God among the governmental actions and rational nomoi “as distinguished from the ‘Divine (nomoi or actions).’ ” A third statement on laws (Kuzari 3.11) distinguishes “between Divine laws, governmental laws and psychic laws” while not mentioning “any duties toward God among the governmental laws, whereas the Divine and the psychic laws are concerned exclusively with such duties.” The “crucial question” about duties toward God opened by the first approving mention is not answered by these other two passages. Yet Halevi must have answered a question he aimed to raise in a reader. How did he answer it? “Under the circumstances one can hardly do more than to discuss the alternatives,” says Strauss to open his next paragraph (33), but he does more, he takes a two-paragraph pause before discussing the alternatives. Those paragraphs show that discussing the alternatives “is not quite easy, since the scholar’s statements are of a strange elusiveness.” The scholar was elusive on two questions. Does religion belong to the moral minimum of any society, the iura naturalia? And can that minimum be called rational? The two questions generate two possibilities. First: “that religion is not essential to society as such is closely linked in his argument with the thesis that the iura naturalia are not rational.” Second: “vice versa.” Strauss forces the reader to word the second alternative: that religion is essential to society is linked with the iura naturalia being rational. Strauss ends: “The connection between the two questions is as close as that between religion as such and morality as such.” Religion and morality are linked: If God is affirmed moral laws are rational; if not, not. Strauss leaves it at that. But at the end of this section (39–41) Strauss returns to this pivotal little paragraph and gives his own words for that lovely little vice versa, words that allow him 27. Paragraph 20 had stated that the rational nomoi that the Philosopher had in mind are a complete code identical with the religion of the philosophers.



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to speak his final words on religion and morality at the very end (45). This aspect of his hunt for the moral minimum—does it include duties toward God? can it be called rational?—rises to decisive importance for the theme of the essay, the philosopher’s relation to social order, because the philosophers’ linked answers go to the heart of social order. So the scholar’s elusiveness is not strange after all: he’s embarrassed and his “embarrassment can easily be accounted for” (34). It is Halevi’s embarrassment: “To deny that religion is essential to society, is difficult for a man of Halevi’s piety.” And not only for him: it’s difficult, “we venture to add, for anyone who puts any trust in the accumulated experience of the human race”—Strauss interjects himself to urge that there are good grounds for sharing Halevi’s embarrassment. Asserting that religion is essential to society means “ascribing some value even to the most abominable idolatrous religion,” and Strauss uses the scholar’s example: “for the proverbial gang of robbers, or the lowest and smallest community, cannot be supposed to adhere to the one true religion or to any of its imitations.” But this changes the scholar’s example: it makes his community of robbers the proverbial gang of robbers, and it identifies the gang with the lowest and smallest community whereas the scholar separated his community from the lowest and smallest (32)—the key lesson on a philosopher’s relation to society lies sequestered in these changes. Strauss continues: “From his point of view, it is, I believe . . .” This is Strauss’s only I believe in his essay, his only credo, and it occurs after he said he shares Halevi’s difficulty.28 Of what exactly does Strauss say I believe? That “[f]rom his point of view it is . . . impossible to decide the question as to whether the denial, not accompanied by the assertion of the existence of any other deity, of the existence, say, of Moloch is better or worse than living faith in Moloch.” Halevi’s point of view is that of a philosopher returned to the Jewish fold, and for Jews Moloch is an abomination, the god of the enemy Ammonites who occupy the land their Yahweh promised them. Halevi is embarrassed for one reason only: “the fact that he raises at all the philosophic question of the basis of any and every society.” Halevi’s embarrassment is that of a philosopher who recognizes the indispensability of religion while being an adherent of the Jewish religion. His piety dictates that he say that believing in no God is better than believing in the abomination of the Ammonites; his knowledge informs him that Moloch’s relation to the Ammonites is like Yahweh’s to the Jews. And Strauss’s credo? To say, “it is, I believe, impossible to decide,” is 28. Strauss called attention to the “credo” with which both the Christian and the Jew open their expositions (17).

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to adopt Halevi’s point of view. I stand, Strauss professes, where my great medieval teacher stood. I embrace embarrassment. I’m embarrassed to have to talk about it.29 The two-paragraph pause on elusiveness prepares the central paragraph of this section (35), Strauss’s report, ineluctably elusive, on just how to hunt down Halevi’s answer on the moral minimum of any society. Strauss offers the clue the scholar offered by his scattered answer to the question raised by the scholar’s first approving statement on the rational nomoi: “Do duties toward God belong to the moral minimum required of any society however low?” (32). The scholar’s last two approving statements answer that question. The basic term in the terminological jungle is “governmental laws.”30 “The governmental laws by themselves seem to be the indispensable moral minimum of any government, or the evidently necessary and sufficient, and the always identical, framework of both the many manmade codes and the one Divine code” (35). To learn what they are, “one has to overcome [a] difficulty” that Halevi arranged in his second and third statements on laws: each offers lists that mix the governmental laws with other laws, the rational nomoi in the second (Kuzari 3.7), revealed laws and psychic laws in the third (3.11). Strauss finds a final hint: the fact that the third statement distinguishes governmental laws and psychic laws “leads one to suspect a corresponding, although by no means identical, distinction between governmental laws and rational nomoi” in the second. Now it’s easy. Strauss repeats the verb he used earlier when describing Halevi’s reason for omitting the conversation between the scholar and the philosopher: that omission compelled his reader “to find out, by independent reflection, what the absent philosopher might have to say” (12). “To find out” (35) the governmental laws that are the moral minimum, “compare the second and the third statement”; those laws appearing in both lists are, “without

29. Embarrassment rings not quite right to describe the unavoidably awkward position of a philosopher who is an adherent of a revealed religion. Strauss is evidently searching for the right English vocabulary to describe the awkwardness of necessarily refraining from stating the deadly truth while under the necessity to indicate it. Still, embarrassment is an improvement over related wording Strauss chose in 1939 to describe Xenophon’s and Plato’s awkward situation: “teaching the truth according to the rule of bashfulness,” “most bashful speeches about the most bashful of men” (“Spirit of Sparta,” 530). Strauss names Halevi twice in this paragraph on the awkwardness of raising the philosophical question of religion within the Jewish fold. He will not name Halevi again until the final sentences of the final paragraph. The absence of “Halevi” seems to serve the purpose of enabling Strauss to refer with some ambiguity to “the scholar” and to “the author” with the intent of implying his own participatory assent as scholar and author. 30. Strauss used iura naturalia as a synonym of the “governmental laws,” the moral minimum, in paragraph 33.



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any doubt,” the laws in question, the framework of every code. Strauss found out how Halevi hid in full sight the moral minimum of any society whatever. It’s no trick now to find the items on both lists (36), but the hunter instructs by complicating things, singling out first two items appearing on one list only. The duty to train one’s soul by fasting and humility is on one list only: “this is not surprising, since it is fairly absurd to imagine a gang of robbers training their souls by fasting and humility in order to guarantee the preservation of their gang.” The prohibition on murder is on one list only: “this again is easily understandable considering that the Bible prohibits murder absolutely, whereas a gang of robbers, e.g. would merely have to prohibit the murder of other members of the gang.” These two nonexamples, confirmed as nonexamples by the test case of the gang of robbers, lead to the first item on both lists: “This explains also why he mentions in both enumerations the prohibition against deceit or lying; for the Bible itself speaks on the occasion of that prohibition merely of the neighbor.” No robbers. Why not? The question must be asked because the gang returns for the second item on both lists, a duty to honor parents. No gang is mentioned regarding the first law of the moral minimum in order to have the reader think of their absence, to find out why they’re absent only for the prohibition on lying. As for honoring parents, Strauss must work to make it fit the gang: Ibn Tibbon’s translation makes it honoring fathers, and Strauss understands them as advisers or teachers: “accordingly, [the scholar] would signify that even a gang of robbers cannot last if they do not respect those of their fellows who are their intellectual superiors.” A gang of robbers must observe the first as well: not deceiving one another, they deceive their neighbors in order to last. By reverting to a gang of robbers (cf. 20) and making them the smallest and lowest, Strauss forces his reader to recall that the scholar spoke of a community of robbers (30) and distinguished it from the smallest and lowest (32). Strauss is not careless on a grave question: these shifts are his intentional surprises inviting interpretation in the light of the topic of his essay, what a philosopher is in relation to social or political life. The community of robbers then is “the most noble community” (cf. 20). Halevi and Strauss redeploy a famous original from Plato’s Republic that they refuse to mention; they honor the greatest of their intellectually superior fathers by using an image Socrates used in his argument with Thrasymachus through which he aimed to establish community with an apparent rival. The community of robbers is the community of philosophers; they rob from social life only those like themselves, readers who can think independently and find

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out the arguments of the absent philosopher in Halevi’s dialogue—and Strauss’s commentary.31 Is a community of philosophers odd, genuine philosophers being solitaries whose way of life is asocial (29)? No, they are a community across time, and while their individual surviving depends upon deceit, their lasting as a community depends upon a prohibition on deceiving one another, upon truthfully supplying their reasoning to one another, as Halevi did in his dialogue, making the truth accessible to the reader he surprises and turns into a hunter. Halevi is a model community-member; obliged by justice to his own kind and that alone, he addresses them out of his implications and silences while addressing his defense of Judaism “to naturally pious people only” (15). But when it becomes apparent that the most noble community is a community of philosophers, a whole series of “I mean to say’s” is needed because the language of morality, a language of obedience, does not fit the community of questioners. Instead, the two items of its “moral” minimum must be construed not as obligatory or prescriptive but as descriptive; they state what its members do, not obediently, but out of the wellspring of eros that drives them, love that to say the least includes self-love. The doing and speaking of each honors the fathers out of erotic gratitude, and each takes care not to deceive the potential “puppies of his race, by whom he wants to be loved in turn” (PAW, 36). The true history of philosophy is the story of a community of lovers stretched across time. The purpose of their exotericism is to preserve their community across time and to enlarge it one fit reader at a time. Strauss’s treatment of his community looks back in honor to his intellectual superiors and looks forward expectantly, lovingly, to the reader of his kind. With this 1943 essay Strauss takes up membership in the community of robbers. Strauss’s hunt succeeds; the “governmental laws cannot be called, in the last analysis, rational laws” (37). But can it be that the framework of every code including that of the community of the most rational is not rational? It is not a set of universally valid conclusions of theoretical reason; it is the conclusion of practical reason, which is “in a sense more rational,” for it is

31. Socrates’s argument led Thrasymachus to treat him more justly as one who shares an enterprise with him: think of us, Socrates tacitly advised Thrasymachus, as a community of robbers aiming to steal young men from the way of their fathers; our strength—you who hold that justice is the interest of the stronger party—depends on treating one another justly (Republic 351a–352d). Socrates made a similar argument for community with Protagoras: his fable of Spartan philosophy turns thinkers into family members with responsibilities toward kin (Protagoras 342a–343b); his exegesis of Simonides’s ode gives him permission to blame a kinsman, rash Protagoras, for putting the whole family at risk because his new form of exotericism is inadequate (343b–347a).



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dictated by expediency and solves “justly a problem which exists in a given country at a given time.” Strauss can then state the formal characteristics of the governmental laws (38). No duties toward God; they delimit the essential elements of any “Binnenmoral”; they cannot be called rational.32 The suc­cessful hunt of section IV answers the question with which the essay set out: yes, Halevi held “the philosophic view” (3); he “denied the rational character of the Natural Law.” He “apparently contradicted” that view but only apparently and for reasons of expediency, a philosopher’s reasons, practical reason’s reasons, the reasons of a member of the community of robbers raised by chance as a Jew in the twelfth century and learning what his time required of him. Strauss immediately smudges things. He argues as if the scholar cannot have accepted the view he disentangled, “although it is one alternative interpretation of his statements” (38), one of two alternatives on the connection between religion and morality (33). The scholar, Strauss says, “virtually rejects” (38) one of the reasons Strauss gave in the previous paragraph for saying that the rational nomoi as the philosophers’ moral minimum “cannot be called, in the last analysis, rational laws” (37). That virtually rejected reason made them the product of practical reason; by virtually rejecting that reason the scholar indicated “a new difficulty,” which Strauss takes up in paragraph 39. The scholar’s “central statement” (Kuzari 3.7) made it clear that “the outline” of the philosophers’ moral minimum “cannot be filled in adequately but by God alone”; “even a merely governmental code, if it is to be good for the community, must be the work of revelation.” Strauss finds himself “driven” to that conclusion, calling it the scholar’s “ultimate answer” (40). Strauss follows the scholar; he rehides the alternative that the most noble community can preserve itself by prohibiting deceit and honoring “fathers” with no duties toward God and a Binnenmoral that cannot be called rational. The scholar and Strauss add an Außenmoral to assert that not just religion but revelation is necessary and rational. Strauss seems to let go of the alternative he so painstakingly disentangled, but it stands firm as reason’s alternative, inviolable if shy, behind its Außenpolitik. Strauss winds up the hunt with instructions on how to find the “way back” from the “ultimate answer” to the true alternative (40): recall the connections of the two “alternatives” (33). He “recalls” the alternative he left as “vice versa,” giving it words only after assigning its components a tell-all

32. Strauss took over Binnenmoral from Max Weber, who used it to denote a morality internal to a particular group, a nonuniversal morality by definition, group loyalty that explicitly took priority over the Außenmoral or Außenpolitik prescribing behavior toward outsiders.

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label: assertions. First the scholar accepts the assertion “that the iura naturalia are rational” (that means to say, by practical reason), then he accepts the assertion “that religion belongs to these iura naturalia” (that means to say, for all societies but the community of philosophers). He accepts the second “with some hesitation.” Why hesitate? To hesitate on religion is to hesitate on that one of the assertions that ultimately led the converted Halevi back to the Jewish fold. He hesitated, he tarried over the philosophers’ answer, their rational nomoi, before making his grave decision to break with their complete codes, their political theologies, and instead return to a complete code that theoretical reason judges less advantageous for philosophy. He hesitated, he weighed the wisdom of a new way to live the philosophers’ Binnenmoral of honor to the intellectually superior father-founders. It takes time—and not the now so beautifully comic hoped-for “very short time” (13)—to conclude that a break with one’s intellectually superior fathers is wise.33 Knowing his way back from the scholar’s ultimate answer to his true answer, Strauss ends section IV repeating that move himself: “We shall then say that” prohibiting deceit and honoring the teachers do not exhaust what he earlier said were “without any doubt” (35) the only governmental laws; we shall say instead that “according to him, the rational iura naturalia . . . include what may be called the demands of natural piety as well.” Strauss has found out why the scholar had an apparently “selfcontradictory” attitude toward the philosophers’ rational nomoi (22). The “ambiguity” of both opposing and approving of the rational nomoi allowed the scholar to indicate that “only on the basis of faith can allowances be made for reason.” Having his scholar approve the rational nomoi in an elusive way allowed Halevi to show how a philosopher is different and what his proper relation to social or political life is. Halevi indicated to a reader like Strauss what the moral minimum is for the community to which he finds himself drawn by reason, while also showing him that every society except his has a moral minimum less minimal than his. By repeating the scholar’s move at the end of section IV, Strauss accepts membership in Halevi’s community on Halevi’s terms; by writing “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” as he did, Strauss honors the prohibition on deceit and the wisdom of fathers, and by adding section V he shows that he accepts Halevi’s reason for innovating in political theology.

33. At a similar historic turning point in Plato’s Republic (450d) Socrates prostrates himself before Adrasteia, dread Necessity, not knowing, not being able to know, whether the historic step he is about to take can truly be, as he thinks it is, for the best (see my How Philosophy Became Socratic, 310–11).



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STRAUSS’S EMBRACE OF HALEVI’S REASON FOR INNOVATION (“V. THE LAW OF REASON AND THE NATURAL LAW”) Strauss opens section V repeating the opening of section III. The intervening sections III and IV have proven instructive about the two ambiguities Strauss introduced, for the scholar’s ambiguity of opposing and approving the philosophers’ rational nomoi (22) turned out to be a match for the Philosopher’s ambiguity of complete codes and the framework of all codes (20): the scholar opposed the rational nomoi of the philosophers’ complete politicaltheological codes, and he approved the rational nomoi as the framework of every code. Keeping the scholar’s ambiguity separate from the Philosopher’s ambiguity throughout sections III and IV allowed Strauss to show the reader learning from the scholar’s opposition to the complete codes of the philosophers that to make reason the basis of faith causes doubt and anarchy in a time of revelation. As for the framework of every code, the reader learns first to isolate the moral minimum of the unique community of philosophers and then to add to their minimum the larger minimum of all other socie­ ties: their need for religion, which now appears as the need for revelation, which requires calling the natural law rational. The difference between the moral minima of the philosopher hermit and those of his environing society teaches the reader the philosophers’ need for exoteric speech. What remains? To show Halevi’s reasonable ground for adopting a new Außenpolitik that replaces the philosophers’ complete codes with revelation. Looking back at the philosophers’ historic practice, Strauss notes that the particular application of the general rules of their Außenpolitik “depends considerably on the character of the society in which the individual philosopher happens to live” (43).34 In a society like Halevi’s that was hostile to philosophy and from which no emigration was practical, a philosopher would “for the time being . . . adapt his conduct, as far as necessary, to the requirements of that society.” Because “contemplation requires withdrawal from society,” “the sum of rules of conduct” for the philosopher would be the rules “of the philosophizing hermit” (cf. 20).35 An internal emigrant, his 34. For simplicity’s sake, I omit the last twist section V gave to “the Law of Reason”: Strauss identified its “core” with the sum of rules for the philosopher’s conduct; he treated its Außenpolitik as part of its Binnenmoral. Clarity in reading section V depends on keeping this expanded core of “the Law of Reason” in mind. 35. The rules of social conduct for the philosophic hermit were set out by Nietzsche in a way that preserves the hermitage without bowing to the old religion (Gay Science aphs. 364–65; see my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 390–92).

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model is sociable Socrates who refused to leave Athens. Strauss can then finally say “what a philosopher is,” or “the relation of philosophy to social life” (1). “While philosophy presupposes social life . . . the philosopher has no attachment to society: his soul is elsewhere” (44). He observes the rules of his society merely as a means toward his end of “contemplation” (which means to say inquiry); for him alone these basic laws “are rules of ‘prudence’ rather than rules of morality proper.” In contrast to these solitaries stands “the truly good or pious man . . . ‘the guardian of his city,’ φύλαξ πόλεως.”36 The absolute rules governing the good or pious man, the philosopher observes as “non-categoric”; he can thus “adhere in his deeds and speeches to a religion to which he does not adhere in his thoughts; it is this view, I say, which is underlying the exotericism of the philosophers.” Separating the good man and the wise man and making that the basis of exotericism, Strauss can end on the wisdom of Halevi’s argument for revelation. Strauss begins his final paragraph by saying that the scholar accepts “the philosophers’ view of the Natural Law” as far as tacitly asserting its nonobligatory character for the philosopher (45, cf. 4). But by going that far with the philosophers, he discovered “the fundamental weakness of the philosophic position”—not of philosophy—“and the deepest reason why philosophy is so enormously dangerous.” The reason is that the philosophers are right: “morality not based on Divine revelation, natural morality is, strictly speaking, no morality at all.” The philosophers judge natural morality “hardly distinguishable from the morality essential to the preservation of a gang of robbers.”37 “Natural morality being what it is, only a law revealed by the omnipotent and omniscient God and sanctioned by the omniscient and omnipotent God can make possible genuine morality, ‘categoric imperatives.’ ” This is Halevi’s argument for his break with the philosophers’ rational nomoi: revelation’s God strengthens people’s willingness to obey purely political laws (25) by raising the stakes infinitely. Therefore: Return to the Jewish fold, its God demands it, morally speaking: “only revelation can transform natural man into ‘the guardian of his city,’ or, to use the language of the Bible, the guardian of his brother.” Plato buttressed his guardians’ morality with a noble lie; Halevi goes him One better, transforming natural men into guardians of the brothers

36. Strauss’s Greek goes back to Plato’s Republic (414a–b); these words fall just before the noble lie necessary for securing the goodness and piety of the guardians of the city that will become the city ruled by the philosopher. 37. In footnote 141 Strauss had just used “community of robbers” to note that the philosophers spoke of certain rules as obligatory in order to make them more effective.



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through the lie of an all-seeing, all-powerful Rewarder and Avenger. Halevi opposes the philosophers’ rational nomoi, Plato’s Laws for example (27), with Plato’s tacit permission. For Plato initiated the dangerous game of philosophers advancing the moral lying of poets in order to transform natural humans into believers fired with hope and fear. Plato prepared revelation’s way: in his Republic he buttressed the noble lie by having Socrates seem to argue that the whole is ruled by a unitary Good and by having him end with an argument for all-seeing moral gods who, the story goes, reward and punish in the next life. A student of Plato advances the game: his innovation moves philosophy, if with some hesitation, from Athens to Jerusalem to make use of the transformative power of its more generous and more ferocious enforcer of morality. Tacitly arguing that Plato’s city in speech had, in a way, with God, become actual, Halevi returns to the Jewish fold like a Socrates going down to a cave already constituted by the rule of the strongest imaginable enforcer.38 Revelation’s appeal is broad: one does not have to be “naturally pious,” as Halevi’s king was, one has to have only “a passionate interest in genuine morality in order to long with all [one’s] heart for revelation: moral man as such is the potential believer”—the God of revelation is an easy sell. Now, after being unnamed since the paragraph Strauss will recall (33), Halevi can return. Halevi found permission for his innovation in the philosophers themselves. He found “a sign for the necessity of the connection between morality and revelation” in the closely linked double denial of the philosophers: denial of “the Divine lawgiver” and denial of “the obligatory character of what we would call the moral law.” Their double denial is a sign for the necessity, practical necessity, of the unworded vice versa (33), double assertion of a divine lawgiver issuing categoric imperatives that can be called rational. Strauss thus ends by completing the argument of his last three sections, following as Halevi, raised obedient to a moral law in a non-Greek tradition with an Absolute Lawgiver, provides philosophy with a new habitat. “In defending Judaism . . . against the philosophers, [Halevi] was conscious of defending morality itself and therewith the cause, not only of Judaism, but of mankind at large.” Judaism’s champion rises as morality’s champion for all mankind, a philosopher making the assertions of a believer in a place and time already ruled by revelation and its absolute enforcer of a moral law. But Halevi’s assertions require that he—and

38. Plato’s theological politics in the Republic is prepared by Charmides, where Socrates alludes to Herodotus’s story of the god Zalmoxis to suggest the moral power of monotheism (see my How Philosophy Became Socratic).

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Strauss—act as if a philosopher could have an objection to philosophy from somewhere transcendent to philosophy: “His basic objection to philosophy was then not particularly Jewish, nor even particularly religious, but moral.” Halevi’s moral objection to philosophy is a philosopher’s prudential judgment that philosophy in the age of revelation is well advised to abandon the philosophers’ rational nomoi and go underground, pulling over itself a living religion that theoretical reason knows to be less advantageous to philosophy than a religion that divinized the heavens. Halevi’s moral objection to philosophy thus serves a practical purpose transcendent to morality that Halevi must have judged the chief reason for the enormous danger of philosophy: philosophy endangered itself if it gave the moral an objection to philosophy, for the moral—always more powerful—could and would call in the All-Powerful and his limitless imperatives. The reasoning is simple, basic, and everywhere repeated in Strauss: Philosophy and Revelation are adversaries. Philosophy is a dangerous adversary for revelation because it can discover the truth. But philosophy understands revelation’s superior means of enforcing what every social order needs. It is wise for philosophy, always parasitic on the wider society in which it finds itself, to submerge itself in the morally superior religion that already rules its devotees. Philosophy, alert to the doubt and anarchy it can cause, chooses to apparently yield the field to the morally powerful, keeping for itself the inner freedom that is all it needs, yet offering path markers to itself that are hardly noticeable. The converted philosopher returns to his native fold, offering it arguments for its health and preservation that hide arguments for the health and preservation of his true community. Halevi’s defense of Judaism against philosophy is guided by the interests of philosophy.39 Having intimated Halevi’s ruling reason for returning to the Jewish fold, Strauss issues a restraining order. His penultimate sentence notes Halevi’s “remarkable restraint” and gives its reason: his “not being a fanatic.” Ruled by his mind and not by a longing heart, “he did not wish to supply the unscrupulous and the fanatic with weapons which they certainly would have misused.” The fanatic would have misused the weapon of capital punishment on the author, or at least the weapon of burning his books to kill

39. Strauss placed in the introduction of the book within which “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” would permanently reside a simple statement assigning the moral argument that ends “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” its secondary rank: the philosophers “defended the interests of philosophy and of nothing else. In doing this, they believed indeed that they were defending the highest interests of mankind” (PAW, 18).



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his influence: restraint is no surprise in the face of such persecutors. And the unscrupulous? They must be those who would not scruple at betraying Halevi’s secrets if they could find them out. The restraint with which Halevi wrote kept those without scruples from ever learning his secrets while training in the necessary scruples those capable of learning them.40 Strauss’s final sentence brings “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” to a close on the recovered if scrupulously sheltered Halevi. “But this restraint cannot deceive the reader”—practicing out of love that prohibition on deceit in the moral minimum he truly held, Halevi deceives all but “the reader,” that singular who singles himself out of the plural named in the essay’s first words, “Every student of the history of philosophy,” by reading alone. Reading alone alerts that reader to Halevi’s surprising omissions and ambiguities, allowing him to find out “the singleness of his primary and ultimate purpose.” What seems to every student of the history of philosophy to be assimilation to the God of Abraham is, the reader learns, assimilation to the God of Aristotle: Halevi’s primary and ultimate purpose is to understand. Strauss learned how to explode the bomb he held in his fist: write in a manner that controls its explosion, confining it to the mind of the reader who can bear it. In 1943 Leo Strauss came forward as the reader who recovered the genuine Halevi and as a writer who embraced Halevi’s restraint for Halevi’s reason, the well-being of philosophy.

EXPOSING EXOTERICISM The unscrupulous. Strauss must mention them in part to appeal for restraint in his reader, an appeal that caps his practice in this essay of making it hard to recover what he recovered. But he made it easier than Halevi did. And he republished his essay in Persecution and the Art of Writing, a book that invites readers with a variety of scruples to observe the fascinating practices of past philosophers while teaching them to disentangle ambiguities on their own. Publishing it there let his recovered Halevi loose in a modern academy built on scruples unfriendly to secrecy. But more important than the conventions of modern academics is the judgment philosophers make on the spiritual situation of their present. “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” is guarded about “what a philosopher is,” but in a 1956 unpublished lecture Strauss said this: “It is certainly not an overstatement to say that

40. In his 1941 “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Strauss gave two axioms that showed just why the security of a writer like Halevi can be guaranteed (PAW, 25–26).

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no one has ever spoken so greatly and so nobly of what a philosopher is as Nietzsche.”41 Nietzsche spoke openly of what a philosopher is because he judged the spiritual situation of the present to be different from what Strauss judged. Nietzsche’s judgment too came after some hesitation: after five books written under the conviction he shared with philosophy’s dominant tradition that truth was deadly to society, he came to judge that the modern advancement of science definitively altered philosophy’s setting. Truths once judged deadly were now irremediably public, and, as Halevi saw, philosophy’s strategy had to change to accord with a changed setting. The purpose of my book—showing the enduring importance of Leo Strauss—includes arguing that Nietzsche read the spiritual situation of the present more accurately than Strauss did. After Nietzsche, because of Nietzsche, different scruples apply to those aiming to recover the true history of philosophy. Nietzsche spoke so greatly and so nobly—and so openly—of what a philosopher is in order to have philosophy assume its rightful role in advancing the modern enlightenment and its experiment of founding society on the truth. Adopting Nietzsche’s perspective as far as I am able, I will scrupulously expose Strauss’s somewhat veiled or exoteric arguments as openly as I can.

41. Strauss, “Existentialism,” 315.

part two

The Socratic Enlightenment

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he 1938–39 discoveries in Greek exotericism reported in the letters to Klein blossomed over time into Strauss’s most important, most enduring work as he recovered for contemporary readers the wisdom of the Greeks that reached its peak in the great Socratics. True to the sentiment that made Xenophon his Liebling, Strauss singlehandedly recovered that great Socratic thinker from the neglect and ridicule of modern misunderstanding. Insight into the implications Xenophon wove into the conventional homilies of his texts contributed powerfully to Strauss’s understanding of the extent and purpose of exotericism. More than that, Xenophon’s artfulness helped shape Strauss’s own chosen way of providing his reader access to the radicality of philosophy; Strauss’s exotericism is in part an embrace of Xenophontic writing. In part 2 I consider the peak of Strauss’s great achievement in understanding and presenting Xenophon, because there, at that peak, Strauss shows the essential Socratic gain in philosophy and political philosophy. After two chapters dealing with Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, I move to Strauss’s most important essay on what he always recognized as the supreme attainment of ancient philosophy, Plato’s dialogues. I end this part on ancient thought with Seth Benardete, a thinker set in motion by Strauss who confirms the suspicion Strauss expressed in his letters to Klein: it all started with Homer.

chapter three

The Peculiarly Socratic Philosophizing: Xenophon’s Gynaikologia

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eaders drawn to Leo Strauss have good reason to pay close attention to two books that by themselves might seem to have little to recommend them, as distant as they seem from the customary issues of intellectual life today (they are commentaries on Xenophon), and as superficial as they at first seem (they appear more like mere paraphrase than anything else Strauss wrote). But Strauss said in a letter to Gershom Scholem a year before he died that “my two books on Xenophon’s Socrates . . . are not the last thing I have written, but I believe they are the best” (GS, 3:764–65). Within his best two books, in his preface to the second, Xenophon’s Socrates, Strauss singled out the first, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, as the more important: he wrote and published his interpretation of the Oeconomicus first, he said, “because that work is, it seems to me, the most revealing and at the same time the most misunderstood of Xenophon’s Socratic writings” (XS, preface). Strauss first wrote on Xenophon in the midst of his discoveries in exoteric writing, publishing his first essay on an ancient author on Xenophon in 1939, “The Spirit of Sparta and the Taste of Xenophon.” In 1948 he published a commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero that provided extremely detailed indications of Xenophon’s artfulness in a long text on a short dialogue and in 359 footnotes appended to the text, many extremely rich. At the end of the introduction to that path-breaking book Strauss said, having just noted that he had not dotted all the i’s, that “[o]ne can only hope that the time will again come when Xenophon’s art will be understood by a generation which, properly trained in their youth, will no longer need cumbersome introductions like the present study.” There is every reason to think that . An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Armada and Gornisiewicz, Modernity and What Has Been Lost, 147–71.

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Strauss wrote for that hoped-for time when, more than twenty years later, he composed his two books on Xenophon’s Socrates in the least cumbersome manner. And it is wholly fitting that the last essay Strauss wrote, completed a month before his death, treated “Xenophon’s Anabasis.” Xenophon seems to have been Strauss’s exemplary teacher, instructing him on philosophy and political philosophy from the beginning of his recovery of Greek exotericism to the end of his life. It is then a fitting act of gratitude that Strauss singlehandedly recover for contemporary readers the classic whose success in clothing himself as an idiot led a century and a half of modern scholarship to take him to be one. Xenophon narrates his Oeconomicus after uttering a single sentence of his own, its first: “I once heard him discourse on the management of the household as well, in about these words.” After that he relates only the words of Socrates or Kritoboulos except for “Socrates said,” “Kritoboulos said,” and the like. Xenophon’s sole sentence implies his presence in the audience for the conversation he narrates. As for his own audience, initially it is anyone who can read, but it narrows to those who can stay interested in a book so many have judged tedious and trite; ultimately it narrows to the fewest, who come to see that it has hidden marvels addressed just to them. Strauss too mastered this art of audience selection in his best books; they are masterpieces of the art of appearing less great than they are. Within the conversation that Xenophon narrates between Socrates and Kritoboulos on gentlemanship, he has Socrates narrate a conversation he held at an earlier time with Ischomachos after asking Kritoboulos if he wanted to hear “from the beginning how I once came together with a man who seemed to me really to be one of those men to whom the name of gentleman is justly applied” (6.12). Socrates’s narration of that conversation occupies the second two-thirds of the Oeconomicus (chapters 7–21). Strauss supplied his own title, Gynaikologia, to the first four chapters of Socrates’s narration, adding to each a number, a subtitle, and the number of the corresponding chapter in the Oeconomicus: Gynaikologia—I: Marriage according to the gods and according to the law (Chapter VII); Gynaikologia—II: Order, I (Chapter VIII); Gynaikologia—III: Order, II (Chapter IX); Gynaikologia—IV: Cosmetics (Chapter X)

Strauss’s book, like Xenophon’s, has twenty-one chapters. Strauss’s chapter headings prominently display Xenophon’s chapter numbers but leave his



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own unnumbered. Strauss gave a reason for saying that the Oeconomicus was Xenophon’s most revealing work: “in its central chapter Socrates is directly contrasted with a perfect gentleman” (XS, preface). In his own book Strauss moved Xenophon’s central chapter, its eleventh, slightly off center, making Xenophon’s central chapter follow his own central chapter, his eleventh, the final chapter of his Gynaikologia. Study of Strauss’s Gynaiko­ logia confirms what was already visible in his 1943 “Law of Reason in the Kuzari”: Strauss lavished special care on centers—of individual chapters, of the Gynaikologia, and of his whole book. These centers show that Strauss mastered a technique he had long appreciated in classical authors, the literary art of centering, a silent way of highlighting what matters most. It is a laconic art of so controlling the flow and pace of an argument that it attains its greatest insights at peak, central moments, pausing at the peak to gather and share what the flowing commentary has made almost available. There is grandeur in this art of centering that is anything but mechanical; it depends as much on the willingness of the reader to grant his author the role of instructor as on the grace of the author to give his reader access to what he has learned. The density and precision of these moments at the center are, it seems to me, the best measure and most pleasing reward of Strauss’s philanthropy, his chosen way of giving what he has been granted.

GYNAIKOLOGIA—I: MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO THE GODS AND ACCORDING TO THE LAW Strauss prepares to discuss Socrates’s narration of his conversation with Ischomachos by saying that it brings “to light and life a unique event of his past,” his once and for all “discovery of what perfect gentlemanship is.” Strauss’s Gynaikologia treats the first four chapters of Socrates’s narration of that unique event, which, it turns out, occurred at a much earlier time than his conversation with Kritoboulos and was not merely one unique event among many other unique events in Socrates’s past but the singular event of unique importance because it changed the history of philosophy forever: Socrates’s turn. The first subject of the first chapter of the Gynaikologia is Ischomachos’s education of his wife, his “management” of her. The first stages of

. XSD, 129. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. Strauss explained the phrase perfect gentleman as “the ordinary English translation of a Greek expression which more literally translated means ‘a man who is noble [beautiful, fair, fine] and good’ ” (128; the bracketed words are Strauss’s).

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this education strongly excited Socrates’s curiosity: “on no other occasion does Socrates in the Oeconomicus express his eagerness to learn in such strong terms” (132). His eagerness is easily accounted for by the topics Ischomachos raised in his first lecture to his young wife, topics assembled and summarized by Strauss in the brief central paragraph of his first chapter. There, he notes that Ischomachos urged his wife “to do as well as she can what the gods enabled her to do by bringing her forth, and what in addition the law praises” (135). Strauss looks first to law, noting that “Ischomachos does not ascribe divine origin to the law” and that the law “he has in mind is an unwritten law” whose origins are obscure except for the fact that the origin is not divine. Then he speaks of nature, referring back to Ischomachos’s word for the gods’ “bringing forth” (ephusan, from phusis, nature) his wife: “What the gods have generated, what owes its being to the gods, is ‘nature’ as distinguished in particular from law.” Here begins the special focus in Strauss’s chapters: Socrates, a student of nature, having sought out the perfect gentleman, is eager to hear what his education of his young wife implied about his tacit understanding of nature and its relation to the lawful order of which he, the perfect gentleman, is the esteemed exemplar. The Socrates who had till then studied only nature eagerly learns that the gentleman, not himself a student of nature, holds the implicit or unexamined view that the gods generated nature and that law is of wholly human origin. A “comparison” dominates the latter half of the first chapter of the Gyn­ aikologia, Ischomachos’s comparison of his wife’s position in the household to that of the queen bee in a beehive. Strauss measures how that comparison is apt and inapt. Ischomachos made this comparison at the very start of what Strauss calls his “lecture” to his wife (137), his very first lesson following his very first questioning of his young wife on why she thinks he chose her. Responding to her question of what she might do “to help in increasing the household,” Ischomachos says, “By Zeus . . . just try to do in the best manner possible what the gods have brought you forth to be capable of and what the law praises.” “And what are these things,” she asks (Oeconomicus 7.16–17). They are works comparable to the works that “the leading bee of the hive has charge of,” he answers first, launching into a long, uninterrupted lesson for her on what marriage is according to the gods and according to the law. He ends by recalling his opening comparison: “And it seems to me . . . that the leader of the bees also toils in this way to accomplish the works that the god has ordered her to do” (7.32). Only then does his wife speak again: “In what way . . . are the works of the leader of the bees similar to the works I must do?” Their following dialogue shows why Strauss gave



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a warning when Ischomachos first introduced his comparison: it “is obviously liable to misunderstanding and even to misuse” (135). Strauss focuses on that liability in the final paragraph of his chapter. Strauss reports Ischomachos’s reply that “the wife can be compared to the queen bee since both control even the outdoor work of the members of the community while they themselves always stay indoors” (138). He notes that Ischomachos emphasized that “the queen bee does not suffer the bees to be idle” but that he was silent on the drones, one reason being that “the well-ordered household does not tolerate human drones.” Having called attention to the inaptness of the image in regard to drones, Strauss says that “Ischomachos’ comparison of the two kinds of females is apt in many points, although not all of them are immediately convincing to his bride.” Could they become convincing in ways she can’t anticipate? Strauss intimates his affirmative answer by concluding his chapter with three ascendingly significant ways in which its aptness may seem questionable. “For instance,” the queen bee’s control of the upbringing of the progeny: “when the young ones are fit to work, she sends them out under a leader to found a colony.” The wife was apparently led to wonder whether she is to send out her children “to found a colony under a leader other than herself (or her husband).” “Furthermore,” the comparison leaves it unclear whether Ischomachos believes that the queen bee takes care of the sick bees as the good wife takes care of the sick servants. But his wife notices immediately that such care exercised by her would be most rewarding because “it makes the servants grateful and enhances their good will.” Ischomachos makes the image fit by noting that “when she leaves the hive, none thinks of staying behind, but all follow her.” This leads Strauss to wonder “whether in the case of divorce all servants will leave together with the wife” (139). “Above all,” the comparison of the wife with the queen bee “suffers from the fact that it does not provide a proper place for the husband and master.” Strauss notes that “Ischomachos saves the comparison as well as he can by surreptitiously admitting that his wife is indeed the ruler of the maidservants rather than of the menservants,” but what Strauss notes last is most telling, for Ischomachos states “powerfully and movingly that if she proves manifestly superior to him, she will be the mistress of him who is the direct ruler of the menservants, even and especially after she has

. Toward the end of the conversation Ischomachos causes Socrates “to reflect on the importance of bringing in good likenesses” because one of his likenesses—“one should expel the drones from the hive” (17.15)—aroused Socrates’s anger against weeds (190–91).

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ceased to be young and of youthful bloom.” Neither Xenophon nor Strauss mentions any reaction by Ischomachos’s wife, but a reaction becomes imaginable after closer acquaintance with her is gained through Strauss’s commentary: the first lesson she ever learns from her husband begins and ends with a most memorable comparison; introduced to “counteract his wife’s extreme modesty and diffidence,” “to reassure her,” Ischomachos’s queen bee comparison may, on that unforgettable occasion, have planted a seed of possible supremacy in a potential queen. Study of all four chapters of the Gynaikologia allows the possible inaptnesses of the queen bee comparison to display their full aptness. Such study shows who Socrates is and how he appears. So far from being a perfect gentleman or wanting to be, Socrates could appear to a gentleman to be a drone. But Strauss is bent on emphasizing that Socrates looks to his possible appearance and as a result becomes in fact—womanly. In application to Socrates, Ischomachos’s initial comparison that at first seems apt and inapt will come to sight as wholly apt. The open and homely comparisons that Xenophon employs harbor a hidden and exalted sense.

GYNAIKOLOGIA—II: ORDER I “Order I,” the first of two chapters on order, concerns “the usefulness and beauty of order for human beings” (140–41); the second, “Order II,” “concerns . . . the order itself” (146). The two chapters are also linked by the way they begin: “Both chapters open with a question of Socrates concerning the effect of Ischomachos’ teaching on his wife” (146). Socrates’s question is his sole speech in the first of the chapters: “Did you notice, Ischomachos . . . that she was stirred to diligence by these things?” “Yes, by Zeus,” says Ischomachos, moving at once to another subject of his instruction, a “lecture” occupying the rest of the chapter, a lecture whose effect he was careful to ensure by giving it under the most favorable circumstances, for she had just failed him: unable to find something in her sphere that he wanted, “she blushed deeply, she was annoyed with herself” (140). Ashamed, condemning herself, she will not let it happen again after hearing her husband’s lectures on order. Ischomachos’s lecture conveys the usefulness and beauty of order through “examples,” three at first, chorus, army, and trireme. Strauss shows each to be both apt and inapt. Part of their inaptness stems from their being in motion whereas order as understood by Ischomachos “belongs to rest rather than motion”; in addition, they contribute to disorder. Despite the partial inaptness of his examples, Ischomachos “turns to admonishing his



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wife to join him in putting all their belongings into their proper place so that they will be always available for use” (141). But “Ischomachos is not quite satisfied with the three examples” and gives a fourth and last example that Strauss calls “most apt” (142) and “most revealing” (144). It is most apt because “Ischomachos is concerned with instructing his wife in how to establish and keep order among their implements and utensils” and this example is the order of utensils on a great Phoenician merchantman. Ischomachos addressed this example, by name, to Socrates; it “is to instruct, to educate even Socrates” (142). On the Phoenician merchantman, “the very survival of everyone on board depended on . . . the most beautiful and most accurate order.” This demanded “the utmost care, especially on the part of the man in charge.” That man, the boatswain, a petty officer on a merchant ship, “already possessed perfect knowledge of where everything was placed and how much there was of it.” Yet despite having that knowledge, he was observed by Ischomachos “inspecting everything as to its being handy in every situation that might arise.” “Wondering at this examination” (Oeconomicus 8.15), Ischomachos tells Socrates, he “asked him what he was doing.” Strauss summarizes what Ischomachos reported as the direct speech of the knowing and inspecting man in charge responsible for the survival of everyone on board: he told him that there is no time to search for the needed things when the god raises a storm at sea, for the god threatens and punishes the slack; one must be satisfied when the god does not destroy those who do no wrong; when he saves those who do service very well, one must be grateful to the gods.

The boatswain’s view of how gods act distinguishes three kinds of humans, the slack, those who do no wrong, and those who do service well. His view of the gods’ actions prompts him to intense watchfulness over the order established on board ship. Ischomachos “finds no fault” with the boatswain’s view, and Socrates “is silent throughout the chapter.” Strauss himself speaks up to contrast the boatswain’s view with Ischomachos’s: “the boatswain is more certain than Ischomachos about the gods punishing (and therefore noticing) the slack.” Strauss can compare the two views because in the previous chapter he reported Ischomachos’s view of the gods’ noticing and punishing: “if a man acts against the divine or natural order . . . his disorderly conduct is perhaps noticed by the gods and he is punished for it” (137). On that occasion Strauss spoke up for a silent Socrates to say, “Ischomachos is less certain of the gods’ omniscience than is Socrates.”

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Strauss can know Socrates’s certainty because Xenophon said in the Memo­ rabilia that “Socrates believed that the gods know everything, what is said, what is done, and what is silently deliberated” (1.1.19). Strauss leaves it to his reader to figure out just how Socrates’s certainty in the Memorabilia is related to his silence in the Oeconomicus, or how the Memorabilia as a whole stands to the Oeconomicus. Strauss adds to his statement that the boatswain is more certain than Ischomachos about the gods punishing the slack that the boatswain “is as doubtful as Ischomachos about evil befalling only the bad, i.e., about whether one can speak in strict parlance of divine punishment” (143). Strauss then turns to the implications of the most apt example for the issue of order. “In the boatswain’s statement, and hence in the whole chapter, order is not presented as in any way rooted in something divine; it is presented rather as being altogether of human origin; the gods are mentioned only as disturbers of order.” Strauss ends his paragraph on the boatswain’s view of the gods and order: “One could say that order is presented here as devised against the unpredictable actions of the gods.” Strauss’s reflections on the boatswain’s view of the gods noticing and punishing and of the gods and the origins of order—his statement of the theology and ontology implicit in Ischomachos’s most apt example of order—falls in the central paragraph of the second chapter of the Gynai­ kologia, just as his statement of Ischomachos’s implicit view of the gods and the origins of law and nature fell in the central paragraph of the first chapter. Here, deriving the boatswain’s view of the gods and order from his reported words about the merchantman, the sea, and the storm, Strauss can say that order as a whole (not just the order represented by law) is presented as wholly of human origin, as not in any way rooted in something divine, and as devised against the unpredictable actions of the gods. Order, in Ischomachos’s view as now refined by his most apt example, is of wholly human origin, and nature (to import the word from Strauss’s previous central paragraph) is like the sea, in constant motion and subject to disorder that is potentially destructive of all human ordering and that comes from the gods. Setting out these views in these two central paragraphs, Strauss waits till the central paragraph of the third chapter of his Gynaikologia to contrast them with Socrates’s “teaching” (147–49). He thus spreads across the three centers of his Gynaikologia chapters the exalted themes of gods, nature, and order, plus the human actions that follow from what is believed about these things. In the third he will complete his treatment and intimate that Socrates’s “teaching” arose from reflection on Ischomachos’s beliefs as their wise correction.



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But as to centers, paragraph 4 of the second chapter on the Gynaikolo­ gia occupies a special place: following the central paragraph of the chapter, which invoked the central paragraph of the previous chapter and prepared the central paragraph of the next chapter, it is itself a central paragraph, the eleventh of the twenty-one paragraphs of the Gynaikologia. What could it center after a center that had such profound implications for the questions of gods, nature, order, and human action? Paragraph 4 interrupts Strauss’s commentary on Ischomachos’s lecture because Ischomachos’s most apt example reminds Strauss of something Socrates said about Cyrus while making his case for farming with Kritoboulos. “Ischomachos’ story of the Phoenician merchantman and its boatswain reminds us of Socrates’ story of Cyrus and his pleasure garden.” The central paragraph of the Gynaikologia contrasts two competing stories of order, the perfect gentleman’s and the philosopher’s: it does what Strauss said Xenophon’s central chapter in the Oeconomicus did: “in its central chapter Socrates is directly contrasted with a perfect gentleman,” a contrast that is “the most revealing” matter in the most revealing of Xenophon’s Socratic writings (XS, preface). Strauss draws five different contrasts between the competing stories, but the context for them is two points on which they agree: in both, non-Greeks are the “models in regard to order,” and “the order is of human origin.” After stating his five contrasts, Strauss separates Socrates from Ischomachos’s teacher while linking Socrates to both Ischomachos and Cyrus: “Socrates has, so to speak, nothing in common with the Phoenician boatswain, whereas he has very much to do with Ischomachos, the model gentleman, and with Cyrus, the model ruler.” The absoluteness of “nothing in common” calls attention to the vagueness of “has very much to do with”—what does the latter mean? The next sentence, one of two to close the paragraph on imperatives, suggests the answer: “We must therefore wonder whether in his view Ischomachos or Cyrus occupies the higher rank.” To be told to wonder how Socrates ranked the two is to be told to wonder just how Socrates has very much to do with each as model: is either his model? The perfect gentleman is not his model because Strauss said that Socrates has no intention of becoming a perfect gentleman. Is the Persian ruler his model? Strauss ends his paragraph on a second imperative: “We must leave it open whether the contrasts just pointed out are of any use for settling this issue.” If we don’t want to leave it open, if we wonder how Strauss’s five contrasts may be of use in settling this issue of Socrates’s model, we can learn that they settle entirely just how Socrates has very much to do with Cyrus as model ruler. First contrast, the ordered thing. A pleasure garden; a merchantman.

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Second contrast, the orderer. “A man who is almost a king”; “a nameless boatswain” who is a “man in charge” (142). The three remaining contrasts move quickly beyond these two basic components of the contrasts, but what Strauss placed at the centers of the first two chapters of the Gynai­ kologia invites reflection on these two taken alone. For if the merchantman is the model human attempt to construct order by a nameless man in charge, what is to be inferred about the sea on which it sails, that place of storms raised by the god? The sea must be the image of nature implicit in this model of human order, unpredictable, uncontrollable nature against which human constructs rise as a temporary haven. And the view of nature implied by the pleasure garden as the model for the human attempt to construct order by a man who is almost a king? There, nature appears as the giver of already ordered kinds open to further ordering by near-kingly enterprise moved by a sense of pleasure. And that passion of pleasure in a garden contrasts with the human root of the other model of order: fear and concern must move the nameless man in charge of the merchantman in a sea given to storms. And finally, the difference between the two humans whose stories these are takes on its elemental importance when it is seen that the two who live these different views of nature with different origins in the passions are the two whose lives are being contrasted, the philosopher and the perfect gentleman. But the paragraphs on the two contrasting views of gods, nature, and order, and the contrasting human passions on which the two are based and the human actions they entail, still have an evident lack: the image of the pleasure garden lacks both gods and a deed worthy of a man who is almost a king. The final central paragraph of the Gynaikologia will fill those lacks, for there Strauss introduces “Socrates’ most comprehensive teaching,” a teaching on nature, gods, and order that is evidently the act of a man who is almost a king. Third contrast, order and adornment. This central contrast seems at first to consist of a single sentence: “In the Persian story the order belongs together with Cyrus’ resplendent adornments of all kinds; in the Phoenician story the splendor is altogether replaced by utility.” This contrast bringing together adornment and utility explicitly strips the boatswain’s merchantman altogether of adornment. And Cyrus’s pleasure garden? Is it altogether stripped of utility? What is the place of utility in Cyrus’s pleasure garden and in the other resplendent adornments with which it is to be numbered? This question of how adornment and utility may belong together in the order of the pleasure garden seems to be the issue Strauss addresses in his supplement to the single sentence of the central contrast, for he adorned this contrast with the central footnote of his chapter—and a central footnote to



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a central contrast of the central paragraph of the Gynaikologia promises to be both revelatory and dense. It consists of two sentences telling the reader to do three things: “Cf. Socrates’ identification of the beautiful or noble with the good in Mem. III.8.5-7; cf. Mem. IV.6.8-9. Cf. Plato, Republic 458e4.” We are to compare the mix of order, adornment, and utility with two passages that add an element to the mix: the good. And we are to consult Plato. What does Socrates’s identification of the beautiful or noble (two translations of kalos) with the good in the first Memorabilia passage mean? When Strauss commented on this passage in his later Xenophon book, he called the identification a “paradoxical thesis” and gave the reason Socrates stated it: it “stems from the attempt to reject the excess of the noble over the good as irrational” (XS, 76; see 73–76). Socrates stated a paradoxical thesis about the good because his interlocutor attempted to reject as irrational any aspect of the noble that exceeded the good as he understood it. That interlocutor was a philosopher, Aristippos, and Strauss suggests that Socrates’s conversation with him can be read as substituting for a conversation with Plato (XS, 73–74). Socrates had conversed earlier with Aristippos in the Memorabilia (2.1), attempting unsuccessfully to persuade him to take political life seriously. Aristippos, a philosopher holding the good to be pleasure, stuck to his view that that meant living as easily and pleasantly as possible. Rejecting the excess of the noble over the good as irrational is one piece of Aristippos’s failure to take political life seriously, for political life depends upon an excess of the noble over the good construed as pleasure. Socrates did not fail to persuade Plato to take political life seriously and to embrace the paradoxical identification of the noble and the good (XS, 32–39; see OT, 92–102). Socrates, teacher of young aspirants to perfect gentlemanship while not himself a gentleman, and counselor of philosophers on the seriousness of political life, argues for a paradoxical view of the good that has a utility for political life as ordered by the gentlemen. Arguing for that view has a utility for Socrates too, he whose “story” can tell of a ruler in a pleasure garden with resplendent adornments of all kinds: Socrates takes political life so seriously as to go to the trouble of adorning himself with a paradoxical thesis about the good that ranks the life of the gentleman highest by granting it its irrational excess of the noble over the good; it is a good for him, a rational man, to grant that irrational excess.

. Socrates’s understanding of the irreducibility of the beautiful to the good or useful is indicated by Strauss in his treatment of the central chapter of Xenophon’s Symposium, the consideration of Socrates’s beauty; the second reason for that irreducibility concerns Socrates the beholder for whom the beautiful is good (XS, 167).

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As for the second passage of the Memorabilia referred to in Strauss’s footnote (4.6.8–9), when Strauss discussed it (XS, 119–20), he referred back to the first passage in order to show how Socrates’s shifting usage regarding beautiful and good indicates the limited purpose of each exchange: each serves Socrates’s purpose of educating his interlocutor, while both together can educate companions who heard both or who read both in Xenophon. And the Plato passage Strauss’s footnote told the reader to consult? In commenting on the footnote’s first Memorabilia passage Strauss did what he told the reader of his footnote to do, compare Plato, Republic 458e4. That passage shows the relation between utility and the sacred: “in a properly constituted city only the most useful marriages are the holy ones” (XS, 76). Plato indicates that the sacred can be useful to a philosopher as a resplendent adornment useful to the city. The central footnote therefore suggests the following interpretation of the central contrast of the central paragraph. Utility for Socrates the philosopher dictated that his good—enjoyment of the pleasure garden of indulging the unquenchable passion of inquiry into the order of the beings—be protected by resplendent adornments that include taking political life so seriously as to trouble himself to identify the noble with the good and to bring in the sacred to secure the way of life of the gentleman by persuasive arguments. The central contrast will prove itself central in a literal way too: it must be supplemented by the second half of the Gynaikologia: the center of the next chapter will present the kind of resplendent adornment that completes the previous chapter-centers by supplying a new teaching on the gods, nature, order, and human action, and the last chapter of the Gynaikologia completes the argument by showing what such adornment is: “cosmetics.” The central contrast does not leave it open: in Socrates’s view the model ruler occupies the higher rank, and Socrates will, in an exalted sense, model his own behavior on that of the model ruler. Fourth contrast, closeness to the original. Ischomachos actually saw the order in his story and heard the orderer, whereas Socrates neither saw nor heard but got his story through intermediaries. Therefore, “one could say that . . . Socrates is closer to the original” of the Phoenician story, which he got directly from Ischomachos, than to the original of his own story. To question Socrates’s closeness to the original of his own story is to invite the question, who is its original? The answer: Xenophon. Xenophon saw Cyrus’s pleasure garden, he heard Cyrus speak, and he wrote what he saw and heard in an adventure story bound to make him famous, his Anabasis of Cyrus. And he wrote the book showing how Cyrus the Great could be considered a model ruler, his Cyropaedia. And he wrote the book containing



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“Socrates’ story” and every other story of the Oeconomicus. Why would Strauss draw a contrast that points, yet merely points, to Xenophon as the actual original for “Socrates’ story”? Earlier, commenting on “Socrates’ story,” Strauss indicated Xenophon’s role as a storyteller by highlighting the compulsions he was under to make his story persuasive (116–18). The general context for Strauss’s consideration of this effort of persuasion is his attempt to understand why Xenophon chose a conversation with Kritoboulos for the Socratic discourse (92). Kritoboulos is the son of Socrates’s old friend, the gentleman Kriton, and he comes to light in the dialogue as disinclined to pursue his father’s way of life, being attracted instead to comedies and horses and Socrates. Socrates initiated the conversation with Kritoboulos in order to remind him of his duties, and “[w]e are free to suspect,” Strauss says, that he “did this at the request of” Kriton, who could see that his son “admired Socrates more, much more than his own father” (101). Aiming to persuade Kritoboulos of the desirability of the way of life of the gentleman, Socrates needed a model farmer who already had authority for Kritoboulos. He therefore began with what “people say” of the great Persian king: that he believed farming and the art of war belong to the most noble and necessary pursuits and that he devoted himself to both. He then had “to prove the truth of the rumor” and did so first by an argument whose adequacy Strauss wondered about. Other items about “Cyrus, the most famous king,” took Socrates to a story that “would convince Kritoboulos fully that Cyrus—the most glorious of all the Persian kings” was as proud of his farming as of his being a warrior, “if he could be sure that the story is true.” But the hero of that story is not the most famous king: “Socrates is . . . compelled to speak . . . of the younger Cyrus.” There’s another problem: “Even of the younger Cyrus, Socrates did not have first-hand knowledge.” And here Strauss states, “but Xenophon had, and Xenophon, we remember, was present at the conversation between Socrates and Kritoboulos on household management.” Not saying directly that Xenophon is the original, Strauss moves to yet another problem of persuasion. Bringing in the younger Cyrus cannot by itself solve the problem because the younger Cyrus had less authority than the Great Cyrus: “Socrates is therefore compelled to improve somewhat on the younger Cyrus’ record.” But even improving on the record is not enough: “above all, [Socrates was compelled] to conceal as much as possible the fact that the younger Cyrus is not the same individual as the first Cyrus.” Strauss then compares the smoothness of the transition from the first Cyrus to the second with Xenophon’s transitions from the Memorabilia to the Oeconomicus and from Thucydides’s History to the Hellenica, transitions whose lack of evident

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smoothness raises questions. Having thus brought in Xenophon as the one with firsthand knowledge and as an author whose way of writing involves artfully constructed persuasion, Strauss says, “Besides, many Greeks might have found it difficult that a barbarian should be held up as a model for the Greeks.” How was this final difficulty handled? “Xenophon was therefore compelled to make his Socrates make the greatest contemporary Greek authority—the Spartan Lysander, the victor in the Peloponnesian War— establish the authority of the younger Cyrus” (italics added). By allowing Socrates’s problem of persuasion to be seen as Xenophon’s problem, Strauss allows his reader to see just who was under compulsion in all this storytelling, this improving and concealing and making authoritative for the sake of persuasion: Xenophon, who had firsthand knowledge, was compelled by his purposes in his Oeconomicus to make his character, Socrates, say what it was necessary to say to persuade his character, Kritoboulos. Having named the original of Socrates’s story—Xenophon—Strauss returns to his customary level of narrative: “Socrates does this by retelling a story . . .” Xenophon disappears but now he is always invisibly present as the author who is compelled to make his Socrates make the necessary adjustments to persuade his Kritoboulos of the nobility of farming through stories about the model ruler Cyrus. “Socrates” is from now on Xenophon’s Socrates outfitted by Xenophon with the appropriate stories, for some of which he is the genuine original. There is one final feature to be added to Xenophon’s role as the inventive storyteller playing an active part in Socrates’s persuasion of Kritoboulos, a feature that makes him manifestly the original of “Socrates’ story.” By having Socrates tell Kritoboulos about an already dead younger Cyrus, Xenophon fixes the dramatic date of their exchange: it must be after September 401, when Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa. But that fact turns Xenophon’s first sentence, his only sentence in his own name, into a puzzle: he could not have been present when Socrates conversed with Kritoboulos between September 401 and July 399, when Socrates was executed, because he was in Asia Minor, where he had gone in March 401 with the express purpose of observing Cyrus—as he says in his Anabasis, the very book in which he relates the details about the death of Cyrus that he assigns to Socrates in his Oeconomicus. Present at the death of Cyrus, he uses details to which he was an eye and ear witness to point to his necessary absence from a discourse he

. This feature strongly reinforces Strauss’s point in this fourth contrast although he seems not to have noticed it, judging by his saying without qualification that “Xenophon, we remember, was present at the conversation between Socrates and Kritoboulos” (118).



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opened by seeming to claim he was present. Xenophon must want his reader to suspect that he opened his Oeconomicus with a correctable fiction. But why? Perhaps to suggest that he had been present on a different occasion when Socrates discoursed on the management of the household in “about these words,” slightly different words each time for Socrates’s retelling of the unique event through which he discovered what perfect gentlemanship is. Xenophon thereby implies that he was present in such an attentive way that he could know what Socrates would say on similar occasions at which he could not have been present. His first sentence indicates the character of all his sentences: based on Xenophon’s authority as eye and ear witness, they say what Socrates would say on such an occasion—and what he would say always opens access to something different that he also means, access through informed inference correcting a first impression. Xenophon’s “presence,” phantom though it be, is inexpungeable from the paradigm Socratic discourse: that discourse must picture a Xenophon present because the discourse that educates the many Kritobouloses to gentlemanship also invites the rare Xenophon into the pleasure garden of philosophy while training him in training gentlemen. Xenophon stakes his claim to Socratic authority on the ease with which he invents Socratic speeches for occasions on which he can only seem to have been present. Xenophon, master of persuasive storytelling, is the original of “Socrates’ story” in the emphatic sense that Socrates could not possibly have heard it or told it. But Xenophon’s story is no less authoritative, no less Socrates’s story, for that. What does Xenophon’s being the actual original of “Socrates’ story” have to do with the issue Strauss’s contrasts settle, Socrates’s view of the relative rank of model gentleman and model ruler? As told by Xenophon, Socrates’s story helps his Socrates persuade a young gentleman to pursue the way of life of the gentleman by ennobling that life through a fiction of a model farmer who is actually a model ruler. But while the whole conversation aims to persuade his friend’s son that the life of the gentleman is the highest life because even an admired ruler held it highest, Socrates’s story intimates that Socrates himself ranked ruling higher than gentlemanship,

. Xenophon may also play with his impossible presence at the other conversation recorded in the Oeconomicus, Socrates’s earlier conversation with Ischomachos. Choosing to set that conversation in the colonnade of Zeus the Deliverer, Xenophon set it in a colonnade that came to feature, Pausanias reports, a painting of the Athenian cavalry in support of the Spartans at the battle of Mantineia in 362; the most notable figure among the Athenians in that painting is Grylos, son of Xenophon (Pausanias, 1.3.3–4). That battle broke the Spartan hegemony over Greece and is the final event Xenophon described in his Hellenica (7.5.15–27); he made it a valedictory for the great Theban leader who fell there, Epaminondas, while making no mention of his son.

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for the story shows a storyteller winning a kind of rule over a young gentleman via a story. Socrates has no intention of becoming a gentleman, but he is by deed a ruler whose instrument of rule is authoritative storytelling. Xenophon, looking himself like a model gentleman, assigns his Socrates a story of which he is the original; he imitates in writing Socrates’s purpose in speaking; doing what Socrates did, he facilitates rule by the philosopher Socrates. “Socrates’ story” thereby becomes the fit model of all Socrates’s stories by showing them doing two things at the same time. While educating the relatively many Kritobouloses in gentlemanliness by making it seem the highest way of life, it educates the few Xenophons to the actual highest way of life, which includes a storytelling component that makes the question of its original—is it Socrates’s or is it Xenophon’s?—irrelevant because all such storytellers tell the same kind of story. Fifth contrast, adornment and the divine. “The Persian story is silent on the gods, although it is adorned with an oath; the opposite is true of the Phoenician story”—it is silent on oaths, although it is adorned with actions of the gods. The adorned of the fifth contrast is a reminder of the central contrast: in the pleasure garden that is the order of the model ruler, order belongs together with adornments that include the kind that is an oath, the one spoken by a Persian ruler being an oath to Mithras (118). On the merchantman that is the model of order of the model gentleman, such splendor is altogether replaced by utility. There, the man in charge speaks of the gods as disturbers of order and utters no oath because his gods are unreachable by oath. The reader of Strauss’s late book on Xenophon has to engage in the never easy but always pleasant work of discovering the beautiful treasures that the philosophers hid in their works. And here one of the most explosive treasures to be discovered comes to light as the confirmation of what exists in Strauss’s letters to Klein as mere assertion. There, Strauss said that one of the words with a double meaning in the Socratic circle was kalokagathia, the word for gentlemanship: “Kalokagathia was, in the Socratic circle, a swear word, something like ‘philistine’ or ‘bourgeois’ in the nineteenth century” (February 16, 1939; GS, 3:567). In Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse that word takes on its proper dignity: in a work by a Socratic, “gentleman”

. Strauss later assigns “Socrates’ story” its proper place when, after Socrates has told a story of which he is the original and the subject, Strauss can say that Socrates’s story of the horse of Nikias the foreigner “is as characteristic of Socrates as the stor[y] of Cyrus [is] of Lysander” (160)—the story of Cyrus is reassigned to the political character Xenophon chose to make it authoritative, and Socrates is granted a story that points to his difference as a philosopher.



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names the high way of life to which the Kritobouloses should aspire as the highest imaginable, and Socrates’s manner of recommending it points to the truly highest imaginable to which a Xenophon can aspire. Exoteric praise shelters an esoteric even higher praise. Strauss’s five contrasts show that Socrates judges the model ruler higher in rank than the model gentleman and suggest that Socrates aspired to rule out of the pleasure garden of philosophy. How can a philosopher rule? As Cyrus who was almost a king ruled, the contrasts answer, through resplendent adornments that belong together with his pleasure garden. The resplendent adornments peculiar to a philosopher’s rule are here indicated in advance: authoritative stories underwriting useful oaths to gods that reflect a new common view of nature. Socrates’s story about the gods is the theme of the central paragraph of the next chapter. That a philosopher learns to rule through adorning stories is the theme of the final chapter of the Gynai­ kologia, “Cosmetics.” The central paragraph of the Gynaikologia really is central: it gathers what preceded it, anticipates what follows, settles the central issue of rank, shows that and how the philosopher rules, and suggests what a philosopher, resident of a pleasure garden, holds. The contrasts, as compact and subtle as they are, give every appearance of doing what Strauss’s final sentence orders, leave it open whether model ruler or model gentleman holds the higher rank for Socrates. But they settle it after all, settle it with the reserve Strauss mastered. “We must leave it open” must therefore state an imperative that Strauss both took as a compulsion and addressed to his reader: Leave it open.

GYNAIKOLOGIA—III: ORDER II Strauss begins the third chapter of his Gynaikologia by calling attention to the close connection between the two chapters on order as “appears immediately from their contents.” That connection is “in addition . . . indicated by . . . the beginnings of the two chapters,” each opening “with a question of Socrates concerning the effect of Ischomachos’ teaching on his wife.” Socrates’s questions brought out in the first of the chapters that his teaching stirred her “to greater care: the care as such antedated the lecture” (146), and in the second that she promised to take care and asked her husband “to bring their things in order in the manner stated by him: her concern with order did not antedate the lecture.” Antecedent care and lack of antecedent concern with order mark Ischomachos’s “nice or sweet bride” (133). Do they also mark that apparent innocent now asking a perfect gentleman what perfect gentlemanship is? Socrates now asks Ischomachos “how he

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brought their things in order for her” (146). Antecedent care, it seems, drove nice and innocent Socrates to ask, and a concern for order was kindled in him by hearing Ischomachos’s way of “separating his indoor things into tribes in order to establish order within his house” (147). After calling attention to the close resemblance between the beginnings of the two chapters on order, Strauss begins his central paragraph of his second chapter on order with a sentence bearing a close resemblance to the one beginning the central paragraph of his Gynaikologia. Both interrupt his commentary because something of Ischomachos’s reminds him of something of Socrates’s: there, “Ischomachos’ story . . . reminds us of Socrates’ story”; here, “Ischomachos’ separating his indoor things according to tribes in order to establish order within his house reminds us of Socrates’ separating the beings according to races or kinds in order to discover the order of the whole” (147). As the resemblance of their openings indicates, this central paragraph takes up and completes that central paragraph which intimated that Socrates took Cyrus in his pleasure garden as his model. Moreover, the central paragraph of the first chapter of the Gynaikologia set out what Ischomachos held about gods, nature, and order, while the central paragraph of its second chapter set out what the boatswain held about gods, nature, and order. This central paragraph sets out “Socrates’ most comprehensive teaching,” a teaching on gods, nature, and order, or on the highest beings, the totality of beings, and human beings. This central paragraph takes up and completes the theology and ontology present in the two previous central paragraphs and in the central paragraph of the Gynaikologia: this is the peak of peaks. Strauss quotes Xenophon’s Memorabilia for Socrates’s separating the beings according to kinds: Socrates “never ceased considering with his companions what each of the beings is” (147). When commenting on this Mem­ orabilia passage two years later, Strauss noted a subtlety preserved in an alternative manuscript: “Perhaps Socrates never ceased considering what each of the beings is silently ‘in the midst of his companions’ (the reading of B), even if he did not consider it ‘together with his companions’ ” (XS, 116–17). On this reading, Socrates left it to his companions to participate in his silent consideration of the beings: a Xenophon could participate, a Kritoboulos not. Silent participation leads to “the center of Socrates’ life—a center of which [Xenophon] does not speak owing to the limitation he has imposed on himself especially in the Memorabilia” (XS, 117). Strauss too silently leads his reader to the center of Socrates’s life in this central paragraph, for being reminded of Socrates’s separating by Ischomachos’s separating puts Strauss under a compulsion: “We are forced to wonder whether



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Ischomachos’ separating his indoor things according to tribes is not the model for the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing.” In this last of his central paragraphs in the Gynaikologia Strauss crafts his sentences to raise questions that their progress answers, leading one into the center of Socrates’s life, the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing. Was Ischomachos Socrates’s model for his attempt to discover the order of the whole in its races or kinds through his method of dialectics? Strauss recalls two matters that may suggest he was: Socrates approached him in order to learn what perfect gentlemanship is, and his example par excellence of order (the merchantman) was meant to educate even Socrates. To learn what a perfect gentleman is is to learn a lot: “the question regarding the perfect gentleman may be said to comprise all the questions regarding human things which Socrates was always raising.” Strauss names two, those concerning the pious and the noble, adding that “these questions call for separating, for instance, what is pious from what is noble.” This suffices for him to say, “It seems then that Ischomachos was in a manner the source, not only of Socrates’ substantive knowledge of the human things, but also of his way of acquiring that knowledge, of his ‘method.’ ” This unbelievable conclusion needs a defense, and Strauss adds that it is not as surprising as it first sounds for this reason: “Socrates’ most comprehensive teaching, his teaching which transcends the human things, deals with the whole order of the cosmos, the order that serves the benefit of men and is due to the god’s oikonomein.” The god, Socrates teaches, manages a household, the cosmos, in an orderly fashion that serves human benefit. Is Ischomachos the source of this teaching, Ischomachos that manager of a household who holds a different view of the gods (137)? Strauss’s sentence on Socrates’s most comprehensive teaching, so stunning in its suddenness and scope, generates a caution: “It is true that the teleotheology is exposed to difficulties.” Socrates’s teaching is a teleotheol­ ogy, a label Strauss invents to capture in a single word the two basic claims of the teaching: Socrates teaches a theology and a cosmology that maintain that gods manage a cosmos end-directed for human benefit. Instead of relating that teaching to its ostensible source—Strauss’s point till now—he exposes its difficulties for the rest of the paragraph before finally, at its end, suggesting how to resolve them. He begins with two difficulties from the Memorabilia. First, Socrates contradicts his own teleotheology by claiming

. Late in his book Strauss speaks of “the theoteleology”: “One may also say that [Socrates’s] early interest in physiologia survives in both the theoteleology of the Memorabilia on the one hand and in the teaching regarding farming of the Oeconomicus on the other” (196).

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that “the divine has no needs.” The contradiction is important but less so than an unclarity: “Above all, it is not clear how Socrates’ theology is connected with the ‘What is . . .’ question which he never ceased raising.” Above all, how is Socrates’s separating the beings according to kinds in order to discover the order of the whole connected with his “teaching” on the whole? An initial answer may be indicated by Strauss’s temporary shift from “never ceased considering” (148, 150) to “never ceased raising” (149, 148): Socrates could raise in the midst of his companions a “What is . . .” question he had considered to its end. Turning then to two difficulties that the Oeconomicus presents for the teleotheology, Strauss says, “Ischomachos indicates some doubts regarding the teleotheology.” Well, not exactly. Ischomachos never heard the teleotheology in his sole conversation with Socrates. But he had indicated a view of the gods different from Socrates’s teleotheology, a fact that raises a question about how that teleotheology had its source with him. Strauss goes on: “In particular, in the section devoted to ‘order’ there is almost complete silence about the god or the gods.” The complete silence is Socrates’s and Ischomachos’s; the Phoenician boatswain spoke of the god. Ischomachos found no fault with what he said, though it expressed greater certainty than he had about gods punishing and therefore noticing the slack: did he welcome such a view of order? But that view gives “even less support for the teleotheology than before,” for while the boatswain “is as doubtful as Ischomachos about evil befalling only the bad,” he does not present order “as in any way rooted in something divine . . . the gods are mentioned only as disturbers of order” (143; cf. 135). Where does silent Socrates stand? “As for Socrates, he speaks in the Oeconomicus of the gods as at least as much disturbers of the philanthropic order as its supporters; he is silent during Ischomachos’ lectures on order; later on he says that the gods do not rule the year in an ordered manner.” The two difficulties in the Oeconomicus invite the solution that lies implicit within the structure of the Oeconomicus: an old Socrates is reporting on an event much earlier in his life. The Socrates who sought out Ischomachos was a much younger man than the one who taught the teleotheology in the Memorabilia: hearing Ischomachos’s lectures on order enabled him to learn what needed to be taught—Ischomachos was in this manner the model for the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing. The just-quoted arresting phrase, the philanthropic order, would then suggest that the Socrates who spoke with Ischomachos already viewed nature as a philanthropic order and the gods of Ischomachos and the boatswain as misanthropic inventions of suspect passions. The comprehensive teaching he develops after meeting



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with Ischomachos would amount to a translation of his own philanthropic view into a theology. The final sentence of Strauss’s paragraph confirms this temporal solution and advances the process of thinking that brings this peak into full view. For Strauss was therefore tempted to wonder whether the Xenophontic Socrates was not, like the Platonic Socrates, dissatisfied with the simple teleology— anthropocentric or not—which at first glance seems to supply the most rational solution to all difficulties and turned for this reason to the “What is . . .” questions or to “the separating of beings according to kinds.”

Xenophon’s Socrates must be construed developmentally, as Plato’s Socrates presented himself in Plato’s Phaedo. The “simple teleology” that young Socrates abandoned must then be literally separable from the teleotheology he would later teach—it lacked the theoi. Using Plato’s account of Socrates’s development to interpret the Oeconomicus suggests that Socrates’s conversation with Ischomachos is Xenophon’s representation of Socrates’s turn, showing a young Socrates turning to his own method of inquiry, to the “What is . . .” questions. But young Socrates sought out Ischomachos as a consequence of the turn his thinking was taking, because he sought him out in order to pursue that particular “What is . . .” question— What is a perfect gentleman?—which comprises “all the questions regarding human things” (148). Hearing Ischomachos answer this “What is . . .” question, young Socrates learns that the proper teaching for gentlemen would be a teleotheology that was an anthropocentric improvement on the misanthropic theology on which they already acted. Strauss attached a footnote to this final sentence of his central paragraph. It supplies first two references to Phaedo. They send the reader to the Platonic Socrates’s report on his initial hope for a teleology that holds that mind, the cause of all things, orders all things for the best, whether earth, sun, moon, or the rest of the heavenly bodies (Phaedo 97c3–98b6), and then to his report that his inability to credit such a cause led him to his “second sailing in search of the cause,” his decision to turn away from “looking into beings” and to “take refuge in the logoi and look in them for the truth of beings” (99c6–e6). The Platonic template of Socrates’s turn fits the Xenophontic Socrates if seeking out Ischomachos is that part of his turn to the logoi that looks for the truth of beings in Ischomachos’s lectures educating his wife and finds in them the perfect gentleman’s understanding of gods, nature, and order that Strauss put at the centers of his previous Gynaiko­ logia chapters. Xenophon and Plato chose formally similar ways to present

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what each must have regarded as the most important event in the history of philosophy: an old Socrates relates to young companions the turn that led to his mature teaching, explicitly schooling the Kritobouloses in an edifying teleotheology while silently showing Xenophon the way in to the center of his life. Strauss combines Xenophon’s and Plato’s accounts to help show the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing by showing how Socrates’s teaching, his teleotheology, arose from his “What is . . .” questioning. For after its references to the Socratic turn in Phaedo, Strauss’s footnote vouchsafes, guardedly, a most illuminating revelation about Plato’s Socrates. After absorbing the Phaedo passages, the reader is invited to compare “the parallel development on a higher level—the level of the ‘kinds’ or ‘ideas’—and in this sense at a later stage, as reported in the Parmenides 130b7–e4.” Plato’s Parmenides reports a development in a Socrates who, though still young, is slightly older than the one reported on in Phaedo, for he has already made the turn to the ideas. Plato set his Parmenides during Parmenides’s famous visit to Athens with his follower Zeno in August 450: this higher and later stage of Socrates’s philosophical development occurred when he was about nineteen. At the start of this stage, understanding the kinds to be ideas, he is, as Plato presents him, a brash young thinker who believes he has solved the problem of kinds with his doctrine of transcendent ideas, for he wields it like a weapon to strike down the solution to the problem of the one and the many that Parmenides and Zeno famously advocated for years. In the sole speech to which Strauss directs his reader, old Parmenides expresses admiration for Socrates’s “zeal for speeches,” but he has just crushed Socrates’s doctrine with the first of his fatal refutations of transcendent ideas. He goes on, within the speech as Strauss refers to it, to challenge a humbled young Socrates, saying that “philosophy has not yet gripped you as it will, in my opinion. And when it has you will dishonor none of these things; but as for now, you still look to the opinions of men, because of your age.” To be a “parallel development” to the one in Phaedo, “on a higher level . . . at a later stage,” this stage too must move from one way of seeking a solution to the problem of cause to a different one. In this later development the young Socrates is compelled by Parmenides’s argument to move beyond his youthful doctrine of transcendent ideas to a more satisfactory if unstated view peculiar to Socratic philosophizing, the

. Nails, People of Plato, 308–9. “That it is necessary to consider the question regarding ‘the young Socrates’ is shown by the fact that Plato draws our attention to this subject” (SA, 4). Strauss there adds that “[i]t seems that the Socrates to whom Diotima revealed the secrets of Eros was also young.”



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future that Parmenides said was possible for him. But this leads to a puzzle in Plato: Phaedo shows Socrates making his refuted doctrine of ideas part of his teaching on the last day of his life as he presses his “safe” doctrine of ideas on a young Cebes worried about reason’s ability to ground what he so needs to believe, that his soul is immortal. Adding this Plato comparison to the final sentence of his paragraph allows Strauss to leave to his reader actual entry to the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing: the Plato comparison suggests that Xenophon’s mature Socrates teaches his teleotheology as Plato’s mature Socrates teaches his doctrine of ideas, as a variant of what he had earlier held but learned was exposed to difficulties, to logical refutation, but which he came to see as both salutary for young gentlemen and useful for prospective philosophers. The complexities of Strauss’s last central paragraph can be unknotted as Strauss’s conscious action: he bunched into simultaneity events he knew to be stretched across time. He did what Xenophon and Plato did, build in temporal complexity to tax the reader and educate him in solving it. The solution is to pull the bunched events apart into their chronological sequence; so separated they allow Socrates to be viewed developmentally. The Gynai­ kologia shows a young Socrates learning what would, over time, make him the teacher of a teleotheology. The pivotal event following his turn to the “What is . . .” questions was his conversation with Ischomachos; learning what perfect gentlemanship is, he is set on a path of learning what would be salutary for gentlemen to be taught while allowing him to continue on the path of understanding cause, of learning the truth about gods, nature, and order. With Plato’s help a Socrates in process emerges from Strauss’s culminating central paragraph, a Socrates becoming the Socrates of the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing. With Plato’s help Strauss answers his question on the connection between Socrates’s theology and his “What is . . .” questions: his “What is . . .” questions are connected to his theology as its originating source. Asking a perfect gentleman “What is a perfect gentleman?,” he is led to the proper theology for gentlemen, a teleotheology in which the gods so order the cosmos as to serve the benefit of gentlemen, primarily by allowing them to speak in strict parlance of divine justice. The teleotheology did in a manner have an Ischomachean origin: his defective view of gods, nature, and order invited a Socratic corrective. Socrates as theologian tamed the gods into human service; he ruled the unruly gods by making their hitherto unpredictable actions predictable or moral. Teaching the teleotheology without mentioning its difficulties allowed Socrates in the midst of his companions to silently raise questions about the kinds of being and

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therefore about the highest beings and how that kind of being might be related to the whole of beings. The teleotheology was something that Strauss was well positioned to recognize: it is Socrates’s theological-political program, an enterprise in theology as politics that puts forward a teaching welcome to Ischomachoses to come, all the sons of worried Kriton. Here Socrates’s antecedent care sees to the overcoming of his lack of antecedent concern for order—he knows himself compelled to devise a reasonablesounding order of the whole that meets the needs of the human soul and supplies what at first glance seems the most rational solution to all difficulties. By this action, this man of contemplation, of inquiry, becomes the vortex of so-called world history, eventually becoming the model even for the founding modern philosophers, teaching them how to act on behalf of philosophy and of social order, in their case by a strategic dismantling of a particularly virulent teleotheology that had come to rule philosophy. But if Socrates’s mature teleotheology is that part of the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing that is a politic teaching for gentlemen—Socrates’s political philosophy—what did the mature Socrates actually hold about “the order of the whole” (147)? To what knowledge of gods, nature, and order did his “method,” his “What is . . .” questions, lead him? Strauss begins to answer this question in a last sentence added to the footnote added to the last central paragraph: “The ‘What is . . .’ questions are meant to dispose of the questions regarding the ‘material and efficient causes’ of the natural species.” Strauss completes the triumvirate of Socratics who established the Great Tradition: for all their differences in presentation, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle remained true to the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing. More importantly, the sentence indicates how the “parallel development” reported in Plato’s Parmenides helped solve the problem of cause, for it explains the purpose of the “What is . . .” questions by exploiting a precise ambiguity in “dispose of.” In the now most common sense of dispose of, the “What is . . .” questions are meant to set aside entirely unsettling questions regarding material and efficient causes of the natural species and, though this is unspoken, locate their causes wholly in formal and final causes; reproducing Ischomachos’s view that the gods generated nature, they are meant to set aside the dangerous inquiries of the Greek science of nature by dealing with the causes of natural species teleotheologically. But dispose of in its initial primary sense means to set things in their proper or fitting order—separating the beings according to their natural kinds in order to discover the order of the whole. The peculiarly Socratic philosophizing does not set aside the genuine science of nature with its investigation of material and efficient causes—that is the primary activity of the pleasure garden—



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but it shelters such investigations within causes that can seem alternative to it but are supplementary to it. In formal and final causes Socratic philosophy investigates the natural and inescapable cognitive activity of humans that orders material events and things into concepts or ideas. Socrates chose to add to the inescapable structure of that activity escapable teleotheological notions, employing or inventing imaginary kinds and imaginary causes to read the cosmos as fulfilling the imaginary purposes of imaginary beings. The footnote to Strauss’s final central paragraph shows that while the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing was pursued in varying ways by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, it remained a never-ceasing consideration of nature and human nature sheltered behind the salutary teaching on nature and human nature that it knew to have difficulties. The final sentence of Strauss’s footnote thus serves to introduce the next paragraph as that part of Strauss’s report on the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing that treats Socrates’s investigation of nature. It describes, if incompletely, a Socrates who completed the parallel development on the higher level anticipated in the Parmenides passage. Strauss begins this paragraph by assigning a contention in his central paragraph its proper weight: it was “a deliberate exaggeration” (149) to suggest that Ischomachos could be the source of both Socrates’s substantive knowledge of the human things and his “method,” but it was needed as a corrective for those “concerned with ‘the Socratic problem’ ”; to correct their supposition that Socrates learned nothing from Ischomachos, act as if Socrates learned every­ thing from Ischomachos. The peak of peaks, then, is not quite finished: the present paragraph will give a true account of what had to be exaggerated there. For those concerned with the Socratic problem did something still worse: they managed to miss Socrates’s attempt “to discover the order of the whole by distinguishing the kinds of beings that make up the whole.” Consequently they missed the achievement that is, by far, of the greatest importance: Socrates’s “finding out what each of those kinds is.” That quiet finding out deserves the most attention, and it anticipates Strauss’s statement of what Socrates’s investigation of nature actually came to conclude about nature and human nature. Yes, Socrates blamed those who engaged in the inquiry into the nature of all things, but for what reason (150)? Not because they inquired but because their publicly stated answers made the whole enterprise look laughable or criminal. Strauss infers from Socrates’s blame the “sane and sober” view of beings as a whole implied in the blame: there are a finite number of kinds; the kinds themselves neither change nor come into being or pass out of being. Himself a Xenophontic writer, Strauss only implies the most arresting result: every particular being comes into

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being and passes out of being, including the beings with the highest kind of being. Socrates’s teaching thus shelters the ontology or truth about the beings that Socrates found out, a naturalism that recognizes the sovereignty of becoming. The teleotheology then is like law and the merchantman, a construct of altogether human origin, originating with the philosopher who came to understand human nature and the power of authoritative teaching to manage the taught. Strauss’s final sentence on the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing accounts for the false appearance that Socrates limited his inquiry to the human things. He thus addresses the situation he described in the second sentence of his book, the situation in which those concerned with the Socratic problem have landed us: “Socrates is said to have disregarded the whole of nature altogether in order to devote himself entirely to the study of ethical things” (83). Strauss can now point to what survives this contemporary misunderstanding of Socrates: “this appearance is ultimately of importance only because it points to the humble (“Ischomachean”) origin of the philosophizing peculiar to him.” The philosophizing peculiar to Socrates originates in his turn to the human without exhausting itself in the human; it discovers the human place in nature by discovering nature through the human. Thus Socrates became himself, a teacher whose public teleotheology educated the gentlemen while igniting the genuine education of those like himself passionate to understand. The philosophizing peculiar to Socrates is a teaching on the whole and a continuing investigation of the whole under the notion of natural kinds. It is political philosophy grounded in philosophy, a teaching and an investigation carried on simultaneously in the highest refinement of speech, Socratic dialectic through which Socrates taught a teleotheology and never ceased considering what each of the beings is in the midst of his companions. Strauss’s peak of peaks is a lovely structure, a central paragraph on the apparent peak, a linking footnote, and a second paragraph on the real peak, an inescapably, naturally clouded, never to be conquered peak. Strauss beautifully engages in the philosophizing peculiar to Socrates. Ischomachos’s lectures to his wife are the temporally deepest retrievals in the Oeconomicus. In its timeless narrative present, the Oeconomicus is Xenophon’s report: he narrates it all for all time. His first retrieval reports an earlier dialogue between Socrates and Kritoboulos. Within that dialogue is a second retrieval, Socrates’s report of his earlier dialogue with Ischomachos. Within that report is the third retrieval, Ischomachos’s report to Socrates of his earliest educating of his wife. The pauses Strauss built in at the centers of his commentary on Ischomachos’s report show



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that the structurally deepest retrieval retrieves Socrates’s deepest subject. Socrates’s steering and Ischomachos’s eagerness to report his success combine to make Socrates an auditor of the perfect gentleman’s implicit and inchoate understanding of nature, his conviction that he brings order to what the gods bring forth. He stands within nature as a maker, full of care, diligent, inventive, over against a nature unpredictable and wild but yielding like an unformed female to forceful interventions by her mastering male. Strauss’s careful centering assigns Socrates’s corrective teaching on nature, his teleotheology, its proper role: as civically salutary it is fixed and finished at the center, but as rationally precarious it is only a start. Strauss simply states what the “What is . . .” questioning intimated in the interstices of the teleotheology: Socrates’s finding out of natural kinds and imaginary kinds, an implied ontology according to which the process that nature is generates always transitory beings distributed across a hierarchy of natural kinds. The study of nature finds out those kinds plus humanly generated kinds or tribes that the turn to the logoi also reveals, kinds that can be said to be “natural” as unwittingly generated by the care-full being. Subject to witting modification by a knower who knows their origins, these humanly generated natures can be shaped into useful implements for ordering the care-full being. The centers of the Gynaikologia make the teleotheology a fit teaching for one who takes Cyrus in his pleasure garden with his resplendent adornments as model regal ruler for ruling gentlemen. Homely Xenophon exalts; most exalted is knowing; exalted too is the ruling knowing necessitates.

GYNAIKOLOGIA—IV: COSMETICS It can be no accident that Strauss pushed back Xenophon’s central eleventh chapter to make his own eleventh chapter central. Instead of simply following Xenophon’s twenty-one chapters, he added a chapter at the start, and then in order to end with twenty-one, he folded Xenophon’s seventeenth and eighteenth chapters into his own eighteenth chapter. Strauss’s central eleventh chapter has no center; it is a block of four paragraphs, three of commentary, one of judgment on Ischomachos’s education of his wife. The chapter as a whole shows why Strauss contrived to place cosmetics at the center of his best book. Ischomachos is eager to report other examples of his wife’s obedience to a Socrates eager to hear the first (153, 132). But one example proves enough. After hearing it he puts a stop to Ischomachos, leaving the gynaikologia, Strauss says, incomplete (156). Why does one example prove to be enough?

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Strauss emphasizes that Ischomachos’s report on his wife’s virtue interests Socrates at least as much as that virtue itself. If this one example is enough to exhaust Socrates’s interest in the perfect gentleman’s attempt to educate his wife, it must teach him the last lesson needed on both the gentleman and the virtue he reports. Strauss’s first paragraph elaborates Socrates’s contrast of two kinds of reproduction of originals, Ischomachos’s report on his wife’s virtue and Zeuxis’s portrait of a beautiful woman. Socrates’s contrast “can easily induce one to think that the beauty of a living human being can be surpassed by a painter’s imitation, while the virtue of a living human being cannot be surpassed or even rivaled by a poet’s or a writer’s imitation.” Strauss ends his paragraph on a third reproduction of an original, another report on the virtue of a human being: “We surely do not go wrong if we assert that Xenophon regarded his reproduction of Socrates’ virtue for more than one reason as inferior to that virtue itself, one reason being that in publicly presenting Socrates’ virtue he could not assume that he was speaking only to friends.” Still, Xenophon’s reproduction makes it possible for genuine friends to view Socrates’s genuine virtue. And Ischomachos’s report on his wife’s virtue? Is it too inferior to her virtue? Certain it is that Ischomachos lacked Xenophon’s reason for making his wife’s virtue appear inferior to her virtue; after all, displaying her virtue in what he thought was its fullness to both friends and nonfriends displayed his own virtue as a perfect gentleman. But what he believes to be a full display of her virtue may fall short of her genuine virtue. What is Ischomachos’s report and what is his wife’s virtue? Strauss notes that the cosmetics Ischomachos’s wife used once reappear in Xenophon’s writings (154–55). In Socrates’s rendering of Prodicus’s story, Vice beautified herself to seduce Herakles: she acted to make her complexion appear whiter and rosier than it was and her bearing seem straighter than its nature.10 Cyrus the Great “acted, according to Xenophon, in order to beguile his subjects” with the same cosmetics (155), and Xenophon applauds Cyrus for using those cosmetics and counseling his commanders to use them, platform shoes to “seem to be taller than they are . . . color beneath their eyes so that they might appear more beautiful eyes than they are, and rubbed-on colors so that they might be seen as having better complexions than they had by nature.”11 Vice used the cosmetics as a means of seduction, Cyrus as a means of rule. Ischomachos’s wife used them to seduce, but obedient to her husband’s lecture, she never used them again because his lecture taught 10. Memorabilia 2.1.22. 11. Cyropaedia 8.1.41.



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her that they repelled him. “The perfect gentleman Ischomachos has no use for such practices,” Strauss says, practices that attempt to “improve on her being, the truth, her nature” (154). Ischomachos takes a “firm stand . . . for nature, or truth, against deception” (156). Socrates learns from Ischomachos’s report that the perfect gentleman wants being, truth, and nature as they are—and believes he knows what they are. What does Socrates learn about the virtue of the wife from her husband’s report? Strauss began his chapter with Socrates admiring her “masculine mind” while swearing like a woman (153). Her masculine mind, Strauss explains, “revealed that virile concern with one’s own that makes human beings good defenders of their own.” Strauss speaks a second time of her masculine mind, though Xenophon did not: when Ischomachos threatened to deceive her by pretending to be richer than he is, she “broke in ‘straightway,’ ‘at once,’ ” “she becomes lively,” “since she must repel the thought that her husband might deceive her about his property by boasting or by concealment; she thus shows again how masculine her mind is in regard to her own” (155). She is virile in defending her own, but is her mind simply masculine? In a dialogue with her educating husband that Strauss paraphrases in detail, she shows that her means to the goals of her masculine mind cannot be and are not masculine but are as they must be feminine, indirect and subtle, guileful and beguiling. She “broke in” to her husband’s speech to deploy the one means she had of securing an advantage over him: she says (as Strauss reports her husband’s report) that “she could not love him from her heart, from her soul, if he were a man who would do such things.” She speaks of love from the heart, he speaks of sharing each other’s bodies. He “clinches the issue” with a comparison, the last of the Gynai­ kologia; it concerns what the gods have done: just as the gods made horses most pleasant to horses and cattle to cattle and sheep to sheep, “so human beings regard the genuine body of a human being most pleasant.” Strauss notes the “lack of parallelism” in the comparison but says it “is justified by the fact that nature enables human beings, as distinguished from the brutes, to invent and use cosmetics.” Strauss uses the word cosmetics for the first time in his “Cosmetics” chapter when he makes nature replace gods and cosmetics natural for humans. He ends his paragraph on how Ischomachos spoke of nature and cosmetics: after showing “in the section on order that men can and to some extent even must improve on nature, Ischomachos now calls his wife back from an unnecessary and undesirable deviation from nature, from a deviation which originates in the wish to deceive.” Strauss summarizes the last three chapters of his Gynaikologia: “after having devoted the section on order to genuine beauty, he speaks

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in the subsequent chapter of spurious beauty.” Cosmetics, Ischomachos judges, are spurious beauty that deviates from nature and originates in the wish to deceive. Socrates, a student of nature, neither approves nor questions “[t]he firm stand taken by Ischomachos for nature, or truth, against deception” but eagerly asks, “By the gods . . . what did she reply to this?” Her replies can “end . . . the gynaikologia” (156) because they teach an eager Socrates a certain cosmetics. Strauss makes his point by his strict consistency in employing the language of appearance, not of being, truth, or nature. Ischomachos’s wife never again used these cosmetics but “tried to present herself undisguised and in a becoming manner”—her becoming manner is her success in her conscious effort to make herself seem undisguised. For she asked her husband “how she could come to sight as beautiful in truth and not merely in appearance”—she asked him what appearances would meet his standard of truthful beauty. His simple advice led to this: “by acting thus, the wife will look more attractive to her husband than her maid.” Looking more attractive by acting, “she will be superior anyway . . . by the voluntary character of her submission.” She is superior, but is her submission voluntary, she who must submit as the maid must submit? Ischomachos assures Socrates “that his wife still behaves now as he had taught her then.” Compelled to submit in a household ruled by her husband, a man with the laws on his side, she learns the necessity of appearing voluntarily submissive to his standard of being, truth, and nature, making it the standard of her appearance. Knowing her situation and learning her husband’s demands, she makes herself a master cosmetologist and her ostensible master her cosmetics’ beguiled victim. Through Ischomachos’s report on how she learned to act, the perfect gentleman’s wife teaches Socrates the indispensable lesson in cosmetics for one who is superior to the perfect gentleman but under his rule: abjuring cosmetics that cannot withstand proximity, she outfits herself in the invisible cosmetic of obedience to his standard of being, truth, and nature. Hiding a willful opacity in apparent transparency, she guarantees his willing transparency. Self-commanding in seeming obedience to a commanding she is powerless to counter directly, she counters indirectly, in a veiling way, acting and entirely winning over her unmusical perfect gentleman husband, that man of rectitude proud of his model wife, eager to recite examples of her obedience. His deluded report on his wife’s pleasing appearance of obedience offers Socrates insight into the way of life of the gentleman: sedate and secure in its self-confident mastery, its trust that it can lecture order into malleable nature, it proves easy prey to a deception that knows



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the uses of counterfeit obedience. Its morality-fueled conviction of its own rightness stamps it with obtuseness, with insensitivity to artfulness, to a cosmetic willingly and knowingly deceptive. Ischomachos’s report on his wife’s virtue displays the vulnerability of his own vaunted virtuousness. His report on his wife’s virtue, like Xenophon’s report on Socrates’s virtue, is inferior to that virtue itself.12 Socrates “behaves like a woman in contrast to the masculine character of Ischomachos’ wife” (153). But Ischomachos’s masculine wife behaved like a woman in virtuous obedience—and her example taught a Socrates who resembles her in the essential respect: he too is ruled by the more powerful in the household that is the city of the perfect gentlemen. Socrates behaves like a woman; he learns from her example the virtue of seeming obedience and seeming transparency to what rules him. But it was “the masculine character of Ischomachos’ wife” that led her to abjure the very cosmetics adopted and recommended by Cyrus the model ruler. Did she abjure Cyrus’s means in order to gain Cyrus’s manly end? The aptness of the first comparison of the gynaikologia, the queen bee, shows that she did: the “mistress of the house” (156) proves to be “mistress of him who is the direct ruler” of the outside things (139); “she proves to be manifestly superior to” her “husband and master” (139). When Strauss recalls Cyrus again to cite his use of cosmetics (155), he recalls the model ruler who ranks higher than the perfect gentleman. Manly Socrates learned from Ischomachos’s wife how to achieve Cyrus’s end: his masculine mind is inwardly manly in outwardly using feminine means to secure his end of rule. The “masculine mind” of Ischomachos’s wife reveals “that virile concern with one’s own which makes human beings good defenders of their own.” As a philosopher Socrates is not attached to his own city or household but is willing to measure and abandon them in favor of the foreign if it is rational to do so. As a philosopher Socrates defends what is genuinely his own; he is manly in his masculine mind, his interior resolve to defend philosophy itself, passionate pursuit of the “What is . . .” questions. He learns from Ischomachos’s wife: her husband’s report on her virtue teaches him both that a certain womanly obedience is necessary for the inner freedom indispensable to philosophy, and that the limit on her outward freedom does not preclude a kind of rule over her apparent

12. His report may also surpass his wife’s virtue. If Strauss is right in identifying her in his final paragraph of the Gynaikologia, she is wanton in the inward license she allows herself and the outward actions they lead to. She is “a quite remarkable wife,” and Strauss paraphrases words Andocides used at his trial to describe the actions of “that most impudent hag” (158).

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ruler. To defend what falls to him by natural right of superior wisdom, he must gain rule over the ruler of the outside things through cosmetics. The centers of the first three chapters of Strauss’s Gynaikologia show that Socrates’s defense of his own through rule over the gentlemen can be effected in one way only: he can rule the human whole through a persuasive teaching on the whole that will be welcomed by the gentlemen. Human action springs from human belief about the human place in nature. Ischomachos believed that the gods generate nature, whereas law that orders relations among humans is not of divine but of human origin (134–35). His belief was refined by the boatswain’s belief that order is altogether of human origin and sails like a great merchantman on a sea on which a god can raise a storm that punishes all equally to the slack (142–43). Having learned the power of these beliefs about nature and the gods and the human effort to establish lasting order; having not pronounced yet in his own way asked and answered one question in particular about the kinds of being, What is a god?; and, not least, having learned a concern with order from his own precarious place in the household; Socrates crafted a novel teaching on gods, nature, and order. According to his teleotheology, the whole is a moral order that serves the benefit of men and is due to the god’s oikonomein (148–49); the laws governing the human can then be said to be not altogether of human origin. Strauss crafted his book to have its central chapter show what Socrates’s teaching is: cosmetics. Offered to the young offspring of the upright pillars of society, it is an instrument for future rule over society’s rulers that gives the philosopher who offers it a respectable place in society; Socrates rules the “outdoor,” rules actions, by coming to rule the “indoor,” thoughts about god and nature. Socrates the philanthropist gives the sons of the gentlemen the gift of a teleotheology, an implement of order altogether of human origin. His philanthropy is a double action by the contemplative, an action that preserves the pleasure garden of philosophy in the midst of the city of the gentlemen while opening it to those naturally suited to enter. From this action, from the rule flowing out of the philosopher ruler’s pleasure garden, the full aptness of the first comparison of the Gynaikologia can be recovered on just those points where Ischomachos’s wife thought it might be inapt—only to the queen bee comparison did Ischomachos’s diffident young wife break her silence and perhaps her awe to raise a question about his first-ever lecture to her (137). The queen bee controls the upbringing of the progeny, sending them out when mature under a leader to found a colony (138). The bees become so attached to their queen through being healed by her that when a divorce occurs, all will leave with the ruling queen. It is



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the master’s place to be ruled by the one who proves manifestly superior to him, the mistress, the female master who rules the direct ruler of the menservants. The queen bee image proves most apt for the most exalted, a philosophical ruler. For this reason, perhaps, Strauss moved Xenophon’s center off-center and put cosmetics at his center: his is not the manly deed that founds the precarious teaching to shelter philosophy in its productive hive; his deed recovers that founding in its cosmetic character. Strauss’s recovery of cosmet­ ics, of the whole art of the exoteric, belongs at the center of his book as the way in to the genuine center, what Xenophon centered, the Andrologia that shows what a real real man is. Together, the Gynaikologia chapters convey Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates’s political philosophy, his theologicalpolitical program, plus intimations of what Socrates holds, what his political philosophy was generated to shelter and advance. Strauss’s showing Xenophon’s showing of Socrates’s political philosophy therefore implies that what Strauss made the defining difference between ancient philosophy and modern philosophy serves a primarily rhetorical purpose: ancient philosophy is as active/interventionist as modern philosophy is, while modern philosophy (as will be seen) holds inquiry, the philosophic way of life, as high as ancient philosophy did. And beyond sharing the primacy of inquiry and the necessity of action, ancient and modern philosophers share as well an understanding of the proper relation of nature, gods, and order, the naturalism achieved by Socrates in which the givenness of natural kinds in the constant flow of all things leads to an understanding of gods as one of the human constructs of order. But does the philosopher’s pleasure garden of natural kinds suggest that Xenophon glimpsed a still deeper ontology, insight into a quality or characteristic spread through the totality of beings in process and open to naming, if only in a weakening and attenuating metaphor, as Plato named the nature of nature eros (OPS, 196) and Nietzsche named it will to power? The categories Strauss assigned Ischomachos make Socrates’s teleotheology, as a cosmetic, spurious beauty, the beauty of a deviation from nature that originates in the wish to deceive. Could the spurious beauty of the cosmetic harbor insight into a genuine beauty of nature, a fundamental way of all beings accessible to a Socrates but judged repulsive by adherents of spurious beauty? Strauss suggests in a most economical way that it could, that nature as it is shines with genuine beauty. His last sentence of his central chapter together with his last sentence on Xenophon’s central chapter contrasts Ischomachos’s attempt to educate his wife with Socrates’s refraining from any effort whatsoever to educate his. Could this mean that Socrates was

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able to change his reaction to nature’s unchangeable conduct because he found in it and loved in it genuine beauty? That would be a truly Platonic, a truly Nietzschean achievement in ontological insight and the human response appropriate to it—and Strauss’s Andrologia ends by suggesting that Xenophon achieved just that.

chapter four

Socrates, the Real Real Man: Xenophon’s Andrologia

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aving made the final chapter of his study of womanliness the center of his book, Strauss moves to the chapter Xenophon centered, the study of manliness that Strauss entitled “Andrologia (Chapter XI).” He does not explicitly note here that it is Xenophon’s center, but he already noted it in his 1948 book on Xenophon (OT, 85), and he will emphasize it in his curt preface to Xenophon’s Socrates. In that preface, a kind of hinge between the two volumes, yes, a kind of center, Strauss makes a joke of his extreme brevity by apologizing for what might seem like prolixity in repetitions that appear in the second volume. This most parsimonious writer made his brief preface refer not only to the centrality of the Andrologia chapter but to the reason for it: it is the most revealing part of the most revealing of Xenophon’s Socratic writings because here “Socrates is directly contrasted with a perfect gentleman.” Strauss’s Andrologia shows Socrates discovering the uniqueness of his way of life and discovering too that it entails its own form of manliness. Strauss ended his Gynaikologia on the superiority of the philosopher Socrates: he is “superior to Ischomachos by having no delusions” with respect to educating his wife. And he expressed Socrates’s superiority in a Socratic way: he is “aware of his ignorance of the art of managing one’s wife.” Socrates’s awareness of ignorance implies knowledge: he knows what he does not know; he knows what can be known and what cannot be known; . Its chapter “The Two Ways of Life” says of the Oeconomicus that “its central chapter contains a most striking confrontation of the life of the economist (who is a ruler) with the Socratic way of life” (OT, 85). The two ways of life had been an important topic for Strauss for a long time: see, e.g., his 1932 letter to Gerhard Krüger, where he speaks of the contrast between biblical revelation and Greek philosophy as “a tradition of obedience and a tradition of questioning” (GS, 3: 406).

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and he knows that what falls outside the possibility of human knowing falls outside the possibility of human managing—moreover, the pleasure garden image of the philosopher’s way of life suggests that it is not just ignorance that guides his restraint. Socrates’s restraint on managing his wife is accompanied by an unrestraint. Learning from Ischomachos, Socrates learns his superiority in knowing and acting, yet he makes no attempt whatever to teach Ischomachos what he’s learning. But Socrates is narrating his conversation with Ischomachos to Kritoboulos, a young man potentially of Ischomachos’s kind, and Strauss makes frequent references to Xenophon’s Memorabilia that indicate what Socrates came to teach because of what he learned from Ischomachos. Socrates’s ignorance of managing his wife includes learning how Ischomachos’s wife manages him. Not only can Strauss’s chapter on the study of manliness therefore display the difference between the philosophic way of life and the political way of life, it can end suggesting how Socrates began to manage Ischomachos, a first step in becoming the master manager of the Ischomachoses. The real real man turns out to be that pupil of a real man who learns from that man’s female master. Socrates controls the conversation. He “puts a stop to Ischomachos’s report about his wife’s doings”—she is far more a doer than first appears—and he asks Ischomachos “to tell him of his own doings” (159). Socrates induces compliance by referring to those doings as “the things to which he owes his high reputation.” Ischomachos’s reply displays his concern for reputation: he invites Socrates “to set him right if in any point he does not seem to him to act well.” “Socrates finds fault” with the notion that he could correct a perfect gentleman, and his reason brings his reputation into prominence: “a man who is the model of a perfect gentleman cannot in justice be corrected by a man who is reputed to be an idle talker and to measure the air.” Socrates’s reputation leads to something more ominous, for he “is reproached on account of his poverty.” By introducing his reputation and his reproach, Socrates begins to bring to light “the profound difference” between his way of life and that of the perfect gentleman. Socrates deals immediately with the reproach, but Strauss makes an observation about Socrates’s reputation: he acquired it “at least partly through Aristophanes and other comic poets.” As for the reproach, Socrates says it seems to be “most foolish” (160), and to explain his judgment he narrates “an experience which he had had.” Strauss paraphrases Socrates’s narration in detail: He would have been greatly depressed by the charge of being poor if he had not lately seen the horse of Nikias the foreigner, which was followed by many men who looked at it with admiration, some of whom praised



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it highly. Socrates approached the groom with the question whether the horse had much money. The groom looked at him as if he were not only grossly ignorant but not even sane, and said: How can a horse have any money? When he had heard this, Socrates recovered from his depression, for he realized that if a horse, although penniless, can become good, provided it has a soul by nature good, Socrates could become a good man. The reproach on account of poverty is then palpably foolish, since if it made sense, a horse would need money in order to be good. (160)

Strauss assigns this “story” pivotal importance: he says it is “as characteristic of Socrates as the stories of Cyrus and of the Phoenician boatswain are of Lysander and Ischomachos respectively.” In his Gynaikologia Strauss called the story of Cyrus “Socrates’ story” in order to highlight the difference between Socrates who resembled Cyrus in his pleasure garden and Ischomachos who resembled the Phoenician boatswain. Now that the theme of order has been replaced by the contrast of the two lives, Strauss can assign the story of Cyrus to Lysander and focus on Socrates’s authentic story of which he is both the original and the subject. The story distinguishes him from both Cyrus and Ischomachos, who become “fundamentally the same” (161) in this chapter comparing the two ways of life. Socrates’s story reports the means by which he “recovered from his depression” at the reproach of being poor. Strauss notes that his recovery depends on prior self-knowledge, “on the tacit premise that he possesses a soul by nature good” (160)—and he supplies the definition of a soul by nature good from the Memorabilia (4.1.2). It is the soul of one who possesses intellectual aptitude plus a particular passion: he “can learn quickly [and] remember what he has learned,” and he has in addition a longing “for all branches of knowledge through which one can nobly dwell in a house and a city and altogether make good use of human beings and of human affairs” (160). “Nobly dwell” seems to imply an implicit concern for others, but the second qualification speaks of the good use of others. How is this story characteristic of Socrates? Unlike the Greeks Lysander and Ischomachos whose characteristic stories made non-Greeks their fundamental teachers, “Socrates has not met with barbarians; he is as remote from barbarians, from barbarism, as possible.” Instead, Socrates “acquires his most important insight into the character of true human virtue by considering the virtue of a horse.” That is, Socrates learns from nature and from a question put to a human being. He gained his essential insight into the doubleness of human virtue from knowing his own nature and—moved by a reproach—learning from the groom that a horse can be admired for its

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nature; “true human virtue is not in need of conventions,” but conventional human virtue is. Not only does Socrates’s characteristic story differentiate natural virtue from conventional virtue, it relates a tale of becoming, a tale of how Socrates gained insight into the full truth about human virtue: suffering reproach while already knowing natural virtue, he posed a question and learned the separability of natural virtue from conventional virtue and the dependence of the latter on praise. He knew then that to avoid future reproach and depression he would have to pose a further question, What is conventional virtue, or what is a perfect gentleman? Socrates’s characteristic story tells why he sought out Ischomachos. “Since he is satisfied that he can become a good man”—already satisfied after questioning the groom and before questioning Ischomachos—“he asks Ischomachos to give him a full account of what he does, so as to enable him, to the extent to which he can understand it by listening, to imitate him, not indeed straightway but starting tomorrow” (161). In Xenophon’s dialogue Socrates’s statement drew a comment that casts light on Ischomachos: “You’re joking, Socrates, but I’ll give you an account anyway” (Oeconomicus 11.7). An Ischomachos with no use for cosmetics has no use for comedy, but he’s man enough or vain enough to ignore the frivolous and treat seriously Socrates’s question about his doings. Socrates’s way of telling stories takes advantage of the sobriety of the gentleman to tell the truth about himself; his comic treatment of the truth allows it to be spoken openly yet escape the notice of the sober. Strauss responds to Socrates’s comic story by yielding to temptation and assigning to “days” the sequential events of this great development in Socrates’s learning: “One is tempted to say that Socrates has his conversation with Ischomachos on the day after he had learned indirectly through Nikias’ groom that he could acquire virtue, and on the day before he began to acquire it; surely that conversation made an epoch in his life.” Socrates’s characteristic story is Xenophon’s way of setting out the events of Socrates’s turn to the human things, Xenophon’s way of showing Socrates becoming fully himself. On the day before Socrates sought out Ischomachos, he questioned the groom of the horse of Nikias the foreigner and was relieved to learn that he could acquire virtue. Yesterday’s event points to the day before yesterday and what must be supposed about Socrates’s life then: it was a life of measuring the air, idle talk, and indifference to wealth. That life brought the reputation, reproach, and depression that led him to pose yesterday’s

. In the Memorabilia, immediately before defining the soul by nature good, Xenophon says that when Socrates “was joking he was no less profitable to those who spent time with him than when he was serious” (4.1.1).



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question to Nikias’s groom. Today made an epoch in Socrates’s life because conversing with Ischomachos about acquiring virtue revealed not only the virtue of Ischomachos’s own doings but, first, the virtue of his wife. Tomorrow Socrates will begin to acquire virtue. Even Ischomachos knows he’s joking, but he doesn’t know just how the joke’s on him, for if it will always be tomorrow for Socrates’s acquiring Ischomachos’s virtue, beginning tomorrow—as a slight indication later today proves—Socrates will acquire the virtue of Ischomachos’s wife in the masculinity of her mind in regard to her own. Ischomachos is too sober to notice, but Socrates’s story “points to the serious difference between Ischomachos’ virtue or gentlemanship, which Socrates lacks . . . and Socrates’ virtue or gentlemanship, which both antedated and survived his conversation with Ischomachos.” Strauss is completely clear: Socrates possesses virtue apart from and invisible to the virtue of a perfect gentleman, yet it too can be called “gentlemanship,” it too is manly or moved by maleness. Because wealth marks “the most massive difference” between the two kinds of male virtue, Strauss can say that Ischomachos and King Cyrus “are fundamentally the same.” Socrates could tell the Persian story characteristic of Lysander in order to distinguish himself from the Ischomachos of the Phoenician story. That Socrates—who rules as Cyrus partly ruled, through cosmetics, not as Ischomachos does, on the basis of what he understands as being, truth, or nature (154)—is left behind without being withdrawn when Strauss’s subject switches from philosophic rule to philosophy proper and he shows how Socrates’s story points to the investigator of nature without Ischomachos’s noticing. Strauss draws a conclusion about Xenophon: “Hence, Cyrus or Ischomachos on the one hand and Socrates on the other stand at opposite poles of Xenophon’s ‘moral universe.’ ” As Xenophon presents Socrates’s manliness and points to the fundamental polarity in the two ways of life, the previous polarity between Socrates and Ischomachos as rulers, important enough to be the theme of the central paragraph of Strauss’s Gynaikologia, moves to its proper eccentric position: the center of the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing is philosophy, the investigation of the beings. Only in his Andrologia does Strauss assign Socrates his proper story. The reason for withholding it till now must lie in the different domains of gynaikologia and andrologia. Socrates’s manliness is displayed in all three “days” of his turn, but it is displayed especially in what he does before, during, and after his turn, his pursuit of the greatest of all outdoor tasks, the inquiry into nature. His turn, itself an act of his manly mind, allows him to learn and succeed at Cyrus’s outdoor task, rule, for Ischomachos teaches

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him that he can rescue his reputation and avoid reproach only by a further act of manliness, teaching those who are manly as Ischomachos is manly, the gentlemen, the cosmetic teleotheology that secures their place in a godordered cosmos. Strauss’s Gynaikologia showed Xenophon’s Socrates learning the need for and nature of a fitting politics for philosophy, the theological-political project or teleotheological teaching to be conveyed through the female arts of cosmetic. Strauss’s Andrologia shows Xenophon’s Socrates telling his characteristic story in order to point to the stages in his manly learning; deep within his philosophizing proper, his investigation of nature and human nature, he came to learn the reputation and reproach they brought and the necessity of learning how conventional virtue is related to his natural virtue. The philosophizing peculiar to Socrates is the complementary mating of maleness and femaleness in a single thinker. Philosophy proper allows the philosopher to come to know nature as a pleasure garden, a knowing that includes knowing the limits on managing it. Learning then from a manager of a household and city what it is necessary to know to rule such managers, Socrates makes a home for himself and his pleasure garden in the city. Strauss’s Gynaikologia and Andrologia succeed in showing how Xenophon could write his Oeconomicus as a “comical reply to Aristophanes’ comical attack on Socrates” (164) and tell the truth about Socrates in public while knowing that those who scorn comedy as frivolous would never notice. To end his paragraph Strauss reverts to the verb that opened it—points—in order to characterize Xenophon’s writing in contrast to that of the other two great Socratics: Aristotle speaks, Plato articulates. Each in his own way provides access to the peculiarly Socratic philosophizing that became the core of the “Great Tradition” (83) shared and advanced by all the genuine philosophers subsequent to Socrates. Strauss’s next paragraphs, the third and fourth of six, deal with the attainment of happiness, with the two different ways to happiness in the two . Strauss deals with the possible exceptions of Epicurus and Lucretius in “Notes on Lucretius” (LAM, 76–139). Regarding Lucretius’s neglect of the salutary effect of religious terror, Strauss says it “leaves us with the sting of the question as to how the unphilosophic multitude will conduct itself if it ceases to believe in gods who punish lack of patriotism or of filial piety” (100). Later, Lucretius “makes us wonder again whether by attempting to take away [religious] fear he does not weaken a salutary restraint” (105). But in Lucretius’s account of human origins Strauss notes that divine punishment “sometimes acts as a restraint. This means, however, that according to Lucretius religion is of a utility which is not altogether negligible” (127). And in his final treatment of the fear of divine punishment in developed political society Strauss says this about Lucretius’s judgment: “We see again that religion may exert a salutary restraint. It is surely greatly preferable that the restraint be exerted by philosophy” (131).



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different ways of life. The pupil Socrates learns that Ischomachos’s happiness has a foundation different from his own and in the process learns the necessity that he adopt a new way of speaking about Ischomachos’s happiness as the precondition of sustaining his own. The two paragraphs begin appropriately, each starting with the name of the man whose way of life it considers. Ischomachos begins his account of his actions with serving the gods, a service that follows from his notions about the relations of gods and humans, in particular his belief that the gods permit happiness only to the prudent, who “do assiduously what prudence prescribes” (162). But he also believes that the gods may withhold happiness even from the prudent and assiduous. The unarticulated theology that grounds Ischomachos’s actions is therefore that of the Phoenician boatswain expressed in a “less shocking and savage manner.” Strauss enumerates the five chief items in which the happiness of Ischomachos’s way of life consists, placing “honor in the city” at the center and remarking that the list shows why there is “no radical separation” of the private life of the household manager and political life or between the way of life of Ischomachos and Cyrus. Strauss gives Socrates’s assessment of these items in his next paragraph, but note must be taken of what Socrates just learned about the foundations of the way of life of the gentleman: in his two words “prudence and assiduity” Strauss has gathered the total of gentlemanly virtue and added to it the hard devotedness with which it is pursued. Socrates here learns the core of the way of life foreign to him but characteristic of the makers of order within which he has unwittingly lived but on which his own unique and independent way of life can now be seen as passively parasitical or, in the language of the hive, as the life of a drone. He will eventually see to the securing of his precarious place among the prudent and assiduous by the correction he offers to the faulty foundation of their way of life, replacing the inadequate theology of the boatswain—the uncertainty of its reward of happiness—with the teleotheology that will guarantee the prudent and assiduous the rewards of their virtue and devotion.

. By putting the attainment of happiness at the center of his Andrologia chapter, Strauss suggests that Xenophon did what Plato did: Plato’s Republic placed at its center the attainment of happiness and the sole way to achieve it: in order to sustain his own happiness the philosopher must rule by promising the city a way to the attainment of happiness (473c–d). . Strauss placed a footnote at the end of this paragraph, that is to say, between the separate paragraphs on the two ways of life; it invites comparison of an earlier passage in the Oeconomicus (2.5) with a passage in the Memorabilia, “II.1.8ff. (especially 13–14).” The Memorabilia passage is most illuminating at this point because it raises the possibility of a middle way between the two

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Socrates pursues a way of life that leaves him “poor and satisfied with being poor,” and because he is satisfied he “is apparently struck most by Ischomachos’ concern with being wealthy and his willingness to undergo the many troubles which accompany the possession of wealth.” Ischomachos’s way of life, however, dictates that he “sees only pleasure where Socrates sees only trouble.” Wealth is pleasant for Ischomachos “because it enables a man to honor the gods magnificently, to assist his friends in their need, and to contribute toward the adornment of the city.” In his crucial observation on these three purposes Strauss states that they are “not selfish.” With these two words Strauss conveys most laconically Socrates’s insight into the fundamental difference in the two ways of life: his own way of life is the selfish pursuit of a passion; the gentleman’s way of life—those troubles, that prudence and assiduity—is “not selfish.” That insight leads Socrates to immediately change his way of speaking; as Strauss remarks: “this is perhaps sufficient reason for Socrates to call them, not indeed pleasant, but noble.” Socrates will not call them pleasant—he does not go that far with Ischomachos—but he goes so far as not to call them troubles, not to call them what they are when viewed from his way of life. Instead, let them be called “noble,” let them be called what Ischomachos calls them; without changing his way of life Socrates will change his way of speaking and adapt his language to the perspective of Ischomachos’s way of life. Completing the same sentence, Strauss adds, “to this extent the pupil Socrates has become convinced by Ischomachos’ defense of the perfect gentleman’s way of life.” Socrates is convinced to the extent of serving his own advantage by adopting a manner of speaking that praises a way of life whose pleasures drive the perfect gentleman to self-sacrifice, to trouble himself with acquiring wealth in order to honor gods, assist friends, and adorn the city.

ways of life. Socrates there initiates a conversation with Aristippos, a philosophic companion of his who desires to pursue a life of pleasure that avoids the troubles associated with ruling. When Socrates suggests that there are still less pleasant consequences of being ruled, Aristippos says (to quote Strauss’s commentary) that “he chooses a middle way between the way through ruling and that through subjection, namely, the way through freedom, the way that leads in the highest degree to happiness” (XS, 34). The middle way would be viable, Socrates replies, “if it did not lead through human beings; living among human beings one must either rule or be ruled . . . If one is not willing to play the hammer, one must play the anvil; human life is necessarily political.” When Aristippos replies that to avoid this he “lives everywhere as a foreigner,” Socrates calls this “a marvelous trick” and describes the still greater threats to such an exposed life. The passage and Strauss’s commentary on it illuminate the necessity behind Socrates’s action in defense of his way of life, his correction of Ischomachos that begins at the end of Xenophon’s central chapter in the Oeconomicus.



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The perfect gentleman’s way of acquiring wealth differentiates him from the general run of men who manage their households: he must be concerned with increasing his. Only through increase can he fulfill “his desire to adorn the city and to support his friends.” Socrates’s way of phrasing the perfect gentleman’s desire, Strauss notes, silently indicates his view of what Ischomachos reported as the three pleasures of wealth: what Ischomachos saw as honoring the gods, Socrates understands as part of adorning the city (163). The pupil Socrates thus learns to station himself consciously among the many who praise the perfect gentleman’s pursuit and use of wealth while being unable to imitate him in such troubles. Socrates “turns therefore for the time being” to those three items in Ischomachos’s enumeration of the parts of happiness that he himself can pursue. But Ischomachos doubts that this modest accommodation to his way of life “is feasible,” and “Socrates agrees.” This agreement leads Strauss to remark that Socrates “surely is eager to hear the full account of how the perfect gentleman spends his day.” Socrates’s eagerness to listen will be richly rewarded because what he hears will enable him to replace his immediate, his not feasible accommodation to Ischomachos’s way of life, turned to “for the time being,” with a feasible accommodation, a correction of Ischomachos’s inchoate theology the turn to which is heralded in this chapter by the small correction that almost ends it. The anticipation kindled by Strauss’s central paragraphs certainly leaves his reader eager for Strauss’s full account of the Andrologia. Strauss begins his account of the doings of the perfect gentleman by announcing that it will not be a full account: “We mention only a few points” (163). One early point proves basic: Strauss quotes words that Xenophon’s Ischomachos states in the indicative—his servant “gives the horse a roll and leads it home”—because they repeat what Aristophanes’s Pheidippides stated in the imperative. Strauss is assertive: “Ischomachos, we shall say, is Xenophon’s substitute for the Aristophanean Pheidippides.” Substitute is subtle: Xenophon substitutes Ischomachos, an older perfect gentleman to whom Socrates makes himself a pupil, for Aristophanes’s Pheidippides, a young potential gentleman whom Socrates teaches and corrupts. Strauss

. Perhaps Strauss’s “for the time being,” his anticipation of Socrates’s full correction of Ischomachos’s way of life, explains the footnote he added to this paragraph, the central footnote of the chapter. The footnote leaves in Latin the statement that “[f]or Aristotle, as for all ancients outside the Church, the worship of the gods presupposed magnificent gestures.” Christianity thus seems to have introduced a novelty that, while itself a teleotheology, altered the conditions of social life that generated the theological-political programs of all the ancients prior to Christianity’s rise to rule. The footnote suggests that all adjustments made by the philosophic way of life to what rules social or political life are “for the time being.”

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takes the repeated words—so representative of a gentleman’s life that Pheidippides says them in a dream—to be Xenophon’s invitation to compare his Oeconomicus with Aristophanes’s Clouds. Strauss compares what the Aristophanean Socrates does with Pheidippides to what the Xenophontic Socrates is doing with Kritoboulos. The former “corrupted completely a youth who was already half-corrupted,” whereas the latter “saves [a youth] from corruption.” Whereas the Aristophanean Socrates “is nothing but a teacher,” the Xenophontic Socrates “is in the first place a pupil” (164). Socrates the teacher once made himself a pupil of the perfect gentleman, who “teaches him, without knowing it, the rudiments of the right kind of philosophizing.” Socrates the pupil learns that he has been teaching the wrong kind of philosophizing, a corrupting kind, whereas the right kind that he learns, what he will make the peculiarly Socratic kind, saves from corruption. “Whereas the pupil of the Aristophanean Socrates looked down on his farming father, the teacher of the Xenophontic Socrates admires his farming father.” Strauss can therefore say, “The Oeconomicus is then in a properly subdued manner a comical reply to Aristophanes’ comical attack on Socrates.” “More precisely,” Strauss says to begin his next sentence, the Oeconomicus describes Socrates’ famous turning away from his earlier pursuits, which brought him the reputation of being an idle talker and a man who measures the air and which left him wholly unaware of what perfect gentlemanship is, toward the study of only the human things and the things useful to human beings.

Strauss’s only shows him imitating the Xenophontic manner, for the second sentence of his book spoke of a Socrates who “is said to have disregarded the whole of nature altogether in order to devote himself entirely to the study of ethical things” (83). His Gynaikologia and Andrologia correct “those who are concerned with ‘the Socratic problem’ ” (149) on just this matter, for they show the Socrates who was a pupil of nature become a pupil of Ischomachos. Now, having made the whole trajectory of Socrates’s life visible, Strauss can say only in order to restore the appearance Socrates gave to his life after being Ischomachos’s pupil: what the pupil learned today demands that what he did the day before yesterday and will do for all tomorrows he do in a way that is attentive to the gentlemen by appearing to concern itself only with the human things. . With respect to Socrates’s gentlemanship Strauss later says: “a perfect gentleman in the Ischomachean sense differs profoundly from the perfect gentleman in the Socratic sense. A per-



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The rest of Strauss’s paragraph broadens the comparison between Xenophon and Aristophanes by setting out differences in Xenophon’s and Plato’s treatment of how Socrates became Socrates in his turn to the human things. Each chose to depict the “profound change” in Socrates as occurring “after the comical attacks.” In Plato’s Apology of Socrates the change “seems to be traced . . . to the Delphic god or to Chairephon, the companion par excellence of Socrates in the Clouds” (see SPPP, 41). And in Xenophon? The change “was traced by Xenophon, it seems, to the comic poet himself—to a man who, through his comedies, kept Kritoboulos away from farming, from performing his filial duties.” Xenophon’s comedy therefore, “in a properly subdued manner,” accused Aristophanes of corrupting the young. Strauss helps his reader appreciate this fine Xenophontic joke: so far from burning down Socrates’s Thinkery, the grateful Kriton can thank the generous Socrates for saving his Kritoboulos from being corrupted by the wicked Aristophanes. Xenophon’s subdued manner is proper because it keeps its accusation of Aristophanes offstage, keeps it in the family of the enlightened to which Aristophanes most certainly belonged even though he betrayed Socrates in an improperly unsubdued manner. The final sentences of Strauss’s paragraph state what Plato and Xenophon share: both “treat Socrates’ ‘pre-Socratic’ past with great delicacy.” Plato’s delicacy “makes his master tell the story of that past—a story which partly confirms the account given in the Clouds—to his friends when he was already beyond the reach of those who condemn the study of nature as wicked.” Beyond the reach? This puts delicately the fact that those who condemn such study as wicked had already got to Socrates, for Plato has him tell of his first investigations of nature only hours before drinking the poison to which the city condemned him. And Xenophon’s delicacy? Strauss’s sentence runs: “The Ischomachos section of the Oeconomicus is at any rate a worthy part of the Socratic discourse written by Xenophon.” Strauss’s commentary on Xenophon’s portrayal of the Socratic turn describes Xenophon’s delicacy with Xenophontic delicacy while making it clearer than Xenophon or Plato ever did that the Socrates who remained a student of nature developed a theological-political teaching on nature that mastered it conceptually for the sake of the rising generation of gentlemen. The full account of the perfect gentleman’s doings having been given, Socrates can move to the issue that completes the contrast of the two lives,

fect gentleman in the Socratic sense is a man who knows through thinking what is pious, what is impious, what is noble, what is base, and so on, or who considers thoroughly the just and unjust things” (175–76).

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or as Strauss now chooses to call it, “the confrontation of the two incompatible ways of life” (165). That issue concerns the speaking that attends the gentleman’s doing. Strauss notes that Socrates begins by “[s]wearing again by Hera,” and he balances that beginning by noting at the end that Ischomachos swears by Zeus: Gynaikologia and Andrologia end by elevating womanliness and manliness into the paradigm divine wife and husband in order to consider the speaking that befits each. Xenophon makes the confrontation between the two incompatible ways of life, those of the philosopher and the perfect gentleman, incompatible in the ways that Hera and Zeus are incompatible: within the unity of a marriage of willing partners each of whom embraces the other and Hera keeps her counsel and her transparent Zeus speaks his mind. Socrates’s “further question,” whose answer completes the account of the perfect gentleman, asks Ischomachos “whether he takes care to be skilled also in debate—in giving accounts to others and demanding them from others.” Ischomachos’s reply focuses on his “defending himself by not doing wrong to anyone and by doing good as much as he can to many, and accusing others by watching those who privately wrong many and who wrong the city and do no good to anyone.” His defense is of his justice, a watchful justice with a strong accusatory element, alert and ready to spring against the possibly unjust for private wrongs, public wrongs, and failure to do good. When Strauss contrasts Socrates, it is the Socrates on trial before Meletus’s charges: Socrates is now learning that he is on constant trial, watched by the justice of the perfect gentlemen alert to accuse fellow citizens in their wrongdoing. Unlike Socrates, Ischomachos did not “spend his life considering the just and unjust things—this would be ‘idle talk.’ ” Just Ischomachos spends his life on the doings that spring from his unconsidered sense of the just and unjust things. Unlike Ischomachos, Socrates “was not in any way concerned with accusing others” (166), but he learns to be concerned with his teacher’s need to accuse others. Learning and judging his teacher’s doings, learning and judging the confrontation between his way of life and the incompatible, accusatory way of Ischomachos, newly concerned Socrates accuses only himself and determines to begin tomorrow to acquire virtue. Ischomachos’s reply did not satisfy Socrates because it said “nothing as to whether he is concerned with putting into words” his defense of himself and accusation of others. Ischomachos assures Socrates that he never ceases to practice what Strauss calls “all kinds of speaking,” and Ischomachos “adds the remark that he was frequently condemned.” Strauss moves directly to just who condemned Ischomachos and just why he was unable



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to defend himself. That is, he eliminates the dialogue through which Xenophon showed Socrates learning the decisive point by his questioning and only then offering the decisive comment. For Socrates learned this last lesson of the Andrologia only by putting two direct questions to Ischomachos after confessing that Ischomachos’s being condemned at all had “escaped my notice.” By not reporting Socrates’s questioning that drew out Ischomachos to confess his invisible condemnation, Strauss makes him seem more forthcoming with Socrates than he actually was, perhaps to suggest just how defenseless he is against Socrates’s questioning. Strauss’s paraphrase of their dialogue notes that Ischomachos added to his description of his speaking “the remark that he was frequently condemned, not indeed by any court of law”—as might have been expected from Ischomachos’s account of the accusatory character of his own speaking—“but by his wife; for he cannot plead his cause well if it is useful to him to say the untruth; swearing by Zeus, he says that he cannot make the weaker argument the stronger one.” In this pivotal, packed sentence Strauss shows that he exaggerated when he said that Ischomachos practiced “all kinds of speaking.” One kind, the kind expertly practiced by those who engage in blamable idle talk, he did not or could not practice even when it would have been useful. Ischomachos’s confident account of himself as a speaker engaged in deliberation and praise and blame ends in a startling confession of failure, of being blamed and of submitting to a judgment of what he must suffer or pay. He makes his confession with complete openness during a confrontation that he does not know is a confrontation, a trial in which he does not know he is on trial. His conversation with Socrates must mirror his conversations with his wife where his confidence in himself leaves him just as unguarded because he doesn’t know that it is a kind of confrontation, for his wife presents herself as only obedient. His noble confession of a failing, his noble failure, further reveals just how things stand in his marriage. For this must be how his wife, by Hera, gets the better of him, by Zeus. Although he was frequently condemned by her and submitted to her judgment as to what he must suffer or pay, he cannot know the full extent of what her mastery allows her to do with him. The sentences Strauss now adds are about Socrates, the Socrates who learned from Ischomachos’s wife how to master her husband, the wife who evidently overcame the diffidence she displayed as a nice or sweet bride in her first conversations with him, an overcoming that Socrates will exhibit within a single conversation. Xenophon’s central chapter ends on Socrates’s response to Ischomachos’s confessed failure that he is not able to make the weaker argument the stronger one. Strauss’s report on Socrates’s response inserts a reference

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to what Socrates is capable of doing, thus giving his words to Ischomachos a most enlightening setting: “Socrates, who—in contradistinction to Ischomachos—could do what he liked with anyone disputing with him, corrects him by saying: ‘Perhaps you cannot make the untruth true.’ ” Strauss’s final sentence on the exchange tells his reader exactly how to view a Socrates correcting Ischomachos: “The Socrates who conversed with Ischomachos was as much a rhetorician as Aristophanes’ Socrates.” The Socrates who conversed with Ischomachos is a rhetorician who can do what he likes with anyone disputing with him. And now he would like to correct Ischomachos, and a Socrates who corrects Ischomachos does now what he said at the start of his inquiry into Ischomachos’s doings he could not in justice do (159). The Socrates who corrects Ischomachos corrects Ischomachos justly, rhetorician though he be. To an Ischomachos confessing his inability to defend himself as a simple failure, rhetorician Socrates offers a praiseworthy, a moral way to understand his failure: understand it as a strength, Ischomachos, a just standing up for the true—a correction that would be welcomed by an Ischomachos who has no use for attempts to improve on being, truth, or nature (154). Socrates’s correction offers moral Ischomachos a moral if untrue interpretation of his true failure as a speaker—as a moral man he will not make the untruth true; he can not lie. Socrates’s very words make an untruth true, a failure a moral strength. Socrates proves by deed that he is willing to make the weaker argument the stronger one. Socrates’s gift of cosmetic moral words offered to the moral man makes a particular untruth true, endorsing the gentleman’s characteristic failure as a speaker—no more than Ischomachos’s wife would Socrates want the gentlemen to learn deception by boasting or concealment (155). By giving the perfect gentleman words to interpret his failure as moral strength, Socrates the philosopher benefits the gentleman, does him good, and he benefits himself by making the two incompatible ways of life seem compatible to the gentleman as he, a mere talker, puts his talk into the gentlemen’s service. . Within this sentence Strauss inserted a footnote reference to give the source in the Memorabilia for Socrates’s ability to do what he liked with anyone disputing with him. His footnote invites the reader to “Cf. Kynegetikos 3.9.” The setting for that passage in On Hunting refers to the faults of hounds used for hunting, and the fault described at 3.9 runs: “Many abandon the pursuit and go back because of their hatred of the hunt, and many because of their love of man (philanthropia). Others try to mislead by baying on the track, representing false lines as true ones.” The two manys and the others seem to be all. For by including this reference here, Strauss seems to understand Xenophon to be suggesting what Socrates liked to do with those who disputed with him: allow the hate and love of most to lead them to abandon the hunt that is Socrates’s peculiar hunt, and encourage the few others to stay with the hunt and learn how to bay, to hunt with rhetorical cover.



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And so the corrections begin, corrections that will not stop until they attain their most comprehensive form. For what begins today with Socrates justly offering a moral correction of Ischomachos’s confessed incapacity will not stop until that someday after tomorrow when Socrates completes construction of the correction that pretends to correct untamable nature through a teleotheology that imagines the very cosmos moral. Socrates is a quick learner. Learning the utility of cosmetics from Ischomachos’s report on his wife, he makes use of his own reticence to correct Ischomachos, to master him by an art of seeming. Strauss thus ends on a particular example of how Socrates will rule, an example that the whole of his Gynaikologia and Andrologia shows to be but a single instance of how Socrates will manage the gentlemen by correcting their view of themselves and the cosmos. As a miniature of the most extensive correction possible, this particular correction shows the ultimate outcome of Socrates’s turn, that epoch in his life that made an epoch in the life of philosophy for it was carried forward by each great Socratic to come, as Strauss indicates in a final addendum to his Andrologia. “Someone might say”—Strauss invents an objector at the end of the Andrologia, he repeats a device that he saw Plato use three times in his Apology of Socrates to allow Socrates to make a “digression” that in all three cases stated the all-important matter, the deepest ground for living and acting as he did. Strauss’s someone makes the appropriate objection that Socrates is not likely to have fared better in arguments with his wife than Ischomachos did with his. In his all-important digression Strauss says, if we may generalize from the only pertinent example given to us by Xenophon, Socrates did not even begin to argue with Xanthippe: when his son Lamprokles complained about his mother’s unbearable conduct toward him, Socrates did not take up the matter with his wife but persuaded his son to change his conduct, i.e., to change his reaction to his mother’s unchangeable conduct.

Socrates neither lectured his wife nor accused her. Instead, he persuaded his son to change his reaction to conduct that he was persuaded to judge not unbearable but unchangeable. To end his Gynaikologia and Andrologia and their consistent invitation to have the homely illuminate the exalted, Strauss offers a final inference to the most exalted. For Strauss so arranges . “Plato’s Apology of Socrates,” SPPP, 41, 44, 50; the explanation of this device is given at the second instance.

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matters—“someone might say”—that Socrates’s final communication in these chapters is not to Ischomachos or the Kritobouloses but to his very son, his offspring, one who comes after him whom he himself generated to carry on what is most his own. “Lamprokles” stands in for that other audience of the Socratic discourse, the Xenophon who painted himself present as the stand-in for each Xenophon to come, each a true son of Socrates. To that someone attentive to implication and concerned with his mother’s treatment, Socrates offers the wisest, most deep-running counsel of all, persuading his son, each son, and through each all, to change his conduct toward his unchangeable mother. For his son Socrates corrects his most comprehensive teaching for the gentlemen. What Strauss suggests at the end of Xenophon’s central chapter, a chapter on the two incompatible ways of life, extends what he suggested at the end of his own central chapter on cosmetics. There, the student of nature, having heard the perfect gentleman’s attempt to master nature, to lecture his own order into her, to give her laws that originate with him—there, Socrates knew that his superiority lay in his having no delusions in this respect, in his being aware of his ignorance of the art of managing nature. And now one learns that that ignorance is not incidental, remediable perhaps tomorrow; it is irremediable because it is based on knowledge, a certain kind of knowledge of nature that knows the limits of management. Knowing his ignorance and the reason for it, Socrates was able knowingly to create the cosmetic that would allow gentlemen to live at home in a cosmos they would believe to be ruled by perfected gentlemen, gods they would believe ruled the cosmos as they believed they themselves ruled their households. Here at the end of the Andrologia chapter, Strauss’s digression makes Socrates’s superiority lie in his refraining from even attempting to argue with nature and in his communicating this restraint to his son, passing on to him not a cosmetic teleotheology but a different reaction to nature’s conduct, his own reaction, a learned reaction grounded in his hunt, his inquiry, and in his finding out the kinds of beings that make up the whole. Strauss’s report on Socrates’s counsel to the genuine offspring of his wisdom may go so far as to suggest, given its context of familial loves, a step beyond mere reconciliation with nature’s unchangeable conduct: love of that conduct, love of what generated both the inquirer and the whole on which he is the grateful spectator. For there seems to be more to Socrates’s relation to nature than the restraint, the acceptance, on which the Andrologia chapter ends. Strauss attached a last footnote to the last sentence of the Gynaikologia chapters, to the clause “If Socrates failed to educate Xanthippe” (158). The footnote says,



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“Cf. Symp. 2.10.” The second chapter of Xenophon’s Symposium contains a singular notice that adds immensely to the understanding of Socrates’s way of life as more than simply an acceptance of nature as it is. Dances were performed at that symposium by two different dancers, a dancing girl and a dancing boy whose respective dances Strauss distinguished sharply. The dancing girl’s first dance occasioned Antisthenes’s question to Socrates as to why he had not educated Xanthippe “but lives with her who is of all wives present, past, and future the most difficult, as she is” (XS, 147); the dancing girl’s next dance was extremely dangerous, and it not only settled the controversial issue of the teachability of virtue but was linked to teaching manliness to the whole city. Socrates, Strauss emphasizes, did not take her dance as a model. “Then the boy danced.” And Socrates proved willing to learn “the postures exhibited by the boy, and . . . he had that wish because he wished to dance.”10 Socrates’s wish made all laugh at him, and Socrates responded to the laughter of all with “a very serious face” and “explained that he wishes to learn to dance for a variety of reasons.” Strauss gives only one of them, noting its three crucial features: “he would not need a partner”—“nor would he have to strip in public”—“but could do it in the privacy of his home.” Speaking then of “those reasons,” Strauss notes that they “were so powerful that he was already dancing” without any instruction, and he reports Socrates’s revelation that “Charmides had caught him dancing in the early morning just the other day.” Yielding to something powerful, Socrates dances alone at daybreak. Charmides, who caught him at it, reported that he feared at first that Socrates was mad, but when Socrates explained the reasons to him, “he went home in order, not indeed to dance, but to do the closest approximation to it of which he was capable”—calisthenics, as Xenophon reported. Whereas Charmides imitated Socrates in the best way he could, Kallias, the host, misunderstood entirely “the strictly private, partnerless character of Socrates’ dancing.” Without a partner, not having to strip in public, privately in his home, Socrates dances at daybreak. Understanding nature as it is, Socrates changed his reaction to nature’s unchangeable conduct; but more than that, nature’s unchangeable conduct, mimicked in the motion of all parts of the dancing boy’s body, powerfully drove Socrates to dance alone at daybreak. With Socrates’s dance, as with the pleasure garden of what was temporarily “Socrates’ story,” Strauss touches with great economy the deepest

10. Strauss does not mention that Socrates “thought of something else in addition, that no part of his body was idle during the dance” (Symposium 2.16)—all was in motion.

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problem, the truth about nature and the human place in nature—plus the appropriate human response to that truth. Socrates’s turn to the human taught him that the humans in charge, the males in charge, judge nature to act unbearably toward humans, like a sea always in motion, always threatening humans and human constructs with destruction, always failing to distinguish worthy from unworthy. Xenophon’s images bring to light Socrates’s insight into the male need to master feared and hated nature, to conquer nature. They show Socrates, the student of nature and human nature, learning that he will have to persuade ruling males of what he learned they would dearly want to believe, that nature is not what she seems but wholly otherwise, end-directed for human benefit by caring gods who ensure that the worthy benefit and the unworthy suffer. Socrates has no quarrel with nature, but he teaches a fiction to make it appear that the male quarrel with nature misunderstands nature. To this degree, Socrates’s teleotheology is itself a project to master nature, to rule it conceptually; it is a conquest of nature that orders nature in accord with human wishes; it is a male project, the project of a real real man to conquer nature conceptually— if only exoterically. Socrates’s intervention, his enterprise, is an early episode in what Strauss came to recognize as the greatest contemporary problem: “Nature, we may say, has become a problem owing to the fact that man is conquering nature and there are no assignable limits to that conquest” (SPPP, 190). When Strauss made that comment three years later in his Nietzsche essay, he was completing his interpretation of Nietzsche’s understanding of the male correction of nature. And Nietzsche, so far from furthering that will to correction, analyzed it as culminating in the correction that is the teleotheology, the correction devised by the wise to serve the human passion for revenge on unbearable nature, the moral correction Nietzsche aimed to reverse with his own teaching. Nietzsche treats with full explicitness what rises so quietly in the suggestions that end Strauss’s Gynaikologia and Andrologia on Socrates’s relation to nature. Socrates’s relation to nature, Strauss suggests, is the opposite of a passion to alter hated nature, it is an acceptance of nature as it is that leads to a love of nature as it is, a dance with nature as it is. The immensity that Strauss touches with such reserve at the end of the Gynaikologia and Andrologia chapters suggests that Socrates alone at home thought and lived the affirmation of nature explicit in Nietzsche’s thought. As this book proceeds, it will make ever more evident what is in the end not at all surprising, that philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche share what is highest and best. The same object of inquiry investigated with the same instruments of inquiry by similarly passionate and supreme masters



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of inquiry—if philosophy is possible at all of course its peak attainments bear a close family resemblance. It was the necessities of exotericism, of fitting philosophy to the ruling men, that forced philosophy to adopt the different guises in different ages that made it look so different when looked back at without the resources of an appreciation of exotericism.

chapter five

Platonic Political Philosophy: “Ministerial Poetry”

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enophon was the first thinker of the Greek enlightenment on whom Strauss published an essay, and he was the subject of Strauss’s last essay. But Plato was the definitive thinker for Strauss. His reflections on Plato occur within his comprehensive study of Greek thought from Homer through Aristotle; his definitive statement on Plato, “On Plato’s Republic,” is flanked in The City and Man by essays on Aristotle and Thucydides. “On Plato’s Republic” treats first the all-important matter of how to read a Platonic dialogue and only then offers a reading of the Republic. Because the Republic is so well known, I take the liberty of beginning my selective treatment of Strauss’s essay at its end.

MINISTERIAL POETRY Poetry is the theme of the last six paragraphs of “On Plato’s Republic” as Strauss considers Socrates’s “apparently unmotivated return” “to the subject of poetry” in book 10. To understand that return, Strauss uses as a guide Socrates’s treatment of Thrasymachus in the Republic. Thrasymachus fosters injustice, but despite that, “Socrates could become a friend of Thrasymachus.” “The poets . . . foster injustice,” but with them too “there is no reason why [Socrates] could not be a friend of the poets and especially of Homer” (133–34). Strauss therefore approaches the famous “ancient

. CM, 133. Subsequent references to “On Plato’s Republic” will be to page numbers in parentheses in the text rather than to paragraphs because many of the relevant paragraphs are longer than a page.

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quarrel between philosophy and poetry” wondering, could that quarrel too be prelude to a friendship, prelude to an alliance? The foundation for Socrates’s return to poetry in book 10 was laid much earlier: “poetry takes the lead when the descent from the highest theme— justice understood as philosophy—begins” (134). From the beginning of book 8, then, the turn from the highest theme, philosophy, meant a descent to poetry. That descent has three parts, “the account of the inferior regimes and inferior souls,” the explicit return to poetry, and “a discussion of ‘the greatest rewards for virtue.’ ” The explicit return to poetry thus “constitutes the center of that part of the Republic in which the conversation descends from the highest theme.” Strauss’s account of the return to poetry illuminates its primary difference from philosophy: “philosophy as quest for the truth is the highest activity of man and poetry is not concerned with the truth.” In his long penultimate paragraph Strauss defines the poet and the poet’s relation to the philosopher (135–37). The paragraph is remarkable in its concision and rapidity as it treats in a most economical way one aspect of the Republic’s solution to the theological-political problem of philosophy, a historic event that set the course for Western thought from Plato to Nietzsche—Nietzsche whose named appearance here is anything but incidental. “The contemplation of the ideas is the activity of the philosopher” (135), but another activity arises as a consequence, namely, “the imitation of the works of artisans [which] is the activity of the poets and other ‘imitative’ artisans.” Socrates presents the “order of rank”—a Nietzschean term— among philosopher, artisan, and imitative artisan in two ways, a repetition that is most illuminating because the first, which treats “making,” puts the god highest, whereas the second, which treats “using,” replaces the god with the user “who possesses the highest or most authoritative knowledge,” the philosopher. Strauss notes that leaving the realm of philosophy proper means being “concerned with the useful rather than with a certain kind of the beautifully pleasant.” He notes a second matter: because “the order of rank referred to in the first half of the tenth book abstracts from the warriors[,] it looks as if the healthy city which did not know warriors or imitative artisans . . . were to be restored with its natural head—the philosophers— added to it.” The tenth book completes the Republic as a “restoration”

. Arguing that Socrates and Thrasymachus, as men of the Greek enlightenment, shared some interests at least, Strauss showed that in the Republic Socrates attempts to enlist Thrasymachus in a project that will serve his advantage: an apparent enemy becomes an ally in a project of Socrates’s devising.

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of the healthy city by showing how the philosophers, turning to the useful from their pleasure gardens, can exercise rule as its natural head. Strauss then turns to “Socrates’ seemingly outrageous judgment on poetry” and asks regarding his three-tier order of rank: who are the artisans whose work the poet-artisan imitates? Before answering, Strauss identifies “the poets’ themes” with “human beings as referred to virtue and vice; the poets see the human things in the light of virtue,” even if “the virtue toward which they look is an imperfect and even distorted image of virtue.” He can then answer: “The artisan whom the poet imitates is the non-philosophic legislator who is himself an imperfect imitator of virtue” (135–36). Strauss applies this answer to the Republic: “justice as understood by the city is necessarily the work of the legislator” (136); he adds: “No one expressed Socrates’ suggestion more clearly than Nietzsche who said that ‘the poets were always the valets of some morality.’” But Strauss adds that “for a valet there is no hero,” the poets are in fact “aware of the secret weaknesses of their heroes.” The poets, supposed valets, oppose the legislator as lacking in understanding: the poets, “spokesmen of the passions[,] oppose the legislator as spokesman of reason.” But Strauss finds a deficiency in most legislators: “the non-philosophic legislator is not unqualifiedly the spokesman of reason.” He can say of these legislators that “[t]he poets have a broader view of human life as the conflict between passion and reason,” and from this broader perspective they can “show the limitations of law.” In this one way, then, Nietzsche’s little dictum fails, for “if the poets are perhaps the men who understand best the nature of the passions which the law should restrain, they are very far from being merely the servants of the legislators.” That fact becomes important to a particular kind of legislator, the prudent kind, for “the prudent legislator will learn” from the poets what they understand best, “the nature of the passions.” It is here that the fate of Thrasymachus in the Republic becomes the key to the truth about poetry, for here it becomes visible that the most prudent of legislators, the philosophic legislator Socrates, becomes the friend of the poets and especially of Homer. Learning from them the nature of the passions, Socrates becomes the ultimate user, who uses what he learned in his new legislation. Nonphilosophic legislators are replaced by the philosophic legislator Socrates, unqualifiedly the spokesman of reason, who becomes the friend of the poets not only through learning from them but through what he does next by himself.

. In his first paragraphs on the Republic Strauss contrasted the “political restoration”—to which some characters in the Republic fell victim—with “the Socratic restoration” (63–64). . Strauss references The Gay Science, aph. 1.



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For Strauss moves to the action of the most prudent legislator. “The genuine ‘quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (607b5–6) concerns, from the philosopher’s point of view, not the worth of poetry as such, but the order of rank of philosophy and poetry.” Repetition of Nietzsche’s phrase order of rank signals Nietzsche’s return as one who also showed that it’s not quite true that poets are merely the valets of some morality, for there are rare exceptions, cases in which a genuine philosopher learns from poets— “the case of Wagner is for the philosopher a windfall”—and can then set out to be a prudent legislator, a philosophic ruler who, as the ultimate user, can lay down laws for the gods. Nietzsche’s most direct treatment of this topic occurs in the urgency of his chapter on religion in Beyond Good and Evil, at its very end, where, having made the proper preparations regarding both philosophy and religion, he lays out the present task for philosophy: philosophy must once again set out to rule religion, for “sovereign religion” has come to rule humanity to the great danger of humanity’s future. The quarrel is a quarrel at and for the very peak of what rules humans, the teaching that will rule them, the good and evil that will rule them, the image of the highest beings that will rule them. Strauss therefore has Nietzsche in mind as he describes how Socrates ends the Republic: “According to Socrates, poetry is legitimate only as ministerial to the ‘user’ par excellence, to the king (597e7) who is the philosopher, and not as autonomous.” Ministerial or autonomous: those are the alternatives Strauss uses to assign to Socrates the task Nietzsche saw as the primary political task for philosophy, a theological-political task. Nietzsche speaks of sovereign religion; Strauss, following Plato, speaks of autonomous poetry, different names for the same phenomenon, belief-grounded-beliefs about god and the soul that rule by ruling human actions. Strauss uses the political language of sovereignty, according to which the king appoints ministers to administer affairs in the king’s interest. Socrates, as his peak political endeavor, acts to bring religion under the care of philosophy, acts to make poetry ministerial to sovereign reason. Socrates’s act is an event in “the disputation . . . [that is] without any question the most important fact of the whole past,” “the genuine, single and deepest theme of all world history and human history, to which all the rest are subordinate . . . the

. Nietzsche, Case of Wagner, epilogue (end). . Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphs. 61–62. . Strauss’s apparent opposition to Nietzsche on The Gay Science aphorism 1 thus becomes complete agreement with Nietzsche on the greatest poet-legislators, that rare poet who is not the valet of some morality but himself the legislator of morality.

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conflict of unbelief and belief” (PAW, 107 n. 35). Strauss shows Socrates at the end of the Republic acting to provide “the unbelieving, philosophic foundation” (PL, 76) of belief by making a new poetry of god and the soul ministerial to sovereign philosophy. To end his paragraph Strauss sets out the alternatives: “autonomous poetry presents human life as autonomous, i.e. not as directed toward the philosophic life . . . But ministerial poetry presents the non-philosophic life as ministerial to the philosophic life.” The alternatives are autonomous poetry or autonomous philosophy, with the issue being rule by one or the other. Philosophy is imperial by necessity; its situation is rule or be ruled, and philosophy ruled by anything but the quest for truth is not philosophy. In presenting the nonphilosophic life as ministerial to the philosophic life, ministerial poetry presents “above all, the philosophic life itself (cf. 604e). The greatest example of ministerial poetry is the Platonic dialogue” (137). The Platonic dialogue as ministerial poetry presents the Socratic way of life, and in the Republic Socrates’s way of life is shown to require a kind of return to the cave, a stooping to rule in the only way a philosopher can rule, through ministerial poetry he himself generates. Given an initial appreciation of ministerial poetry by the penultimate paragraph of Strauss’s essay “On Plato’s Republic,” Strauss’s reader turns back to the chief events of his essay—the interpretations of the new laws for the gods and of the doctrine of the ideas—prepared by the perspective of the end to see them as instances of ministerial poetry essential to Platonic philosophy’s rule over religion.

SOCRATES’S NEW LAWS FOR GODS The two parts of Strauss’s chapter on Plato in The City and Man, the introductory part and the Republic part, are separated by a little dash at the end of paragraph 13. The dash, a mere trace, isolates his treatment of the Republic and invites studying it separately, albeit with the aid of the introductory considerations. Taken as a separate unit, the sixty-five paragraphs on the Republic prove to be shaped by Strauss to have a meaningful center: their thirty-third paragraph (97–100) shows how the philosopher Socrates treats religion when speaking with Adeimantus, a young man grown contemptuous of the religion in which he was raised and of the poets who generated it. The paragraph leading in to the central paragraph proves preparatory, for it treats the first use of the word philosopher in the Republic. That word allows Strauss to correct his earlier judgment that made it look “as if all arts were of equal rank and the only universal art or the only art accompanying



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all arts was the art of money-making” (96–97). But “[n]ow we receive the first glimpse of the true order of arts: that order is hierarchic; the universal art is the highest art, the art directing all other arts.” Announcing that “[t]he art of arts will prove to be philosophy,” Strauss anticipates what Plato announced at the very center of the Republic, that the philosopher must rule for the well-being of a city—and Strauss’s central paragraph treats Socrates’s teaching on the gods as part of the universal or highest art, an instrument of philosophy’s artful rule. Poetry is the first topic of this long paragraph, poetry serving the wellbeing of the city: “The specific pleasure which poetry affords can be toler­ ated only when it is conducive to the noble, to nobility of character” (97– 98). “The austerity of this demand,” Strauss notes, “is entirely agreeable to Adeimantus.” Adeimantus displayed his austerity in the strictness with which he condemned traditional poetry as immoral in his long speech before appealing to Socrates to defend justice. How does Socrates stand to the demand entirely agreeable to austere Adeimantus? “Socrates himself regards that demand as provisional; the whole discussion partakes of the character of myth” (98). Thus distinguishing two points of view, Socrates’s and Adeimantus’s, Strauss will keep them strictly separate in his paragraph. Early education is education in piety that requires telling “the right kind of stories” to children, not those “told by the greatest poets,” Homer and Hesiod, but those conforming to two laws Socrates lays down “regarding what Adeimantus calls ‘theology.’ ” The children’s tales about the gods resulting from Socrates’s laws will, like the older stories they replace, continue to hold sway over “the grown-up citizens of the good city.” Strauss notes that “the conversation between Socrates and Adeimantus about the theology shifts insensibly from the demand for noble lies about the gods to the demand for the truth about the gods.” The truth about the gods is no ordinary issue for it answers the question of the nature of the highest beings, an unavoidable question for philosophy, which raises the question of the nature of the beings. Given that what is agreeable to Adeimantus is provisional for Socrates, the demand for the truth about the gods will have to be scrutinized for any separation between austere Adeimantus and Socrates. “The speakers start from the implicit premise that there are gods, or that there is a god and that they know what a god is.” This crucial observation is followed abruptly by this: “The difficulty can be illustrated by an example.” What difficulty? Strauss uses difficulty three more times in the paragraph, and these three subsequent uses structure the rest of his discussion on “the explicit difficulty,” “no difficulty,” and, in a footnote, “the core of the difficulty.” What is the difficulty? The issue has become “the truth about the

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gods,” with two speakers each of whom acts as if he knows what a god is. The difficulty seems to be knowing what a god is. Does Adeimantus know? Does Socrates? The “example” that Strauss uses to illustrate the difficulty concerns knowing how the gods stand to lying, and his example initiates a kind of dialogic exercise by Strauss concerning what Adeimantus might know, what Socrates might know, and, inconspicuously, what Socrates is doing. Strauss’s example is this: “Socrates asks Adeimantus whether the god would lie or say the untruth because of his ignorance of ancient things and Adeimantus replies that this would be ridiculous (382d6–8).” The example is anything but incidental: it moves to the start of Strauss’s considerations a single item from what Plato himself made the final stage of the conversation between Socrates and Adeimantus on the laws of the new theology, Socrates’s effort to persuade Adeimantus that the gods do not lie. Ignorance of the ancient things is the first of three causes Socrates offers Adeimantus as possible grounds for lying’s being useful to the god. In Plato’s account Adeimantus finds the other two causes equally ridiculous, and Socrates draws the conclusion, “Then there’s nothing for the sake of which a god would lie” (382e). And Adeimantus agrees. And when Socrates then states that gods “are wholly free from lie,” Adeimantus agrees vehemently. Strauss will not expose the lying quality of Plato’s argument, its failure to ask whether the god would lie for the good of humans, a possible ground for human lying affirmed just a moment before (382c). But Strauss did bring forward the first of Plato’s three possible causes of lying, their ignorance of ancient things, as his example of “difficulty” with respect to knowing what a god is. After stating that Adeimantus found it ridiculous that the gods lie for that reason, Strauss looks to Adeimantus: “But why is it ridiculous in Adeimantus’ view?” This question about Adeimantus’s view closes the first half of Strauss’s central paragraph. He then reaches outside the Republic to ask a second question that might answer the first: “Because the gods must know best their own affairs, as Timaeus suggests (Timaeus 40d3– 41a5)?” Strauss’s question seems detached from the exegetical issue of why Adeimantus finds Socrates’s question ridiculous, for Plato’s text implicitly treats that question as having an obvious answer: he finds it ridiculous because he knows the god knows the ancient things; the success of Socrates’s argument separating the gods from lying depends upon his knowing that Adeimantus knows that. Strauss’s second question steps beyond knowledge or ignorance of some particular like the ancient things and, viewed alone, has its own obvious answer: of course the gods know best their own affairs, affairs that may or may not include knowledge of the ancient things but certainly include the issue in question: the gods know best whether lying is



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necessary for them. The direct relevance of Strauss’s question at the center is not immediately clear. Strauss’s next sentence stays with Timaeus in order to raise a particular consideration about the gods: It is true that Timaeus makes a distinction between the visible gods who revolve manifestly and those gods who manifest themselves so far as they choose, between the cosmic gods and the Olympian gods, and that no such distinction is made in the theology of the Republic where only the Olympian gods are identified.

This observation evokes an illuminating comment: “But precisely this fact shows the ‘mythical’ character of the theology”—it shows that the theology of the Republic is poetry, and as Strauss said at the end of his essay, “poetry is not concerned with the truth” (134). But Strauss’s point about mythical character here concerns a different matter, for the absence of Timaeus’s distinction in the Republic shows “the gravity of the failure to raise and answer the question ‘what is a god?’ or ‘who are the gods?’ ” That grave failure was Socrates’s alone: he led the discussion, he posed the questions, he stated the desired conclusions. The grave failure is a consequence of Socrates’s purpose. Speaking with austere Adeimantus in order to lay down the law that the gods do not lie, Socrates begins with what Adeimantus already knows a god is and argues that being that, the god has no reason to lie. Socrates shifted the conversation insensibly from a demand for noble lies about the gods to a demand for the truth about the gods, and pressing that demand shows what the conversation actually is: Socrates’s effort to persuade Adeimantus on the grounds of what he already knows a god is that the gods do not lie. Socrates’s shift to the demand for truth about the gods enables him to secure a new noble lie about the gods. A pause is necessary here because Strauss just pronounced in his central paragraph a question, What is a god?, that his final sentence in The City and Man calls “the all-important question,” a question “coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it.” Strauss ends his book not quite pronouncing it: “the question quid sit deus.” But he pronounced it in the central paragraph of his essay on the Republic and did so to suggest why the philosopher Socrates did not pronounce it with Adeimantus. He does not ask “what is a god?” with Adeimantus because he aims to tell Adeimantus what a god is, to persuade him of a new, more moral conception of the gods than the one he absorbed from Homer; at the center of his essay on the Republic Strauss suggests that Socrates is a maker

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of gods who is not intransigent, who does not insist on raising a question where his interlocutor has no question. Instead, he aims at “a more con­ servative way of action, namely, the gradual replacement of the accepted opinions by the truth or an approximation of the truth.” Provisional ac­ ceptance of Adeimantus’s view permits Socrates to carry him further along the path on which Adeimantus has already embarked on his own: moral repudiation of the gods of Homer and Hesiod that Adeimantus announced in his austere long speech. Without challenging what Adeimantus knows a god is, Socrates lays down two new, non-Homeric, non-Hesiodic, morally austere laws about the gods. For gods who know it is necessary for them to lie, it is useful that austere Adeimantus view them as incapable of lying. Strauss shaped his central paragraph to have two questions on what a god is face each other across its center. One asks about Adeimantus’s view, the other brings in the view of the wise. Their full difference comes to light through the Timaeus passage: Strauss’s two questions divide into two camps what Timaeus suggests are the two possible ways of answering the question “what is a god?,” the large camp of those like Adeimantus and a smaller camp of those like Timaeus. Timaeus shows the difference in a most amusing way. Having separated Olympian gods from the visible gods who revolve manifestly, he says of the Olympians that knowledge of their birth is “beyond our power.” Why believe in them then? The sole reason is the one Timaeus gives for his own believing in them: we know of them only through those who say they are their offspring and who “know best their own ancestors”; because it’s impossible to distrust sons of gods when “they profess to be reporting family matters, we must follow custom and trust them” (Timaeus 40e). With this little parody of the circular reasoning behind all claims to authority by traditional belief, Timaeus smiles his rarity; he stands apart from the credulous while letting himself be counted credulous. Strauss’s restatement of Timaeus’s words uses a secondary sense for one of those words: asking if “the gods must know best their own affairs,” Strauss alters what usually means ancestors (progonous). His little adjustment is a revelation about the wise, whose affairs include knowing what their genuine ancestors, the wise predecessors who generated them, have said and done on the gods—in this sense knowing the birth of the Olympians is not . PAW, 17. To clarify the Platonic Socrates’s way of treating his interlocutors, Strauss earlier called in Xenophon, who said that “Socrates’ art of conversation was twofold: with those who contradicted him he raised the question ‘what is . . .’ regarding the subject matter of the dispute”; “when he discussed a subject on his own initiative, i.e. when he talked to people who merely listened, he proceeded through generally accepted opinions and thus produced agreement to an extraordinary degree” (CM, 53), as he does here with Adeimantus.



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beyond our powers. These ancestors, his ancestors, Timaeus believes while representing his belief as belief in Olympians. Knowing best their own affairs, the gods act; knowing the affairs of the wise, Socrates acts to change Adeimantus’s view of the gods. Socrates acts as Timaeus did not—knowing what Timaeus knows, he acts to give birth to reformed Olympians. Knowing the affairs of the wise, Strauss reports on Socrates’s act not Socratically but Timaeically: he knows the origins but does not himself give birth. But this difference among the wise with respect to acting does not impinge on the difference between them and the Adeimantuses, a fundamental difference with respect to knowing. After asking “what is a god?,” Strauss continues: “Other Socratic utterances might enable one to ascertain Socrates’ answer . . .” No other Socratic utterances are offered here, but almost ten years later, in his essay on Nietzsche, Strauss referenced two such utterances, and they help ascertain Socrates’s answer to the question “what is a god?” or his view on the highest beings.10 Here he says only that other Socratic utterances “are of no use for ascertaining Adeimantus’ answer and therewith for gauging how deep the agreement is which Socrates and Adeimantus achieve.” Strauss submerges what is of primary interest, Socrates’s view, and brings together what he separated, Adeimantus’s view and Socrates’s view, in order to state what the two “surely agree” on, “that the gods are superhuman beings, that they are of superhuman goodness or perfect. That the god is good is even the thesis of the first theological law.” The first law Socrates lays down for the gods asserts that “the god is not the cause of all things but only of the good ones.” Strauss draws an important implication: this “amounts to saying that the god is just: the first theological law applies to the god the result of the conversation with Polemarchus according to which justice consists in helping the friends, i.e. sensible men and in not harming anyone.” Strauss implicitly made this result Socrates’s view of justice or the philosopher’s view (72–73); the first law of the gods’ actions makes the gods’ actions the philosopher’s actions.11 . Perhaps that’s the reason Strauss made his essay on the Republic have only 65 paragraphs, that is, to show what it is not, not 66, not the sum of the books of the Bible, the source of our Olympian; his essay is something less than that because it does only what Timaeus did, show the source of authoritative Olympians. 10. What Strauss says there brings Nietzsche and Plato together on the fundamental issue: “Plato could well have thought that gods philosophize (Sophist 216b5–6; Theaetetus 151d1–2)” (SPPP, 175). The passages intimate that the philosophizing gods are philosophers. 11. At his most outspoken, in a debate he stages between a theologian and a philosopher in a lecture to theologians, Strauss has his philosopher say, “if we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers . . . Poor gods? Indeed, measured by imaginary standards.” Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 163.

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Here Strauss returns to difficulty, now “the explicit difficulty”: it “concerns exclusively the other theological law which asserts the simplicity of the god” (99). That law “has two implications: (1) the god does not change his looks or form (eidos or idea) . . . (2) the gods do not deceive or lie.” Strauss keeps the focus on Adeimantus: the second law “is not immediately evident to Adeimantus; this is true especially of the second implication.” And Strauss applies difficulty to him: Adeimantus “sees no difficulty in maintaining simultaneously that the gods are good and that they lie.” The difficulty then belongs to Socrates, a Socrates trying to make Adeimantus see a difficulty where he saw no difficulty, a Socrates acting to have Adeimantus change his view on the gods’ lying. Strauss does not refer to Homer or Hesiod, the source of Adeimantus’s having no difficulty holding that the gods are good and lie; instead, he makes the lack of difficulty reasonable: in Adeimantus’s view, “the gods possess all virtues, hence also justice, and justice sometimes requires lying.” Socrates would seem to be in agreement, for he maintains that “rulers must lie for the benefit of their subjects; if the gods are just or rulers, it would seem that they must lie.” Socrates’s difficulty is theological-political: while he permits the ruler to lie for the good of the ruled, he elevates the gods’ rule to a plane that prohibits their lying; their goodness implies their truth telling, with no ill effects for the humans they ultimately rule. Having clarified the reason Adeimantus saw no difficulty, Strauss can state the defining difference between him and Socrates: “Adeimantus’ resistance”—his having no difficulty with the gods’ lying—“is then due to his concern with justice as distinguished from love of truth (382a4–10) or philosophy.” At 382a4–10 Socrates speaks not indeed of the love of truth but of “the true lie,” the lie in the soul that “all gods and human beings hate.” Adeimantus’s concern with justice shows this about him: it is not Adeimantus’s passion to fear most the lie in the soul, to fear holding in the sovereign part of himself a lie about the sovereign things (382a). With justice sovereign in his soul, Adeimantus differs from Socrates in the fundamental way, in the rank order of his passions. Socrates’s passion, love of truth, makes him fear most a lie in his soul. Adeimantus’s passion, love of justice, dictates resistance to Socrates’s law that the gods do not deceive or lie. The explicit difficulty is Socrates’s difficulty, not in knowing what a god is, but in persuading a man with a passion for justice that a god is a ruling being who does not lie even justly. Adeimantus “resists the dogma” Socrates is promulgating “because he is more willing than his brother to grant that justice is akin to knowledge or art rather than it is essentially simplicity.” Glaucon presents no difficulty



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for Socrates on this issue because he detached justice from knowledge or art and considered “the perfectly just man as a simple man who has no quality other than justice” (88). As for Adeimantus, Socrates will be able to overcome his resistance because it “is not altogether in harmony with the implications of his long speech” (99). The lack of harmony “is not surprising: he still has much to learn. After all, he does not yet know what justice is”—this lack is Socrates’s opportunity. Inviting a look back to Adeimantus’s long speech for what is disharmonious in his resistance, Strauss also invites a look ahead into what young Adeimantus will learn from Socrates that night. When pointing out the lack of harmony between Adeimantus’s resistance and the implications of his long speech, Strauss added a footnote for his final use of difficulty: “The core of the difficulty is indicated in 366c7 as one sees if one considers the fact that the gods themselves must have divine natures.” At 366c7, Adeimantus said in his long speech that no one is willingly just “except for someone who from a divine nature cannot stand doing injustice or who has gained knowledge and keeps away from injustice.” Adeimantus spoke of human beings, Strauss speaks of gods. The core of the difficulty concerns the actions of the divine natures as Socrates presents those actions to Adeimantus. The divine natures cannot stand doing injustice, but according to whose definition of what a god is and what justice is? Socrates’s earlier correction of Polemarchus’s definition of justice could well require the divine natures to lie in order that no one be harmed by the good they do to friends. For morally austere Adeimantus, however, lying is morally questionable even if what he knows a god is permits the gods to lie. It would be helpful, it would be morally satisfying, if truth telling were always for the best. And it would always be for the best if truth telling was enforced by truth-telling gods and lying punished. Socrates will solve the core of the difficulty of what a god is by making the gods truth tellers who rule in a moral cosmos and thereby guarantee that truth telling will be rewarded and lying punished if not now then in the life to come. Socrates solves the explicit difficulty by persuading Adeimantus that the true view he holds of the gods lying is false and that he should instead hold the lie that the gods don’t lie, a view consistent with his moral strictness. Socrates overcomes Adeimantus’s resistance by the whole story of the Republic; believing the gods don’t lie allows moral consistency: justice and truth telling are wholly compatible in an order ruled by moral gods who see to a good outcome for truth telling.12 12. Homer knew the difficulty: angry Achilles speaks up for a version of Socrates’s solution (Iliad 9.308–14). Achilles tells polytropic Odysseus that he will speak “without regard to

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Knowing what a god is and what gods do and acting out of a divine nature in accord with his own view of justice, Socrates promulgates the true lie that the gods don’t lie. He engages in the godlike action of laying down a new law for the gods that will be welcomed by those inclined to the simplicity of the god and the consistency of the moral. Socrates is the one who has “gained knowledge and keeps away from injustice,” lying for the good of those he comes to rule through speech. Offering Adeimantus a moral lie, Socrates does good to friends, who learn what he’s thinking, while doing good to the many, who will be bound by simple belief in what he says, and he does not harm anyone. As a philosopher Socrates fears most the lie in the soul; as a philosopher ruler he deems such lies necessary for those whose passion is not the true but the just. Having a divine nature that acts justly, Socrates persuades moral young Adeimantus to accept a lie about the gods into his soul.13 In his penultimate sentence in his central paragraph Strauss adds new elements to the issue of humans, gods, and lying that lead beyond the immediate setting. Somewhat later in the conversation Socrates suggests that justice is a specifically human virtue (392a3–c3), perhaps because justice is rooted in the fact that every human being lacks self-sufficiency and hence is ordered toward the city (369b5–7) and therefore that man is essentially “erotic” whereas the gods are self-sufficient and hence free from eros.

Gods free from eros are not Homer’s gods but gods subject to Socrates’s new laws. Free from eros, they are free too from the necessity of lying practiced by the human Socrates in establishing their rule. The most erotic of humans, Socrates, is the most just of humans who acts justly by lying in order best to serve nonself-sufficient philosophy. Having freed the gods of lying for moral Adeimantus, Socrates later, fatefully, assigns to the gods consequences” because as hateful to him as the gates of Hades is one who “hides one thing in his mind but says something else.” Achilles can speak that way and hate that way because of what he believes: things will be accomplished in accordance with the desire of the truth teller because the gods see to it. Plato treated the issue in Hippias Minor where he has Socrates defend lying Odysseus against straight Achilles; see my “Socrates’ Defense of Polytropic Odysseus.” 13. A speech in Charmides comes perhaps closest to actually stating what Socrates knows Olympian gods to be. Plato entrusted the speech not to Socrates but to a proud follower, Critias, eager to prove to a Socrates recently returned from a years-long absence how well he learned from his teacher. Critias’s speech, the center of Charmides, interprets the Delphi injunction “Know thyself” to show that a god is an imaginary being made powerful by words put up in his name by a wise man made powerful by that act. See my How Philosophy Became Socratic, 185–89.



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what counts for justice morally: retribution, harm for the wicked, good for the good. Socrates’s moral lie places the gods under a rule, under the constraint of a law of wholly human origin. Socrates’s new lie about the gods entails lying a moral order into the cosmos; his theology entails an ontology. Plato’s Socrates launches the same theological-political project that Xenophon’s Socrates launched, the teleotheology, the gift to the just that enables them to “speak in strict parlance of divine punishment” (XSD, 143). The two greatest auditors of Socrates agree: Socrates the contemplative acted to found a theological-political project and secure the moral decency of the sons of Athenian gentlemen exposed to the sophistic enlightenment, brought too close to the deadly truth. And Socrates’s action set the pattern that ancient and medieval Platonic political philosophers followed. And Socrates’s action assigned modern Platonic political philosophers a corrective task: undoing, partially or totally, the damage done to human culture by the takeover of Socrates’s solution by Christianity. Socrates is the exemplary philosopher in devising a theological-political program for the well-being of philosophy, and he is, Strauss indicates, exemplary in a second, more basic sense, for Strauss’s final sentence extends the thought on eros introduced in his penultimate sentence: “Eros and justice would thus seem to have the same root” (100), lack of self-sufficiency. Strauss chose to end his central paragraph on the Republic on a topic from which the Republic abstracted, eros, that part of the shared root that gets closer to the nature of the root than justice does (110–12). As the dialogue on justice, the Republic is the definitive dialogue on political philosophy and its ministerial poetry, but because it abstracts from eros, it cannot deal frontally with what ministerial poetry serves, philosophy. What better end, then, for the central paragraph on Plato’s Republic than an invitation to turn to the Symposium, the dialogue whose theme is the god Eros, “the only dialogue explicitly devoted to a god” (OPS, 17). To move from the dialogue on justice to the dialogue on eros is to move from political philosophy to philosophy itself. But the Symposium too must treat philosophy in a politic fashion as indicated by the many intricacies of its setting, like its taking auditors from the time of Socrates’s trial back to a private gathering on a night shortly before the crime of profaning the mysteries: the Symposium profanes, almost profanes, the mystery that counts most, who Socrates really is or what a philosopher can learn. For on that night, Socrates, speaking in private to the most sophisticated audience in Athens, takes them further back in time to his ultimate event of learning, the last stage of his philosophical education as Plato presents it. For Plato indicates in the Symposium that Socrates’s inquiries into nature and human nature led him to

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the most comprehensive insight into nature. “Eros, we can say, is the heart of coming into being and perishing. Eros, we can say, is the nature of nature, the essence of nature” (OPS, 196). It is this ultimate fruit of contemplation, this insight into the nature and extent of the lack of self-sufficiency, that unites philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche in a shared ontology that grounds philosophy’s need for a theological-political program.14

A SATISFACTORY ACCOUNT OF THE DOCTRINE OF IDEAS Later in his essay on the Republic Strauss devotes two paragraphs to Plato’s doctrine of ideas. Socrates introduced that doctrine into the Republic in order to overcome Glaucon’s hostility to his shocking claim that for the city they have built in speech to become actual, the philosopher must rule: the philosopher has a right to rule, Socrates will argue, because he alone knows the ideas. Strauss’s first paragraph on the doctrine of ideas recounts the doctrine as presented in the Republic; the second reflects on it.15 Included in that second paragraph is his judgment that “[n]o one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas” (119). In his two paragraphs Strauss succeeds. Strauss detects a shift in book 5 on the question of whether the good city of books 2–4 is possible. First, Socrates raises the question of whether that city is possible in the sense of being in agreement with human nature: is “communism regarding women and children,” a precondition of the city’s existing, possible (117)? After raising that question of possibility, Socrates “drops it immediately” and escapes into the subject of war. But after Glaucon calls him back from his escape, “[t]he question to which they return is 14. No wonder Seth Benardete edited Strauss’s 1959 lectures on the Symposium and made them available in a book even after his first attempt proved unsatisfactory to Strauss, and his second got “lost,” and thirty-three years later the whole project “had to be done again from scratch” (OPS, vii). The resulting book has the disadvantage of not being shaped into its final form by Strauss himself; still, it helps fulfill the invitation at the end of the central paragraph on the Republic by giving Strauss’s reader access to Strauss’s thoughts on the dialogue that is most generous on the ultimate topic. 15. The two paragraphs fall at the center of the second half of Strauss’s 65 paragraphs on the Republic as the 16th and 17th of the final 32 (pp. 118–21). That Strauss shaped his essay this way suggests a center to the 32 paragraphs of the first half (pp. 79–81): the 16th deals with Thrasymachus and the art of persuasion, saying that “even the rulers themselves need the art of persuasion” without saying that the ultimate ruler is the philosopher who must recruit Thrasymachus for the purpose of persuasion. The 17th refers to “the universal art,” which there is the art of moneymaking; just before the center of the essay (pp. 96–97) Strauss corrects himself to make the universal art the ruling art at the apex of the hierarchy of arts, the art of the philosopher.



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whether the good city is possible in the sense that it can be brought into being by the transformation of an actual city” (118). Having described with some intricacy the particulars of what “they,” Socrates and Glaucon, said and did in this shift, Strauss switches to what “we” are learning from it. “As we learn now, our whole effort to find out what justice is (so that we will be enabled to see how it is related to happiness) was a quest for ‘justice itself’ as a ‘pattern.’ ” In the next sentence we are no longer mere learners: “By seeking for justice as a pattern we imply that the just man and the just city will not be perfectly just but will indeed approximate justice itself with particular closeness (472a–b): only justice itself is perfectly just (479a; cf. 538cff.).” The consequence is that “[w]e thus learn that not even the characteristic institutions of the good city . . . are simply just.” In the summary that follows, justice itself appears as not “capable of coming into being” because it always is and is unchangeable; it “is a ‘form’ or an ‘idea,’ one of many ideas.” To make his case for there being “ideas,” Socrates persuades Glaucon with a long but simple argument to the effect that in addition to the realms of being and nonbeing, there is a realm of being-and-nonbeing. Strauss does not repeat the argument but says only that ideas “are beyond all becoming and whatever is becoming is between being and non-being,” and that the ideas as “the only things which are beyond all change . . . are in a sense the cause of all change” (119). And he describes the ideas: They are self-subsisting beings which subsist always. They are of the utmost splendor.

Their splendor “escapes the eyes of the body,” being “ ‘visible’ only to the eye of the mind, and the mind as mind perceives nothing but ideas.” Going beyond the particulars of what Socrates says to Glaucon, Strauss sketches with great brevity the notion of mind implied by the doctrine of ideas. He also moves beyond the setting to refer to an implication of the doctrine of ideas that comes up later in the Republic: “there must be something higher than the ideas: the idea of the good, which is in a sense the cause of all ideas as well as of the mind perceiving them (517c1–5).” Strauss brings in Aris­totle in order to emphasize that in Plato the highest “is beyond the difference between knower and known or is not a thinking being.” And finally, while it is questionable whether the highest can be called an idea in Plato, “[i]t is only through the perception of the good on the part of properly equipped human beings that the good city can come into being and subsist for a while.” The precondition of the existence of the good city is rule by a

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philosopher who has understood the good; bringing into being a good city from an actual city depends upon rule by that one. Strauss’s second paragraph on the ideas opens with his arresting and oftquoted statement: “The doctrine of ideas which Socrates expounds to his interlocutors is very hard to understand: to begin with, it is utterly incredible, not to say that it appears to be fantastic.” Stating just how the doctrine of ideas alters the object inquired into in the Republic, justice, Strauss again puts the focus on us: “Hitherto we had been given to understand that justice is fundamentally a certain character of the human soul or of the city, i.e. something which is not self-subsisting.” But with the doctrine of ideas “we are asked to believe that it is self-subsisting, being at home as it were in an entirely different place from human beings and everything else participating in justice.” Can we believe what we are asked to believe? If we want to understand it first, there’s a problem: “No one has ever succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas.” To begin his satisfactory account, Strauss says he can “define rather precisely the central difficulty.” Before actually defining the central difficulty, Strauss says that idea “means primarily the looks or shape of a thing; it means then a kind or class of things which are united by the fact that they all possess the same looks, the same character or power, or the same ‘nature.’ ” Things fall into kinds or classes by nature, and inquiry must recover in thought what things are by nature. Idea therefore “means the class-character or the nature of the things belonging to the class in question.” Strauss brings this general definition closer to Socrates: “the idea of a thing is that which we seek when we try to find out the ‘What’ or the ‘nature’ of a thing or a class of things” (120)—Socrates always asked “What is . . .” such and such, a question to which the fit answer is necessarily its “idea.” Only then does Strauss define the central difficulty: “This does not explain however why the ideas are presented as ‘separated’ from the things which are what they are by participating in an idea, or, in other words, why ‘dogness’ (the class character of dogs) should be ‘the true dog.’ ” Dogness is not an example Plato used, but Glaucon, the first person asked to believe this, trained dogs, and Socrates used that fact in other arguments to make matters graphic for dog-training Glaucon. The central difficulty is classic and twofold: the separateness of Platonic ideas and the participation of particulars in that separateness. Strauss refers to “two kinds of phenomena [that] lend support to Socrates’ assertion.” Again, they are classic: “the mathematical things” like lines and circles that as such can never be found in any representation of them; and “above all, what we mean by justice and kindred things,” which transcend



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all particular instances of them. But Socrates goes beyond these two kinds of phenomena to seem “to say that what is patently true of mathematical things and of the virtues is true universally,” and he brings in Socrates’s examples from book 10, “an idea of the bed or of the table,” and “it is hard to say that a perfect bed is something on which no man can ever rest or that a perfect howl is completely inaudible.” However hard that is to say, “Glaucon and Adeimantus accept this doctrine of ideas with relative ease.” Why were Glaucon and Adeimantus able to believe this so easily? Yes, they “have heard of the ideas . . . many times before,” but this is not sufficient reason, and the reason Strauss now offers provides both the essential answer and the essential insight into Plato’s doctrine: Glaucon and Adeimantus have heard still more frequently, and in a way they know, that there are gods like Dike (536b3; cf. 487a6), or Nike who is not this victory or that victory, nor this or that statue of Nike, but one and the same selfsubsisting being which is in a sense the cause of every victory and which is of unbelievable splendor.

Strauss applies to the god Nike words he earlier used for the ideas, and he describes Nike in a way that makes her like an idea in the essential respects: she transcends every particular victory but is in a sense the cause of each, for each victory participates in what she is. Strauss’s next sentence completes his case: “Glaucon and Adeimantus know that there are gods—self-subsisting beings which are the cause of everything good, which are of unbelievable splendor, and which cannot be apprehended by the senses since they never change their ‘form’ (cf. 379a–b and 380dff.).” Glaucon and Adeimantus know this; knowing that they know it, Socrates easily persuades them of the core tenet of Platonism. There is, of course, “a profound difference between the gods as understood in the theology of the Republic and the ideas,” but it can nevertheless be asserted “that those who have come to accept that theology are best prepared for accepting the ideas” (121). The central difficulty of the doctrine of ideas is not a difficulty at all for boys who begin with Dike and Nike and who have already assented to Socrates’s two new laws for the gods—laws that themselves began with what Adeimantus knows a god is. With Glaucon, as before with Adeimantus, Socrates the theologian takes advantage of his interlocutor’s knowing what a god is to alter his notion of divinity.16 16. In a 1961 letter to Benardete Strauss reported that “[m]any years ago I was struck by the fact that Glaucon while wholly unprepared for the doctrine of ideas, accepted it almost

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And here, in order to understand the nature and extent of the crisis faced by Glaucon and Adeimantus, exemplars of their generation, it is useful to call in a feature of the Republic that Strauss, despite his exegetical principles, failed to notice. He began his account of the Republic by stating: “While the place of the conversation is made quite clear to us, the time, i.e. the year, is not” (62). In fact, Plato’s first sentence forced the time, the year, the very day, to become a question for his reader: Socrates says he is narrating the Republic on the day after the Athenians introduced a new goddess, a most noteworthy event for a city that knew itself to be dependent on the favor of the gods for its well-being and that had not introduced a new god at least since the Persian wars. What day was that? Plato’s first sentence does not answer the question it raises because it withholds the name of the goddess, it keeps its question a question. Only at the end of the long exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus does Plato have Thrasymachus say that the festival is the Bendideia (354a). And when he says that, every contemporary reader who was paying attention learned the answer to the question Plato raised with his first sentence: Socrates narrated the Republic on the day after the introduction of Bendis, a moment of Athenian need so acute that they took the unprecedented step of introducing a new god as a possible aid to heal what Plato’s reader would now know was an unprecedented time of defeat and plague for an imperial Athens at war for its life.17 By stating that the exact time of the Republic was not made clear to us, Strauss deprives himself and us of the powerful symmetry Plato made available: Socrates introduced his novelties on god, justice, and the soul on the very night in the very place that his countrymen introduced a new goddess in hopes of healing their city and aiding its cause. Strauss thus missed the sublime rhetorical occasion Plato arranged for the most famous political work of all times: on the day on which numberless Athenians streamed back up to Athens to report on the all-night public spectacle of the introduction of the new god, Socrates came back up to Athens to report on what he introduced privately on that same night in that same place. Once the

immediately. A clue is offered by the reference to Momos [487a]. In brief, he is prepared for the ideas by the gods (a certain kind of gods, the gods who have no proper name proper). Everyone knows that Nike was present at Marathon, Salamis etc., that she is the same whether sculptured by x or y, worshipped in a or b etc. . . . In other words the ideas replace the gods. For in order to do that the gods must be a prefiguration of the ideas” (May 17, 1961). (Strauss’s letters to Benardete are available from the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago.) 17. For the full argument for setting the Republic in early June 429, see Planeaux, “Date of Bendis’ Entry into Attica.”



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occasion is seen in its proper gravity, the single most important feature of the temporal setting works its full effect. The long speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus that compel Socrates to respond with the bulk of the Republic point to one historic event beyond all others, for the crises of war and plague are shadowed by a larger crisis: Plato set the Republic in the time of the death of the Homeric gods for decent young Athenians caught up in war and plague and the sophistic enlightenment. The gravity of the temporal setting—it is the greatest of all emergencies, a time of the death of the gods—assigns proper weight to what Socrates did last night and does today in Athens: introduce the new ministerial poetry, gods who do only good and do not lie, permanent ideas of justice and the other virtues under the sway of the idea of the good, and, to nail all human actions with fear and hope, watchful moral gods administering punishment and reward to immortal souls. This view of things—can it be called noble?—would come to dominate post-Homeric Greek civilization and subsequent Western thought until the long withdrawing roar of its demise in our time, the death of God and the death of Platonism.18 Given this momentous setting for Socrates’s introduction of the ideas as a kind of divinity, one can appreciate all the more the importance of Strauss’s succeeding where no one had ever succeeded. The satisfactory account shows the doctrine of ideas to be a timely construction by a philosopher who knows the spiritual situation of his time and acts to provide new grounds for believing in the reality of justice. Beginning with knowledge of what the first auditors of the doctrine already know a god is and never raising the question, What is a god?, Socrates persuades them of what they most want to believe: there are good reasons to be decent. Faced with the moral/religious crisis described existentially in application to themselves by Glaucon and Adeimantus, faced with the crisis of the death of their gods, Socrates responds in a way that decidedly fit the times. Transcendent “Platonic” ideas could be believed by those who knew that gods were beings like Dike and Nike, self-subsisting, of unbelievable splendor, and in some way the cause of every particular like them. Strauss shows how the ideas

18. This great feature of the timeliness of the Republic points to an allied feature confirmed by numerous Platonic dialogues: in his great act of replacing cardinal doctrines taught by “the poet who educated the Greeks” (Republic 606e), Plato indicates that he himself was educated in that act by Homer. The Homeric roots of Plato’s teaching will be indicated in the next chapter; in my How Philosophy Became Socratic I show how the revolutionary teachings set out by Socrates in Protagoras, Charmides, and the Republic have conscious Homeric precedents that Plato acknowledges in the oblique way unavoidable by a founding teacher using Homer to oppose Homer.

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were credible without making them any less fantastic—the already existing fantasy made them seem credible. The doctrine of ideas, entering the world through philosophy in this particular way, is a public service to a particular public, the generation of Athenian youths deprived of the gods to which their fathers, Cephalus among them, still sacrifice. Strauss ends his paragraph on the purpose served by Socrates’s nowunderstandable introduction of the ideas. “The movement to which the reader of the Republic is exposed leads from the city as the association of the fathers who are subject to the law and ultimately to the gods toward the city as an association of artisans who are subject to the philosophers and ultimately to the ideas” (121). The movement of the Republic shows a historic passage of subjection from one form of rule to the next, from discredited ancestors and their gods to philosophers and their ideas. The ideas are instruments of rule, effective instruments because they so resemble what their audience knows a god to be. The ideas are ministerial poetry ministering to Glaucon and Adeimantus for their own good and the good of philosophy.19 By indicating the timeliness of the doctrine of timeless ideas, Strauss makes us doubt that he imagined that Plato imagined that his doctrine itself could be timeless. And it wasn’t: the great Platonic political philosopher Alfarabi dropped it entirely; his audience was not raised on Dike and Nike. And the great contemporary Platonic political philosopher Strauss went so far as to show how Socrates’s willing audience found it easily believable, reinforcing its unbelievableness for us. But if the doctrine of ideas can be dispensed with by Platonic political philosophy, what are the elements indispensable to Platonic political philosophy, its truly defining elements?

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE JUST CITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THE RULE OF THE PHILOSOPHER Strauss’s discussion of the ideas falls within his larger discussion of two different questions of possibility: Is the just city possible? Is the rule of the

19. The doctrine of ideas is of course also more. Benardete spelt out with greater specificity than Strauss ever did the way in which Socrates’s presentation of the ideas is true: it depicts the popular “Platonism” fundamental to human knowing as such, the gathering and ordering of all experience through language and under categories of the mind. What Socrates teaches is an account of knowing as Platonism that leaves everyone a Platonist except those few who come to understand knowing. Knowing knowing, or as Socrates’s more politic formulation has it, knowing what he does not know that he does not know it, frees one from the cave of “knowing” as far as that is at all possible. See Benardete, Socrates’ Second Sailing, 129–39; Argument of the Action, 295f.



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philosopher possible? Strauss orders his two questions his own way, freely altering the order of topics in the Republic. Exposing Strauss’s complex argument here grants insight into the issue that Plato placed at the center of his Republic, the indispensable elements of Platonic political philosophy. For the sake of clarity throughout the following pages, I state the conclusion of Strauss’s argument at the start: the just city is impossible because it is against nature; the rule of the philosopher is extremely improbable but possible in one way only, through persuasion that the impossible just city is possible. This defines Platonic political philosophy: successful establishment of philosophic rule through an impossible just city made to seem possible. “A new beginning” of the Republic occurs at the start of book 5 with a repetition in which Socrates “obeys” (115) a decision of his companions to “force him to take up the subject of communism in regard to women and children” (116). Socrates makes this two questions: “(1) is that communism possible? (2) is it desirable?” After setting out Socrates’s account, Strauss says that “we are disappointed to see that while Socrates takes up the question of whether communism regarding women and children is possible, he drops it immediately (466d6ff)” (117). Our disappointment concerns the main issue: because “the institution in question is indispensable for the good city, Socrates thus leaves open the question of the possibility . . . of the just city, as such.” But “Socrates is not for long allowed to escape from his awesome duty to answer the question of the possibility of the just city” (118). Strauss first says that Glaucon compelled Socrates to return to this question, but he corrects himself: Socrates “compels Glaucon to compel him to return to the fundamental question.” And he changed the question: a question of “whether the good city is possible in the sense that it is in agreement with human nature” became a question of “whether the good city is possible in the sense that it can be brought into being by the transformation of an actual city.” Here, after noting that Socrates says they are seeking a “pattern” for “justice itself,” Strauss leaps over the intervening points in order to explicate Socrates’s notion of pattern as a “form” or an “idea” that Socrates introduced to a shaken Glaucon in order to justify his introduction of the philosopher king. After his account of the ideas Strauss returns to his place in the Republic: “We must now return to the question of the possibility of the just city” (121). We return knowing that the just city cannot be an “idea” or an “ideal” but that “[i]ts status” resembles what Socrates initially suggested, “that of a perfectly beautiful human being as painted which is only by virtue of the painter’s painting.” The just city “is” only

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by virtue of Socrates’s speaking. But it turns out that “even the just city as a pattern is not capable of coming into being as it has been blueprinted; only approximations to it can be expected in cities which are in deed and not merely in speech.” Strauss interprets Socrates’s assertion that the just city cannot come into being as blueprinted as “provisional” (122): it prepares his assertion that it is possible if “very unlikely” for the just city to come into being through a feasible change in an actual city. That feasible change is “the ‘coincidence’ of political power and philosophy.” Strauss treats all the details of this momentous statement. Of course he states that “the philosophers must rule as kings or the kings must genuinely and adequately philosophize,” but he focuses on what Socrates claims that “coincidence will bring about”: “ ‘the cessation of evil,’ i.e. both private and public happiness.” Belief in this possibility is necessary: “No less than this must be possible if justice as full dedication to the city is to be choiceworthy for its own sake; this condition can be fulfilled only if the city is of consummate goodness, i.e. such as to bring about the happiness of ‘the human race.’ ” We thus see that “Socrates introduces philosophy as a theme of the Republic” to answer the question of how the good city is possible (122); the rule of the philosophers is introduced only “as a means for realizing justice.” The question of the possibility of the just city, Strauss notes, arose through the action of Polemarchus at the opening of book 5, and as “a remote consequence of Polemarchus’ action Socrates succeeds in reducing the question of the possibility of the just city to the question of the possibility of the coincidence of philosophy and political power” (123). Here the two possibilities that structure these pages appear in a single sentence. Strauss touches the second possibility first, the rule of the philosopher: “That such a coincidence should be possible is to begin with most incredible.” And he moves Adeimantus’s incredulity forward to this point as what “everyone can see”: “that the philosophers are useless, if not even harmful, in politics.” If rule by the philosophers is to be possible, the cities must “become willing to be ruled by philosophers and the philosophers [must] become willing to rule the cities.” Strauss states immediately what will survive as his considered judgment to the end of his discussion: “This coincidence of philosophy and political power is very difficult to achieve, very improbable, but not impossible.” It is “in this context”—dealing with Adeimantus as representing what “everyone can see”—that Socrates says that “he and Thrasymachus have just become friends, having not been enemies before either.” That friendship means that Thrasymachus puts his power as a persuader of the public into the service of Socrates’s end, philosophic rule. Strauss ends his long



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paragraph by stating categorically that “[t]he many will have to be addressed by Thrasymachus and he who has listened to Socrates will succeed” (124). But Strauss then asks, in a brief paragraph, Why didn’t this happen? Why didn’t “the philosophers of old” “bring about the rule of the philosophers and therewith the salvation and the happiness of their cities”? Judging from this part of the conversation, Strauss says, “it appears easier to persuade the multitude to accept the rule of the philosophers than to persuade the philosophers to rule the multitude.” That means that “the philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities.” And Strauss reasons as follows: Only the non-philosophers could compel the philosophers to take care of the city. But, given the prejudice against the philosophers, this compulsion will not be forthcoming if the philosophers do not in the first place persuade the non-philosophers to compel the philosophers to rule over them, and this persuasion will not be forthcoming, given the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule.

He ends his paragraph by saying: “We arrive then at the conclusion that the just city is not possible because of the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule.” But did we arrive at this conclusion through the force of a valid argument whose premises exhaust the possibilities? No. A philosopher could be compelled by something other than the nonphilosophers—he could, like Socrates, be compelled by what he learns to compel himself to rule. Or a potential philosopher could learn from Socrates’s argument in the Republic, the argument Strauss now lays out, for his next paragraph begins by asking, “Why are the philosophers unwilling to rule?” The paragraph answering this question begins with a pre-Socratic picture of the philosopher’s eros for knowledge as entailing “no leisure for looking down at human affairs” (125). Because they believe that “they are already firmly settled far away from their cities in the ‘Islands of the Blessed’ . . . only compulsion could induce them to take part in public life in the just city.” The paragraph gives Strauss’s account of Socrates’s image of the Cave, and that explains his pre-Socratic beginning: Socrates uses his Cave image to introduce the great novelty in philosophy for which he stands. Strauss recounts this most famous image, but he manages to omit the most prominent feature of its result, even though it is the very issue with which he is here concerned, namely, what compels the philosopher to rule? He omits the dramatic imperative that Socrates put into direct speech to address those educated to philosophy by the city in speech: “You must go

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down,” he orders, and his command repeats his declarative first word in the Republic: “I went down.” Strauss explains why the philosophers are unwilling to rule by using the Cave story but omits the command that sprang from it: the compulsion of the philosopher to rule sprang initially from Socrates’s self-compulsion. With Socrates, Strauss indicates by omission, philosophy began its historic effort to rule by the transformation of an actual city. The Cave story helps make clear that rule by the philosopher meets resistance because of the “fabricated or conventional opinions” on which the city rests. It is even “the best of the non-philosophers, the good citizens,” who most passionately oppose philosophy because they are most passionately attached to the convictions of their city. Strauss withdraws his earlier judgment: “the multitude is not as persuadable by the philosophers as we sanguinely assumed in an earlier part of the argument.” And the reason is clear: “philosophy and the city tend away from one another in opposite directions.” These final words of Strauss’s paragraph state “the true reason why the coincidence of philosophy and political power is extremely improbable”—that is to say, possible, possible by one who has come to understand the natural divergence of the good and the wise but who sees that the good, the sons of the best, find their attachment to the convictions of the city loosening.20 Socrates’s Cave image is Strauss’s means for showing how rule by the philosopher became possible. Understanding the true reason why philosophy and the city diverge enabled Socrates to understand why rule by the philosopher is desirable and how and when it is possible. Can it be an accident then that Strauss opens his next paragraph with a first sentence that puts together “Socrates” and “turn”? For Strauss’s concern here is the turn in philosophy from pre-Socratic philosophy practiced in contempt of the human things to Socrates’s practice of attending most carefully to the human things, a turn initiated by Socrates’s turn to the logoi in order to explain cause. “The difficulty of overcoming the natural tension between the city and the philosophers induces Socrates to turn” from a theoretical question—is “the just city . . . ‘possible’ in the sense of being conformable

20. The full story of that understanding or of the possibility of rule by a philosopher would have to include the way that Socrates came to understand the true reason why philosophy and the city diverge: Socrates asked and answered the question What is virtue? and thereby understood the role of virtue in the city and the divergent virtue of the philosopher. The question What is virtue? leads to insight into that for the sake of which virtuous action is undertaken, insight into the power of the good, and that knowledge of the good leads to insight into the power of the notion of the cessation of evil. Knowledge of good and evil, knowledge of what God prohibits, paves the way to rule.



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to human nature”—to a practical one: is “the just city . . . ‘possible’ in the sense of being capable of being brought to light by the transformation of an actual city”? The rest of Strauss’s paragraph treats the Republic’s final condition for the rule of the philosopher—“expel everyone older than ten from the city” (126). This “solution” “leaves one wondering” how it is possible, and Strauss gives the answer: through a tacit expulsion, for Socrates “could have persuaded many fine young men, and not a few old ones,” to believe in the possibility of the city built in speech “so that justice will be done,” the act of persuasion Socrates is shown achieving with his interlocutors, detaching them from the views of everyone else over ten. Two paragraphs of summary conclude Strauss’s discussion of the two possibilities—of the just city and of rule by the philosopher. The first shows that the “just city is . . . impossible” because it is “against nature” in three ways: there can be no “cessation of evils,” rhetoric does not “have the power ascribed to it,” and “the equality of the sexes and absolute communism are against nature” (127). But imagining the cessation of evils is not against human nature; it seems in fact to be part of human nature to imagine ways in which evil could be made to cease. And Socrates’s rhetoric in the Republic culminates in ministerial poetry, a tale of cessation of evils in a moral sense as just gods punish the wicked and reward the good in a life to come. The second summary paragraph shows that the philosopher and only the philosopher “can be truly just” because in him alone the reasoning part of his soul does its work well; its rule over the other parts of the soul makes him alone wise, just, courageous, and moderate. It can thus be said that “only in philosophy do justice and happiness coincide.” On the one hand, that means that the philosopher is “self-sufficient, truly free, or his life is as little devoted to the service of other individuals as the life of the city is devoted to the service of other cities.” On the other hand, “the philosopher in the good city is just also in the sense that he serves his fellow men, his fellow citizens, his city” (127–28). Spelling out this service, Strauss shows that it is undertaken not on the grounds of the “natural inclination” or “eros” that moves the philosopher to seek the truth but instead “under compulsion.” Does that not compromise his being “truly free,” his not being devoted to the service of other individuals? Service of his fellow men can mean here, given the topic, one thing only: rule by the philosopher. What compels that service? One kind of compulsion only: “It should not be necessary but it is necessary to add that compulsion does not cease to be compulsion if it is self-compulsion.” To explain why the philosopher would compel himself to stoop to rule, Strauss reintroduces justice “in the larger sense according to which it consists in giving to each what is good for his

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soul.” He distinguishes two kinds of such philanthropy by the philosopher. In the first, “giving is intrinsically attractive to the giver”: the philosopher gives what is necessary to allow “the potential philosophers” to be set on the path to philosophy. In the second, giving “is merely a duty or compulsory”: the self-compulsion of “I went down” to speak the Republic in a time of emergency. For if the first kind “is choiceworthy for its own sake wholly regardless of its consequences,” the second kind “is merely necessary, and identical in the highest imaginable case with the rule of the philosopher.” The just city is impossible; rule by the philosopher is possible. Strauss now takes the last step in his doublet, combining the two: Socrates’s treatment of the inferior cities in book 8 “requires that the fiction of the possibility of the just city be maintained” (129). Recognition of the impossibility of the just city must be followed by recognition of the fact that “the Republic never abandons the fiction that the just city as a society of human beings . . . is possible.” The reason is clear: in order to keep spiritedness aroused—the anger and indignation indispensable to the city—it is necessary to sustain the belief that the just city is possible. Strauss the realist takes “utopia” seriously: “belief that the cessation of evils is possible” is required to sustain “the exaltation of spiritedness.” Socrates’s way of establishing this fiction, this functional utopia, is to speak mythically and have the Muse imply that the just city is possible by acting as if it was once actual, in the beginning, before the fall into the current inferior regimes. Success in this step— inculcation of the fiction of the possibility of the just city—turns the extremely improbable rule of the philosopher actual. With that step, Platonic political philosophy in its original, paradigm form stands full height. A philosopher rules through successfully founding a believable utopian fiction. Belief in the impossible cessation of evils becomes the means for the amelioration of evils, particularly that evil that is the divergence of the best of the nonphilosophers and the philosophers, the divergence of the good and the wise. All subsequent Platonic political philosophy followed the path first trod by Socrates; it saw the truth of Socrates’s command, “You must go down.” Strauss shows how Plato showed that it is possible for a philosopher to rule through teaching a new dream of the impossible just city. Strauss thus showed what is timeless in Platonic political philosophy: action in a time of emergency for philosophy that provides a new ministerial poetry to structure the world meaningfully with regard to evil. Strauss’s account of Plato’s theological-political project, like his account of Xenophon’s teleotheology, causes his own hard line of demarcation between ancient philosophy and modern philosophy to evaporate at the peak of philosophic ambition or self-



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compulsion. Ancient philosophers beginning with Socrates acted to provide a ministerial poetry favorable to philosophy: they undertook a “project” that came to have world-historical dimension. Medieval Platonic political philosophers like Halevi—understanding the spiritual situation of their time to be an association of believers subject to the agents of the Universal God everyone knew to be the only God—endorsed that God as the most muscular defender of the moral law and found a way to provide a hidden place for philosophy within that already existing “Platonic” system. Early modern Platonic political philosophers, understanding the spiritual situation of their time to be a crisis in the kingdom of darkness that threatened philosophy itself, constructed a new just city that they pictured as a long way off but worth bringing near by work on the world informed by the new science of nature that could understand nature in its actions. And finally, as I will argue in the last part of this book, Nietzsche, understanding the spiritual situation of our time as a crisis of nihilism brought on by the collapse of Platonism, responded as a Platonic political philosopher responds, with a theological-political program that is an approximation of the truth fit for the times. Strauss’s work of recovery, the keys he offered to understand exoteric writing in its necessity and its techniques, enables Plato’s reader to uncover the project of the philosopher Socrates at a turning of the world. That signal event, Socrates’s theological-political innovation, gave its stamp to Western civilization all the way forward to Nietzsche. But looking in the other direction, looking back before Socrates with an understanding of Socrates’s innovation, one can see that he had, as he well knew and as Plato everywhere indicated, one predecessor above all, the educator of Greece whose gods were dying, Homer.

chapter six

Extending the History of Philosophy Back to Homer: Seth Benardete’s Odyssey

Some day my belief that Homer started it all and that there was a continuous tradition from Homer until the end of the 18th century will be vindicated. —Leo Strauss to Seth Benardete, November 15, 1957

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eaders inspired by Leo Strauss have produced numerous translations and interpretations of classical works of the Western tradition, contributing immensely to the recovery of that tradition. Seth Benardete stands out as the most rewarding of these, if the most difficult. He concentrated on Plato, but his perhaps most accessible book, by no means easy, is The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey. I end “The Socratic Enlightenment” on Benardete’s book because it vindicates Strauss’s belief that Homer started it all. Reading Homer as a master of the exoteric art recovered by Strauss, Benardete discovered in Homer, the first known author of our tradition, its first philosopher and political philosopher. While making his initial discoveries in exotericism among Greek writers, Strauss reported to Klein that “what Plato in the Theaetetus says about the poets of the past age, namely, that they disguised philosophy in poetry, can, as far as Hesiod is concerned . . . be actually proven.” After giving the proof in Hesiod, he adds, “I’m convinced it’s not different in Homer.” He reports nothing further on Homer in the letters, nor did Homer occupy a prominent place in his writings thereafter. One comment, however, in an important place, makes the essential point. Introducing the History of Political Philosophy he edited with Joseph Cropsey, Strauss begins with the origins of political philosophy in philosophy and says that

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[t]he primary theme of philosophy . . . is “nature.” What is nature? The first Greek whose work has come down to us, Homer himself, mentions “nature” only a single time; this first mention of “nature” gives us a most important hint as to what the Greek philosophers understood by “nature.” (HPP, 2)

He then quotes the event in the tenth book of the Odyssey whose treatment by Benardete will be a chief theme of my chapter, Hermes revealing the nature of the herb moly to Odysseus. Strauss ends his quotation of Homer with this: “Hard is it to dig for mortal men, but the gods can do everything.” The gods are omnipotent, Strauss concludes, not because they know everything, for they don’t, but because they are “knowers of the natures of the things . . . ‘Nature’ means here the character of a thing, or of a kind of thing, the way in which a thing or a kind of thing looks and acts, and the thing, or kind of thing, is taken not to have been made by gods or men.” Strauss’s final comment takes Homer literally: “the first man we know who spoke of nature was the Wily Odysseus who had seen the towns of many men and had thus come to know how much the thoughts of men differ from town to town or from tribe to tribe” (HPP, 3). Homer’s Odysseus was the first to come to know the nature of man and to act on that knowledge. The first philosopher and political philosopher, Strauss intimates to open his history of political philosophy, was wily Odysseus, because, learning what only the gods had known, he came into the knowledge that gave them their power. Commenting on his experience of studying with Strauss, Benardete remarked on Strauss’s ability to have “burst-like insights into whole arguments” even when he did not know a book especially well: “So his awareness of the passage about physis in the Odyssey (10.303), that was not dependent on an interpretation of the work as a whole. [He just knew that] this was really decisive.” Benardete devoted considerable attention to Homer, writing his dissertation on the Iliad and publishing articles on it. The Bow and the Lyre, written in 1994, is the fruit of his lifelong attention to Homer. In its preface he describes learning from Plato in a way that he could not learn from Homer and the tragic poets. His failure was “no fault” of the older authors: we lost knowledge of how to read them. Plato’s famous remark on “the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy,” Benardete says, cast a spell over him that kept him from wondering whether Plato himself had learned from the poets. He then briefly relates how it was Plato himself who led him, over time, to questions that allowed him to recover . Benardete, Encounters and Reflections, 42–43.

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the lost art of reading Homer and other wise poets—wise poets being redundant in Benardete’s usage, for he distinguishes poets from versifiers. Nearing the end of his preface, Benardete reports a view he finds expressed in Plato’s Phaedrus: “the ascent to the beings always passes divergently through the fiction of the Olympian gods.” And he asks whether the poets, poetizers of the Olympian gods, understood their own doing or making. If they did, they would not be simply the preface to philosophy but would have entered philosophy itself, knowledge of the beings. It is on this issue that Benardete, for the only time in his book, mentions “[m]y teacher, the late Leo Strauss”: Strauss “had often spoken to me about this possibility, but I did not know then what he really meant, and I do not know now whether what I think I now understand was what he really meant.” Benardete’s book on the Odyssey presents his mature view on the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, an issue on which he was set to thinking by Leo Strauss. His book presents the view that Plato recovered from the poets “a way of thinking that is not on the way to philosophy but is philosophy.” Therefore, when he says that on this view “the apparent tension between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher would disappear,” he implies the same of Homer: Homer the poet of the Odyssey is one with Homer the philosopher. I single out two sections of Benardete’s book, “Nature” and “Hades,” for the obvious reason: they treat in turn philosophy and political philosophy in a way that displays the harmonious relation between them when poetry is understood in the most expansive sense: god making. Singling out two sections, tearing them out of Benardete’s developing narrative, comes at a high cost: they treat episodes within two tightly woven Homeric narratives, Odysseus’s own story of his odyssey as told to wise Alcinous, and Homer’s story, which he presents as having being told to him by the Muse. These broader narratives enclose the two episodes I discuss and are essential to Odysseus’s total odyssey as Homer relates it. I tear out these two because they show that in Homer too philosophy and political philosophy are related by sequential implication: fundamental insight entails comprehensive action. The last sentences of Benardete’s beautiful book have always meant the most to me: “Odysseus is free to submit to his fate and begin his second journey. He should now know that his destiny is to establish belief and not knowledge.” Benardete’s book-long argument is condensed into these . See Benardete, Bow and the Lyre, 153 n. 2. Subsequent references will be to page numbers in parentheses in the text.



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sentences, for his argument reenacts a becoming. The “wisest of men” becomes truly wise only after he has understood the meaning of the war won at Troy, the moral war and its warriors. Following the complex thread of the Muse’s chosen way of presenting the complex odyssey of Odysseus, Benardete reveals the stages whereby this reflective man of understanding enters philosophy and political philosophy.

“NATURE” “A mighty necessity is upon me.” So says Odysseus as he sets out for the house of Circe, a setting out that leads to what Benardete calls a “revela­ tion” that “[f]rom every point of view, both intrinsically and extrinsi­ cally . . . is the peak of the Odyssey” (84). Presented as the gift of Hermes, the revelation “that things have natures” stands as the peak, the indispensable insight with which philosophy gains its true ground. But what is the mighty necessity that led to the revelation? Many preparatory steps were involved, including all four episodes already related in the nine-stage odyssey Odysseus is describing for Alcinous, wise king of the Phaeacians. The immediate trigger of the mighty necessity, however, is Odysseus’s recognition of his “negligence or dereliction of duty,” his unprecedented withdrawal from command that caused the Laestrygonian disaster: having surrendered command, Odysseus allowed eleven of his twelve ships to sail into the harbor of the Laestrygonians while he, with “characteristic caution,” moored his own ship outside the harbor, leaving himself and his crew the chance to escape. Why did Odysseus withdraw command and in this passive way cause the destruction of over ninety percent of his men? The preceding episode, Aeolus and his gift of winds, explains why. These three episodes, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Circe, Benardete placed together under the title “Nature”: the discovery of nature in the Circe episode came about because of what the Aeolus and Laestrygonian events did to Odysseus. . Republic 390a. . No one will ever visit an actual island of Circe or Aeolus or any other place in the imaginary geography invented by Odysseus to convey to wise Alcinous his odyssey to philosophy and political philosophy. But thanks to the inspired and obsessive labors of Robert Bittlestone, assisted by the academic expertise of Cambridge University philologist James Diggle and Edinburgh University geologist John Underhill, we can now knowingly visit Odysseus’s actual Ithaca for the first time since antiquity. It is not the western Ionian island now called Ithaca but the northwest peninsula of nearby Cephalonia, a peninsula formerly separated from Cephalonia proper by a strait. We can now walk up again from the sandy beach of Phorkys Bay to the site of Eumaeus’s pig farm and from there on up to the commanding height where Odysseus’s palace once stood, marveling that the origins of Western philosophy, Western civilization, got part of

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Aeolus, steward of the winds, gave Odysseus a bag in which he had sewn up all the winds but Zephyr, allowing him the apparently unimpeded opportunity to sail home to Ithaca. Having decided that he could trust only himself on that sail home, Odysseus stayed awake nine days and nights guiding the ships. On the tenth day, sighting Ithaca and close enough to see men tending fires, he was overcome by sleep. With Odysseus asleep, his crew opened the bag, suspecting, reasonably enough, that it contained treasure that Aeolus had given Odysseus and that he had not shared with them; the released winds blew them away from Ithaca. Benardete reports Odysseus’s reconstruction of the speech of his crew as “Odysseus’s understanding of their resentment, which he expresses as their coming home emptyhanded even though they accomplished the same journey as he did” (80–81)—a deeply mistaken view of Odysseus’s journey, if an understandable one. Benardete focuses on Odysseus’s report of his thoughts on awakening far from Ithaca: in despair, he ponders suicide. Rather than slip over the side and under the waves, however, Odysseus “endured in silence: he gives up control of his ships and men. He asks no questions . . . He lets things take their course. He becomes indifferent” (81). He chooses “resignation.” Blown back to Aeolus’s island, Odysseus hears Aeolus’s curse on him as “an object of enmity to the immortals” (82), and Benardete observes that Odysseus too seems to have concluded that “[h]e does not deserve to exist unless either he himself is perfect or he commands total trust on the part of his crew.” Aeolus’s curse causes a “decisive change” in Odysseus, for he now knows that he is “on his own, and no divine support is to be expected.” Benardete’s word choice highlights the singular importance of this change: “This turn to complete self-reliance emerges as the necessity for his men to row for six days straight.” The turn to rowing reminds Benardete of “the proverb ‘second sailing,’ which applies to those who cannot employ the best means possible but must be content with whatever means are available.” This turn, this second sailing, means that “[t]he feasible replaces the ideal.” Benardete makes no mention of Socrates when using his famous words from Plato’s Phaedo (99d), but his preface spoke of “Socrates’ ‘second sailing’ ’’ as Socrates’s “own term for the turnaround in his own thinking when he abandoned a direct approach to cosmology and turned instead to speeches rather than to the beings” (xii). Benardete invites his reader to think of the events he is now describing in the Odyssey as Homer’s version of the Socratic turn, a turn leading in Homer too to the discovery of nature. their impetus in these very hills and harbors. See Bittlestone, Odysseus Unbound and www .odysseus-unbound.org.



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After saying that “the feasible replaces the ideal,” Benardete goes on to describe a sequence of two alterations caused by this replacement. First, it “alters the very character of Odysseus’s narration” (82): Odysseus narrates the Laestrygonian episode differently. Second, “[t]he Laestrygonian disaster alters Odysseus” (84): it is altered Odysseus who sets out for Circe’s house in order to rescue his men and to whom Hermes reveals the nature of the moly. These alterations in the narrative and in Odysseus show that the feasible new way is the way to philosophy after the abandonment of the ideal way. Benardete reports Odysseus’s narration in the altered terms Odysseus gave it: “Odysseus does not say a word about [the] injustice or wickedness [of the Laestrygonians]. He does not even pray for their destruction. His account is as neutral as Homer’s description of the carnage of war” (82–83). Odysseus’s neutral narration is “stripped . . . of any mention of the gods” (83). Neutrality allows the acts of the Laestrygonians to be viewed from their perspective: seeing eleven alien warships enter their harbor, they act to defend themselves against what looks like an invasion force. And neutrality allows a different perspective on Odysseus: abandoning rule of his men, tying up his own ship outside the harbor, not even advising them to be as cautious as he knew it was necessary to be—could this mean that Odysseus’s “neutral tone” arises “from a resentment against his own men and a corresponding satisfaction in their ‘punishment’ ”? Regarding his relationship to these men, Benardete says, it is inconceivable that Odysseus’s “negligence or dereliction of duty could be defended at home if any managed to survive.” Finally, neutrality may reflect the fact that “Odysseus has had a potentially grave problem solved for him, to which he himself called attention when he reconstructed the speech of his own crew”; he had them express their resentment against him “as their coming home emptyhanded even though they accomplished the same journey as he did” (81). The “grave problem” they represent, then, is that even though they cannot have understood everything Odysseus understood, “their experiences have made them wiser;” paternal rule over them is no longer possible. The task

. Benardete emphasizes the altered narration by repeatedly invoking Odysseus’s previous narration of the Polyphemus episode. He shows Homer’s corresponding neutrality by citing Iliad 16.404–10: Homer applied to the actions of heroic Patroclus the image Odysseus applied to the actions of the Laestrygonians, spearing fish. . Benardete thus suggests that Odysseus’s action could be based in anger, the meaning of his name given to him by Autolycus, his grandfather on his mother’s side, a most telling name when added to the name he gave himself in the Polyphemus episode, outis—nobody. Benardete’s accounts of Odysseus’s names are continuously instructive (3, 43–44, 76–79, 129–30; see n. 18 below).

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that lies ahead for Odysseus, securing a new regime in Ithaca over which Telemachus will preside, would be made immeasurably more complicated if hundreds of men believe “they accomplished the same journey as [Odysseus] did.” Odysseus knows his own responsibility for the disaster, because his narrative, “stripped as it is of any mention of the gods,” corrects his earlier attribution of responsibility to Zeus (9.551–55). Blaming Zeus shows the measures Odysseus is willing to take “in order to cover up his own responsibility”(84); narrating the Laestrygonian disaster in a neutral manner shows what he learned of his own responsibility. “The Laestrygonian disaster alters Odysseus” (84). As Benardete turns to this second and more important consequence of the replacement of the ideal by the feasible, he notes that the changes in Odysseus are forced on him as “democratic concessions”: he addresses his men as friends for the first time; he shares the stag he shot; he divides his forty-four men into two equal groups and puts Eurylochus in charge of one; he conducts a lottery to determine which group will investigate the island that turns out to be Circe’s. Two additional changes, however, are chosen. One is a matter of speech. For the first time he tells the names of some of his crew: Eurylochus, Polites, and “he ends his stay at Circe’s . . . naming the nobody Elpenor.” And the deed of the altered Odysseus? When Eurylochus returns to report that all the other men had disappeared, “Odysseus decides to rescue them,” saying, “a mighty necessity is upon me.” The mighty necessity marks an alteration of the first order: “This is the first time Odysseus does anything that does not involve his own advantage. He risks his life for his ‘evil’ companions and trusts that those he leaves behind, with the unreliable Eurylochus, will not desert him.” To always point to centers seems like cheating, like taking unfair advantage of an author’s care in modulating his voice and leading his reader to things carefully constructed for private tutoring, special treasures that won’t bear shouting. But Benardete pointed to centers in Homer, and one of the centers he isolated is the Circe episode (as he points out here). His own account of the Circe episode—of what the mighty necessity, the alteration in Odysseus, led to—begins at the complex center of his book, the first of two central paragraphs twinned at the center of “Nature,” the section twinned with “Hades” at the center of the central chapter “Odysseus’s Own Story.”

. The Bow and the Lyre has nine chapters, and the central chapter, “Odysseus’s Own Story,” has four subchapters, “Nature” and “Hades” being the central pair. These two subchapters are also the tenth and eleventh of twenty subchapters. Where chapters have subchapters, they constitute the whole of the chapter; the book therefore consists of twenty-two units if the chap-



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The second of his two central paragraphs deals with the consequence of Odysseus’s risking his life for his men: “This completely just and daring action, with its implicit recognition of what he shares with his fellow human beings, is instantly rewarded.” The reward is a gift of the gods: “Hermes reveals to him that things have natures. From every point of view, both intrinsically and extrinsically, this revelation is the peak of the Odyssey.” It can be no accident that here at the center and peak where the words can be assumed to be most studied, Benardete chose, for the fundamental insight of reason, its indispensable step into philosophy and the rational account of the order of things, words that Leo Strauss used for reason’s fundamental opposite: reveals, revelation. Why he did so is clear. Odysseus is telling his own story after seven years with Calypso, the “Concealer” (37), years spent shaping the way he would tell the tale of his odyssey to a man like Alcinous—and he attributes his insight to Hermes. And Homer shapes the tale he tells to have the word nature, physis, be used only once, right here. Benardete defers to Odysseus, to Homer, to Strauss, and calls reason’s fundamental and comprehensive conclusion a “revelation.” Benardete shows the necessary connection between philosophy and political philosophy in his first words about philosophy. Before describing the actual event at the peak, Benardete shows just why, intrinsically and extrinsically, it is the peak. Intrinsically, within the Odyssey, Benardete finds two aspects to the peak. First, with respect to the human as such, “[i]t comes after a series of encounters with men who illustrated the character of the bestial in the composition of man and thereby exposed the conditions of political life” (84). The peak follows full exposure of the bestial conditions of political life to a thinker leading a journey home; but the peak itself is attained at the moment of exposure to a different aspect of the human fully articulated in what Odysseus relates as his encounters after the Circe episode: “only various forms of the divine —Hades, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of the Sun.” The peak itself contains a new aspect of the bestial: “[t]he swine Odysseus’s men become complete the series” of the bestial. And the divine? It must be present at

ters without subchapters are added to the subchapters. Benardete placed an endnote on centers (note 127) at the center of “Nature,” appended to “the shape [Odysseus] gave to his story” (85). The Circe episode, which Benardete is treating here, is the central or fifth in the story Odysseus shaped, “Odysseus’s account of his nine adventures.” But Hades is central “in Homer’s account of Odysseus’s eleven adventures.” It is appropriate then that Benardete twin “Hades” with “Nature” at his center. The formal fitness of Benardete’s twinned centering of “Nature” and “Hades” mirrors substantive fitness: “Nature” and “Hades” deal respectively with philosophy and political philosophy in their essential connectedness.

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the peak and can only be—Circe being not yet encountered—Odysseus’s act to save his men. His “just and daring action, with its implicit recognition of what he shares with his fellow human beings,” experienced as such, known as such, seems to be the tripping point for the revelation: to be human is to be a bestial/divine mix and to be that mix essentially; to be a human being is to do what the human must do given what it is, given the forms of bestiality/divinity in its—nature. The human is what it is and not some other thing; to be human is to act out a nature, to be an instance of the kind human. From this peak of insight into nature, Benardete looks back to an event in the Odyssey that Homer has already related concerning the bestial/divine split. “Odysseus’s narrative thus shares in his own experiences at sea after he left Calypso. He had then chosen first the divine and last the bestial” (84–85). That sequence of choices occurs within the fundamental choice Odysseus has already made at Calypso’s, “his choice of home and mortality.” That particular divine/bestial split related earlier by Homer “turns out to have been anticipated in the shape [Odysseus] gives to his story.” The peak event is thus illuminated by pondering an event that Homer chose to tell earlier but that chronologically fell later. Folded within the complex layering of sequences lies the total chronology of the odyssey to philosophy and to political philosophy. Unfolded into its chief events it reads: the post-Troy understanding of Troy or of morality; the odyssey to philosophy itself that peaks with the Circe episode; seven years with the Concealer on what amounts to the Isle of the Blest; the choice of home and mortality that dictates taking the raft home or descending home; storms within that choice that dictate choosing first the divine and last the bestial; and actually telling the whole shaped tale when a fit audience is found, in this case a wise king. The nature of the human is one aspect of the revelation of the moly that makes that revelation the peak of the Odyssey intrinsically. Benardete shows a second aspect. “At the same time [Odysseus’s] story contains versions of both ‘Nestor’ and ‘Menelaus.’ ” These names stand for views of the whole that Benardete already discussed because Homer put them too earlier in his story. Telemachus journeyed to Pylos and Sparta early in the Odyssey to inquire of Nestor and Menelaus what they knew about his father, and here at the peak Benardete summarizes what he heard: Nestor interpreted

. Benardete laid out Homer’s presentation of the sequence of choices of divine and bestial consequent on the storm at sea (choices that followed the basic choice, the philosopher Odysseus’s choice of home and mortality), on the extremely dense pages 40–43, pages that the peak helps interpret, as do pages 51 and 148.



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the whole by trying “to fit everything . . . into a pattern of divine justice.” Menelaus came close to “suggesting a comprehensive understanding of becoming, which Helen had deepened with her suggestion of the inscrutable heart behind all appearances.” Hermes’s revelation is the peak also because it attempts to understand what Nestor and Menelaus and Helen attempted to understand: an order to the whole. Compared with these earlier efforts, “Hermes’ showing of the nature of the moly, however, seems to be of a different order.” The peak attains a literally different order, an order of the whole construed rationally as an order of natures instanced in the moly. The revelation of this order “lets Odysseus share in the knowledge the gods have without his having to share in their being.” In the pleasing humor of these final words of his central paragraphs, Benardete voices Odysseus’s insight into the choiceworthiness of human being over the ageless and deathless nonbeing of divinity. This choiceworthiness is not obvious to all. Benardete made the words of Nestor’s son, “All men need gods” (17), a running theme with respect to Odysseus. Does he? He doesn’t: he can share in their knowledge without having to share in their being. He does: knowing the conditions of political life, the divine and the bestial in the human, he will learn that choosing the divine/bestial makes it his destiny to establish belief and not knowledge. And externally? Benardete shows in his next paragraph that Hermes’s revelation that things have natures is the peak of the Odyssey from an external point of view: he jumps to Aristotle’s Politics and shows how its account of human nature contains the most basic elements of Odysseus’s discoveries. “Odysseus’s adventures so far seem to have unfolded as if they were meant to illustrate Aristotle” (85). But the Aristotelian elements in Odysseus’s experiences “are not grounded in an Aristotelian understanding of nature.” This seems to mean not only that they occurred prior to the discovery of nature as the means to that discovery but also that the peak insight needed a train of thinkers to arrive at the full view implied within it. Benardete again summarizes Odysseus’s experiences with the Laestrygonians and the Cyclops and concludes that “[i]t now seems that the way to the discovery of nature”—the way that led eventually to Aristotle—“has been decisively prepared for” by two events: “on the one hand, by the unsupported human effort to reach the Laestrygonians,” the inquirer’s effort of a second sailing that abandons the ideal and replaces it with the feasible; and on the other hand, “by Odysseus’s uncompelled choice to be . Benardete entitled his chapter on these views “Pattern and Will,” dividing it into two subchapters, “Nestor” and “Helen and Menelaus.”

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just.” Again, the mighty necessity moving Odysseus to his act of rescue is affirmed as indispensable: philanthropy not only belongs to philosophy, it is present at its beginning as a precondition of its beginning at all. Benardete does not often repeat himself. But here, having brought in Aristotle to glimpse the whole sweep of the Greek understanding of nature from Homer to Aristotle, he repeats himself on the mighty necessity presupposed in the attainment of philosophy: love of the human as human is a precondition of the self-knowledge that brings insight into nature. Having proven the peak the peak intrinsically and extrinsically, Benardete can ponder Hermes’s revelation. The decisive matter is to understand the moly as the “antidote” to Circe’s enchantment. It is not a magic potion or charm; its name carries no special powers. “What Hermes does with the moly is to show Odysseus its nature (phusis)” (86).10 “It was black in its root, and its flower like milk; the gods call it moly, but it is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods can do everything.” The revelation lies wholly in the showing: “the gods’ power arises from the knowledge of its nature.” Odysseus, having dug up what it is hard for mortal men to dig up, comes to know what the gods know, and that knowledge is power, power initially to resist enchantment. But knowing how to resist enchantment implies knowing how to enchant. Knowing what the gods know, Odysseus takes on the power of the gods. Armed with knowledge, Odysseus is proof against Circe’s particular enchantment, “transforming a man into a pig, with its head, voice, bristles, and build, but the mind (noos) remains as it was before.” Benardete repeats his odd word build: Odysseus’s “knowledge, then, is the knowledge that the mind of man belongs together with his build. They are together as much as the root and flower of the moly.” Man is mind and build. What is build? It must be what is transformable into piggishness, that element of the human that can be corrupted into swinelike bestiality while mind remains mind. Expanding it into the other forms of the bestial that Odysseus has experienced and naming it platonically, build must be appetite and spirit, elements of soul that can dominate the soul and press mind into their service. Odysseus is that rarity whose experiences allow his mind to understand his build, how he’s built, and thereby win control over the potentially bestial in 10. Who is Hermes? As Odysseus comes near the house of Circe, he appears as “Hermes of the golden staff” (10.277–78), messenger of the gods, but in the act of giving Odysseus the antidote and explaining its nature, he is “Argeïphontes,” friend of thieves (10.302). And Hermes was the teacher of Autolycus, Odysseus’s grandfather on his mother’s side, a man “who surpassed all men in stealing and in swearing oaths for the god Hermes himself had endowed him” (Odyssey 19.395–96). See N. O. Brown, Hermes the Thief, 8.



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himself: “ ‘There is in your breast,’ Circe tells Odysseus, ‘a mind that does not admit of enchantment’ (10.329).” If his knowledge gives his mind power over his build, it could also give his mind potential power over the build of all others ruled by build while imagining they’re ruled by mind. Benardete reflects on what “Homer was the first, as far as we know, to have come to” understand (87), the “philosophic principle” of unity according to which a kosmos of composite order accessible to mind underlies what is visible to the eye; to that, Homer “gave the name ‘nature.’ ” “The unity that logos discovers can be sounded”—it can be plumbed and spoken—“but never without ambiguity.” Did Homer go further? Did he understand the unities to be causes, as “Socrates seems to have proposed” (note 134)? Benardete answers in his note that “[i]n Homer, only the first step has been taken.” His text agrees: “It is unclear whether Odysseus extends the principle beyond this one insight, but he does have it confirmed” (87). The confirmation occurs later, in Hades, and becomes a permanent part of Odysseus’s understanding of human nature. In this anticipatory look into Hades, Benardete indicates one of its key features. “In Hades, he learns, there are recognizable images of men and women, but, with the exception of Teiresias, they have no mind.” Only the wise man survives in Hades with his mind, only he has an afterlife as more than an image of his shape. Benar­ dete notes that to escape Polyphemus Odysseus claimed to be nothing but mind; now, however, having been shown the moly, he knows himself better. In addition, with Circe he sees his men “in an unrecognizable form but with their minds intact.” Combining these insights, Odysseus learns that no man is immortal, no man carries the unity of shape and mind into Hades, although the wise live on differently, still teaching. Therefore, years later, he is immune to Calypso’s offer to make him deathless and ageless because he knows it “cannot be genuine.” The revelation of the moly, knowledge of the unity of bestial and divine in human nature, gives mortal Odysseus immunity to the charms of both Circe and Calypso; he cannot be made swine­ like, and he cannot believe he is more than he is. Who is Odysseus then? He is the man named by his grandfather, Autolycus, Wolf Himself, and Benardete showed that the root of his name is anger and that Homer used the verb odussomai only for divine anger except when Autolycus named Odysseus (43–44). But Odysseus also named himself, calling himself outis, No One, in order to escape from Polyphemus’s cave, and Benardete showed how ou tis implies mê tis and therefore that the name Odysseus gave himself rings of anonymous mind (mêtis) (3, 77–79). The human mind of Odysseus, coming to know itself in the duality pictured in his names, discovers nature.

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Through Circe’s domestication of his men, Odysseus learns the possibility of a “city of pigs,” a bestialization of man that followed his democratizing his rule. By quoting Plato’s Republic Benardete prepares Homer’s portrayal of the key step in the odyssey to philosophy. The theme of bestiality, he says, “culminates twice, first among the Laestrygonians and then with Circe’s swine.” The latter, however, points to an insight of a different order; it points, Benardete says, guarding his words, “to a humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily.” And who knows that? Odysseus only and only after he sees the bestiality of fully domesticated man. Only he—and only then—comes to know that it belongs to man to know who he is. Democracy “points” to philosophy; all varieties of what man necessarily is can flourish in the freedom and permissiveness of democracy, but more than that, its domestication, pressed to the full, alone makes possible that rarest variety that comes to know what man necessarily is. The step into philosophy is the philosopher learning his difference and his sameness in difference. Odysseus the knower is unique: “Without that knowledge [of what man necessarily is] he can be enchanted and made subject to perfect rule.” Does that imply that with that knowledge one could duplicate Circe’s enchantment, perfect rule? This question takes us deeper into the Republic, to its very center, where Socrates announces the precondition of perfect rule, that philosophers become kings or kings philosophers. Indicating that this is what Odysseus—a king who has become a philosopher—is pondering, Benar­ dete asks: just how “tight” is this connection between doing and knowing, justice and knowledge? Is it as tight as the connection between “ignorance and bestiality,” the tightness of mutual implication? “The insight might be implicit in the action,” Benardete answers, the deed of rescuing his men may imply revelation of the moly, “but the action is not guided by the insight” (88)—as Odysseus narrated it, the insight succeeded the action. So the next question must be: “Is the necessity Odysseus acknowledges he is under to rescue his men ultimately the same as the knowledge of the necessity of the togetherness of looks and mind?”11 That mighty necessity to act, was that already knowledge? Are justice and knowledge so tightly connected that at the upmost peak they are the same? If they are, then the precise knowledge Benardete describes, the necessary togetherness of looks and mind and the act that led to it, are one event split by the poet into two. The peak with its

11. “Looks” in this sentence is a synonym for the more usual “human shape” (e.g., 87, 92).



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mighty necessity and its revelation of the moly would then be an instance of “the plot of poetic dialectic” (xiii). The connection between justice and knowledge would then be so tight that as knower Odysseus must rescue his men. If this is so, the philosopher must rule, stoop to rule. The next paragraph assumes this connection and indicates how action and knowledge are together. Guarding his words, Benardete says this: “If man cannot live except politically, he must live with men who, if they do not know what constitutes man, must have a version of the knowledge of what constitutes man that does not preserve, however much it may reflect, the nature of man” (88). Odysseus is a solitary in the independence of his mind, but as a man he cannot live except politically; coming to know what constitutes man and having to live with those who cannot know, he knows he must offer them a version of his knowledge that reflects it without simply baring its harming truth. The justice of Odysseus’s rescue of his men includes doing himself justice; his act for others is also a self-interested act, the self-preservation of the wise man through teaching a version of what he knows in order for him to be able to live politically. Odysseus rescues his men in order to rule them through a teaching, and that teaching effects rule for the sake of what he knows. Benardete states the indispensable element in that rule: “Homer indicates that a most powerful version of that knowledge is summed up in the word ‘Hades.’ ” “Hades” is the next section of Benardete’s book, the second half of its center, its first half being “Nature.” But here Benardete brings Hades forward, treating it out of order so as to explain how Hades is connected to nature as a teaching that is a version of a knowing; Odysseus’s teaching will be a version of Odysseus’s knowing. “ ‘Hades’ splits body and soul apart in a peculiar way: the soul retains the looks of the body, and the mind vanishes entirely.” This split indicates the unreality of Hades, but Benardete’s point here is to indicate the function of Hades as a teaching. First, “Hades distinguishes man from everything else. Men go to Hades, all other animals just die.” Hades allows humans to believe that a cardinal difference elevates them above all other animals. Second, “[t]his distinctiveness of man, whether exaggerated or not, imposes on man certain constraints,” of which Benardete mentions the prohibition on cannibalism. Belief in Hades both elevates man and directs his behavior. Compelled by what he knows to act on behalf of those with whom he must live and who can never be knowers, Odysseus acts to elevate and restrain through belief. “Hades is a negative determination of man, and, as such, a lawful equivalent of Odysseus’s knowledge of his nature.” Odysseus knows and acts out of knowledge; he will teach those with whom he lives to believe in Hades and thereby to act out of

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belief-imposed constraints, to act lawfully. The invisibility of Hades “seems to displace the invisible bond in the nature of man” known to Odysseus. “Hades, therefore, is not a deduction from the knowledge of that bond.” It is not knowledge implied by knowledge but a poetic version of knowledge fit for believers led by Elpenor. Elpenor, hope, shows how necessary Hades is for him and how unnecessary for Odysseus: he “has to remind Odysseus to bury him and threaten him with punishment if he does not.” Benardete begins his next paragraph asserting that “Odysseus’s knowledge of nature does not go beyond the knowledge of man in general” (88). It does not extend to the knowledge of maleness and femaleness, of Circe, say, as Benardete’s next sentences show: his knowledge “does not protect him against the possibility that if he sleeps with Circe she may unman him (anênôr). A difference seems to be implied between the intelligible eidos of human being (anthrôpos) and the visible species (eidos) of man (anêr) and woman (gunê).” Are there intelligible eidê of manliness and womanliness? Benardete is poised on the edge of an immensity. Circe is a goddess of a woman. Could she put her womanliness into the service of her masculine mind and do to Odysseus what Ischomachos’s wife did to Ischomachos? What does Odysseus know of maleness and femaleness as such? What does Homer know? Benardete looks to the event: “If Odysseus is naked, he is helpless against Circe unless she first swears an oath not to harm him in some other way.” Being naked, Benardete suggests, probably means both “to be without clothes and to be unarmed.” Does Odysseus need to be armed? Not if Circe is right: “Circe understands sexual love as a way of their shedding their mutual distrust.” But Odysseus doesn’t trust her: he “is told that she would still have an advantage over him.” What advantage? Instead of pursuing the possibility of intrinsic female advantage, Benardete looks to male weakness: “There is in man some capacity to resist, a strength of soul or whatever we choose to call it, that can be lost or diminished regardless of knowledge.” What is it in man that could be lost or diminished in the face of woman, rather than added or augmented as Circe may be suggesting? “It seems to comprehend more than the shame and the weakness that, in the case of men, might be thought to accompany sex.” Instead of trying to identify that losable more, Benardete ends by contrasting Circe: “as a goddess and a daughter of the sun, Circe has nothing to lose and nothing to hide.” Can that be true of womanliness in the face of manliness—can she risk being wholly transparent to maleness? Poised on the brink of the question of manliness and womanliness, with access to the resources of the Odyssey and its divinization of so many females, most particularly wise, warlike Athena, Benardete lets the issue go. Is he confessing what Strauss confessed



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in his Nietzsche essay: “I have no access” to that ingredient of Nietzsche’s “theology” which divinized Ariadne?12 The Bow and the Lyre limits the knowledge of nature attained by Homer’s Odysseus to “the knowledge of man in general” (88).13 But Benardete’s 1984 commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus showed that Homer himself claimed a knowledge of nature as a whole. In Theaetetus Socrates makes Homer the great general standing at the head of the large army (Theaetetus 153a) that constitutes the tradition of Greek wisdom that holds that “all things . . . come to be from locomotion and motion and mutual mixing; for nothing ever is, but (everything) always becomes” (152d). As Socrates there goes on to say, all the wise in succession, except Parmenides, converge, Protagoras and Heraclitus, and Empedocles, as well as the tip-top poets of each kind of poetry, Epicharmus of comedy and Homer of tragedy. Homer with the line “Ocean and Mother Tethys, the becoming (genesis) of gods” has said that everything is the offspring of flowing and motion.14

Benardete’s commentary on Theaetetus exposes Socrates’s penetration of the exotericism Homer originated, describing it this way: the “veiled speech of Homer[,] ‘Both Oceanus and mother Tethys, the genesis of gods’ . . . says, according to Socrates, that all things are the offspring of flowing and motion, whereas it seems to say that the gods have their origin in a male and a female god, who did not themselves become.”15 Homer then, the first author whose writings have come down to us, is the first to convey a process ontology, a totality of becoming, and to veil it in a poetic theology of ostensibly immortal beings. But that originating Homeric achievement attains, in Socrates, something far more important than mere explicitness because Socrates sees that “the principle of everything is a something, permanent, comprehensive, that gives its own character to everything”; the whole tradition of Greek ontology from Homer onward is gathered into a Socratic 12. See below, pp. 293–300. Benardete’s footnote at this point acknowledges that Odysseus’s unmanning may refer to sleep, not sex. His views on Penelope are not encouraging about the divinization of womanliness. See n. 18 of this chapter. 13. Benardete says that Odysseus’s “story contains versions of both ‘Nestor’ and ‘Mene­ laus’ ” (85; on Menelaus see 86), that is, of the two previous attempts in the Odyssey to give an account of the whole. But he does not seem to elaborate an Odyssean account of nature as a whole, of human kind within a totality of kinds. 14. Theaetetus 152e (Benardete translation); Iliad 14.302. See Theaetetus 180d on the inadvisability of doing what Protagoras did in openly revealing this truth about things to everyone. 15. Benardete, Being of the Beautiful, 1: 105.

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culmination. But if “only now with Socrates can the truth be brought entirely into the light,” that light must include its own veiling because if Socrates has just told Theaetetus “the secret of the wise,” their secret is that they never “said what they meant.” Wise Socrates will poetize his insight regarding the permanence of kinds into a theology of ostensibly permanent entities. This history of Greek ontology and poetic theology with its origin in Homer and its peak in Socrates seems not to enter The Bow and the Lyre; there, Benardete is content to follow Odysseus as he moves from the original discovery of nature in human nature to the discovery of the necessary theological-political program to shelter it. After letting the great issue of manliness and womanliness fall, Benardete follows Odysseus’s narrative into an epoch-making theological point. After Circe swears her oath and they make love, Odysseus falls into a distress that Circe cannot figure out. Odysseus shares with his fellow humans something she lacks; he pities them, she does not. She takes pity only after she sees each man clasp Odysseus’s hand and hears the house ring with lamentations of longing. “This is an extraordinary thing; a god learns from a man” (89). The extraordinariness of her learning lies in its being an event in the history of religion: gods from now on pity humans and act on their pity. Like Hades, the gods’ pity represents a historic advance in religion, in what a god is. Benardete wonders what might have happened had Circe not sworn her oath and learned pity: perhaps Odysseus, having attained a paradise of knowing and enjoying, “might have been dehumanized . . . might have suffered another form of enchantment . . . Perhaps he no longer would have had the heart or manliness to resist a version of Calypso’s temptation.” Had he not learned that he could teach a god pity, perhaps he would have chosen to live forever on an Island of the Blest and never descended to humans. What Odysseus learned at the peak, his entry into philosophy, would have been historically useless had he not taught a god to pity; having for the first time done something just and daring, not involving his own advantage, he teaches the gods to be like him. When Odysseus returns to bring the rest of his crew to Circe’s, he uses an image for his men that turns them into domestic animals joyfully dependent on him. Eurylochus shatters that image of perfect rule, shrewd Eurylochus who charges that it was by Odysseus’s wickedness that their comrades perished in Polyphemus’s cave. “This charge,” Benardete comments, “which casually attributes criminality to the desire to know, is too close to the truth to be answered effectively” (90). Benardete’s final paragraph in “Nature” begins: “The discovery of nature is clearly linked with the problem of rule.” Rule by Odysseus was once so natural, so sovereign



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and gentle that he took over rule in Ithaca long before his father Laertes, himself a good ruler, had died.16 Now, however, now that war and return have changed his men, now that a new generation of young Ithacans strive to replace an Odysseus thought lost and to usurp Telemachus’s right to rule, now the discoverer of nature will have to establish rule that is new in two ways. One way accommodates the Elpenors with Hades, and the other way is intimated here by Odysseus’s failure with Eurylochus. For “Odysseus ultimately loses out to Eurylochus” on the island of the Sun, and here at Circe’s he loses control as his men demand to return home after a year. “The obstacle Eurylochus represents points directly to the suitors.” Odysseus learns from his failure with Eurylochus that successful rule by those he will put in place, Telemachus and his associates, depends upon an act of political establishment that will hold in memory the wickedness of those who opposed it and the virtue of those who established it: all the suitors must die and die for moral reasons.

“HADES” “Hades can be said to be the most potent symbol” of the Olympian gods (91). In “Hades,” that section twinned at the center with “Nature,” Benardete shows Odysseus learning Hades’s potency and therewith perhaps his hardest lesson, what he must teach. “Odysseus is about to enter upon his fate” as he draws the logical implications of his discovery of nature. Having learned that humans have a nature, act out a nature, he learns that he must teach humans a potent supernatural. A philosopher must become a political philosopher with a theological-political teaching. In Hades Odysseus learns the two main elements of his fate. One, involving his justice, concerns Ithaca and the establishment there of the order of succession that will institutionalize wise rule in the absence of the wise man. The other, involving his piety, concerns leaving home for his final journey to establish Hades and the Olympian gods among a people who do not know them. “The discovery of nature is clearly linked with the problem of rule” (90), and in “Hades” Benardete shows Odysseus learning the two dimensions of the problem of rule plus their solutions. The center of The Bow and the Lyre shows philosophy generating political philosophy.

16. Athena appearing as Mentes betrayed the fist behind that gentle rule: “so terribly did [Mentes’s father] love” Odysseus that he gave him the deadly poison for his arrows that he so insistently sought (Odyssey 1.260–64).

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The second paragraph of “Hades” is particularly eloquent and deep as Benardete conveys Odysseus’s despair at this next stage of his learning. For this is the Odysseus who just gained a stage of enlightenment that cannot but bring the deepest exhilaration—a year with Circe. Now, however, he hits a limitation on enlightenment, a limit on its power that seems to render it worthless. Benardete suggests that the problem is perpetual: “The difficulty we have in understanding Hades” is one Odysseus faced. But he solved it: if he despairs on learning that he must go to Hades, he recovers slowly as he learns from Elpenor and Teiresias. Benardete introduced Elpenor at the end of “Nature” as “the man of hope . . . the youngest and least equipped with either brains or brawn” (90). He now reports Odysseus’s telling of “the mischance of Elpenor” (91). “In the Odyssey, no soul goes to Hades before Elpenor’s does, and Odysseus himself never speaks in this way again.” But Homer does: “It is Homer who bears witness to Hades. It is the only one of Odysseus’s tales that Homer retells” (92). And Hades is the only heading Benardete uses twice, for when Homer tells of the souls of the suitors going to Hades, Benardete gives that event too the title “Hades” (146–50). “Odysseus himself,” Benardete says, “seems to believe the soul to be no more than the fact of breathing . . . and the soul as something separable and in itself merely the hope of the foolish ‘man of hope’ Elpenor.” By contrasting Homer and Odysseus on their view of Hades, Benardete is able to explain Odysseus’s despair: it would “arise from his being told, after he had realized the necessary togetherness of human shape and human mind, that the gods can separate them.” Odysseus learns that the gods have the power to do what cannot be done, separate or seem to separate the constituent elements of human nature, which can exist only together. But the gods grant a benefit too: “in the case of Teiresias” they can “put them together again apart from life and away from the light of the sun.” The gods permit the wise man a singular future as the only human whose active mind persists in the afterlife. Odysseus’s despair, as Benardete displays it across this section, is the despair of the rational man at the power of the irrational. The power of the gods is the power of imaginary beings over an imaginary entity that those most lacking in brains believe goes down to Hades. Attaining insight into human nature, Odysseus sees the power the gods have over human nature because of the way it rules the Elpenors. One of the lessons showing Odysseus the power of the gods comes at the end of his journey to Hades: he sees the Kimmerian people “upon whom the sun never shines either when it is rising or when it is setting,” a literally benighted people of literally no



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enlightenment, but a living people. “To be alive is not the same as to see the light of the sun . . . Night belongs to the gods” (92). And there will always be Night, and Night will always carry its invisible powers into the Day in the needs of the Elpenors. Homer depicts his Odysseus learning the unwelcome lesson that Nietzsche, millennia later, knew would be least welcome to the newly liberated free minds of the modern Enlightenment to whom he addressed his books: the power of religion. Homer will show a despairing Odysseus learning to tap that power—the very lesson Nietzsche learned and had to teach while fearing that it came too early, too soon after the liberation from God. In Hades, Odysseus’s first two encounters and his last are especially instructive. From Elpenor, the first, he “learns about the divine duty he owes to the least important of men” (92). Elpenor fell to his death at Circe’s and arrives in Hades before Odysseus. He adds to the account of his death that Odysseus has already given “that a god had doomed him . . . Odysseus attributed it to a lack of brains” (93). Dim Elpenor and wise Teiresias, encountered second, each assign Odysseus a task. Elpenor asks “that his armor be buried with him, a tomb (sêma) be built near the seashore, and an oar be fixed on top with which he used to row when he was alive.” Elpenor “wants to be known to people in the future as a somebody, even if he is not a name to them. They will know who he was from what he did. It is not much, but it is something.” “[F]rom Teiresias [Odysseus] learns his future” (92), for Teiresias tells him that after killing the suitors he was fated to one more labor: “you must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey” (11.121). Elpenor’s oar on top of his tomb “cannot be misunderstood” (93), but the oar Teiresias instructs Odysseus to carry must be misunderstood: Odysseus’s journey will take him to a people who do not know the sea and do not salt their food; they do not know of ships or oars. The clear sign (sêma) to Odysseus that he has reached his goal will be when a traveler meets him and, on seeing the oar Teiresias has told him to carry on his shoulder, says he is carrying a winnowingfan.

When he hears his oar called a winnowingfan, “Odysseus is to fix the oar in the ground and make a sacrifice to Poseidon.” In order to perform the massive sacrifice Teiresias describes, Odysseus will have to persuade the strangers among whom he has arrived to provide the animals for sacrifice. He will have to make a persuasive speech. Teiresias does not give him his words, but Benardete starts him off: “ ‘There is a god,’ he will say, ‘who presides

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over something you cannot see.’ ” That unseen god is potent Hades presiding over the unseen afterworld. The sacrifice is to Poseidon, inseparable from his brothers, Hades and Zeus, and the avenging god whom Odysseus offended by blinding his beloved son Polyphemus. To make a sacrifice to Poseidon among those who do not know the sea and to tell of unseen Hades is to introduce the Olympian gods to those still ignorant of them. Wise Teiresias instructs the knower that he must journey to establish belief in gods in whom he himself has learned disbelief. After starting Odysseus’s speech on an invisible god, Benardete reverts to the setting for Odysseus’s tale, Phaeacia and its wise king: “Odysseus, who was chosen to bring home to the Phaeacians that the gods have ceased to be manifest to them and are essentially invisible, is destined to extend the Olympian gods into a region where the sign of their being will cease to point to their being.” Odysseus’s task is historic. It is previewed in the “practice run” (50) of what he is effecting among the Phaeacians by telling his odyssey to their wise king: the knower of nature, passing on his knowledge to a wise ruler, shows himself destined to be a radical reformer in religion, replacing the visible gods with invisible Olympians; the gods disappear into words, into a veil of words. Odysseus “will break the connection with the cosmic gods that still lingers, in the element of metonymy, among the Olympian gods. The oar will be a sign with a displaced significance. That significance will be of a radically new kind” (93). Odysseus effects his revolution in religion through poetry: “the poetry implicit in the word for winnowingfan (athêrêloigos)—it is literally a ‘chaff-destroyer’—does not offer a way to explain the oar.” The oar as a sign on Elpenor’s tomb stands unmistakably for Poseidon, lord of the sea, and for the sailor buried under it. The oar stuck in the ground among those who do not know the sea will come to stand for Hades of the winnowingfan, symbolizing the separation of the good from the bad by an avenging justice in the afterworld. Only later does Benardete state the scope of Odysseus’s theological-political labor: misreading the oar as a winnowingfan “does not just hold among a people who do not know the sea; the effect of that misreading will spread everywhere and put everyone in fear and trembling” (106). The topic has there become the fate of the Phaeacians after Alcinous heard Odysseus’s story, accepted it, and commissioned a ship to take him home. Zeus tempers Poseidon’s excessive appetite for punishing them for benefiting Odysseus, but Benardete is clear, he is ruthless, in stating the core of the new religion: “The essence of this new relation [between gods and men] will be one of terror” (105). The terror will be inescapable, for the new religion teaches that man is “completely porous for the gods. The gods . . . can get in anywhere, and there is no place to hide”



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(57). At the center of Benardete’s book the only living mind among the dead instructs Odysseus on a second journey to establish invisible moral gods who will terrorize everyone everywhere. As his book moves through its second half, that journey is a constant background and frequent foreground until its last sentence announces that the hard lesson has been learned.17 Teiresias, the wise man whose mind lives on, tells Odysseus his far future by assigning him his journey with the oar. He tells him his nearer future as well, what he must do at Ithaca before he sets out on his final journey. Benardete devotes the center of his “Hades” section to that task, having changed the order in which Teiresias presented the tasks. He approaches the center with a paragraph on its theme, the establishment of the new regime at Ithaca whereby the wise ruler secures the succession of wise rule through the generations of inevitably less wise that follow him. Teiresias informs him of the troubles in your household, insolent men, who are eating away your livelihood and courting your godlike wife and offering gifts to win her. You may punish the violences of these men, when you come home. —(11.115–18)

As Benardete says, “The violent acts of which Teiresias speaks . . . are one: Antinous hits Odysseus with a stool” (94). This is “another sign,” one that “requires the killing of 108 suitors in order that there be a requital for it.” The central paragraph of “Hades” investigates what “Teiresias intended” with the sign of Odysseus being hit by a stool; it investigates “[t]he apparent disproportion between the crime of the suitors and their punishment.” The suitors sue for the hand of Penelope, the queen they regard as widowed by the death of absent Odysseus: they are aspirants to rule following the tradition of legitimate succession, presuming only that they get rid of Telemachus.18 Benardete speaks of Odysseus’s “vengeance” and wonders 17. Among the riches of the second half of his book is Benardete’s demonstration that corresponding to the withdrawal of the gods into potent invisibility is the internalization of guilt and the consequent fear of deserved punishment: the invisible Olympian brothers require a new understanding of the soul as well. 18. On one matter of great seriousness, Benardete seems to me to be serially mistaken: Penelope. He ridicules her for being merely and excessively pious, for lacking hardness, being dissolvable into mere water. Penelope can be spared this unbecoming sport by considering that the suitor Amphimedon, dead and in Hades, “puts Penelope squarely in the center of the conspiracy against the suitors” (149) and “assumes that Penelope was in on it from the start” (96). Benardete thinks Amphimedon is mistaken, but he’s not. Eva Brann recognized Penelope’s acuteness and

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why the suitors’ “last-minute proposal should not be accepted, that they pay back what they ate and drank plus damages.”19 He concludes that “they must be punished for the thought that lay behind their gobbling up of his goods.” That thought treated him as no longer alive, and “[n]ot to be alive would mean to them to be helpless”—it did not mean descended to Hades. “The suitors do not believe in Hades” (95). In place of Hades, the suitors threaten to send wrongdoers to “the bogeyman King Echetus.” Echetus lacks Hades’s potency: he “is a kind of pre-Olympian Hades who sets no limits on mortals.” This deficiency in punishment points to something still more significant: the suitors never speak at all of men as mortals . . . [they] do not believe that men are constituted by the contrariety of the pair immortal (athanatos) and mortal (thnêtos). They therefore do not acknowledge ‘mortal’ as the marked term of that pair, with ‘Hades’ and all it entails standing behind it.

Just what “Hades” entails ends the paragraph: “The vengeance with which Elpenor, a nobody, threatens Odysseus if he does not bury him, presupposes that though dead he is not helpless. He is something.”20 resolve: “When does Penelope recognize Odysseus? At first sight, of course” (Homeric Moments, 274; Brann provides exegetical proof from the beautiful precision of Penelope’s words to Odysseus, 274–84). Recognizing her disguised husband, she tells him of her own guile in tricking the suitors into believing she was weaving a shroud for Laertes; she tells him a “dream” that conveys to him her recognition of him while also conveying her knowledge of the need for utter secrecy; and she sets up the contest of the bow in order to arm him for the fight. Did Benardete reflect on what Strauss showed of the power of Ischomachos’s wife’s cosmetics? Very instructive with respect to Penelope’s guile is Winkler, “Penelope’s Cunning and Homer’s.” See also Haller, “Gates of Horn and Ivory in Odyssey 19.” 19. Benardete attributes this proposal to Amphinomus, the best of the suitors, the one Penelope liked best and who warned Odysseus; it was actually made by Eurymachos, the leader, with Antinous, of the suitors (94). 20. In the central section of the chapter “Nonfated Things” Benardete identifies Homer’s positive way for every human to be a something. Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus is challenged at the door to his palace by Irus, a real beggar. Odysseus beats him up, knocking him out—saving him from the coming killing. Odysseus “tells him in effect that he was punished for affecting to be the prince of beggars and strangers” (127). Odysseus made a number of such boasts and challenges to prove himself a superior inferior: to a beggar, a swineherd, a suitor, a slave woman. Benardete concludes: “The dignity of the human, to which everyone seems entitled, shows up together with the pride of Odysseus, to which no one else can lay claim; and everyone is punished who does not acknowledge the coincidence of the class-characteristic of man with the highest representative of man. No body (ούτιδανός) is No One (ου’´ τις)” (128). Everyone is a somebody because each is a member of the same species as Odysseus. Strauss expressed the thought: “By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and



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Benardete did not quite say what Teiresias intended: the founding of a new religion. All the suitors, aspiring rulers of the old order, must die in order to wipe out memory of the old religion, which did not know how to set limits on mortals by threatening proper punishment. The paragraph of “Hades” that Benardete made central considers the cost of founding the religion of which Hades is the most potent symbol by setting the cost, 108 suitors, against the gain, the potency of Hades: a nobody can threaten a somebody from Hades. Odysseus had to kill all 108 suitors in order to arm the gods with Hades or to give power to the vengeance of the nobodies by making the gods agents of punishment. The “slave revolt in morality” is the work not of slaves or masters but of the wise poet. Why give power to the nobodies? Because the coming order will necessarily be more democratic, ruled not by a wise man but by Telemachus and his associates. The associate Homer makes most prominent is you, Eumaeus, “noble swineherd” and “leader of men,” Homer’s sole addressee within the poem, addressed as “you” some fifteen times. Homer spoke literally in calling him “noble swineherd”: he was of royal birth but slavish nature, loyally tending the pigs of a master absent for twenty years, happy to condemn the freedom-at-all-cost sought by his Phoenician nurse willing to win freedom for herself by yielding him up to her deliverers. To address Eumaeus as “leader of men” “indicates that the Odyssey is primarily for him” (124), a leader of pigs. A more democratic order needs Olympian gods: the strength of rulers not themselves strong must be fortified by more powerful agents. But doesn’t this make the killing of all 108 suitors an act of mere calculation and not the act of justice that Homer himself, plus the gods and Penelope and Telemachus and all the others, says it is? The central paragraph of the central section of “Nonfated Things,” “The Slave Girls,” faces the possibility that Odysseus acted out of pure calculation: “The more Odysseus seems calculating, however, the more terrible he becomes . . . we are not being overly squeamish if we find Odysseus repulsive because he can bring himself to realize an argument” (126). And Benardete blinks. He acts to restore Odysseus’s morality by taking seriously all that “evidence” against a “coldblooded Odysseus,” evidence tracing his actions to his heart, to righteous indignation at suitors made wicked and blameworthy. Benardete’s blink at a repulsive Odysseus serves a purpose, or proves calculating: “This reinterpretation is not meant to make us feel any better about Odysseus, but rather to bring into relief the unblinking gaze of Homer, who would in this way therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or as uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind” (LAM, 8).

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be distinguishing the bow from the lyre.” Using the very title of his book, Benardete intimates that Odysseus’s killing bow is sung as the instrument of right by the sweet lyre of an unblinking calculating mind. The succession requires the cold-blooded killing of all the noble heirs of the old regime and requires as well allowing the gratuitous indecency of hanging the slave girls as an act of cleansing vengeance performed by the new rulers. Homer beautifies the repulsive calculation of necessity in the character he authored; he needs his moral decency intact if he is to be honored forever as the founding father of the political order we enjoy by the grace of wise Zeus.21 Benardete finds Odysseus’s discovery of what Hades really is in the line that opens and closes the Circe episode: “There is no possibility of accomplishment for those who weep and mourn” (97). In Hades everyone weeps and mourns. “Nonaccomplishment characterizes Hades.” The nonaccomplishment is of a particular kind: “Hades is dominated by the demand for the satisfaction of right . . . What never dies is ungrounded or senseless expectation.” Self-knowledge enabled Odysseus to recognize the power of the demand for the satisfaction of right: his own desire for revenge on Polyphemus taught him “the great strain the will is under to reinterpret necessity as right” (75). Yielding to that strain built and sustains Hades. What Odysseus sees last in Hades he takes “as a sign that he will not see [Hades] again” (97). What he sees last is Herakles. Part of what Herakles in Hades illustrates is “the unreality of Hades”: Herakles in Hades is as real as the carving on his golden shoulder strap, for “Heracles himself (autos) is among the gods” (98). Herakles made a god means that what Herakles in Hades illustrates most crucially is “the absence of the good.” For who is Herakles to Odysseus? Benardete tells his reader now what Homer withheld for later: Herakles murdered Odysseus’s friend Iphitus, who gave him the bow with which he will slay the suitors. Herakles is a murderer who killed Odysseus’s friend in his own home when Iphitus was there as his houseguest (21.11– 41). “The gods reward injustice with immortality.” “Perhaps he fears he would have seen Iphitus”—with these words of bitter eloquence Benardete ends “Hades,” explaining why curious Odysseus left in “green fear.” “This is the low point of Odysseus’s narrative,” perhaps the lowest point possible, for the unreal gods welcome to their number a real criminal, allowing him to escape Hades for Olympus and real immortal glory. Odysseus can accept

21. Benardete ends his book on the unrecognizability of Odysseus as the killer of the suitors: Penelope attributes the killing to the just gods; Laertes finds it the very proof that they exist. Overcoming the need to be recognized for what he really is and did frees Odysseus to submit to his fate; now he should know his destiny (152).



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the amorality of nature, but the immorality of the gods, their rewarding criminality with immortality, is harder. Still, Teiresias knows that that is the cure Odysseus must swallow. Who then is Teiresias, that underworld instructor? The only living mind in Hades is the wise man who alone has an afterlife as himself, as a mind teaching the rare living visitor to arrive in Hades with his mind intact that he still has a task to perform. Teiresias is Homer’s acknowledgment that he too was favored by a teacher among the dead. When he too journeyed to the underworld, he too learned from a wise predecessor, living on in wise words, that he had a task to perform after understanding human nature. There is a long tradition of wisdom stretching back in time, Homer suggests through his Teiresias, a tradition from which he learned and to which he contributed by composing the Odyssey. Who then is Homer? A singer in the epic tradition, he is, he suggests, the current nameholder for nameless wisdom passed on from wise to wise and modified or advanced as necessity dictates. As a teacher on the gods set in motion by “Teiresias,” Homer teaches a wisdom about the gods that causes the visible gods whom all revere because of their evident power to fade in the brilliant light of invisible Olympians better able to work the necessary effects on human nature, better able in their invisibility to be constantly present to encourage and to judge. Being a singer in the epic tradition, he knows the power of song to mesmerize and stamp whole populations. Being Homer, he knows how to bend that tradition to new, more moral ends enforced by angry Poseidon and invisible Hades and ruled over by wise Zeus and wise Athena, the wisdom born from Zeus’s very head; and he knows how to embed in the already existing exoteric form of epic verse esoteric truths to inform and instruct those like himself. With his Odyssey Homer became the Teiresias of aftertime; those who visit him after his death by entering the underworld of his Odyssey find him a mind alive, a mind with counsel for the aspiring wise on the necessity of a second journey, of aspiring to rule through words put up of the gods. Benardete visited Homer there, but he began his book on Homer by saying he found Plato in Homer and wondered if his finding was “forced and willful” (xi). Did Plato read Homer as Benardete read Homer, as his Teiresias?

HOW DID PLATO READ HOMER? The evidence that Plato read Homer as Benardete read Homer is, by necessity, indirect. Socrates’s attack on Homer in Plato’s Republic is not counterevidence, because the Republic shows that Socrates too learned that it was

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his destiny to establish belief and not knowledge—and to establish those beliefs, the authority of Homer had to be broken. Socrates did not have to kill 108 suitors, he had to kill Homer, seem to kill Homer. I confine myself to three examples that show Plato reading Homer as Benardete did.22 Plato gave most of his dialogues a time and place in Socrates’s life, a chronological setting that allows them to be arranged along the timeline of Socrates’s life. If the dialogues are treated as wholes, the youngest Socrates appears in Protagoras.23 The chronologically first speech in Plato’s corpus is therefore the question put to Socrates by a fellow citizen: “From where, Socrates, are you appearing?” The citizen answers his own question because he believes that he knows Socrates well enough to conclude that he must be appearing from an erotic pursuit of Alcibiades, a now unlawful pursuit given that Alcibiades’s first growth of beard is showing. Acknowledging the lighthearted charge that he is a criminal, Socrates defends himself with his first speech on Plato’s stage: “Don’t you praise Homer, who says that the most charming age is that of the early beard?” Homer says that of the Hermes who appeared to Odysseus at the moment when mighty necessity moved him to rescue his men from Circe’s enchantment, the Hermes who revealed to Odysseus the nature of the moly. Plato therefore arranged that the first words spoken by his Socrates answer both the question of his origins and a criminal charge—and Socrates’s first words praise Homer for Odysseus’s encounter with Hermes, for the act of revelation at the peak of the Odyssey. A more awesome opening to the Platonic corpus is scarcely imaginable. From where, Socrates, are you appearing? From an understanding of nature on the way to delivering my people from enchantment. Did Plato mean to imply, then, that Socrates is a new Odysseus? Plato set Charmides in late May 429, about four years after Protagoras, on the day after Socrates returned home from his two-and-a-half- or three-year absence with the Athenian army besieging rebel Potidaea. Socrates says he returns different, having learned in his absence a new teaching on the soul, a teaching that is a medicine that can heal the sickness of the head troubling Charmides. The medicine takes the form of “incantations” taught to Socrates, he says, by a doctor of Zalmoxis, the god of the Getae, who believe he is the only God. Who is this returning Socrates now come home after

22. For additional examples and expansions of these three, see my How Philosophy Became Socratic. 23. Within the dialogues Phaedo, Parmenides, and the Symposium, Plato gave his readers glimpses of a still younger Socrates on the way to his mature thought, a maturity first shown in his confrontation with the man thought the wisest of his time, Protagoras.



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a long absence and announcing that he brings a new teaching on god and the soul? Plato leads his reader to the proper understanding by referring to the Odyssey four times, openly and not at all openly. Each of the four references refers to a separate recognition scene in the Odyssey where returned Odysseus masked as a beggar is recognized as himself. Plato put all four in the proper order from the first recognition by Telemachus to the last by old Dolius, with the most prominent being Penelope’s recognition conveyed to Odysseus through the dream she reports. Plato therefore allows his Homertrained audience to recognize the Socrates of Charmides as a new Odysseus returning after a long absence to save his people with a new teaching on god and the soul. But why does Charmides contain no syllable of the promised incantations? Plato set the Republic in early June 429, a week or two after Charmides: the Republic reports the healing incantations that the returned Odysseus promised but left unspoken in Charmides. The Republic is Socrates’s report in Athens of a private conversation he held last night in the Piraeus, at the place and time that the Athenians were publicly introducing a new goddess in hopes of deliverance from the plague. Today Socrates narrates in Athens for all to hear the genuine teaching of deliverance, his own new teaching on god and the soul—and on what a philosopher should be believed to be. Plato intimates most beautifully that a new Odysseus teaches the new beliefs: he allows Odysseus’s name to be spoken only twice, at other times explicitly avoiding his name as when referring to “the wisest of men.”24 Socrates first names Odysseus near the beginning, when he refers to Autolycus, Wolf Himself, Odysseus’s grandfather on his mother’s side, who gave him his name. He cites Homer’s description of Autolycus as surpassing all men “in stealing and in swearing oaths,” disreputable qualities that help Socrates seem to dismiss his argument’s conclusion that the just man is the best thief (334b–c)—qualities of Autolycus, passed on to his grandson, that slowly become apparent as characteristic of the justice of the wise man. Socrates next names Odysseus at the very end, when the soul of Odysseus is the last to choose a new life in the closing myth of the Republic, the myth that helps establish Plato’s new, post-Homeric Hades. Recovered from the love of honor, the soul of Odysseus spends a long time searching among the available lives, at last finding the one it sought, “the life of a private man who minds his own business.” The Republic teaches that the most private

24. Republic 390a. Plato there seems to criticize Odysseus for making the pleasures of eating and drinking “the finest of all things.” But Odysseus’s words actually refer to the setting for what he regards as the truly finest thing, the feast of listening to a wise poet.

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of men who most minds his own business is the philosopher: the soul of Odysseus chose as its next life the life of Socrates, the returned Odysseus of Charmides and the Republic. By having Socrates name Odysseus only at the Republic’s opening and close and only in reference to a forebear and a successor, Plato indicates that Socrates too had his Teiresias, his forebear in the succession of wisdom: wise Homer. And Plato acknowledges thereby that he too will have a successor among souls that choose their new lives partly by reading him, by entering the underworld of his writings: Plato too acknowledges that he too knows that his successor must kill all 108 suitors.25

FROM HOMER TO NIETZSCHE If philosophy is the passion to move from opinion to knowledge on the great themes of man and world, there is continuity in philosophy from ancients to moderns in both the passion and the understanding that that passion can bring; expressed in the names that figure most prominently in this book, that means that there is continuity in philosophers’ understanding of nature and human nature from the ancients Homer through Socrates to the moderns Bacon through Nietzsche. And if exotericism is the theologicalpolitical art that advances philosophy in the world, there is continuity in exotericism from ancients to moderns, in the theological-political programs of Homer through Socrates, and Bacon through Nietzsche. With respect to exotericism, the difference in the historical setting that now matters most is the difference that Bacon planned would matter most: the rise of a public natural science whose investigations of nature and human nature bring the truth calmly into the open for a broad slice of the population. The deadly truth already visible to Homer, the now public knowledge of the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds, and the lack of any cardinal difference between man and the other animals, became the occasion in Nietzsche for a new development in exotericism, a ministerial poetry that does not pretend that the world is other than it is. Roberto Calasso said, “Every doctrine of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad.”26 No, the Odyssey progressed beyond the Iliad. And 25. In his book on the Republic, published five years before he completed The Bow and the Lyre, Benardete refused to set wise Plato in the stream of supplanted Teiresiases. Instead, he works to make it seem that Plato’s Socrates is a mind alive but with no predecessors: in his last paragraph he says of the fateful choice by the soul of Odysseus, “In the myth of Er no one chooses [the life of philosophy] . . . Socrates himself seems never to have been Odysseus. His daimonion, he said, was probably unique” (Socrates’ Second Sailing, 229). 26. Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 106.



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Plato’s Socrates, Benardete indicates, progressed beyond the Odyssey both in philosophy, taking the idea as cause, and in political philosophy, teaching morally stricter gods and a morally stricter Hades. Benardete shows that Homer anticipated that next step in religion with his Theoclymenus, “he who hearkens to gods” (119). His is a “mind so possessed by the gods that it can ‘see’ what no one else can.” “[H]e embodies the future rule of the prophet, who will be the sole intermediary between gods and men once the gods have completed their withdrawal” (120). Delivering his lamentation like a “quasi-Biblical prophecy,” he “belongs to another story.” Theoclymenus is, says Benardete in the most electric theological judgment in his book, “a deduction of an argument.” Homer teaches with his Theoclymenus the natural history of religion as the inexorable logic of religion.27 Knowing the logic of religion and standing within the Homeric tradition, Plato’s Socrates is the truly free mind who introduces quasi-biblical reforms: he reforms the gods in the Theoclymenean direction, making them more moral and moving toward a monotheism with a Good ruling from beyond being; and he correspondingly alters the soul by taming the thumotic element Homer watered and making the soul immortal; and he alters Hades by increasing its terror and sweetening its hope. Is there progress beyond Socrates, Odyssean Socrates with quasi-biblical advances? Nietzsche closed his first supplement to Human, All Too Human, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, with an entry called Descent to Hades. It begins: “I too have been to the underworld, like Odysseus, and will be there many times again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able to talk with the dead, but have not spared my own blood as well.”28 Nietzsche consulted the alive minds among the dead, eight thinkers in four pairs, “who did not refuse themselves to me the sacrificer,” Plato among them, paired with Rousseau. “Whatever I say, resolve, cogitate for myself and others: upon these eight I fix my eyes and see theirs fixed on me.” In his mature works, those eyes fixed on him, the new visitor to Hades, descended to that underworld from a radically transformed present, argues for the necessity of progress in both philosophy and political philosophy, in knowing the world as will to power and nothing else and in celebrating that world partly through the god-creating instinct.

27. Strauss traced that logic or genealogy of religion in “Reason and Revelation,” Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Politico Problem, 141–80. 28. Human, All Too Human, part 2, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, aph. 406. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Human, All Too Human are from the Hollingdale translation.

part three

The Modern Enlightenment

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o move from ancients to moderns is to cross one of the most prominent divides in Strauss’s writings, an apparent ditch separating philosophy’s highest attainment in Socratic wisdom from what Strauss presented as a form of thought inferior to it because infected by what intervened, Chris­ tianity or, more generally, Revelation. Strauss elevates the ancients as hold­ ing contemplation or inquiry highest and demotes the moderns by claiming that they held mere action highest. But the exotericism of Xenophon and Plato hid Socrates’s ambitious acts of philosophic rule; and the exotericism of the great moderns promoted for strategic reasons the supremacy of action while hiding the fact that they held contemplation or inquiry highest. At this point therefore an element of criticism enters my account of Strauss’s philanthropy in the form of a defense of modern thinkers. How does the modern Enlightenment stand to the Socratic enlightenment? That question lies at the core of Strauss’s thinking on the spiritual situation of the pres­ ent and the proper strategic course for philosophy. I focus on three writings spread across Strauss’s career from 1935 to 1954–55 to 1972–73. At one pole of Strauss’s critique of modern thought stand the founders of the modern Enlightenment; I defend those founders against Strauss’s demotion by argu­ ing that their project is a continuation of classical philosophy’s political endeavor. At the other pole stands Nietzsche as an apparently negative ful­ fillment of the modern Enlightenment; I defend Nietzsche against Strauss’s apparent attack by arguing that Nietzsche’s political project of advancing the modern Enlightenment is rightly founded on a philosophic understand­ ing of the whole and of the spiritual situation of the present and that it rightly advances philosophy’s great tradition of rule by the rational through ministerial poetry.

chapter seven

Attacking the Enlightenment on Behalf of Orthodoxy: The Introduction to Philosophy and Law

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ix weeks after Philosophy and Law was published on March 30, 1935, Strauss wrote to Kojève in Paris, hurt that Kojève had loaned his copy to a friend before reading it himself: “Just read the Introduction and the first essay. The Introduction is very daring and will interest you if only because of that . . . In my view it is the best thing I have written.” Klein agreed; when he reported his reaction to Strauss he called it “epoch making,” “a totally outstanding book,” the introduction “belongs without doubt to the very best that you have written.” But Klein adds, “if in order to understand what is written one has to think it three times around from the back—how shall ‘one’ understand it!?” Klein is quoting Strauss’s “own commentary” on his introduction, but if it has to be read “around from the back” (hintenherum) and three times, he must have made it intentionally indirect and complex, even though he had not yet learned just how indirect and com­ plex, how exoteric, the books of the great philosophers actually were. Strauss could write his introduction in just a few weeks early in 1935 be­ cause it gathers the themes that had occupied him intensely for a decade and a half, presenting them with the coiled brevity and verbal mastery of a fully engaged advocate who knows how to take down his enemy—for this is war, spiritual warfare with high stakes. While gathering his past thinking, the introduction is also, as Heinrich Meier states, “programmatic for Strauss’s future studies.” Written three years before his decisive discoveries in . Letter of May 9, 1935, OT, 230. Part of the daring may lie in the occasion for the book: Strauss needed it to bolster his case for being appointed to a new position in medieval Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing an introduction that ends by virtually declaring his atheism is, given that purpose, daring. . Letter of May 6, 1935. Strauss’s letter from which Klein is quoting is not available. . GS, 2: xxvi.

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exotericism, it exhibits the continuity of Strauss’s career: those discoveries did not change his focus but gave it new and unexpected depth as the medi­ eval and ancient philosophers to whom he was already predisposed proved even better guides, even more knowing exemplars, than he had previously imagined. Yet despite its pivotal character and his judgment on its merits, Strauss did not see to the translation of the introduction or of the other three essays in Philosophy and Law. Strauss’s first two paragraphs, marked off from the remaining fifteen by a little dash, set the goals of his book and suggest his historic purpose: to recover from modern prejudice the “search for truth” that is philosophy’s genuine hallmark. Socrates is not yet the model. Three years before Strauss discovered what Maimonides actually hid in his Guide, he is already “the true natural model” of rationalism. Highlighting Maimonides in his first paragraph allows Strauss to state his polemical purpose: Maimonides is “the stumbling-block on which modern rationalism falls.” Strauss’s antiEnlightenment aim is basic: “To awaken a prejudice in favor of this view of Maimonides and, even more, to arouse suspicion against the powerful opposing prejudice, is the aim of the present work.” Strauss writes as an ad­ vocate aware of the goal of his rhetoric: prejudice is not only what he targets but what he wants to establish. His introduction therefore demonstrates nothing either exegetically or by rational proof; instead, it aims to persuade, engagingly and forcefully. The second paragraph sets out a paradigm of what philosophy is for Strauss: first comes the great effort of learning the spiritual situation of . There must have been good reason, given that he did arrange the translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, a far less pivotal book—whose translation falls woefully short of what is necessary for an adequate to say nothing of a “Straussian” translation. . Eve Adler’s translation (the more accurate of the two English translations) omits the help­ ful little dash Strauss placed after the second paragraph. References to the introduction will be to paragraph numbers in the text. I use Adler’s translation but adjust it on occasion for greater literalness. . Not even Adler’s translation can transfer the peculiar powers of German prose into En­ glish, its capacity to fold punch and surprise and pleasure into the flow of long, structurally com­ plex, energy-gathering sentences whose whole sense clicks into clarity with a closing verb or verbs—and to space such sentences with short pithy ones. The introduction shows Strauss at the height of his long-polished rhetorical prowess. Its one flaw for later readers not immersed in those long-ago debates is its high level of abstraction in dealing with historically identifiable positions. Strauss’s later reflections on these intellectual wars of his maturing are set out with admirable clarity a quarter century later in his 1962 autobiographical “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Re­ ligion” (LAM, 224–59). Many matters left obscure in the abstraction of the introduction there appear with names named, citations given, historical background sketched, and all poignantly phrased as an older man’s reflections on himself as “a young Jew . . . in the grip of a theologicopolitical predicament.”



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the present, the encompassing cloud of presupposition within which a thinker always finds himself. The first step of self-knowledge, character­ istic of philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche, is learning just where he stands in an already formed world of dominant opinion by viewing it from outside. Our present situation, Strauss claims, predisposes one to believe that the present is the highest rung yet attained and that nothing essential can be learned from the past. But “to make up one’s mind about the present,” one must confront “modern rationalism” with the medieval rationalism against which it first rose up and which it eventually defeated. Doing that seriously, he promises, transforms medieval rationalism in the mind of the inquirer: what was at first only a means of clarifying the pres­ ent situation rises to “the standard” by which modern rationalism is mea­ sured and condemned as a mere “semblance of rationalism.” Strauss will expose and criticize its two chief features, its “idealism” and its fact/value separation. Strauss’s goal is a recovery of what he calls in the first line of this para­ graph, a “natural inclination toward the past.” He makes no comment on his phrase, but recovery of the natural implies that the present or modern is unnatural in turning away from the past to look toward the future for the exemplary. Natural here refers not to nature as an object of inquiry but rather to something like Husserl’s “natural attitude,” the unreflected dispo­ sition toward things with which humans customarily operate. Taking as a fact a “natural inclination toward the past” implies that there exists a trans­ historical set of presuppositions, a generalizable lived-world that would re­ gard the modern historical view as an error or an offense. Strauss’s recovery of the past aims to be a recovery not just of the origins of the present but of what he appears to take as the exemplary and transtemporal human condi­ tion prior to reflection, a condition that the modern view of the primacy of the historical has made invisible.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE PRESENT SITUATION OF JUDAISM Philosophy and Law aims to recover medieval rationalism whose “ ‘clas­ sic’ for us is Maimonides.” Us: Strauss’s 1935 book was written for Jews, as most of his writings had been. His case begins with his third paragraph. “The present situation of Judaism . . . is determined by the Enlightenment” . Meier notes that in the Germany of 1935 “a publication by a ‘Jewish author’ on a ‘Jewish subject’ at a Jewish publishing house . . . went virtually unnoticed . . . Philosophie und Gesetz

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defined as “the movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ini­ tiated by Descartes’ Meditations and Hobbes’ Leviathan.” This first indica­ tion of Strauss’s understanding of the Enlightenment can serve as a first occasion for weighing his understanding because the two books named, so far from initiating the Enlightenment, state explicitly that they intend to serve something already initiated, the true foundation of the Enlightenment that they aim to advance. Descartes’s Meditations (1641) serves the project laid out in his first book, his 1637 Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. There, his “meditations” occupy part 4, a part carefully introduced by part 3 as Descartes’s means of sheltering himself, a part carefully followed by part 5, which announces that only here will he present the “truths more useful and more important than all I had previously learned or even hoped to learn”—and here he outlines his contribution to the new science of nature whose roots lie in Francis Bacon, as he tacitly acknowledges in part 6. As for Hobbes’s Leviathan (1650), Leon Craig shows that the polity Hobbes there advocated with world-historical success aimed to provide the politi­ cal framework within which alone Baconian science could be advanced and secured. “The Lord Chancellor Bacon loved to converse” with Hobbes, who served as his secretary, and Hobbes’s Leviathan serves the new sci­ ence of the teacher with whom he too must have loved to converse. This element of the Enlightenment, its foundation in the new science of nature, Strauss ignores. Failure to acknowledge either that foundational role or the eventual impact of public natural science on the spiritual situation of our present seems to me the chief shortcoming of Strauss’s view of the modern Enlightenment. In 1935 he cannot yet be fully aware of the ubiquity of the exotericism he discovered in 1938–39, but even after those discoveries, his account of modern philosophy and political philosophy fails to give proper place to the role played by the new natural science. Setting out “the present situation of Judaism” (3), Strauss speaks of “the Age of Enlightenment” as an event in the past to which the present has a peculiar relation: because the present shares all its presuppositions with the Enlightenment, “it is only or chiefly the opposition between the Enlight­ had been in print since 1935 without ever really having been published.” “How Strauss Became Strauss,” 2; GS, 2: x–xi. . See the long quotation from John Aubrey’s The Life of Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury that Craig puts at the head of his monumental and immensely instructive The Platonian Leviathan. In The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Strauss acknowledges that “Hobbes’s achieve­ ment . . . however great it may be, is nevertheless of the second order—secondary in comparison with the founding of modern science by Galileo and Descartes” (PPH, 2).



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enment and the present that tends to be remarked and taken seriously.” Opposition on less than fundamental matters leads the present to judge the Enlightenment “overcome” in a progressive sense that leaves behind its “trivial” concerns and contemptible “shallowness.” Strauss lists the four “great controversial questions debated by the Enlightenment and or­ thodoxy” that are no longer even posed: the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the reality of biblical miracles, the eternity of the Law, and the creation of the world. Now it is conceded that Scripture is of human origin, miracles are impossible, law is historically variable, and the world is eternal. The present can scorn the Enlightenment as superficial and past because on all the important points it won and now rules. Did it deserve to win and does it deserve to rule? Strauss’s answer in 1935 is No, just as it was in 1921 when in his dissertation he defended Jacobi’s view that Enlightenment at­ tacks could not touch the irrefutable core beliefs of orthodox Christianity. In articles, lectures, and letters between 1921 and 1935 Strauss frequently repeated this view. Preparing his 1935 “No,” Strauss stresses the gravity of the issue: if the four points of strife are surrendered to the Enlightenment, “one must say that the Enlightenment has undermined the foundation of the Jewish tradi­ tion” (4). That was the purpose of the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, he maintains, and the radical Enlightenment generated the “moderate En­ lightenment,” whose effort to mediate between the demands of revelation and those of reason draws Strauss’s contempt.10 “Later thinkers” saw the indefensibility of this moderating effort and accepted all the conclusions of the radical Enlightenment while mounting a “counter-attack” on behalf of the tradition by “internalizing” the concepts of creation, miracle, law, and revelation, reestablishing the foundations, as they thought, by transform­ ing them into psychic phenomena true to human experience. Three times Strauss says “die Späteren”—the later—namelessly denouncing their view: “internalizations” are a kind of dishonesty; if God did not create the world

. Strauss’s dissertation, “Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Ja­ cobi,” is reprinted in GS, 2: 237–98; see especially 247, 250–51, 270–77, 281–83, 285–87, 288–91. On Strauss’s intellectual origins, see Chacón, “Reading Strauss from the Start.” See also Janssens, “Problem of Enlightenment.” Janssens’s book, Between Jerusalem and Athens, provides a help­ ful, if uncritical, account of Strauss’s consistent and vehement attack on the Enlightenment from 1921 through 1935. Most of Strauss’s important publications from this period are translated with excellent notes and commentary by Zank, Leo Strauss: The Early Years. 10. Israel (Radical Enlightenment) shows the self-awareness with which the radical Spinoza prepared the moderate Enlightenment that was embraced enthusiastically by liberal Protestant theologians and intellectuals.

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in the “external” sense, “then one must in all probity disavow the creation, or, at the very least, avoid any talk of creation.” The strategy of internalization developed in response to the inadequacy of the moderate Enlightenment extends to “today,” to the new theology (later called “neo-orthodoxy”) that was a subject of Strauss’s close study in the 1920s; its greatest figures in the Jewish tradition were Franz Rosen­ zweig, for whom Strauss had great respect, and Martin Buber, for whom he had none.11 For Strauss, this counterattack is in fact a complete surrender on the only level that counts, the factual character of creation, miracle, law, and revelation. The “internalizations” are “in truth denials” but don’t seem to be denials because we have been taken over by the power of the Enlightenment way of thinking (5). The only way to break that power is to “purposely struggle against our own prejudices by using historical re­ flection”—the means that Strauss employed through his whole career. He calls our unrecognized entrapment in contemporary bias Befangenheit, a term used juristically for prejudice in a witness. Our being trapped in bias can dawn on us, Strauss maintains, if we examine the way in which the “internalization” has justified itself by two methods of proof-texting: first, by selectively citing favorable statements from before the time of the for­ mation of doctrine; second, by using extreme statements from within the tradition as if they were foundational. Strauss adds a footnote here in which his theological argument is “extended” to philosophy. The footnote is im­ portant because it offers the distilled fruit of years of Strauss’s thinking on the history of philosophy and the difference between ancient and modern. Here, he expresses the key points of his indictment of the Enlightenment and indicates how to break its grip on us.

NATURE IN THE PHILOSOPHY FOOTNOTE “The Enlightenment’s aim was the rehabilitation of the natural through the denial (or limitation) of the supernatural, but what it accomplished was the discovery of a new ‘natural’ foundation which, so far from being natural, is rather the residue, as it were, of the ‘supernatural.’ ” This claim will have a 11. Strauss’s interests in the new theology were not narrow: he was first impressed by the revolution in Christian thought marked by Karl Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1919; see JPCM, 460, “A Giving of Accounts”), and he read other contemporary Chris­ tian theologians such as Friedrich Gogarten (PL, 48–49); he had studied Calvin, whose defense of Christian orthodoxy gave him a model for defending Jewish orthodoxy (SCR, 193–214). See also Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes politische Wissenschaft,” 1: “the re-awakening of theology, which for me is marked by the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig.”



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long and important life in Strauss’s work: the Enlightenment unnaturally and unwittingly extended revelation; it does not know itself; to know it as itself is to win freedom from it and open the way to recover the genuinely natural. Strauss’s indictment claims that “the founders of the religious as well as the philosophical tradition” arrived at certain “extreme possibilities and claims . . . by starting from the natural and the typical.” Centuries of fa­ miliarity with those extremes made them “self-evident and in this sense ‘natural’ ” to the founders of modernity, who then treated them as what they were not, a beginning point or foundation for their negation of both the religious tradition and the philosophical tradition. Strauss formulates a general claim of how ancient and modern differ: “in contrast to ancient and medieval philosophy, which understand the extreme by starting from the typical, modern philosophy, in its origin and in all cases where it is not restoring older teachings, understands the typical from the extreme.” Four examples substantiate this abstract claim; all derive from Strauss’s work on Hobbes, whom he then considered “the originator of modern political philosophy.”12 The first example states that the moderns left out of account “the ‘triv­ ial’ question about the essence and teachability of virtue,” and because they did, “the extreme (‘theological’) virtue of charity [Liebe] becomes the ‘natu­ ral’ (‘philosophic’) virtue.” Readers of Plato’s Protagoras will recognize that Strauss is referring to Socrates’s effort to force Protagoras to consider the essence and teachability of the virtues. Piety appears there along with cour­ age, justice, moderation, and wisdom, but the “theological” virtue of char­ ity of course does not.13 The Christian virtue of charity did not belong to the virtues analyzed as natural or typical by the founder of the philosophic tradition; it was an “extreme” raised to singular importance by the Apostle Paul, presumably one of those meant by Strauss’s reference to “the founders of the religious . . . tradition.” Given the long dominance of Christianity, 12. PPH, “Preface to the American Edition,” xv. Strauss’s Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis was completed a few months after the introduction to PL, in May 1935 (GS, 3: 773). It first appeared in an English translation, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, in 1936. 13. Strauss discusses Plato’s Protagoras in his Hobbes book at GS, 3: 166–69; PPH, 145–49. Considering Hobbes’s failure to “ask first ‘what is virtue?’ and ‘can it be taught?’ ” Strauss adds the question “what is the aim of the State?” (PPH, 152). The first two questions thus expand to the fundamental political question. He goes on to argue that Hobbes took over the aim of the state from (Christian) tradition or common opinion by answering that its aim is “peace at any price.” Hobbes therefore failed to follow Plato in raising the question of “what is good and fitting” for the state (PPH, 153).

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charity came to seem natural, even the “philosophic” virtue. Did the found­ ers of the modern tradition, in unknowing neglect of Socrates, thoughtlessly take over a Christian extreme as natural for philosophy itself? The answer is No. Francis Bacon, master manipulator of speech and paradigm setter for the rhetorical strategy of the modern founders, knowingly adopted the Christian term charity for rhetorical gain. He had an anti-Christian project to sell to a warring Christian world: use their words to make the project seem what it is not, a pious application of Christian charity. While exoteri­ cally elevating charity, Bacon held philanthropy higher, a Greek and not a Christian virtue, a philosophic virtue he knew to have Platonic roots. Contrary to what Strauss maintains in this essay prior to his discoveries in exotericism, Bacon and his followers knew what they were doing in appro­ priating the language of Christianity for their anti-Christian project, their Greek, philosophic project.14 Strauss’s second example of an extreme refers to the critique of the Greek virtue of courage by “the founder of the philosophic tradition,” nameless here but to be identified with Socrates/Plato, judging from Strauss’s refer­ ences to Protagoras and Laws.15 Socrates’s philosophic critique of courage, the primary virtue of Greek manliness, was part of his discovery of the “extreme (and thus in this life unrealizable) ideal of knowledge.” Socrates’s pursuit of the extreme of knowledge did not come at the cost of the virtuous character of courage, but the moderns, Hobbes, “radicalized” the ancient critique “in such a way that the virtuous character of courage as such is denied outright.”16 Socratic philosophy left in place the “natural” order of social virtue while rising to the genuine extreme of knowledge, knowledge that knows that it does not know, knowledge of what is unattainable. The familiarity of that extreme, its having become tradition and therefore com­ mon or visible in its externals, made it vulnerable to misuse, to seeming appropriation without actual appropriation. Strauss’s point seems to be that modern philosophy is not philosophy and it destroys natural virtue.

14. Bacon, Essays 13, “Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature”; see my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 137. Bacon’s use of charity influenced Descartes’s générosité and Hobbes’s magnanimity, which Strauss discusses in PPH, 55–57. 15. Strauss refers to a speech by Protagoras that elevates courage and separates it from the other three virtues (Protagoras 349d), and a speech by the Athenian Stranger that diminishes courage, the virtue held highest by his interlocutors (Laws 630d). See PPH, 145–49. 16. For Strauss’s expanded view of the fate of courage in Hobbes, see PPH, 163–65. Hobbes denies the virtue character of courage (164), but his method necessarily leads to the “reabsorption of wisdom by courage” (165).



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Strauss’s third example also comes from nameless Hobbes, who made “the extreme case of the ‘right of necessity’ . . . into the foundation of natu­ ral right.” The right of necessity arises from the foundational passion, fear of violent death; as the right of self-preservation it is basic to modern natu­ ral right and prior to and basic for law.17 Just what natural right confers when understood Socratically will be a major issue in the introduction. The fourth example looks not to the past but to the future: “the polemic against the extreme possibility of miracles becomes the foundation of the ‘idealistic’ turn of philosophy.” Strauss will employ both parts of this claim to make his case: polemic against miracles is basic to modern philosophy, and it is based in fear; the “idealistic” turn refers to epistemological and not moral idealism, to an ever more extreme interpretation of human knowing as making where knowing the world is making the world. Strauss’s four examples articulate his main critique of the philosophic founding of the Enlightenment: it did not know what it was doing. Out of mere passion against a ruling religion, it appropriated from the philosophic tradition high insights, treating them as common phenomena while being in­ fected by the very religion it rose to oppose. This is 1935: proper insight into the exotericism of the modern founders made possible by Strauss’s later dis­ coveries completely disarms these polemical points: the great modern found­ ers were exoteric masters who knew full well what they were doing; having judged that warring Christianity was a threat to philosophy, they judged it necessary to make war against it while appearing to be allied with it. Strauss goes on: despite these failings at its origins, the trajectory of the Enlightenment had a lucky result. It ended by making visible in our spiritual present the real founding actions that the founding actors lacked the self-knowledge to see. And it makes visible the natural situation out of which philosophy itself was founded and which modernity rendered in­ visible. Strauss’s compact footnote ends on this great good fortune: “The natural foundation which the Enlightenment aimed for but itself overthrew [now] becomes accessible.” Nietzsche helped: he “radicalized” “the Enlight­ enment critique of the tradition.” With his “critique of the principles of the tradition (both the Greek and the Biblical) . . . an original understanding of these principles again becomes possible.” In the midst of a historicism he rejected, Strauss is careful to say, “[t]o that end and only to that end”— i.e. recovery of the original principles of the tradition—“is the ‘historicizing’ of philosophy justified and necessary.” Here is the goal of Strauss’s lifelong, 17. Strauss details the revolutionary character of Hobbes’s view of the primacy of right over law in PPH, 155–57.

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groundbreaking “historicizing” of philosophy, recovery of philosophy’s original situation, its natural and necessary way of always reoriginating; only with that recovery can philosophy become self-understanding, a hu­ man being gaining through reason knowledge of who and where he is. The completed arc of the modern makes that recovery of philosophy possible. Strauss uses an image for this process of recuperating from modernity in order to recover philosophy’s natural origins. We have fallen, he says, into “a second, ‘unnatural’ cave.” This image modifies a point Strauss found in Maimonides, a fourth obstacle to philosophizing that Maimonides added to the three pictured in Plato’s cave image. That fourth obstacle is the biblical tradition itself, habituation to authoritative texts, obedience to which must be broken for philosophy to begin.18 The biblical tradition is the culprit only secondarily: we have fallen into the second cave “less because of the tradi­ tion itself than because of the tradition of polemics against the tradition”— because of the Enlightenment and what Strauss supposes is its ignorance of its presuppositions. We must recover from the Enlightenment before we can recover what it misunderstood and misrepresented in its polemic against it. Strauss’s project for philosophy in the present comes to sight in this footnote as a way of learning how to begin, or of working oneself out of an initial misunderstanding and finding that beginning point which alone promises a genuine philosophical outcome. It is a double ascent: “the ascent from the second, ‘unnatural’ cave . . . into that first, ‘natural’ cave which Plato’s image depicts, to emerge from which into the light is the original meaning of philosophizing.” One returns from Strauss’s footnote to his text having gained insight into the philosophical background of his theological argument.

18. Maimonides, Guide, 66–67 (1.31). Strauss quotes and discusses Maimonides’s image in PL, 57–58. Strauss’s image of a second cave was published first in 1931 in a book review: “today we find ourselves in a second, much deeper cave” (“Review of Ebbinghaus,” EW, 215 ). He had first implied a second cave in an unpublished lecture of December 21, 1930, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart” (GS, 2: 377–91). In the context of Plato’s cave and Maimonides’s fourth impediment (GS, 2: 385–87), he speaks of being trapped in the prejudices of the Enlightenment, stating that “we are much deeper under than Plato’s cave dwellers” (GS, 2: 389). In a manuscript dated Febru­ ary 6, 1932, “Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart,” again in the context of Maimonides, Strauss says, “there is now another cave underneath the Platonic cave” (GS, 2: 456; see also 462: “the cave of modernity,” “the 2nd cave”). In his 1948 essay on Spinoza, the second cave becomes “a deep pit” that modern philosophers dug “beneath the pit in which they were born” (PAW, 155). For discussions of the second cave, see Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 102–8, and Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 56–59. Strauss never refers to Montaigne’s statement that his age stands to the age of the ancients in darkness and naturalness as the bottom of a mine shaft stands to a mere cave (Essays 3.9, “Of Vanity”).



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“WE ARE GUIDED HERE BY THE INTERESTS OF JUDAISM” Strauss’s dismissal of the new theology, coupled with his earlier dismissal of the moderate Enlightenment’s compromise between orthodoxy and En­ lightenment, leads him to urge reinstatement of “the alternative ortho­ doxy or Enlightenment” as a “quarrel,” a “battle . . . about the one, eternal truth” (6). He indicts recent Jewish thought—Hermann Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig—for not engaging in that “fundamental review” of the quar­ rel because it had reservations against orthodoxy that were “of Enlighten­ ment origin”—as it well knew (7). Strauss claims that “all those who have attentively observed” this movement in recent Jewish thought will know that it failed to acknowledge both what the Enlightenment attacked and its own silence on the quarrel between the Enlightenment and orthodoxy. Strauss’s footnote (no. 6) applies this criticism even to what is “by far the most important critique of the Enlightenment that has emerged from [this] movement, viz. Cohen’s critique of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise.” And he refers his reader “provisionally” to the essay he published in 1924 attacking Cohen’s critique of Spinoza. It was a most remarkable essay: with supreme self-assurance and in total control—and in the first long ar­ ticle he ever published—a twenty-four-year-old destroyed the famous argu­ ment against Spinoza by “the master . . . revered by philosophically-minded Jews who were devoted to Judaism,” Strauss included.19 His brilliant de­ molition is unanswerable; its methodological arguments elevate Spinoza’s reasoning beyond mere personal bias and locate it in principled opposition to Orthodoxy within the historical setting of seventeenth-century Holland and principled advocacy of “the liberation of science and the state from ecclesiastical tutelage.”20 Having completed his essential argument against Cohen, the young Strauss seems suddenly abashed at just how shocking his takedown of the revered master will seem: he finds it necessary to state “a matter of principle” as if he has just heard an unstated challenge, Why are you doing this?: “We are guided here by the interests of Judaism.” Those interests, he goes on to say, depend upon truthful understanding of Spino­ za’s critique, an understanding Strauss has just made possible by destroying Cohen’s personal attack, an understanding that leads on to Strauss’s own vehement critique of Spinoza.

19. SPPP, 233. 20. EW, 147; GS, 1: 370.

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We are guided here by the interests of Judaism.21 That was the guiding interest of all of Strauss’s writings of the 1920s, the interests of a politi­ cal Zionist who emphatically did not believe what traditional Judaism be­ lieved, announcing in 1928 that he is an atheist and that atheism is the only foundation for a viable modern Judaism.22 This basic view has not changed in 1935. Strauss’s introduction sets out what the interests of Judaism re­ quire of an atheist Jew with respect to the Enlightenment: the interests of Judaism require a healthy orthodoxy, so its unbelieving advocate hands orthodoxy useful arguments against Enlightenment attacks. “It is most important that the classic quarrel between the Enlighten­ ment and orthodoxy be resumed or re-understood” (7). Under this impera­ tive Strauss examines “the so-called ‘victory’ of the Enlightenment over orthodoxy,” an actual but unearned victory. To see that, “drag out the dusty books that are to be considered the classical documents of the quarrel” (8). Strauss’s study of old books, not yet informed by full recovery of exoteri­ cism and its grounds, already aims “to attain a view of the hidden premises of both parties . . . and thus a principled judgment of right and wrong in their quarrel.” His footnote (no. 8) suggests that much of the work has al­ ready been done: he sends his reader to six locations in his Religionskritik Spinozas that consider the hidden premises of the classical and modern cri­ tiques of religion and reach the conclusion he here states: “there can be no question of a refutation of the . . . basic tenets of the tradition.” The reason is the one repeatedly stated in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion: “all these tenets rest on the irrefutable premise that God is omnipotent and His will unfathomable.” And: “as a consequence of the irrefutability of orthodoxy’s ultimate premise, all individual assertions resting on this premise are un­ shakable.”23 Strauss’s rhetoric does not permit him to acknowledge that the Enlight­ enment founders were fully aware of this orthodox shelter against rational challenge—as were all philosophically informed opponents of the fideism that had existed since the beginnings of the confrontation of the biblical tra­ dition with the wisdom of the Greeks—Jews, Christians, and Muslims all ap­ pealed to a written revelation given to them by an all-powerful, all-knowing God whose purposes could not be fathomed by creatures with finite intel­ 21. Strauss’s German: “Wir sind hier vom Interesse des Judentums bestimmt” (GS, 1: 370). 22. “Sigmund Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion,’ ” EW, 202–8; GS, 1: 431–39. 23. Heinrich Meier performed a major service for Strauss studies by setting out four ways in which Strauss indicated that reason could refute revelation—and by publishing “Reason and Revelation,” Strauss’s most direct exercise in rationally refuting revelation (Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 23–28, 141–80).



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lects clouded by the Fall. Enlightenment thinkers knew their opponents to be untouchable by argument, knew that a strategy other than refuta­ tion had to be deployed. Strauss makes much of the weapon they actually deployed, the weapon Lessing identified in the Christian confrontation: the “weapon is mockery” (9). Mockery did not follow prior refutation of the mocked teachings, mockery “is the refutation.” The mockery is therefore “an indirect proof of the irrefutability of orthodoxy.” Therefore, “orthodoxy was able to survive the attack of the Enlightenment, and all later attacks and retreats, unchanged in its essence.” Strauss’s rhetoric is odd: emphasizing a supposed irrefutability of rev­ elation, he blames its opponent for not refuting it but merely mocking it. He does not say what he well knew: the mockery was, in its beginnings, necessarily veiled. Sovereign orthodoxy ruled and exercised the rights of rule: Christian orthodoxy punished open mockery by open death, public hangings, burnings, quarterings, disembowelings discouraging of further mockery. Mockers who wanted to mock effectively had to be as careful as the great Descartes; they had to be thinkers of high capacity and writers of artful dexterity. Descartes, that prankster on a world-historical scale, led only those readers to laughter who could penetrate his writings and see what the objects of his veiled mockery deserved: to be laughed at. He thus helped launch the gradual shift that made it possible for mockery to be as open as that of Voltaire, who reported that in his time the high clergy could hardly look at one another without laughing. What sober Strauss refuses to say is not only that mockery was the sole weapon available against an op­ ponent who had surrendered reason but that it was—used correctly, used as the great modern founders used it—deadly.24 Strauss knew it, of course. He had studied Nietzsche for years, and Nietzsche celebrated the world-changing power of mockery in the first aphorism of The Gay Science, a book that argued that science can, against appearances, lead to gaiety, that a true view of things can actually lead to laughing, so uplifting is it. Nietzsche’s aphorism sets the power of mock­ ery against all teachings of purpose. Dependent upon belief, such teach­ ings forbid laughter at any item of belief judged indispensable; raising secret laughter at them discredits them subversively. Eventually, all such teach­ ings suffer the fate of standing naked on the stage before an audience free at

24. The Descartes chapters of my Nietzsche and Modern Times (pp. 145–271) show how great Descartes’s capacity for pranks really was: it proved to be enough to help change the world, and we should be far more grateful than we are. My reading of Descartes’s great books, and of Bacon’s, was of course made possible by Strauss’s recovery of exotericism.

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last to laugh at the ridiculousness that once held sway over them. A student of Nietzsche now comes forward ridiculing ridicule of the ridiculousness of revelation. He knows that no better weapon exists than the mockery he so soberly pillories.25 Strauss treats the Enlightenment’s resort to mockery as proof of its fail­ ure to refute orthodoxy. But it seemed to have won, and its seeming victory had “a highly consequential positive result” for it (10). While the Enlight­ enment attack failed, its defense succeeded: it exposed the fact that the premises of orthodoxy “are not known . . . but only believed, and that they therefore do not have the binding character of the known.” Being mere be­ lief drastically altered orthodoxy’s situation in a setting of modern science: “whereas pre-Enlightenment science was in a certain harmony with the doctrines of belief, the new science, which proved itself in the battle against orthodoxy, if it did not indeed have its very raison d’être in that battle, stood in often concealed but, at bottom, always active and thus always reemerging opposition to belief.” Did the new science have its very raison d’être in the battle against orthodoxy? Bacon knew it did not, and he is the philosopher responsible for first putting the engines of the new science at the forefront of the battle against orthodoxies grown powerful and warlike. For Bacon, the battle had the raison d’être of defending philosophy itself against a religion that presented itself as the true philosophy and that ruled Europe in two warring armies of two Christian orthodoxies, each driving the other to ever stricter orthodoxy and ever greater ferocity, threatening the existence of all moderate camps. The developing new science success­ fully made the premises of revelation mere beliefs by virtue of its “destruc­ tion of natural theology and natural right.” In the world of modern science “[t]he final result is that unbelieving science and belief no longer have, as in the Middle Ages, the common ground of natural knowledge, on which a meaningful quarrel between belief and unbelief is possible.” In the spiri­ tual situation of the present, orthodoxy has “no share in the world created by the Enlightenment and its heirs . . . it survived the nineteenth century as a misunderstood relic of a forgotten past, more despised than wondered at.” Strauss thus attests to the success of the founding strategy of modern political philosophy: what once ruled the world to the threat of philosophy itself (as Bacon judged) has been reduced to a spent force whose claims to

25. Referring to the role of mockery in Hobbes’s critique of religion, Strauss noted in a letter: “ ‘Laughing’ belongs essentially to all enlightenment, be it platonic or modern” (to Krüger, July 17, 1933, GS, 3: 431). Descartes spoke of the uses of mockery in The Passions of the Soul (nos. 180–81), a book with which Strauss was familiar (PPH, 56, 88).



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knowledge have no cognitive value and whose claim to authority is there­ fore groundless. Strauss says orthodoxy is despised; it is truer to the rhetoric of his argument to say that the world formed by modern science makes orthodoxy laughable.

THE “TRULY NAPOLEONIC STRATEGY” OF THE MODERN ENLIGHTENMENT The failure of the Enlightenment attack on orthodoxy did not distract it from “the construction [Aufbau] of its world” (11), a construct Strauss pre­ sents as an ever more explicit articulation of the “idealism” latent in modern rationalism from its founding. “One must rather say it was forced into con­ structing a world by this very failure.” Because the tenets of orthodoxy “can­ not be refuted by experience or by the principle of contradiction,” “there remained no other way but to attempt to prove that the world and life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of an unfathomable God. That is, the refutation of orthodoxy required the success of a system.” “[T]he world created by [man] had to erase the world merely ‘given’ to him; then orthodoxy would be more than refuted—it would be ‘outlived.’ ” Strauss steps forward like a Jewish Kierkegaard, or at least Johannes Climacus, who mocked Hegel’s system and its supposed power to refute Christianity. He even manages to get within range of Johannes’s whimsy in always having to wait till next Sunday for the system to be completed. In Strauss’s case the desired system began with Spinoza and ended with Heidegger. The target of his rhetoric is the Enlightenment “construction” of a world as ostensibly a wholly conceptual construct, a world-interpretation whose validity depends on its eventually accounting for everything and leaving no place for God. Strauss introduces a military metaphor for this strategy: “the Enlight­ enment, striving for victory with a truly Napoleonic strategy, left the im­ pregnable fortress of orthodoxy in the rear, telling itself that the enemy would not and could not venture any sally.” Strauss’s metaphor sounds like memorable, knockdown ridicule, but it is perfect praise that fits the actual strategy most beautifully. Descartes, like all the other confederates “united by the fact that they all fought one and the same power—the kingdom of darkness” (TM, 231), knew his enemy and knew the one strategy available to a solitary thinker aiming to overthrow the rulers of the age: mere books had to ignite a movement that would slowly attract adherents until it be­ came a mighty army against which no “ancient kingdom” could stand. His Discourse on the Method spoke only of “the ancient kingdoms of China and Mexico” (part 3), but it meant Christian Europe most of all, Europe ruled by

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the warring parties of Christendom whose wars Descartes made it a point to observe firsthand. Descartes acknowledged Bacon as the master strategist of the Napoleonic strategy. Bacon set out the strategy in a dialogue he ar­ ranged to have published only posthumously, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War. Six European leaders gather in Paris to discuss the necessity of holy war against Islam; but Bacon’s mastery of exotericism allows us to watch as the two characters named after Greece and Rome plot rational holy war against Christianity, while the two characters assigned biblical names, religious fanatics representing Catholic and Protestant orthodox­ ies, celebrate their divine mission by presenting in all innocence a litany of crimes committed over centuries by their sovereign orthodoxies.26 Bacon’s Advertisement is the only work by the founder of the modern scientific-technological project that goes “into the temple,” as he says in his “Letter of Dedication to Bishop Andrewes,” rather than “into the city” as all his other works do. With this little dialogue, Athens goes into Jerusa­ lem aiming to take possession and rule it, as the Apostle Paul once entered Athens with a view to ruling it and its “unknown God” (Acts of the Apos­ tles 17:15–34). Bacon means to succeed as Paul succeeded, first with mere words. And the nearly four centuries that have now passed since his little dialogue first appeared attest to the world-changing effect of Bacon’s truly Napoleonic strategy. For what has irrefutable orthodoxy become in those regions of the world where the spirit of the modern Enlightenment has be­ come dominant, as it has in post-Christian Europe? A set of impregnable little fortresses in the rear, unable to venture any sally, Hutterite or Amish colonies living their truth quietly within a surrounding world willing to tolerate them as they would never tolerate the “worldly” if they held rule as Calvin did in Geneva and allowed Servetus to be burned for heretical views. And where the impregnable fortresses are not like Amish colonies but rule supreme and are able to arm themselves for sallies with all the available weaponry of modern technology? Can it still be thought wise to continue to arm them with arguments as Strauss did in 1935? But the issue is not simply strategic because the world “constructed” by the radical Enlightenment, the world viewed by science, is no mere conceptual construct as Strauss’s rhetoric here would like it to be. Modern

26. Bacon’s Advertisement Touching Holy War, a document of foundational importance for the spiritual warfare of modern times, has seemed an embarrassment or triviality to Bacon’s con­ temporary editors, none of whom has seen fit to reproduce it in their collections. My edition, first published by Waveland Press, is now available to be downloaded free at http://books.google.com. I am grateful to Dereck Coatney for preparing the online edition.



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science’s description of the world aims to be true of the world while rec­ ognizing that it is ever incomplete, ever subject to further discovery along the only available arc of factual learning; the world certified by science’s method of knowing is conditionally, testably, refutably true, its truths held under the police supervision of mistrust, as Nietzsche said.27 The Enlight­ enment is not fearful of mockery for always having two tasks to complete next Sunday, a conceptual task with respect to its understanding of the world and a persuasive task with respect to the way whole populations con­ strue the world. Its truly Napoleonic strategy governs its present as it gov­ erned its origins. It is worthwhile to linger over Strauss’s metaphor of a truly Napoleonic strategy because a great deal hinges on just how the modern Enlightenment acted in its beginnings. What motives and aims for the European future did its exoteric method hide? The metaphor pictures an advancing army not wasting its energy besieging fortresses impregnable by definition, whose forces hold the whole plain and all its surrounding horizons. It pictures the only winning strategy: advance where advance is possible; advance toward the horizon by opening new horizons in every direction through insight into the natural and human world as it is; advance against the closed hori­ zons that the impregnable fortresses claim to know as the world that hori­ zons us. The modern philosophical founders, under the great stress of what they judged to be a threat to the promising civilization of the Renaissance and thereby to philosophy itself, knew they ran a great risk. Bacon, like all his later confederates, was a student of Plato who knew well Plato’s warn­ ings against scientific-technological progress: he titled his posthumously published invitation to such a world New Atlantis and showed just why Plato’s strictures in Timaeus-Critias against the Atlantis that was Plato’s own invention can reasonably be set aside given the emergency of the spiri­ tual situation of his present.28 And New Atlantis intimates the long-term goal of Bacon’s theological-political program to curb the power of an au­ tonomous or ruling Christianity. In Bensalem, the Pacific island that has already enjoyed the benefits of Baconian science for three centuries, a wise leader introduces Christianity as its civil religion. Its sacred books appear through a miracle engineered by science but planned not by mere scientists, planned by the actual ruler of Bensalem, a philosopher who appeared at that time as philosophers always appear, rarely and naturally, but who, given the institutions of Bensalem, found a paved way to philosophic rule in the 27. Nietzsche, Gay Science, aph. 344. 28. I give an exegetical account of New Atlantis in Nietzsche and Modern Times, 27–66.

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island of his birth. Like all philosophers, this philosopher at this moment in Bensalem history takes the measure of his times and redirects it in the best way feasible. He judges that it is best, now, to introduce Christianity in a moderated version under the already established public rule of science. Bacon’s theological-political program makes use of the available God while tempering him and subjecting him to philosophic rule.29 On behalf of what did Bacon launch his massive theological-political strategy? On behalf of philosophy understood Socratically, for Bacon, like Socrates, held that philosophy’s ontology or ultimate view of being could be conveyed through the fable of Eros. The seventeenth of the thirty-one fables Bacon retells in The Wisdom of the Ancients is “Cupid, or the Atom.” “The fable relates to the cradle and infancy of nature, and pierces deep,” as deeply as possible, for “Love I understand to be the appetite or instinct of primal matter; or to speak more plainly, the natural motion of the atom; which is indeed the original and unique force that constitutes and fashions all things out of matter.” The fable depicts the primary principle as an appetite in­ trinsic to matter by making Eros “entirely without parent; that is, without cause.” In a later projected account of the myth, Bacon says that represent­ ing Cupid as without parent or without a cause is “an observation of no small significance; nay, I know not whether it be not the greatest thing of all.”30 So significant is it that “a philosopher should be continually remind­ ing himself that Cupid has no parents, lest his understanding turn aside to unrealities” (463). When Bacon then discusses the atomism of Democritus, he employs the fable of Cupid to depict the ultimate appetite of matter and to correct Democritus in a Democritean direction of what is more primary than the material atom, the force more fundamental than all known forces, the primary force or motion (464). As Bacon’s nineteenth-century editor, Robert Ellis, stated, “Bacon had obtained a deep insight into the principles of the atomic theory,” for in Bacon “the atomic theory becomes a theory of forces only.”31 Bacon shares the ontology of the philosophers that recognizes the sovereignty of becoming and finds in becoming a fundamental appeti­ tive principle. And Bacon, like the ancient philosophers, moved from an

29. See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 30–31. In a remarkable episode of a philosopher acknowledging a philosopher-teacher, Descartes shows in the Meteorology essay of his first book how to engineer a version of the sign in the sky that accompanied Bacon’s miracle introducing Christianity to Bensalem: Descartes too aims to mold Christianity into a new paste as a moderate civil religion. See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 157–59. 30. “On Principles and Origins according to the Fables of Cupid and Coelum,” Works 5.462. 31. Works, 3: 70 (preface to De Principiis atque Originibus).



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understanding of the totality of beings to an understanding of the highest beings. Bacon’s theological-political strategy advanced the front in every direc­ tion including theology, where exotericism was, as Xenophon and Plato showed, the indispensable cosmetic for a philosopher. Let the impregnable fortresses be; assure their guardians that the field they rule is wholly theirs; act as if what they hold by belief is knowledge; argue that they have a right to their domain of knowledge and we have a right to ours. Touch their domain only to this degree: persuade, if not the guardians of orthodoxy, then some fraction of those who attend to them that their own authorities encourage the advancement of learning. Was not King Solomon an inves­ tigator of nature? So give the name Solomona to the mythical founding king of the mythical new Atlantis that pursues the rational investigation of nature. And did not the deepest Christian virtue, charity, mandate relieving the human estate? So make charity the rallying cry of the new science and its attendant technology. The exotericism of the radical Enlightenment, Bacon’s strategy, aimed to dupe the spiritual rulers of the age: you rule your domain and let us rule ours since we too are doing God’s work. Confident that orthodoxy had no cognitive value, Bacon could loose an investigation of nature equipped with all possible resources of human intellect and imagi­ nation and expect to win every cognitive conflict. And expect to disarm the impregnable fortresses by depriving them of offensive weapons within the new horizon of understanding, eventually depriving them of intellectual respectability in a world that honored intellect. And expect, over centuries, to reproduce in the actual world the condition he imagined for his new At­ lantis: a Christian-looking religion ministerial to science ruled inconspicu­ ously by sovereign philosophy. Was it necessary that the innovation be what Strauss and Johannes Cli­ macus mocked it for not being, the perfect system? It was enough, with the scientific advances of centuries, to have a consilient system of united sciences of the universe, life, and humanity, a cosmology, biology, and an­ thropology that gained highly probable, ever-expanding knowledge of their subject matters.32 The claim to a perfect system was the claim of the im­ pregnable fortress—and that claim could be mimicked and mocked if one was clever enough. Descartes was clever enough. He handed the Jesuits,

32. In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt argues that the re­ discovery in 1417 of Lucretius’s long-lost De rerum natura and the atomic physics that grounded Lucretius’s explanation of nature and human nature set in motion the intellectual forces that founded the modern revolution. See also Brown, Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence.

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educators of the powerful, his Meditations. In it they could find a system of reasoning that claimed to be perfect and to prove the existence of God and (in the subtitle of the first edition) the immortality of the soul: wouldn’t they like to use it as the only book to introduce students to philosophy, replacing all the old scholastic works they had been using? This was a bril­ liant new tactic in the Napoleonic strategy, for the Meditations contained all the principles of Descartes’s physics, and having the Jesuits adopt it would introduce the Greek horse into the Trojan fortress.33 Meanwhile, for those who were neither Jesuits nor inclined to their tutelage, there were “those truths more useful and more important than anything [Descartes] had previously learned or even hoped to learn,” truths derived from a study of nature that would, Descartes promised, following Bacon, make us “mas­ ters and owners of nature.” His best readers would learn on their own from his masterful exoteric books what Descartes said privately and pleasingly to a person he praised as his best reader, Princess Elizabeth. His metaphysical meditations? Don’t spend more time on them than he does, a few hours a year.34 A truly Napoleonic strategy. Made successful by the exotericism whose nature and extent Strauss had not yet discovered.35 Meanwhile, Strauss’s paragraph ridiculing the truly Napoleonic strategy (11) moves toward its conclusion that the Enlightenment has failed. The En­ lightenment renounced “the impossible direct refutation of orthodoxy” and instead, Strauss notes with sarcasm, “devoted itself to its own proper work, the civilization of the world and of man.” Its victory hinges on the success of that work (as the Enlightenment strategists well knew): “if this work had prospered, then perhaps there would have been no need for further proof of the right of the Enlightenment’s victory over orthodoxy.” But Strauss’s view of the spiritual situation of his present leads him to judge that the

33. Descartes whispered his strategy for his Meditations in a letter to his friend Marin Mer­ senne: “These six meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But please, this must not be spread abroad, for those who follow Aristotle will find it harder to approve them. I hope that they will gradually get used to my principles and recognize their truth before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.” Descartes, Philosophical Letters, 92–94 (January 28, 1641); see my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 163. On Descartes’s exotericism generally, see “René Descartes, Baconian,” ibid., 145–70. 34. Descartes, Philosophical Letters, 141-42 (June 28, 1643). 35. Thanks to the detective work of Theodor Ebert we can now appreciate the deadly serious­ ness with which fortress Catholics took Descartes’s threat: three and a half centuries after the deed Ebert built a persuasive case proving that Descartes was murdered by the Catholic priest, a Sorbonne doctor of theology, who served the French Embassy in Stockholm and that he used as his means an arsenic-soaked communion wafer. See Der rätselhafte Tod des René Descartes.



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Enlightenment has already failed: “the belief is perishing that man can, by pushing back the ‘limits of Nature’ further and further, advance to ever greater ‘freedom,’ that he can ‘subjugate’ nature, ‘prescribe his own laws’ for her, ‘generate’ her by dint of pure thought.” Employing phrases from mod­ ern philosophers to suggest that the modern project is dead, Strauss moves to end his paragraph on two questions that set the course for the rest of his introduction. Before considering them, however, it is edifying to reflect on Strauss’s phrases “subjugate nature” or “prescribe . . . laws” to nature. Here, in 1935, he uses these phrases from Locke and Kant to denounce the Enlightenment, but the phrases apply perfectly to what Strauss thirty-five years later placed at the center of his best book, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse: Socrates devised a “teleotheology” to subjugate nature to an idea or ideal of nature. Socrates’s teleotheology prescribed to nature laws of wholly human origin; it constructed, created, a world in which humanity lived. Strauss’s history of Platonic political philosophy shows how that Socratic construct, that poetry, came to rule a world, the world now in decline, re­ duced to impregnable fortresses, given the recovery of nature ever more persuasively exhibited by Baconian-Cartesian modern science. Strauss said in a 1954 essay on Hobbes that physics “did not harm the pagans in the way in which it might harm the adherents of revealed laws” (WIPP, 164). What is of enduring importance in Strauss’s lifework, his recovery of exotericism in the great philosophers, shows that not only physics harms the adherents of revealed religion; so too does the history of exoteric philosophy: it shows that reason’s teleotheological rival is wholly a human construct, a product of Socrates’s reasoning for what fit the times. The history of exoteric philosophy shows that the great modern found­ ers, like the founder Socrates, knew where they were—Bacon even put such knowledge first in his recovery of The Wisdom of the Ancients: “Cassandra; or Plainness of Speech” proves the necessity that a wise man know where he is and know how to speak in the place, the age, he occupies. Knowing that he is neither in “the republic of Plato” nor “in the dregs of Romulus,” Bacon speaks his rebellion against Christianity (the second fable is “Typhon; or the Rebel”) in a way that will make his prophecies effective. Conscious heirs of Socrates, schooled by Plato and in part by Plato’s medieval Muslim and Jewish heirs, Bacon and the other founders of the modern Enlighten­ ment knew they lived in a world ruled by two armed camps of proponents of an aggressive teleotheology, the Revelation that had, to a degree, carried on the philosophic tradition of Greece and Rome. But as philosophers schooled in the Socratic tradition, whose imperative remained “You must go down,” they judged that the emergency spiritual situation of their present cave

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demanded action on their part to curb a Platonism grown dangerous to phi­ losophy itself. Having no Athena to aid in killing all 108 suitors, they set out to reduce the power of the reigning teleotheologies to that of unrefut­ able fortresses by widening the horizon to that approximating the horizon of the philosophers or the horizon of the human mind as such. And that entailed the not-Cassandran exoteric speech of their world-changing books. Again, the enduring importance of Leo Strauss makes itself evident: his recovery of philosophy’s art of writing makes it possible to reconstruct and endorse the founding strategy of the modern Enlightenment. Back in Strauss’s 1935 introduction, paragraph 11 ends on two pivotal questions. The first is general: “What is left, in the end, of the success of the Enlightenment?” The second stipulates just what Strauss will examine in what is left: “What finally proves to be the foundation and the justification of this success?” Strauss pursues first the foundation (Grund) and then the justification (Rechtfertigung) of Enlightenment claims to success.36

THE “FOUNDATION” (GRUND) OF THE MODERN ENLIGHTENMENT The Enlightenment critique of orthodoxy rests on “the unknowability of miracles,” which rests on “the premises of the new natural science” (12). Therefore, the new natural science “appears to be the actual vindication [Rechtsgrund] of the Enlightenment.” Strauss, orthodoxy’s advocate, here addresses the great issue of the cognitive status of modern natural science, its claim to give a truer account of the world than orthodoxy. Strauss ac­ knowledges that “the decisive thing for the Enlightenment’s success was in the first place the belief that the science of Galileo, Descartes and Newton had refuted the science of Aristotle and the ‘natural world-view’ explicated by it, which is also the ‘world-view’ of the Bible.” Can modern natural sci­ ence claim to offer knowledge of the world? To this all-important question Strauss answers: “the new science itself could not long maintain the claim to have brought to light the truth about the world ‘in itself’; the ‘idealistic’ interpretation of it was already latent in it from its beginning.” Strauss will judge modern science’s claim to knowledge of the world by the standard of modern epistemology, philosophy’s effort to generate a theory of knowl­

36. Adler’s translation of Rechtfertigung fluctuates between vindication and justification, and her translation of Grund fluctuates between foundation and basis; the tight continuity of questioning and answering with which Strauss sets out his case loses some of its precision in those fluctuations.



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edge able to explain the apparent success of science in knowing. In a single long sentence, he introduces Kant and Heidegger as witnesses, states that their combined epistemologies destroy the ground and justification of the Enlightenment, and claims thereby the rehabilitation of the Bible. Here is his sentence: Modern “idealism”—perfected on the one hand in the discovery of the ‘aesthetic’ as the purest insight into the creativity of man and, on the other hand, in the discovery of the radical “historicity” of man and his world as the definitive overcoming of the idea of an eternal nature, an eternal truth . . .

Two events in the modern reflection on science—Kant’s account of the structural creativity built into every possible human awareness of world and self, and Heidegger’s account of the complete historicity of human be­ ing in the world—combine to put to rest the classical idea of eternal nature and eternal truth. Strauss’s sentence continues with the gain he saw in the epistemology of Heidegger: modern “idealism” . . . finally understands modern natural science as one historically con­ tingent form of ‘world-construction’ among others . . .

Modern natural science offers only another world-picture, one construct among many. This alleged self-understanding of modern science, Kant plus Heidegger, enables an advocate of orthodoxy to conclude that modern “ide­ alism” thus . . . makes possible the rehabilitation of the “natural world-view” on which the Bible depends.

The long modern spiritual warfare ends ironically for modern thought, for with its final step, Heidegger’s historicism, “the victory of the Enlighten­ ment over orthodoxy loses its originally decisive justification: the proof of the unknowability of miracles as such becomes invalid.” As long as modern science understood itself as the way to genuine knowledge of the world, it could rule out miracles as knowable and with it revelation itself, that foundational miracle of God telling man how to live. But with modern sci­ ence merely a worldview, the knowledge-claim of revelation is readmitted on an equal footing. “So long as this science stood firm as the single way to the one truth, one could lull oneself with the view . . . that the assertion

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of miracles is relative to the pre-scientific stage of mankind and thus has no dignity.” Heidegger grants Strauss a right to assert that the assertion of miracles has intellectual validity. Strauss embraces Heidegger’s historicism to serve his purpose of awak­ ening a prejudice; a writer who will present himself as a critic of radical his­ toricism employs radical historicism to set aside the totality of conclusions attained by the greatest scientific minds over three and a half centuries of intense intellectual labor and put them on an equal footing with “natural” conclusions arrived at prescientifically and supporting the worldview of or­ thodoxy. This is lawyerly sophistry of an entertainingly high order: Here, let me borrow this false conclusion of yours, so that I can reduce the status of modern science’s conclusions about the world, reintroduce the “natural” understanding, and welcome back orthodoxy to an even status with reason; you can have it back when I’m finished so that I can attack historicism generally. Strauss’s maneuver is justifiable only if Heidegger’s historicism is the logically necessary outcome of the principles of the investigation of nature built into modern science from its start. Is it? Strauss offers no argument that it is. Nietzsche did not think it was, and Nietzsche matters because Strauss’s argument will end by leaving Heidegger behind (with­ out a nod of thanks) and putting Nietzsche to use. And from 1935 onward Strauss will be careful to distinguish Nietzsche from Heidegger on the key question, the ontological question of the possibility of human knowledge of what is. Meanwhile, Strauss treats his argument as conclusive. Revelation’s claims have equal dignity to those of science, and it remains to ask: what was the actual basis and motive of modern rationalism now that science can be seen not to be its basis? Strauss ends his paragraph on two questions, the second intensifying the first, and he leaves the question unanswered: he rests his case on an implied answer to a question.37 The question is this: Was not the “unique” “world-construction” of modern natural science, according to which miracles are of course unknowable, devised expressly for the very purpose that miracles be unknowable, and that thus man be defended against the grip of the omnipotent God?

Was it? The desired answer is, Yes, the founders of the modern Enlighten­ ment devised a worldview in order that man be defended against the God 37. The implied answer also answers the question that ended paragraph 11, “What finally proves to be the foundation and the justification of [the Enlightenment’s] success?”



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of revelation. This is an old theme for Strauss, the result of his history of atheism in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion: the terrors of religion, relief from which was promised by Epicureanism, were intensified by revelation, mak­ ing an escape all the more needed. Strauss’s question does not quite accuse the modern founders of acting out of personal fear of the God they didn’t be­ lieve in. It asks only if they were moved by the motive of defending human­ ity against the grip of an omnipotent God. Still, the answer Strauss wants is that modern science was founded in order to assuage fear of the angry God. The purpose of his introduction is to “awaken a prejudice in favor” of Mai­ monides as the classic of rationalism, and “even more, to arouse suspicion against the powerful opposing prejudice” in favor of modern rationalism. Strauss’s question insinuates that modern rationalism, the whole of modern science, is based on a prejudice, a fear of the omnipotent God and develops a worldview just to exclude Him. It is hard to believe that Strauss believed his own arguments that mod­ ern natural science is merely a worldview and that its foundational motive is fear: they depend on giving Heidegger canonical authority he did not have for Strauss and on a mere accusation of ignoble motives. Why hinge ev­ erything on such questionable arguments? It seems that Strauss, purposing only to awaken prejudice and arouse suspicion, felt free, faute de mieux, to employ arguments that are themselves prejudices. The introduction is “very daring,” Strauss told Kojève, and this seems to be part of the daring. If Strauss, using prejudices, can persuade his readers that modern rational­ ism is based on prejudice and fear—and for the most part he persuaded the Straussian school either to hold that or to argue that—then his desire to arouse a prejudice in favor of the medieval succeeds, succeeds as modern rationalism allegedly succeeded, through sophistic reasoning. The next paragraph (13) presses a second alleged outcome of modern natural science into the service of discrediting that science: the fact-value distinction. Modern natural science, Strauss claims, could be the basis of the Enlightenment’s victory only as long as “the old concept of truth” held sway. According to that concept, nature provided the only fit foundation for the ideal. But this could only be a temporary “delusion” because eventually it came to light that the “end-free,” and “value-free” nature of modern natural science can say nothing to man about “ends and values,” that the “Is,” understood in the sense of modern natural science, involves no reference at all to “Ought,” and that therefore the traditional view that the right life is a life accord­ ing to nature becomes meaningless under the modern premise.

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Severing value from fact offers Strauss an opening: “if modern natural sci­ ence cannot justify the modern ideal,” then what is the relationship be­ tween them, for there surely is a relationship? This time Strauss ends his paragraph not on a literal but on a virtual question: one is “compelled to ask whether it is not . . . the modern ideal that is in truth the basis of modern natural science.” The reversal Strauss here effects is similar to that of his previous paragraph: a contemporary consequence of modern natural science that Strauss holds to be false is useful for questioning the origins of modern natural science. Strauss rewords the question one is compelled to ask in order to make it literally conform to the guiding question that ended paragraph 11: one is compelled to ask “whether it is not precisely a new belief rather than the new knowledge that justifies [rechtfertigt] the Enlightenment.” The desired answer is that Enlightenment belief justifies Enlightenment science. His argument in paragraph 13 is as sophistic as that of paragraph 12 if the desired conclusion is taken as logically necessary: sev­ ering a value from a fact does not imply that that very value is the basis of the fact. But this time Strauss does not treat his question as itself a conclu­ sion. Unlike the question that ended paragraph 12, the question that ends paragraph 13 receives an extended commentary: the allegedly belief-based character of modern natural science is the theme of the decisive four-page paragraph that now follows, the closing argument of Strauss’s case in the introduction. Before considering that argument, it is useful to consider Strauss’s only explicit reference to a text by Nietzsche, for he ended his key sentence on the fact-value distinction with this: “that the right life is a life according to nature becomes meaningless under the modern premise,” and he added a footnote: “On the latter point, see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil aph. 9.” There, Nietzsche mocks ancient Stoics for wanting to “live according to nature” while interpreting nature falsely: Stoics create the world in the im­ age of Stoicism, and it’s easy to live according to that. But Nietzsche’s little lecture to Stoics invited them to “[i]magine a being like nature wasteful without measure, indifferent without measure, without purposes and con­ sideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time—how could you live according to this indifference?” Strauss merely referenced this subtle aphorism, the first to mention will to power in Beyond Good and Evil, and offered no comment. His reference therefore may or may not indicate that by 1935 he had already gained the most impor­ tant insight of his 1972–73 Nietzsche essay: Nietzsche meant precisely that nature, understood in the way he “imagined” here, as will to power, is what we must learn to live in accord with—that fact, that true understanding of



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nature, must become the basis of values.38 This, as I will emphasize in these last chapters, is an indispensable part of Strauss’s mature view of the trajec­ tory of modern thought: Nietzsche, not Heidegger, is its genuine outcome, and Nietzsche was not a radical historicist who viewed the world disclosed by Enlightenment science as just another worldview. Instead, deepened by what Strauss recognized as Nietzsche’s ontology of will to power, Enlight­ enment science set forth the ultimate fact in accord with which man would have to learn to live, for will to power is, “as theory, an innovation—as reality it is the fundamental fact [Ur-Faktum] of all history.”39 Understand­ ing will to power as the fundamental fact led Nietzsche to the new highest value, affirmation of the eternal return of the world as it is, the real world— and Strauss showed exegetically in his late interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil that Nietzsche’s thought moved from insight into the fundamental fact to affirmation of the highest value. Through Nietzsche as interpreted by Strauss, a core implication in his 1935 introduction disintegrates: the inner logic of “modern rationalism” does not culminate in the separation of fact and value that proves the primacy of value in establishing modern natural science.

THE “JUSTIFICATION” (RECHTFERTIGUNG) OF THE MODERN ENLIGHTENMENT Strauss’s paragraph 14 runs for four pages because he permits no break in tracing the tight history of the justification of the Enlightenment by an ideal. His argument is of great interest: it captures in vigorous, sure sen­ tences more than a decade of his thinking on orthodoxy and philosophy; it packs into those sentences all the explosive energy of the most important spiritual issue at a turning of the age; and, at its end, it arouses a suspicion that, wait a minute, is this all lawyer talk, all rhetoric to win a case for Strauss’s overriding interest? Accusing modern natural science of being based on fear sounds disrepu­ table; accusing it of being justified by belief in a new ideal avoids that taint because its own advocates concede that a new ideal “was decisive for the victory of the Enlightenment over orthodoxy” (p. 34).40 What is that ideal? 38. This first reference to will to power leads to three others in part 1, and the four serially claim will to power to be basic to philosophy (aph. 9), life (aph. 13), world (aph. 22), and soul (aph. 23), and they collectively prepare the argument in part 2 that “the world viewed from the inside . . . would be will to power and nothing besides” (aph. 36); see my Nietzsche’s Task. 39. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 259. 40. I use page references for the four-page paragraph 14.

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Its adherents say, “the ideal of freedom as the autonomy of man and his culture” (p. 35), but Kant’s answer is neither the original nor the final ideal: the history of justifying the Enlightenment by ideals has three phases. Au­ tonomy was a viable version of the ideal “only during a peaceful interlude,” Kant’s time, when “the battle against orthodoxy seemed to have been fought out” to victory. The original ideal was “freedom” of conscience, freedom to philosophize, and against it Strauss cites the Jewish tradition’s view: “rebel­ lion against the Law . . . Epicureanism,” a view “corroborated by historical investigation of the original Epicureanism,” e.g., Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Epicurus is “the classic of the critique of religion,” but the Epicurean critique underwent an essential change in the Enlightenment. Tranquility may be both the Epicurean and the modern goal, but according to the origi­ nal justification of the Enlightenment, tranquility could be achieved only through the subjection of nature, particularly human nature. And whereas ancient Epicureanism battled the terror of the religious delusions, the En­ lightenment battled the delusions as delusions.41 The cadence of Strauss’s prose mimics The Communist Manifesto and alters the Epicurean notion of retiring to a garden by quoting first Voltaire and then Descartes: Liberated from the religious delusion, awakened to sober awareness of his real situation, taught by bad experiences that he is threatened by a stingy, hostile nature, man recognizes as his sole salvation and duty, not so much ‘to cultivate his garden’ as in the first place to plant a garden by making himself the master and owner of nature.

This “crude” original conception of the Enlightenment was “overcome” by the final ideal of the Enlightenment, the one that betrays the true core of its transformation of Epicureanism. But before taking up that ultimate out­ come, it is useful to linger over Descartes’s phrase “the master and owner of nature.” Strauss had not yet discovered the full extent of exotericism in the philosophic tradition, but even after he did, it never became clear that he read such founding documents of the Enlightenment as Bacon’s and Descartes’ as the works of exoteric philosophers.42 But Descartes is such a philosopher. His phrase here is part of his invocation of the Bible’s garden of

41. When Strauss translated this portion of his 1935 text into his autobiographical preface of 1962, he replaced “the Enlightenment” with “modern unbelief.” 42. Strauss’s 1941 essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing” distinguishes the exoteri­ cisms of ancients and moderns in a way that seems to me untrue to the greatest moderns; PAW, 33–37.



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Eden, and the beautiful precision of his words makes clear that Descartes, no dreamer, is exploiting the Bible’s dream of perfection to overthrow the rule of the Bible in the only way possible, the way pioneered by Bacon: im­ plant a new dream that rings of the Bible’s dream of immortality in perfect bodies but transfers the happy outcome to the imagined end of the long period of human work on the world, work facilitated by the new science that Descartes, that mathematical genius, outfits with the mathematical method lacking in Bacon. Descartes knew that it was imperative to make the new impossible dream seem compatible with the old one, for the new dream could replace the old dream only gradually, over centuries, leaving the otherworldly dream that ruled Descartes’s world to the impregnable fortresses in the rear of an advancing world bent on improving the human estate here and now. Did Descartes dream that dream that he presents as a worldly version of the Christian dream? Like Plato, like Bacon, Descartes knew the utility and necessity of a promise of paradise, an impossible just city, and like Plato and Bacon he employed the impossible just city on be­ half of possible philosophic rule—a truly Napoleonic strategy in Descartes as in Bacon, strategists laying the foundations for a new age beyond sov­ ereign religion and employing the classic Platonic device of a theologicalpolitical program that makes an impossible just city seem possible. Strauss did an injustice to the masters of the exoteric who founded the modern world if he judged “the master and owner of nature” to be anything other than the expression of a popular dream consciously planted by fully awake political philosophers schooled by Plato and aiming for philosophic rule over sovereign religion by coopting its dreams.43 The final ideal justifying the Enlightenment, Strauss asserts, is the one that best exhibits its ever-present core: in this ideal “the religious ideas are rejected not because they are terrifying but because . . . they are comforting; religion . . . is a way out chosen . . . to escape the terror and hopelessness of life” (36–37). Strauss is eloquent in describing this “latest and purest” ideal justifying the Enlightenment: A new kind of fortitude, which forbids itself every flight from the horror of life into comforting delusion, which accepts the eloquent descriptions 43. For the full force and precision of Descartes’s Baconian phrase “the master and owner of nature” based on the details of its setting in Discourse 6, see my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 146–48, 183–89. On the necessity of exotericism for philosophic rule, Bacon was quite explicit: “Concerning Government, it is a part of knowledge secret and retired, in both these respects in which things are deemed secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some because they are not fit to utter” (Advancement of Learning 2.23.47).

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of the misery of man without God as a proof of the goodness of its cause, reveals itself eventually as the ultimate and purest ground for the rebel­ lion against the tradition of revelation.

It was rebellion all along, as the open rebellion that ends it betrays. “This new fortitude, being the willingness to look man’s forsakenness in its face, being the courage to welcome the terrible truth, being toughness against the inclination of man to deceive himself about his situation, is probity [Redlichkeit].” The virtue of probity based on the virtue of courage is the final ideal justifying the Enlightenment. Strauss appended a footnote here to deny “the new probity” the dignity of “the old love of truth,” letting the denial be made by two philosophical friends with whom he had been corresponding for years, Gerhard Krüger and Karl Löwith. “Intellectual conscience” means only “the ‘inner’ sover­ eignty of science over man, and not just any science, but modern science” (Krüger); the alleged “impartiality” of the new probity is “the impartiality of not being partial to transcendent ideals” (Löwith) (no. 13). Strauss speaks in his footnote of an “opposition” between probity and love of truth, where probity is “open avowal that one is an atheist [with] the resolute intention of accepting the consequences.” The 1935 Strauss renounces the Strauss of 1928–29, that open atheist with the resolute intention of accepting all its consequences as the ground of his vehement political Zionism.44 Strauss ends his footnote by anticipating the conclusion of his whole paragraph: “if one makes atheism, which is admittedly not demonstrable, into a positive, dogmatic premise, then the probity expressed by it is something very differ­ ent from the love of truth.” The new “intellectual probity” rejects all attempts to mediate between the Enlightenment and orthodoxy—it does what Strauss did all his life. He then makes his key pronouncement: “This atheism with a good conscience, or even with a bad conscience, differs precisely by its conscientiousness, its morality, from the conscienceless atheism at which the past shuddered.” The Epicurean turned activist at the founding of the modern becomes the new atheist who “rejects for reasons of conscience the belief in God.”

44. The last example of Strauss’s crusading atheism seems to be his May 1929 essay “Zur Ideologie des politischen Zionismus.” Arguing for political Zionism, Strauss states that its only possible basis is atheism. What could a modern human being be but an atheist? On what other grounds but the truth could a historic people today secure its present and future? “Propaganda for atheism is not necessary,” he said. “The conditions under which we live have on the whole more impact than every spoken or written word.” “We don’t demand atheism, we recognize it as a fact and as powerful.” “We are Jews without faith.” GS, 1: 442–44.



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Where did this moral foundation of the new atheism come from? It “is a descendant of the tradition grounded in the Bible; it accepts the thesis, the negation made by the Enlightenment, on the basis of a way of thinking that became possible only through the Bible.”45 The new atheism, then, heir to biblical moralism, is only “the latest, most radical, most unassailable har­ monization” of the Enlightenment and orthodoxy (p. 38). This atheism, the heir and judge of the belief in revelation, of the centuries-old, millennia-old struggle between belief and unbelief, and finally of the short-lived but by no means therefore inconsequential romantic longing for the lost belief, confronting orthodoxy in complex sophistication formed out of gratitude, rebellion, longing and indiffer­ ence, and also in simple probity, is according to its own claim as capable of an original understanding of the human roots of the belief in God as no earlier, no less complex-simple philosophy ever was.

This marvelous sentence brings the introduction to its rhetorical and sub­ stantive peak. “The last word and the ultimate justification of the Enlight­ enment is the atheism stemming from probity, which overcomes orthodoxy radically by understanding it radically, free of both the polemical bitterness of the Enlightenment and the equivocal reverence of romanticism.” The Enlightenment refutes itself; its original justification was calming fear; its final justification is a Bible-based virtue; its critique of religion was, from beginning to end, founded on passion and virtue. Orthodoxy stands un­ touched by three centuries of Enlightenment attack: its attackers were just believers voicing their prejudice. I have treated this passage in such detail because of the evident im­ portance Strauss assigned it: not only is it the rousing culmination of the 1935 introduction, he reproduced it in 1962 with modifications as the cul­ mination of what he intended to be a prominent document for his legacy, the autobiographical “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” which he placed at the head of the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and made the ninth chapter of Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968). Its argument is particularly important as guidance to Strauss’s rhetoric for a reason Strauss is prohibited from stating: it is Nietzsche’s argument, not Strauss’s—as Strauss of course knew. He simply used it for his own purpose

45. The 1962 preface replaces this sentence with the curt “Compared not only with Epicure­ anism but with the unbelief of the age of Spinoza, [the final atheism] reveals itself as a descendant of Biblical morality.”

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without mentioning its author’s name. A reader of Nietzsche as devoted and competent as Strauss knew, of course knew, that this argument in all its details is the vivid and unforgettable central argument of the chapter “Our Virtues” in Beyond Good and Evil, the chapter devoted to a topic of great importance to Strauss, the relation between morality and philoso­ phy in the book that Strauss said “always seemed to me to be the most beautiful of Nietzsche’s books” (SPPP, 174). Failure to recognize that this is Nietzsche’s argument has allowed Strauss’s denunciation to have a long afterlife: it has become canonical among Straussians as grounds for dismiss­ ing Nietzsche as merely moral.46 Nietzsche arranged the argument of “Our Virtues” to peak at its lit­ eral center. Peerless analyst of the spiritual situation of the present, he had defined and criticized modern virtue as secular Christian virtue and then in his central aphorism (aph. 227) isolated the single virtue still left for ad­ vanced moderns from the whole of Christian virtue: Redlichkeit, intellec­ tual probity. But a great danger lies in probity, he said: as the virtue with the highest moral value, it could block us from what is simply highest. Having made moral virtue and that limit on it central to “Our Virtues,” he moved with the proper preparation to what is highest, his decisive argument about Geist, mind and spirit in its highest attainment that mere probity may block (aph. 230). The geistigste form of Geist, the highest form of the intellectual/ spiritual, is philosophy, the transmoral passion to understand. But Geist-asphilosophy presents a problem or threat to Geist in the form it takes for the vast majority, “the basic will of the spirit” or the passion for comfort and well-being. That passion moving the vast majority compels them to oppose the cruel philosopher with his passion for knowledge. “Why knowledge at all?,” Nietzsche asks to end aphorism 230, given its cruelty and the rea­ sonable hate it draws from the vast majority? His next aphorism reports a philosopher’s answer: the drive to know is our nature, the unteachable, way deep down, given in the rarest minds. Aphorism 231 ends the sequence of aphorisms on virtue and knowledge by claiming continuity with the knowl­ edge sought by all the great Socratics: Know Thyself. This imperative is ontological/epistemological, not therapeutic: know that being to which alone relatively direct access is available, and from that self-knowing infer the character of all beings on the logical principle of parsimony. “Our Vir­ 46. Even a commentator as competent as Janssens makes Nietzsche the target instead of the author of this argument (Between Athens and Jerusalem, 94). Meier, on the other hand, implic­ itly exempts Nietzsche from Strauss’s denunciation by speaking of “the philosophy following Nietzsche” and of “the philosophy of the age of Heidegger” (Leo Strauss and the TheologicoPolitical Problem, 18); but he does not give Nietzsche explicit credit for Strauss’s argument.



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tues” thus traces late modern virtue to a point already reached at the end of part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil: psychology, study of the soul, “is again the path to the fundamental problems” (aph. 23). And that path led to the peak of part 2: insight into the way of all beings (aph. 36). Strauss set all this out in his late Nietzsche essay; in 1935 he understood “Our Virtues” well enough to exploit for his own rhetorical purpose the difference between the moral virtue of Redlichkeit and the philosophic passion to understand. So isn’t that the old love of truth? Right here, in aphorism 230, Nietzsche said that he explicitly abstains from all “garish finery of such moral word tinsels” as “love of truth” in order to speak simply of seeking knowledge and not dress it up in the self-praise that may keep one from what philosophy truly is. Strauss’s distinction between love of truth and probity is part of what he took from Nietzsche, lifting his words from the two relevant apho­ risms, Redlichkeit (227) and Wahrheitsliebe (230). Why not name Nietzsche as his source? Because his whole historical argument attacking the modern Enlightenment would have been jeopardized by naming Nietzsche as its con­ temporary outcome; naming Nietzsche would have run the risk of vindicating the modern Enlightenment on Nietzsche’s terms—for Nietzsche, as my next chapters will show, aimed at rational advancement of the modern En­ lightenment based on understanding the spiritual situation of the present. In his 1962 preface, Strauss went partway in setting things right with Nietzsche. After translating parts of the culmination of his 1935 introduc­ tion for the culmination of his preface, he added this: “the hierarchy of moralities and wills to which the final atheism referred could not but be claimed to be intrinsically true, theoretically true”—a claim Heidegger’s radical historicism could not and did not make—“ ‘the will to power’ of the strong or of the weak may be the ground of every other doctrine; it is not the ground of the doctrine of will to power: the will to power was said to be a fact.” Yes, Nietzsche said it was a fact: he set out the essential argument for that fact (aph. 36) and explicitly said that the will to power is “as theory, an innovation—as reality it is the fundamental fact [Ur-Faktum] of all history” (aph. 259). The outcome of the Enlightenment is not radical historicism but an ontological knowledge-claim. In 1962 Strauss made no further comment on Nietzsche’s claim about will to power but spoke of “the self-destruction of reason,” a judgment that could apply to radical historicism but not to the claim to reasonable insight into the fundamental fact, the claim that could, as Nietzsche thought, vindicate reason.47 47. As far as Heidegger is concerned, Rodrigo Chacón shows with admirable lucidity and judgment how Strauss’s encounter with Heidegger, beginning with his attendance at Heidegger’s

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In 1972–73 Strauss went further in setting things right with Nietzsche. In “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” he made the greatest possible contribution to studying Nietzsche as a genuine philoso­ pher by showing how the will to power could reasonably claim to be the fundamental fact and how eternal return could reasonably be understood as the highest value grounded on that fact; Strauss showed how Nietzsche linked fact and value in the deepest way. Then, treating “Our Virtues,” Strauss expanded his contribution to the study of Nietzsche by showing how Nietzsche distinguished moral virtue from the highest spirituality, philoso­ phy. He arrived at the aphorism on probity (Redlichkeit) (aph. 227) via the one before it: “we immoralists” are “men of duty” whose duty is probity, the completion of the great contemporary virtue of “the historical sense.” Strauss acknowledges the explicit limitation Nietzsche placed on this vir­ tue: “Yet probity is an end rather than a beginning . . . it must be supported, modified, fortified by ‘our most delicate, most disguised, most spiritual will to power’ which is directed toward the future” (SPPP, 188). The “most spiri­ tual will to power” is philosophy, said Nietzsche when first naming will to power in Beyond Good and Evil (aph. 9): mere probity “must be supported, modified, fortified” by philosophy. Strauss ends his paragraph by saying, “our probity must not be permitted to become the ground or object of our pride, for this would lead us back to moralism (and to theism).” If mere vir­ tue is taken to be fundamental, God is inevitable as source and enforcer. Is Nietzsche a philosopher or a moralist? Strauss goes on to show how aphorisms 228 and 229 belong to the developing argument of Beyond Good and Evil: they note the necessity of cruelty, “which, as cruelty directed toward oneself, is effective in intellectual probity, in ‘the intellectual con­ science’ ” (SPPP, 189). Then, in a page and a half that belong to the dens­ est and richest in his essay, he sets out what the drive for knowledge as Nietzsche pursued it implied: naturalization of the human that recovers humanity from the unnatural and leads logically to the affirmation of eter­ nal return. Nietzsche cannot do without nature, Strauss says, and he shows that Nietzsche did not do without nature: his virtue is grounded in his nature, his philosophizing nature. Having followed Nietzsche’s chapter to this fundamental point linking aphorisms 230 and 231, Strauss takes off on his own to emphasize again what Nietzsche did not even mention here, the summer-semester lectures on Aristotle in 1922, influenced his writings of the 1920s; he goes on to show how and why Strauss moved away from Heidegger’s view after 1933, with the conclusion of the introduction to PL being an important event in that movement (“Reading Strauss from the Start,” 287–307, especially 300–302). On Heidegger and Strauss generally, see Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy.



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logic that leads one to affirm eternal return. Why did he do that? Because eternal return, not probity, is the new ideal, the affirmation derived from the new view of nature. The new ideal, the highest possible affirmation of nature, is founded on the insight gained by the highest nature into nature as such. Strauss thus shows that love of truth in Nietzsche, the transmoral drive to insight, leads reasonably to love of the true. In Nietzsche, morality, the new good and bad, is the consequence of a philosopher’s insight into the fundamental fact, not its cause. Nietzsche is not primarily a moral­ ist; he is a philosopher who gained insight into the fundamental fact and discovered in the depth of that apparently deadly truth its opposite.48 In 1972–73 Strauss names the source and gives the locations for the argument that in 1935 he passed off as his own. And by doing this, by showing how insight and action, fact and value, combine in Nietzsche, Strauss showed that philosophy entailed for Nietzsche precisely the sort of responsibility Xenophon’s Socrates exercised in his teleotheology: the highest spiritual­ ity “consists of the spiritualization of justice and of that kind of severity which knows that it is commissioned to maintain in the world the order of rank, even among the things and not only among men.”49 The distinction between ancient and modern philosophy that Strauss made so prominent in his writings melts away: Socrates and Nietzsche each held contemplation, the drive for knowledge, highest, and each learned that knowledge entailed acting on the most ambitious scale imaginable, a theological-political proj­ ect to direct a civilization. Strauss made the culminating issue of his 1935 attack on the Enlight­ enment the question of its justification. But his criticism of its allegedly final justification—it is merely moral—is merely rhetoric. Nothing shows the rhetorical character of Strauss’s argument better than his conscious use of an argument from a late modern, Nietzsche, against the latest modern, Heidegger. He acts as if his argument refuted the modern Enlightenment, as if the necessary outcome of Enlightenment rationalism was Heidegger’s radical historicism on a merely moral foundation, instead of Nietzsche’s philosophy with its claim to ontological knowledge on a foundation of the love of truth—and its aim to advance the modern Enlightenment. But what

48. Strauss also indicated that Nietzsche is not a mere moralist while commenting on the single aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil on eternal return: “But Nietzsche, prompted by ‘some enigmatic desire,’ has tried for a long time to penetrate pessimism to its depth and in particular to free it from the delusion of morality which in a way contradicts its world-denying tendency” (SPPP, 180). The “enigmatic desire” is philosophy itself. 49. SPPP, 187. This is Strauss’s translation of a sentence in Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 219.

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about the alleged first justification of the Enlightenment then, Spinoza’s? In 1948 Strauss published a new essay on Spinoza that became the final chapter of Persecution and the Art of Writing, his final writing devoted to Spinoza. Its title, “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” describes its content exactly, for the essay shows that Strauss’s discover­ ies in exotericism led him to renewed study of Spinoza’s Treatise and new appreciation of Spinoza as a philosopher: he himself seems to have learned how to study Spinoza’s Treatise through the “fresh investigation” of it called for in his first paragraph (PAW, 142). His horizon has widened dra­ matically from that of his 1928 Spinoza book and his 1935 introduction: he no longer considers Spinoza from a Jewish perspective. Now he views him as a philosopher who wrote primarily for Christians, calibrating his words and sentences for what ruled his time and place and aiming to advance philosophy by tempering Christian teaching and luring prospective philoso­ phers. What Spinoza aimed to achieve was nothing less than a fulfillment of Bacon’s religious strategy, for while Strauss does not use these words, he does show Spinoza aspiring to “bray Christendom in a mortar and mould it into a new paste”—to crush Christian orthodoxy and shape it into a tem­ perate, sociable religion true to its principle of charity.50 Spinoza linked his theological-political teaching to his time, aiming to establish “the freedom of philosophizing” just when “reasonable prospects for its establishment” were appearing in Europe (PAW, 192). Strauss’s admiring portrait of a mas­ ter of exotericism culminates in his final paragraphs as he sets out two examples of Spinoza’s sovereign strategy in the face of the varied loyalists he had to temper and persuade. Each example shows that an apparent sim­ plification is an actual exquisite attack on fundamentals. Spinoza’s subtlety enabled him, in the first example, to demolish a point foundational to all their theologies, Jewish and Christian, and in the second, with similar fi­ nesse, to demolish a view that was exemplary, being that of the most rea­ sonable and strongest opponent, Maimonides himself. Strauss thus ends on what is most admirable, having presented Spinoza throughout as admirable. In his long essay there is no hint of his earlier criticism and no whisper of his earlier book on Spinoza. Only fragments of the ending of Strauss’s 1935 attack on the justifica­ tion of the Enlightenment are left after the growing explicitness of his use 50. The quoted words are those of Bacon’s character, Pollio, in his Advertisement Touching a Holy War. Under the cover of a dialogue ostensibly about Christian holy war against Islam, Bacon has Pollio speak the unspeakable aim of Bacon’s religious politics: crush and remake orthodox Christianity. Bacon learned from Plato to engage in religious politics on the scale of a Socrates and with the same underlying aim: the interests of philosophy.



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of Nietzsche and his fresh investigation of Spinoza. What is the upshot of these later developments for the argument of Strauss’s 1935 introduction? They show that to attack a prejudice in the service of a prejudice he em­ ployed prejudice. He was writing not as a philosopher in pursuit of the truth but as an advocate. Reading Strauss’s introduction more than three times around from the back, I think I begin to see why he never republished it.

“THE PRESENT SITUATION” IN 1935 Strauss concludes the argument of his introduction with “the present situ­ ation” (15): “Thus at last the ‘truth’ of the alternative ‘orthodoxy or En­ lightenment’ is revealed as the alternative ‘orthodoxy or atheism.’ ” He bids farewell to his public atheism: The situation thus formed, the present situation, appears to be insoluble for the Jew who cannot be orthodox and who must consider purely po­ litical Zionism, the only ‘solution of the Jewish problem’ possible on the basis of atheism, as a resolution that is indeed highly honorable but not, in earnest and in the long run, adequate.

But a way to a possibly adequate solution has been clarified, and Strauss announces the first step of the public stance he would adopt for the rest of his life: given the outcome of the modern Enlightenment plus the only other feature of the present situation that counts, the urgent “need for an enlightened Judaism,” “one sees oneself induced . . . to apply for aid to the medieval Enlightenment.” Strauss is guided in 1935 as he was in 1924: by the interests of Judaism. But he abandons political Zionism for a still open position that asks aid of the medieval Enlightenment. Six questions block a simple return (16); their answers require “an interpretation of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed” (17). The book that follows is not that interpreta­ tion but merely an attempt “to point out the leading idea of the medieval Enlightenment that has become lost to the modern Enlightenment and its heirs . . . the idea of Law.” Strauss’s position in 1935 is clear: he defends orthodoxy against the modern tide as an adherent of Judaism who cannot be orthodox, who is in fact an atheist who renounces public atheism stemming from probity. Later, after his discoveries in exotericism lead him to the core of the medi­ eval Enlightenment and the Socratic Enlightenment, his position shifts: he defends orthodoxy as an adherent of philosophy in the manner of Halevi. For if the interests of Judaism are his guiding interests from the beginning

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through 1935, his interests become more general and more focused after his discoveries in exotericism. Those interests can be read in Persecution and the Art of Writing. In his conclusion to “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” (1943) his objection to the modern Enlightenment is “not particularly Jew­ ish, nor even particularly religious, but moral”; he defends “morality itself and therewith the cause, not only of Judaism, but of mankind at large.” As befits the end of an essay, this statement of moral urgency is partial or edify­ ing, providing moral uplift while leaving unmentioned the genuine ground of his own interests and Halevi’s. But the introduction of Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) stated that ground: the philosophers “defended the interests of philosophy and nothing else. In doing this, they believed indeed that they were defending the highest interests of mankind” (PAW, 18). This whole—morality with a punishing bite for the well-being of society within which alone philosophy can prosper—extends the Socratic project for phi­ losophy, the teleotheology, out into a post-Enlightenment future. Socrates’s teleotheology, outfitted with a Judge who can really punish, seems to stand as Strauss’s ultimate view.51 Strauss defends the Socratic Enlightenment as supplemented by the me­ dieval Enlightenment against the modern Enlightenment. Is that wise? Is it based on an adequate interpretation of the present situation? In the last two chapters I will consider Strauss’s 1955 lecture “What Is Political Philoso­ phy?” and his 1972–73 “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” in order to help answer those questions. Nietzsche plays a definitive role in each of those writings. The wisdom of Strauss’s position for contem­ porary philosophy must be tested in the contrast between his position and Nietzsche’s position, which aims to advance the modern Enlightenment through a new poetry.

51. For a brief treatment of Strauss’s shifts, see Bolotin, “Leo Strauss and Classical Political Philosophy,” 141.

chapter eight

Attacking the Enlightenment on Behalf of Socrates: “What Is Political Philosophy?”

ADVANCING ATHENS IN JERUSALEM “

W

hat Is Political Philosophy?” was first presented as three lectures in Jerusalem in December 1954–January 1955. Strauss published them in 1959 as the lead essay of a book assigned the same title, thereby making this essay very prominent among his writings. Having given his lectures a Socratic “What is . . .?” title, Strauss uses his first sentence to call attention to his speaking in Jerusalem: “It is a great honor, and at the same time a challenge to accept a task of particular difficulty, to be asked to speak about political philosophy in Jerusalem.” His second sentence gives an initial answer to the question of his title and links it with Jerusalem: “In this city . . . the theme of political philosophy—‘the city of righteousness, the faithful city’—has been taken more seriously than anywhere else on earth.” His praise of Jerusalem seems superlatively affirmative: “Nowhere else has the longing for justice and the just city filled the purest hearts and the loftiest souls with such zeal as on this sacred soil.” Yet such praise leaves unspoken what Strauss held highest, the love of truth pursued in that other city, Athens, named in his second paragraph, the city in which “political philosophy came to light,” the city, one could say, in which philosophy “as quest for wisdom . . . for universal knowledge, for knowledge of the whole” (4) was taken more seriously than anywhere else on earth. The quest for wisdom, also grounded in passion, fills not the heart but the mind, directing it not to zeal but to a discovery of the limits of knowledge, a discovery of “[t]he distinctive trait of the philosopher . . . that ‘he knows that he knows nothing’ ” (5),

. WIPP, 2. Subsequent references to WIPP are to paragraph number in parentheses in the text.

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knowledge that puts limits on zeal. By having Jerusalem represent the passion for justice and Athens the passion for knowledge, Strauss alludes to his true challenge in speaking in Jerusalem. Strauss’s challenge reverses an awesome precedent. Strauss, a Jew who has become a man of Athens, speaks in Jerusalem on what he regards as the greatest discovery of Athens; the precedent is the Apostle Paul speaking in Athens of Jerusalem, bringing news of the true God to those who raised monuments to “the unknown God.” Francis Bacon reversed that mighty example of Paul’s entry into Athens to suggest his own project of entering Jerusalem with a view to capturing it for philosophy as Paul captured Athens for Jerusalem; the Christian Bacon can even cite Paul’s example while keeping his own anti-Christian aim esoterically hidden. Strauss’s aim of praising Athens in Jerusalem is less revolutionary than Bacon’s aim, but he must, no less than Bacon, make his genuine point esoterically because Strauss, praising Jerusalem in Jerusalem, elevates Athens at Jerusalem’s expense. Strauss tells his Jerusalem audience that he knows he is unable to convey even “a weak imitation of our prophets’ vision,” and he warns that he will “even be compelled to lead you into a region where the dimmest recollection of that vision is on the point of vanishing altogether” (1). But he refines his compulsion: “while being compelled, or compelling myself, to wander far away from our sacred heritage, or to be silent about it, I shall not for a moment forget what Jerusalem stands for.” He does not forget; he has it most in mind at the high point of his essay where the Athenian Socrates is named. It is the center of Strauss’s sixty-six-paragraph essay. “What kind of man is the Athenian stranger?” he asks in its thirty-third paragraph, referring to Plato’s Laws, “the Platonic dialogue about politics and laws” (31). He’s a man like the old Athenian philosopher Socrates, Strauss answers, linking Plato’s Laws with Plato’s Apology of Socrates: the only Platonic dialogue ending with the word “God” leads into the only Platonic dialogue beginning with the word “God” (33). In his brief review of the Apology and its aftermath in Crito Strauss focuses on Socrates’s reason for staying in Athens. What kind of a man is Socrates, the founder of political philosophy? He shows what kind by his decision to stay in Athens and die by its law when he could have done what the Laws pictures: an old Athenian philosopher travels to faraway Crete to bring to the original source of Greek law, and . Acts of the Apostles 17:15–34. . See my edition, Francis Bacon, An Advertisement Touching a Holy War, 78–80. . Seth Benardete used just the right verbs about Strauss’s Athens/Jerusalem division: “he came to see that the Athens side comprehends the Jerusalem side” (Encounters and Reflections, 176).



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to its most powerful contemporary representative, Sparta, the blessings of Athens. Socrates stays, Strauss shows, because he is, as a philosopher, a philanthropist, and philanthropy begins at home. On what basis did philanthropic Socrates decide to stay and be killed, refusing “to avail himself of [the] opportunity” to escape? He did not base his decision to die “on an appeal to a categorical imperative demanding passive obedience, without if’s and but’s.” Instead, his “refusal was based on a deliberation, on a prudential consideration of what was the right thing to do in the circumstances.” Strauss goes on to give three considerations, but he has just made his central point in his central sentence: there is no imperative more categorical than a law laid down by the only God; passive obedience to categorical imperatives with no ifs or buts defines Jerusalem’s zeal. Socrates bases his life-determining decisions wholly on the active judgment of his mind. In the center of his essay contrasting Athens and Jerusalem Strauss holds Socrates high by not forgetting what Jerusalem stands for. The first consideration Strauss gives for Socrates’s refusal to leave is his old age; had he been younger, he would possibly have done what Aristotle did, leave town. The second consideration is where would he go? The disjunction he uses to persuade Crito that he has nowhere reasonable to go leaves an orderly country far away as a reasonable place to go, a country like Crete. “We are entitled to infer that if Socrates had fled, he would have gone to Crete,” and the Laws shows what he would have done there. But he did not escape to live in Crete. Was old age the only reason he “chose to die in Athens”? No: “Socrates preferred to sacrifice his life in order to preserve philosophy in Athens rather than to preserve his life in order to intro­ duce philosophy into Crete.” The cause for which Socrates chose to die was the state of philosophy in Athens. “If the danger to the future of philosophy in Athens had been less great, he might have chosen to flee to Crete.” Socrates’s philanthropy, his love of the human, began at home in love of philosophy, in concern for the future of philosophy in the intellectual center of the Hellenic world where he had lived his philosopher’s life and become loved and hated: sacrificing his life, choosing to die at the right time in the right place, was a dramatic testament to philosophy, a once and forever reason for others to ponder the supreme value of philosophy and the reasons for loving it and hating it. Focusing on Socrates’s manner of choosing, Strauss again recalls the opposite manner—he ends his paragraph by repeating what Socrates’s decision was not: his choice “did not consist in the simple subsumption of his case under a simple, universal, and unalterable rule.” Jerusalem stands for simply subsuming all cases under the universal and unalterable rules given once and for all by a God to be obeyed,

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not inquired into. Athens stands for a reasonable, flexible response to circumstance, and Socrates, aged seventy, reasonably, not zealously, gave up his life as a powerful statement against unreasoned obedience, an instance of which was the proximate cause of his dying. Strauss, a kind of Athenian stranger, traveled to Jerusalem, our original source of ultimate law, and centered the incompatibility in principle of revealed religion and philosophy, the conflict between passive obedience and reasoned inquiry. The other paragraph of the central pair, the thirty-fourth, opens the second half of Strauss’s essay with this appeal: “But let us return after this long story to the beginning of Plato’s Laws.” It is hard to imagine a more subversive historical appeal; that Strauss made it in Jerusalem is all the more worthy of wonder. To return to the beginning of Plato’s Laws is to leap back over the long interregnum during which Jerusalem-obedience in the form of Christianity held sway over Athens and exercised the right of the victor, interpreting Plato’s dialogues as Jerusalem-like. Strauss’s appeal to return moves back through passive obedience to a beginning that is the model for introducing Athenian philosophy into a faraway place. Strauss’s new beginning recognizes that “the originator of the Cretan laws, or any other laws, is not a god” but human beings. And the legislator is what already governs, “the politeia, the regime. Therefore, the guiding theme of political philosophy is the regime rather than the laws” (34). Or at least the regime “becomes the guiding theme of political thought when the derivative or questionable character of the laws has been realized.” This is an Athenian event. And Jerusalem? “There are a number of Biblical terms which can be properly translated by ‘law’; there is no Biblical equivalent to ‘regime.’” The Athenian event of realizing and pondering the questionable character of the laws lacks a Jerusalem equivalent. At the center of this very prominent essay Strauss placed a defense of the freedom of philosophy against a view that commands the intellect to subject itself to a revelation. Still, as a man of Athens opposed in the freedom of his own judgment to Jerusalem-obedience, Strauss chose to be an Athenian friend of Jerusalem, offering arguments to the obedient that have an Athenian look.

“OUR UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT IS HUMAN IN MAN” To end the second part, “The Classical Solution,” Strauss considers two common objections to classical political philosophy. The first is that it is antidemocratic and hence bad, the second that it is based on a cosmology that “has been proven to be untrue by the success of modern natural sci-



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ence” (39). In answer to the second objection Socrates reappears. Strauss places him under the protection of a general premise: “Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man” (42). This proclamation legislates immunity for the “human in man” from all gains in understanding made by modern science, whether in understanding the universe that surrounds us, or the natural history of life on earth that evolved us out of other primate species, or the neurological functioning of the human mind. Strauss invokes a form of the ontological argument to allege that “[t]o understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible.” Nietzsche called such affirmations “faith in opposite values,” the prejudice of classical philosophers that the high and pure could never have originated in or be explained by the low and base. In part 4 of his Discourse on the Method Descartes argued for the existence of God on the premise that “the more perfect cannot arise from and depend upon the less perfect.” At the end of that part, however, reflecting on truth and certainty, he invited those of a skeptical temperament to doubt that he believed this premise, and when he moved next to his scientific account of the universe, he in fact though not in word employed the contrary principle of the more perfect arising from and depending upon the less perfect as the principle by which alone the natural history of the universe and of the human could be properly understood. And Strauss? He gives no indication of holding any particular transcendent truths by which the human might be understood, neither the teleotheology of Socrates nor the Judaism to whose fold Halevi returned. He introduces Socrates but makes no effort to show how he understood the human in man from above down. Instead, he uses Socrates’s claim of ignorance to refute the objection that classical political philosophy is “bound up with an antiquated cosmology.” Classical political philosophy “was originated by Socrates. And Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance” (42). This is no trivial skepticism, for as Strauss observes, “Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth, of the whole. Socrates, then, viewed man in the light of the mysterious character of the whole.” Passionately seeking knowledge, Socrates had been a keen student of natural philosophy in his youth, but its limitations in explaining cause led him to turn to his . Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 2. . See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 238–44.

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own way, and Strauss draws the conclusion: “He held therefore that we are more familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that situation.” Strauss mentions another Socratic aspect of understanding the human in man: “We may also say he viewed man in the light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental and permanent problems.” Strauss continues his thought about cosmology: “For to articulate the situation of man means to articulate man’s openness to the whole.” His final sentence sums up his Socratic defense of classical political philosophy on cosmology: “This understanding of the situation of man which includes, then, the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem, was the foundation of classical political philosophy.” Strauss’s defense of Socratic ignorance is vulnerable to an objection based on the success of the modern quest for cosmology: beginning with Copernicus, that quest made dramatic, horizon-changing discoveries that led to knowledge of cosmology. The modern quest in cosmology, now centuries old, has given contemporary humans the gift of an ever truer and more adequate understanding of the universe that confirms and expands what was speculatively proposed by the pioneers of Greek science from whom Socrates made it seem he turned away. The situation of man as man after centuries of public dissemination of expanding cosmological and biological knowledge is not the same as the situation facing Socrates: the shelter of ignorance is not good enough. Socrates claimed knowledge of ignorance, and a responsible knowledge of ignorance learns what can be known of the cosmos and the human—as Strauss suggested Socrates continued to do. It is now publicly known, for instance, that the earth is a satellite of a third-generation star and that every atom on earth that was not part of the hydrogen, helium, or lithium created at the origin of our universe was created by nuclear fusion in the core of stars and exploded back into space by supernovas. And it is now publicly known that our species evolved from other primate species and that human behavior can be studied on a continuum of animal behaviors that displays our human differences without positing any cardinal difference between humans and other animals. How does such actual knowledge affect Strauss’s defense of the ancients? The knowable cosmos and our knowable evolutionary history are not at all compatible with Socrates’s teleotheology or Jerusalem’s account

. This understanding of the ideas must be thought together with understanding the ideas as philosophical versions of the gods Dike and Nike that made the ideas so readily acceptable to Glaucon and Adeimantus, and with understanding the ideas as representations of natural kinds into which the mind sorts perceptions.



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of creation by the God who commands our obedience. Does deference to Jerusalem on the basis of moral utility—as in the final paragraph of “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari”—demand that we act as if we are as ignorant of the causes of the human as the ancients were? The ignorance defense will wear ever thinner as science continues its investigations and continues to serve the ethic of public disclosure of all that it knows, while inviting testing and refutation by the only method fit to comment on issues of cosmology and biology. Strauss’s observation that physics “did not harm the pagans in the way in which it might harm the adherents of revealed laws” (WIPP, 164) acknowledged that the implied cosmology of the Bible is open to challenge by physics. This does not mean that physics refutes the God of revelation; but it does mean that insisting on God as morally necessary requires an ever-heightened willfulness in turning attention away from conclusions drawn by human intellect in the greatest of all modern enterprises—and all the great modern philosophers from the founders through Nietzsche paid very close attention, as Strauss seems not to have done, to the knowledge gains of modern physics, biology, and anthropology. The Strauss who calls in Socrates’s knowledge of ignorance as a defense against modern cosmological knowledge can be asked a political philosophy question: Is it prudent in our time to align philosophy, the love of wisdom, with a teleotheology that demands ignorance of the modern cosmological solution, rather than aligning it with that offspring of philosophy which seeks to know the world to which the human is inquiringly open? The final paragraph of “The Classical Solution” points to a profound aspect of the classical solution that is not at all ignorance. “To articulate the problem of cosmology means to answer the question of what philosophy is or what a philosopher is” (43). To begin his consideration of what a philosopher is in relation to cosmology, Strauss follows Plato in moving away from Socrates: “Plato refrained from entrusting the thematic discussion of this question to Socrates.” The stranger from Elea brings the philosopher to light as one who “strives for knowledge of the whole.” Parts of the whole are knowable, with knowledge split into a fundamental dualism: knowledge of homogeneity, as in mathematics, and knowledge of heterogeneity, as with human ends. The latter, higher kind of knowledge can attain “knowledge of what makes human life complete or whole; it is therefore knowledge of a whole.” Such knowledge is “knowledge of the human soul . . . the only part of the whole which is open to the whole.” Then comes the decisive thought for knowledge of the whole: the human soul is “therefore more akin to the . I pursued this question in greater detail in Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, 168–73.

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whole than anything else is.” Strauss veers into caution: “But this knowledge . . . is not knowledge of the whole.” No, but as knowledge of a kinship, it invites inference about that to which it is akin. Strauss is cautionary, describing the human susceptibility to being charmed by one or the other of the two forms of knowledge, the charms of “competence” and of “humble awe.” He ends by lauding philosophy as “characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.” “Yet it is necessarily accompanied, sustained and elevated by eros. It is graced by nature’s grace.” The eloquence of this ending of “The Classical Solution” must not hide its implied knowledge claim. Strauss left the stranger from Elea to end with the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium, who does not claim ignorance: “I claim to have expert knowledge of nothing but erotics” (177d). Socrates that night led his most sophisticated audience to a point where it could see that his claim extended to the whole: he intimated that to be is to be eros, that the character of the whole is not simply mysterious but, as eros, is akin to what is knowable in self-knowledge. Socrates’s claim of ignorance must be modified though not abandoned, for if to be is to be eros, being retains its mysteriousness in its particulars while being inferentially knowable in its character. Socrates’s ignorance defense is therefore qualified by Plato’s Symposium and his claimed knowledge of eros. A student of Strauss thinks of Nietzsche here, for Strauss showed Nietzsche following this very path through knowledge of the human soul (“psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems”)10 to a claim about the character of the whole. Nietzsche inferred on the basis of knowledge of the soul that to be is to be will to power and nothing besides. So what is will to power and how is it related to Platonic eros and to the world being investigated by modern science? This, to me, is the way ahead for political philosophy. Rather than asserting that “our understanding of what is human in man” cannot be affected by modern natural science, we can pursue the question of how scientific knowledge can be useful in reflecting on the ontology/cosmology that runs esoterically through the philosophic tradition from Socrates to Nietzsche, an ontology that recognizes the sovereignty of becoming and that can be labeled, if simplistically, a process monism that does not forget the internal intentionality implied in calling the process either eros or will to power. . On Strauss’s recognition of the ontological dimension of this claim in the Symposium, see OPS, 196; see also Benardete, “On Plato’s Symposium,” Argument of the Action, 167–85, and my essay, “How Benardete Read the Last Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic Education,” in Pangle and Lomax, Political Philosophy Cross-Examined. 10. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 23.



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“ANTI-THEOLOGICAL IRE” The “modern solutions” are multiple but “have a fundamental principle in common,” a negative one: “rejection of the classical scheme as unrealistic” (44). Strauss no longer takes Spinoza or Hobbes to be the founder of the modern. “The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli” (45), and half of Strauss’s pages on the modern solutions are devoted to him. Machiavelli’s work “is based on a critique of religion and a critique of morality” (46), topics Strauss earlier took to be basic in Spinoza and Hobbes. The critique of religion is “not original” but “a restatement of the teaching of pagan philosophers” and certain medieval thinkers. “Machiavelli’s originality in this field is limited to the fact that he was a great master of blasphemy.” Strauss keeps the “charm and gracefulness” of those blasphemies “under the veil under which he has hidden them,” a politic decision for his Jerusalem audience not indulged on other occasions where revealing Machiavelli’s blasphemies—God is the ultimate Tyrant—seems part of the fun (SPPP, 223–25; TM, 48–52). But Strauss’s aim is clear: reveal the crime at the founding of the modern, destroy legitimacy by displaying base origins. As for Machiavelli’s critique of morality, Strauss identifies it with his “critique of classical political philosophy,” whose “main point” is the claim that “there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualization is highly improbable” (47). In the language Strauss used regarding Plato’s Republic, the main point of Machiavelli’s critique of morality was his rejection of the impossible just city as the main approach to politics. Instead of taking his bearings from virtue, from actions in accord with the imaginary just city, Machiavelli took his “bearings by the objectives which are actually pursued by all societies.” After laying out chief features of Machiavelli’s approach, Strauss says that in Machiavelli “[a] fearless thinker seems to have opened up a depth from which the classics, in their noble simplicity, recoiled” (52)—to recoil in this case means to recognize but refrain from openly acknowledging, as Strauss implies by adding that “there is in the whole work of Machiavelli not a single true observation regarding the nature of man and of human affairs with which the classics were not thoroughly familiar.” This claim acknowledges that in setting out Machiavelli’s critique of morality Strauss exaggerated Machiavelli’s novelty by making it seem as if he was the first to observe what he was the first to state. For example, Machiavelli’s view regarding “the founders of society” that “[t]he context within which morality is possible is created by immorality” (48): Homer’s Odyssey taught this limit on the just city in a veiled

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manner by making Odysseus’s founding of Telemachus’s regime depend upon morally justifying the killing of all 108 suitors, representatives of the old regime; Homer played a knowing role in that justification by repeated moral denunciation of the wicked suitors, for he knew that the long-term success of Odysseus’s calculating deed depended on what was sung of it. Why did Machiavelli choose to set in motion what Strauss calls “[a]n amazing contraction of the horizon [that] presents itself as an amazing enlargement of the horizon”? The reason Strauss gives is historical: “By Machi­ avelli’s time the classical tradition had undergone profound changes.” Among them, “[t]he contemplative life had found its home in monasteries”; the focus of contemplation was no longer inquiry but obedience. Also, “[m]oral virtue had been transfigured into Christian charity”; the introduction to Philosophy and Law makes this change “the extreme (‘theological’) virtue of charity,” replacing “the ‘natural’ (‘philosophic’) virtue” (PL, 136 n. 2). These changes are part of the one great change: Christianity ruled Western society. And Strauss makes a point of saying just how Christianity acted in Machiavelli’s day: “Concern with the salvation of men’s immortal souls seemed to permit, nay, to require courses of action which would have appeared to the classics, and which did appear to Machiavelli, to be inhuman and cruel.” Machiavelli and the classics share in condemning Christian actions such as the one Strauss references: “Machiavelli speaks of the pious cruelty of Ferdinand of Aragon, and by implication of the inquisition, in expelling the Marannos from Spain.” A praiseworthy Machiavelli, likened to the classics, steps forth: “Machiavelli was the only non-Jew of his age who expressed this view.” What reason did he give for the pious cruelty of a Christian king? “He seems to have diagnosed the great evils of religious persecution as a necessary consequence of the Christian principle, and ultimately of the Biblical principle.” One of the foundational judgments initiating the modern revolution here comes to word as Strauss shows that he has not forgotten what Jerusalem stands for. According to Machiavelli’s diagnosis, the Inquisition belonged to an inexorable logic not just of the Christian principle but of the principle of monotheism whose God issues categorical imperatives to those for whom nothing is as important as obedience. And Machiavelli’s diagnosis is shared by Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, and other great post-Machiavelli thinkers as a reason for their great action as a reaction.11

11. Recent diagnoses stress the logical link between monotheism and inhuman actions; see Jan Assmann (e.g., Moses the Egyptian, The Price of Monotheism) and Peter Sloterdijk, Gottes Eifer.



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Strauss then weakens diagnosis but repeats the judgment: Machiavelli “tended to believe that a considerable increase in man’s inhumanity was the unintended but not surprising consequence of man’s aiming too high.” In three sentences beginning with “Let us,” Strauss characterizes the “contraction” of the horizon: Let us “lower our goals,” “replace charity by calculation,” “revise all traditional goals”—the contraction is the erasure of transcendence. But if Machiavelli is “the first example” of this “spectacle,” his great followers, particularly Bacon, proved themselves better students of Plato on the very point that Strauss emphasized as central to Plato’s philosophic politics. Against the “main point” of Machiavelli’s “critique of classical political philosophy” (47), Bacon restored the Platonic notion of the impossible just city and did so by consciously making his stated goal look Christian: he translated the Christian heaven into a human future on earth made imaginable by the true science of nature and the technology it generated, and he retained a tempered and tolerant Christianity as a civil religion. In this sense, then, Bacon is the true founder of the modern, its Plato: he taught the modern public a new just city while teaching philosophers its status as impossible dream. Bacon’s great followers adopted Bacon’s indispensable Platonic adjustment to the modern spiritual warfare initiated by Machiavelli. Strauss then concludes his paragraph about Machiavelli’s diagnosis with a claim about his motive. The tepid beginning and wobbly causal claim of Strauss’s sentence belie the pivotal role its core assertion has played in interpreting Strauss’s view of the modern founding: “I would then suggest that the narrowing of the horizon which Machiavelli was the first to effect, was caused, or at least facilitated, by anti-theological ire—a passion which we can understand but of which we cannot approve.” Antitheological ire—this fine phrase offers itself as the deepest explanation of the whole modern revolution, and Strauss’s interpreters have largely accepted the offer.12 The root of the mighty actions that broke the hold of the ancient view as transmitted by Christianity and that founded our world turns out to be anger at God or at least at the Christian way of talking about God. Could it really have been ire, mere ire? And not judgment—the “diagnosis” made by the best minds to oppose the very thing Strauss named:

12. The phrase is a refinement of Strauss’s earlier accusations according to which modern atheism is mere rebellion based on fear of superhuman forces and death, orthodoxy’s old accusations (PL, 35–36). A milder variant appears later in his 1963 essay “Marsilius of Padua”: “antitheological passion” (HPP, 294; LAM, 201).

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rule by an Almighty God, which permits, nay, requires his subjects to perform inhuman and cruel acts in order to please him and win for themselves the blessedness he alone can give and gives only to the obedient? It is not plausible that the best minds of this age of Christian inhumanity and cruelty took up Machiavelli’s invitation because they were moved by antitheological ire. Instead, they shared what Strauss noted in Machiavelli, the judgment and humanity that led him to be the only non-Jew of his time to express himself on the inhumanity and cruelty of Christian fanaticism—and to act against it. Those best minds, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, uniformly employed the art of exoteric writing to give their rationale for taking up the transformative project of Machiavelli, to whom Bacon confessed himself “much beholden.”13 Their writings intimate their judgment that a sovereign religion with an Almighty and Inscrutable God had to be crushed in its sovereignty if civilization was to be preserved, the civilization of the Renaissance in which the great works of Greece and Rome had only recently been recovered for Europe and made available for study. In the greatest works of the post-Machiavelli age—exoteric masterpieces like Montaigne’s Essays, Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (with its three attached essays), Hobbes’s Leviathan, and most particularly Bacon’s Advertisement Touching a Holy War—the greatest minds of the age convey esoterically their real reasons for acting to bring down a tyrannical religion whose wars threatened the Renaissance. In these works these masters show they are schooled not primarily by Machiavelli but by Plato, who taught that philosophy must rule and rule by using the rhetorical arts to teach the few independent minds to rule the minds of the many. With Bacon the great Platonic means of a new impossible just city was put into the service of crushing Christianity. Bacon and those who followed him practiced what Strauss showed Plato and Xenophon practicing, those students of Socrates who combined the highest reason with the most artful writing to redirect the Greek enlightenment and turn it Socratic. And that same Strauss would like us to believe that the greatest minds of the two centuries after Machiavelli were moved by ire and not by judgment in opposing tyrannical religion and founding a world-altering alternative on the Platonic model? No, this is Strauss’s artful rhetoric again. For it is impossible to believe that Strauss believed that mere ire moved these great Platonic thinkers and actors. The rhetorician of the introduction of Philosophy and Law speaks in Jerusalem of the greatest invention of Athens and speaks in the Athe13. Advancement of Learning 2.21.9.



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nian manner. Blending reason and rhetoric, he aims to awaken a prejudice against the modern founders. Exegesis confirms this skeptical stance, for Strauss’s very sentence suggests how to exempt Machiavelli and his great followers from the charge of antitheological ire: was the modern revolution “caused” or was it only “facilitated by” antitheological ire? As far as the greatest minds are concerned, ire did not cause “the narrowing of the horizon” however much their anti-Christian project was facilitated by those who took permission from their writings to act on their antitheological ire. Strauss lets it be believed that he believed that mere ire moved the “whole series of political thinkers who succeeded” Machiavelli in fighting “one and the same power—the kingdom of darkness as Hobbes called it” (TM, 231). Charging ire where he thinks it can facilitate his end, Strauss arouses suspicion against the powerful prejudice in favor of the modern. He will be taken by many to be revealing the truth and by a few to be acting reasonably, Machiavellianly.14 Once this is seen, the rhetorical character of Strauss’s lecture begins to feel obtrusive. He says that “Machiavelli radically changed, not only the substance of the political teaching, but its mode as well” (53). The substance “may be said to be the wholly new teaching regarding the wholly new prince, i.e., regarding the essential inherence of immorality in the foundation of society and hence in the structure of society.” Yes, this “may be said to be” wholly new but it is an observation with which Homer was thoroughly familiar. As for the mode of the unarmed founder Machiavelli, Strauss says he copied the victory of Christianity in making his means of success “propaganda” (54). Strauss employs this tendentious word while acknowledging that Machiavelli’s “propaganda is at the opposite pole of what is now called propaganda, high-pressure salesmanship and hold-up of captive audiences” (55). If Strauss can fittingly apply propaganda to Machiavelli’s mode of success, what might be said of Socrates’s mode of success for the teleotheology he wants Kritoboulos and his like to believe, or for the new laws for gods and immortal souls Socrates sells in the Republic? And it was Strauss himself who emphasized Socrates’s effort to win the rhetorician Thrasymachus to the cause of defending philosophy—and Thrasymachus practiced what? Labeling the rhetorical means of modern philosophy propaganda while employing more laudatory words for the means of classical political philosophy has proven to be an effective item in Strauss’s . . .

14. Even some of Strauss’s best commentators take antitheological ire to be what moved the greatest modern thinkers; see Tanguay, Leo Strauss, 108–17, and Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 189.

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propaganda. For this is another crucial matter shared by ancient and modern Platonic political philosophers, the use of what can prejudicially be called propaganda but can more fairly be called rhetoric to successfully spread a novel teaching that begins with one or two wise men writing, the means that Strauss himself not unreasonably adopted from the predecessors he himself recovered. Strauss is willing to say of Machiavelli’s propaganda, No earlier philosopher had thought of guaranteeing the posthumous success of his teaching by developing a specific strategy and tactics for this purpose. The earlier philosophers . . . offered their teachings to their contemporaries and above all to posterity, without even dreaming of controlling the future fate of human thought in general. (55)

This is the same Strauss who laid out the rhetorical strategies of Xenophon and Plato, of Halevi and Maimonides, strategies of persuasion to noble lies they judged indispensable to social order and useful for sheltering philosophy. Perhaps “the future fate of human thought in general” is the clause that differentiates ancient and modern political philosophers: controlling the future fate of human thought in general is a Christian dream. Shifting from “earlier philosophers” to “political philosophers,” Strauss grants that if they “had arrived at definite conclusions regarding the right political order, they would have been vicious, and hence not philosophers, if they had not been willing to help their fellow men in ordering their common affairs in the best possible way.” Previous political philosophers who came to understand the grounds of right political order had acted on behalf of the well-being of society, as Strauss like no one before him showed in detail. “But they did not for one moment believe that the true political teaching is, or is likely to be, the political teaching of the future.” Did Machiavelli believe that it would? His greatest followers at least believed that the true teaching would need to be accompanied by an exoteric teaching that poetized the truth in order to become effective. Machiavelli “was the first of a long series of modern thinkers who hoped to bring about the establishment of new modes and orders by means of enlightenment”—enlightenment now facilitated by general belief in enlightenment. 15

15. Two invitations in Richard Velkley’s study of Heidegger and Strauss lead his reader to suspect that he reads the modern founding teachers exoterically: “Could not the modern philosopher’s primary self-presentation as a practical benefactor be an exoteric means through which the philosopher finds his way to ‘original natural freedom’?” “Strauss does not give much attention



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As Strauss moves from Machiavelli to his great followers, the word he repeatedly applies to their views is “scheme,” no compliment for philosophic achievements of high rank.16 “Machiavelli’s scheme was open to serious theoretical difficulties,” particularly its “cosmological basis,” which assumed but did not demonstrate “the untenable character of teleological natural science.” The required proof rejecting “the notion of natural ends . . . was supplied, or was thought to be supplied, by the new natural science of the 17th century. There is a hidden kinship between Machiavelli’s political science and the new natural science.” Strauss offers one indication of that kinship: “As appears from Bacon, there is a close connection between Machiavelli’s orientation and the notion of torturing nature, i.e., of the controlled experiment.” Bacon spoke of providing “helps for the sense . . . by experiments.” Experiments augment the study of “nature free and at large” by studying “nature under constraint and vexed,” forcing nature “out of her natural state” because “the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.”17 The point is not “torture” but truth discovered by experimental means: what do truths so discovered suggest about “the normal case”—falling objects in a vacuum, for instance, as compared to the normal case that had made it seem reasonable to hold that stone fell faster than cork because stone contained more of the element that belonged at the center of all things, earth? Bacon introduced an experimental science that, granted time, would make the implied cosmology of the Bible as evidently untrue as the cosmology of Aristotle. To gain time, the new science had to equip itself with what Bacon knew to be rhetoric: he transformed the Bible’s promise of paradise forever in the next life into the promise of paradise forever in the human future through work in the world now and for generations—his truly Napoleonic strategy. By converting minds like Descartes’s and influencing the minds of many, to the indications in modern philosophers of concern with the philosophic life as a distinctive life . . . In the end it is difficult to assess the extent to which Strauss’s Platonic-Nietzschean device of dialectical overstatement controls his account of modern philosophy” (Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 53, 197 n. 18). Despite these invitations to pursue the possibility of deep continuity between ancient and modern philosophers on the essential matter of the philosophic life, I have not been able to find in Velkley’s book indications that he himself followed that invitation. Instead, he seems consistently to treat the modern philosophers as elevating practice above “theory.” E.g., “Philosophy, abandoning the primacy of contemplation in seeking to make man wholly at home in the city, loses sight of the suprapolitical” (118). 16. Strauss first used the word to describe Rousseau’s “scheme of education” (40); and he used it at the start of “The Modern Solutions” to state the principle of modern political philosophy “negatively: rejection of the classical scheme” (44), and to describe the “actualization of [Machiavelli’s] scheme” (47). 17. Bacon, The New Organon, “The Great Instauration.”

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to establish the Royal Society for instance, Bacon advanced the modern employment of human reason whose history Strauss leaves out, natural science. That great history of the rational application of the human mind to discover the truth about nature does not end in “the failure of modern rationality,” the historicism Strauss put to rhetorical use in recommending a return to classical rationality. Strauss’s history of modern “schemes” ignores the greatest scheme of the great schemer Bacon. Identifying Bacon’s scheme, bringing it into the open with tools Strauss supplied through his account of the exotericism of the great authors, does serious damage to Strauss’s scheme, which is far indeed from being the whole story of “modern rationality.”18

“THE WAVE THAT BEARS US TODAY” Strauss arranged the modern solutions under the ancient Greek metaphor of three waves according to which the third wave, the largest, either drowns or saves. In Plato’s use the third wave saves: if the philosopher rules, the city can attain happiness in a certain sense. Does Plato’s use color Strauss’s? Aligning Strauss’s first two waves with Plato’s, equality of tasks for men and women and the expansion of the family to include all citizens, seems quite artificial, and Strauss’s denunciation of the third wave “that bears us today” seems to put Plato’s use at some distance. Still, Strauss’s use of a prominent image in “the most famous political work of all times” (CM, 62) demands attention. The history of modern schemes that Strauss now tells moves first to the two-stage mitigation by which the “revolting character” of Machiavelli’s scheme was made fit for English parlours by Hobbes and Locke. He then moves to “the second wave of modernity,” “Rousseau’s passionate and still unforgettable protest” against the “degradation of man” caused by the first wave (60).19 This stage includes “German idealistic philosophy and 18. Bacon is also instructive with respect to that other main feature of Strauss’s way of depreciating modern philosophy against ancient philosophy, the alleged priority of action over contemplation (e.g., CM, 3–4). When he reached the end of the first book of The New Organon that set out the principles of the new method for the investigation of nature, Bacon said, “And yet (to speak the whole truth), as the uses of light are infinite in enabling us to walk, to ply our arts, to read, to recognize one another—and nevertheless the very beholding of the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all the uses of it—so assuredly the very contemplation of things as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion, is in itself more worthy than all the fruit of inventions” (New Organon, aph. 129). 19. As for Rousseau and the alleged ancient-modern divide, the leading Strauss scholar, Heinrich Meier, has demonstrated in Über das Glück des philosophischen Lebens how Rousseau



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the romanticism of all ranks in all countries.” While “Rousseau returned” and “Kant returned” and “Hegel returned” and “romanticism as a whole is primarily a movement of return,” all these returns “led . . . to a much more radical form of modernity . . . still more alien to classical thought.” The classical emphasis on teleology, on man’s end, had been transformed by Hobbes and Rousseau to an emphasis on man’s beginning, the state of nature, and consequently on history or “History” (63). Strauss makes no mention of the fact that the contest of doctrines on human origins in the service of understanding the human must now be measured by the science of paleo-anthropology, which, as part of its contribution to understanding the human, makes divinization of ancestors whether ancient or Rousseauian absurd. As Nietzsche said—Nietzsche who paid responsible attention to knowledge gains in the science of anthropology and the then-new discovery of the evolutionary descent of man—any attempt to divinize the ancestors now faces the ape who stands at the portal to that way back, “grinning knowingly, as if to say, ‘No further in this direction.’ ”20 The evolutionary story, the true story, is not one Strauss is willing to touch publicly. Strauss ends his account of the second wave of modernity on a brief statement about “German idealistic philosophy” as philosophy of history. Kant and Hegel interpreted the modern doctrine of progress as the necessary “actualization of the right order” (65); with “the same realistic tendency” as the first wave, they aimed at the actual establishment of what remained only imaginary republics in ancient thought. At this stage, “philosophy of history” is thus of one kind only, secularized biblical eschatology. But difficulties intrinsic to Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy of history as a doctrine of progress led to the third wave of modernity. Could the third wave, “the wave that bears us today” (66), imitate Plato’s third wave, rule by a philosopher with a theological-political program? Strauss gives the third wave one paragraph only, his last. Its second sentence runs: “This last epoch was inaugurated by Nietzsche”—and Nietz­ sche did in fact aim to recover philosophic rule. Thus Spoke Zarathustra

exemplifies all the chief features of Platonic political philosophy based on genuine philosophical inquiry. Meier’s book is a major contribution to the elimination of Strauss’s rhetorical divide between ancient and modern and the establishment of the genuine difference-in-continuity between ancient and modern or post-Revelation philosophers. His pages 156–59 display in the appropriate way in the appropriate place the ontology underlying Rousseau’s writing—to oversimplify (and lose the beauty of Meier’s sentences and paragraphs), the process monism he shares with philosophers ancient and modern from Socrates to Nietzsche, the ground of a philosopher’s happiness. 20. Dawn of Morning, aph. 49.

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and Beyond Good and Evil advocate rule by the philosopher in the same way as the ancients did, through poetry, but a new poetry true to the earth and attentive to modern reality: it must include philosophic leadership of science. Could Strauss’s final paragraph suggest that the third wave is philosophic rule in a Nietzschean sense? It is the sixty-sixth paragraph. And 66 must matter in an essay given in Jerusalem by a speaker who does “not for a moment forget what Jerusalem stands for.” His sixty-sixth paragraph turns out to be Jerusalem-like: an apocalyptic denunciation of the outcome of the third wave. Nietzsche’s thought is thoroughly historical, but “he rejected the view that the historical process is rational” or bound to actualize the right order. And Nietzsche “rejected the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modern state is possible,” the genuine individual being the philosopher, that stepson of his time most a stepson in the age of equality. Strauss summarizes Nietzsche’s view of what his Zarathustra calls the “thousand goals”: “that all human life and human thought ultimately rests on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible of rational legitimization.” Only in other contexts does Strauss mention Zarathustra’s thousand and first goal, which differs in the basic respect: understanding the thousand goals as the creations of “great individuals”—a Homer, a Moses—it glimpses a thousand and first goal, a global goal with roots in European natural science and a rational claim to be legitimately based on the truth. Strauss describes a new view of “Nature” different from Rousseau’s view that nature is “lawful and merciful” and the “fundamental experience of existence . . . bliss.” The fundamental experience in the new view is “of suffering, of emptiness, of an abyss.” Strauss rightly does not make this new experience Nietzsche’s own: Nietzsche diagnosed it as what was suffered by those traumatized by the death of God, by the modern withdrawal of millennia of “pampering” teachings like creation and providence that pamper human beings with the belief that God made us and cares for us.21 Because his experience was different, being that of a philosopher, Nietzsche was immune to the withdrawal symptoms associated with the new experience while diagnosing its nihilism and looking to what could lie beyond it. Strauss recognizes the scope and character of Nietzsche’s strategic task: “Nietzsche’s creative call to creativity was addressed to . . . the best men

21. Pampering (Verwöhnung, as in the spoiling of a child) is the word Strauss used in two 1935 letters to Löwith to describe the audience Nietzsche faced and his challenge in addressing it. GS, 3: 638–40 (June 23, July 17).



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of the generations after him,” whom he tempted “to form a new nobility which would be able to rule the planet.” Strauss does not further describe this political dimension of Nietzsche’s thought he leaves unremarked its kinship with the Socratic/Platonic/Xenophontic project for philosophic rule through the best men of their future generations, and he does not acknowledge that this is the only possible way to a future for Nietzsche’s project. But that means that he allows the future for Nietzsche’s thought to blend into the criminal imperialism dreamed up by those he is about to name, instead of allowing it to appear as what it is, aspiration to spiritual rule analogous to that aimed at by Socrates with his teleotheology for the generations of ruling nobility after him. Strauss apparently moves to direct denunciation. He states that Nietz­ sche “preached the sacred right of ‘merciless extinction’ of large masses of men with as little restraint as his great antagonist had done.”22 He condemns Nietzsche for what amounts to being an heir to Jerusalem, a moral/religious believer whose actions are justified by the extreme of belief. He ignores Nietzsche’s statement a few pages later that the war his books encourage is “without powder and smoke.”23 But who can Nietzsche’s “great antagonist” be? Marx as the one most responsible for the dream of the “universal classless and stateless society” Nietzsche opposed? But this is an Athenian stranger ending his contrast of Athens and Jerusalem by indicting modern philosophy: it must be the God of Jerusalem whose categorical imperatives include directives for the annihilating apocalypses devoutly prayed for by his believers. And that may after all cast Strauss’s apparent denunciation of Nietzsche in a different light: all 108 suitors must be killed. And Strauss well knew that Nietzsche said without powder and smoke. Strauss blames Nietzsche for using “his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism and democracy as well.” This contempt for what seem like all the available political options leads Strauss to level the worst accusation possible in Jerusalem: After having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way toward political responsibility. He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime

22. Strauss gives no reference; Nietzsche speaks of “schonungslose Vernichtung” in Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: The Birth of Tragedy,” sec. 4. 23. Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Human, All Too Human,” aph. 1.

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which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like the golden age.

Blaming Nietzsche for the Hitler regime in front of the audience it would most appall is Strauss’s power of passionate speech at its zealous worst. In Jerusalem, never forgetting what Jerusalem stands for, Strauss ends his spiritual warfare against the modern by mirroring the last of the sixty-six books of the Christian Bible: he too ends with an apocalyptic denunciation. He has one more twist for Nietzsche: “He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of the will to power.” In later contexts Strauss treated that doctrine in a responsible, Nietzschean way, as an ontological effort to name the fundamental fact, the way of all beings, with what is unavoidably “a weak and attenuating metaphor.”24 To limit will to power to politics and the human as Strauss does here shows how far he is willing to go for a rhetorical victory in Jerusalem. His public denunciation of Nietzsche in Jerusalem uses words from Plato’s Seventh Letter; Plato denounced a regime in Athens whose leadership included members of his own family, saying that it made “discredited democracy look again like a golden age.”25 A man of Athens uses an Athenian phrase in Jerusalem to sell his zealous rhetoric denouncing the whole of modern thought on the ground of its alleged outcome in Nietzsche’s preparation of Nazism. But Strauss ends on Heidegger, not Nietzsche, on a German philosopher who really was a Nazi. Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism is reasonably interpreted as a logical political outcome of a way of thinking proud to ground itself in resolute loyalty to the blood and soil of Germany. Nietzsche’s way of thinking, by contrast, was that of a “good European,” grounded consciously on the collected heritage of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome while warning Europe early of “the insanity of nationalism.”26 German nationalism, he said, was particularly dangerous because it was based not on a love, like that of France, but on a hate, racial hatred of Jews that placed the European future in jeopardy.27 Heidegger’s way of thinking, Strauss said at the end of his first

24. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 22. In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (34–48) I showed how Strauss’s 1972–73 essay on Nietzsche treated the first two parts of Beyond Good and Evil in a way that was true to Nietzsche’s presentation of will to power as ontology and as the ground for philosophy’s new rule over religion; see also pp. 249–50 below. 25. Plato, Seventh Letter, 324d. 26. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 256. 27. See Beyond Good and Evil, aphs. 250–51, and Gay Science, aph. 377; see also my Nietzsche’s Task, 255–57.



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lecture (26), viewed history as the dispensations of fate passively received by the thinker as what is to be thought. Nietzsche viewed history—“in which no hand and not even a finger of God played a part”28—as understandable by the human intellect informed by knowledge of the human soul. He even claimed to have grasped the whole history of the human as a history of morality now in crisis stage: “We are Hyperboreans. We know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth.”29 Despite these differences on the two most important issues, the possibility of truth and understanding human history, Strauss treats Heidegger as extending the logic of Nietzsche’s thought: “The difficulty inherent in the philosophy of the will to power led after Nietzsche to the explicit renunciation of the very notion of eternity.” This wording opens a gap for understanding the difficulty inherent in will to power in the way Strauss later laid out, but he is in rhetorical mode here, and aside from that small opening on a possible redemption in this apocalypse, denunciation is what counts. Hei­­ degger is the fulfillment of Nietzsche and not only of Nietzsche: “Mod­­ ern thought”—all three waves—“reaches its culmination, its highest selfconsciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity.” Heidegger was latent in Machiavelli and Descartes: “For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.” With these last, apparently pious words implying a return to Jerusalem, the man of Athens in Jerusalem brings to a culmination his propaganda to arouse a prejudice against the whole of modern thought from Machiavelli to Nietzsche: its natural outcome is the Nazi philosophy of Heidegger.

A DIFFERENT NIETZSCHE IN A DIFFERENT SETTING It is nine years after the Jerusalem lectures, March 25, 1964, and Strauss is in a very different setting, an American university, Cornell, at which his charismatic former student Allan Bloom is gathering his own followers to Strauss’s perspective. There Strauss gives a lecture entitled “The Three

28. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 203 29. Antichrist, aph. 1; Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 32, gives a sketch of the moral history of “the last ten thousand years . . . in a few large regions of the earth” including our own, a sketch elaborated in On the Genealogy of Morality.

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Waves of Modernity,” and the Nietzsche who emerges from the five paragraphs devoted to him provides a standard of measure for the rhetorical denunciation in Jerusalem. Speaking to this audience of students, Strauss does not make Nietzsche directly responsible for the Hitler regime, makes no mention of Heidegger as the alleged fulfillment of Nietzsche and modern rationality, and casts Nietzsche in an essentially positive light.30 The Nietzsche of this lecture sustains the temper of Strauss’s new discussion of the first two waves, which managed to get along without antitheological ire, propaganda, schemes, and the like. The lecture is Strauss at his best: sustained brilliance of insight into a wide range of leading modern thinkers coupled with sustained eloquence in memorable formulations of those insights. The sole figure of the third wave is a Nietzsche to be studied for his thought, a Nietzsche that seems to show a Strauss underway, approaching the Nietzsche set out with unparalleled insight in his 1972–73 “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.”31 Saying only that “the third wave is related to Nietzsche” (94), Strauss again starts his discussion of Nietzsche with the “new understanding of the sentiment of existence . . . the experience of terror and anguish.” Again he does not make this Nietzsche’s sentiment. Quoting Nietzsche without giving the reference (Human, All Too Human, aph. 2), he says, “All philosophers have the common defect that they start from present-day man and believe that they can reach their goal by an analysis of present-day man. Lack of historical sense is the inherited defect of all philosophers” (95). This sounds, he says, “very strange in Nietzsche” because the discovery of history had already taken place and Hegel had been the “most powerful philosopher of history.” But Hegel viewed the historical process as rational and resulting in “a peak and end of history” that he, standing on the peak, could understand. Post-Hegelian thought “understood the historical process as unfinished and 30. That Strauss’s rhetorical misuse of Nietzsche at the end of his Jerusalem lectures intentionally avoids a more positive view of Nietzsche can also be seen by looking backward: on April 27, 1940, Strauss gave Nietzsche an honorable position over against Heidegger in a lecture at Syracuse University (“Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy”): he closed his lecture by saying that the philosopher Nietzsche “reasserted hypothetically the doctrine of eternal return: to drive home that the elementary, the natural subject of philosophy still is, and always will be, as it had been for the Greeks, the Κοσµος, the world” (Meier, Leo Strauss and the TheologicoPolitical Problem, 138). 31. In the two books in which “The Three Waves of Modernity” appeared—both of which begin with “What Is Political Philosophy?”—the editor, a student of Strauss, failed to indicate its provenance, giving no indication of the time of its being written or whether it was ever publicly presented. Reflection on just how this account of the three waves may relate to that of the published lectures in Jerusalem is thus robbed of its starting point. See Gildin, Political Philosophy and An Introduction to Political Philosophy. I cite the pagination of the second book.



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unfinishable, and yet it maintained the now baseless belief in the rationality or progressive character of the historical process. Nietzsche was the first to face this situation” in which “all principles of thought and action are historical” and the notion that “the historical sequence of these principles is progressive” was a “baseless hope” (96). Strauss summarizes Nietzsche’s account of human ideals: “All ideals are the outcome of human creative acts, of free human projects that form that horizon within which specific cultures were possible; they do not order themselves into a system.” “Yet all known ideals claimed to have an objective support: in nature or in god or in reason.” And he gives Nietzsche’s conclusion: “The historical insight destroys that claim and therewith all known ideals.” So Nietzsche too occupied a privileged position: “precisely the realization of the true origin of all ideals—in human creations or projects—makes possible a radically new kind of project, a transvaluation of all values, a project that is in agreement with the new insight yet not deducible from it.” Recalling what Strauss said about the teleotheology of Xenophon’s Socrates or about the “ideas” and the teaching on the gods and the immortal soul in Plato’s Socrates suggests the fitting comparison: Nietzsche’s project/Socrates’s project, that is Strauss’s ultimate modern/ancient distinction, one that places Socrates and Nietzsche on shared ground. Strauss notes a possible tension in Nietzsche’s project: “does all this not imply that the truth has finally been discovered—the truth about all possible principles of thought and action?” Alleging first that Nietzsche vacillated between “admitting this” and relativizing his view as only “his project or his interpretation,” Strauss has to grant that Nietzsche admitted it, that he claimed the true teaching: “he believed he had discovered the fundamental unity between man’s creativity and all beings: ‘wherever I found life, I found will to power.’” When Zarathustra says this, life means being,32 and Strauss recognizes it as an ontological claim covering the totality of beings. He speaks first about the ground of Nietzsche’s creative act: “The transvaluation of all values which Nietzsche tries to achieve is ultimately justified by the fact that its root is the highest will to power.” And, repeating its ground, he states just what that creative act is: “The final insight into being leads to the final ideal.” Nietzsche’s ontology grounds his creation of the final ideal: the fundamental fact grounds the highest value. Nietzsche’s act overcame the modern severance of value from fact. And value, the final ideal, is based not on some incidental fact but on the fundamental fact: the world can be known as it is and, subsequently, valued 32. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 2, “On Self-Overcoming.”

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as it is; the highest value is the eternal return of the world just as it is—in its own way, let it be said, an impossible just city, but one the desiring of which bespeaks the deepest love of the earth just as it is: Be what you are, be eternally what you are. Here, in compact form, is Strauss’s greatest insight into Nietzsche, the comprehensive insight: knowing the world kindles love of the world. Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche claims not that “the final insight succeeds the actualization of the final ideal but rather that the final insight opens the way for the actualization of the final ideal.” Unlike Marx, Nietzsche sees no necessity in this actualization: “the coming of the Over-man depends on man’s free choice. Only one thing is certain for Nietzsche regarding the future: the end has come for man as he was hitherto; what will come is either the Over-man or the Last-man” (97). And Strauss can summarize in an admirable sentence Nietzsche’s understanding of the outcome that late modernity has come to think desirable: “The last man, the lowest and most decayed man, the herd man without any ideals and aspirations, but well fed, well clothed, well housed, well medicated by ordinary physicians and by psychiatrists is Marx’s man of the future seen from an anti-Marxist point of view.” Strauss finds “one difficulty peculiar to Nietzsche.” It begins with what Nietzsche shared with Plato: “For Nietzsche all genuinely human life, every high culture has necessarily a hierarchic or aristocratic character; the highest culture of the future must be in accordance with the natural order of rank among men which Nietzsche, in principle, understands along Platonic lines.” The alleged difficulty is this: “how can there be a natural order of rank, given the, so to speak, infinite power of the Over-man?” But Nietzsche never ascribed infinite power to the Over-man. He understood the natural order of rank “along Platonic lines” in this particular too: the Over-man is the philosopher, the “commander and legislator”33 pictured in Zarathustra who brings a new teaching that responds to the particular crisis of his present—as Socrates brought the teleotheology to young gentlemen adrift in a decaying Homeric world whose gods were dying.34 Strauss goes on: “For Nietzsche, too, the fact that almost all men are defective or frag33. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 211. 34. Nietzsche presents the Übermensch in part 1 of Zarathustra as the one whose coming all of Zarathustra’s disciples are to prepare; the word virtually disappears in the later parts as Zarathustra himself performs the founding acts of the Übermensch: gaining insight into will to power and willing eternal return. Übermensch is used almost exclusively in Zarathustra; in Beyond Good and Evil that singular figure is called “the complementary man” (aph. 207), “the genuine philosopher” (aph. 211).



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mentary cannot be due to an authoritative nature but can be no more than an inheritance of the past, or of history as it has developed hitherto.” These phrases from Zarathustra’s speech “On Redemption”35 lead Strauss deeper into the “difficulty” in fact absent in Nietzsche: “To avoid this difficulty, i.e. to avoid the longing for the equality of all men when man is at the peak of his power, Nietzsche needs nature or the past as authoritative or least inescapable.” Nietzsche never suggests that the Übermensch annuls the order of rank by becoming the future Everyman; instead, the Übermensch is nature’s finest, rarest product, natural man in the “lucky hits” of the few highest, the few “genuine philosophers,” the rare founding teacher. Yes, Nietzsche needs nature. And he has nature, nature as historical and generating an order of rank it never annuls. Strauss’s “one difficulty” here is a serious misunderstanding corrected in his 1972–73 essay. There, he grants that Nietzsche has what he needs, ontological understanding of nature as will to power that sorts itself into an order of rank among humans whose peak is the philosopher, a natural product of natural history. Strauss’s 1964 misinterpretation of the Übermensch continues for one last point: “Yet since [nature] is no longer for him an undeniable fact, he must will it, or postulate it. This is the meaning of his doctrine of eternal return.” Strauss’s late essay corrects this misunderstanding too, for Nietzsche does not postulate nature or nature’s historically generated order of rank; nature is the great given for him, the fundamental fact. What he postulates is eternal return, and in postulating that, the eternal return of the whole past just as it was, he affirms nature as it is with its highest possible affirmation. In 1972–73 Strauss calls this Nietzsche’s “relapse into Platonism,” the philosopher’s love of the world affirming the world as lovable. That sentiment of existence is what Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return expresses; and that teaching becomes a winnowing doctrine, a religion that nurtures the natural love of existence while condemning the historic vengeance against natural existence. In a laconic paragraph, Strauss situates Nietzsche as a critic of modernity. “Surely the nature of man is will to power”—is Strauss assenting?—“and this means on the primary level the will to overpower others: man does not by nature will equality.” This is Strauss’s only remark on Nietzsche’s critique of one primary modern virtue, equality of rights, and it blocks access to the ground of Nietzsche’s critique, his defense of the natural order of rank that peaks with the philosopher—Nietzsche protests the modern virtue of equality on behalf of nature and the possibility of 35. Zarathustra, part 2.

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philosophy. Strauss goes on: “Man derives enjoyment from overpowering others as well as himself. Whereas Rousseau’s natural man is compassionate, Nietzsche’s natural man is cruel” (98). Letting “cruel” stand unexplained indulges a degree of the rhetorical denunciation characteristic of the lectures in Jerusalem. Strauss knows that cruelty in Nietzsche is his protest against the other primary modern virtue, “sympathy for sufferers,” which aims to end all suffering. Nietzsche’s endorsement of cruelty derives from his recognition of “the discipline of great suffering,”36 recognition that all human greatness comes as attainment, as struggle to overcome. A last paragraph on Nietzsche touches the matter made pure denunciation in Jerusalem. Acknowledging that “[i]n a sense, all political use of Nietz­sche is a perversion of his teaching,” Strauss notes that “[n]evertheless, what he said was read by political men and inspired them.” This leads to a judgment: Nietzsche “is as little responsible for fascism as Rousseau is responsible for Jacobinism. This means, however, that he is as much responsible for fascism as Rousseau was for Jacobinism.” Just how responsible that is or just how to measure a philosopher’s responsibility is left open. Inviting reflection on how Nietzsche’s teaching was perverted, Strauss abandons denunciation in favor of inquiry, abandons apocalyptic Jerusalem condemnation in favor of Athenian inquiry. Strauss’s final paragraph suggests how pivotal Nietzsche is. “[T]he critique of modern rationalism or of the modern belief in reason by Nietzsche” means that we are not permitted “to return to the earlier forms of modern thought.” Nietzsche fulfills “modern rationalism” with a critique that is fateful: it is “the deepest reason for the crisis of liberal democracy.” Crisis does not mean demise, and Strauss gives one reason “above all” for viewing this crisis in a positive light: liberal democracy “derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.” Strauss ends his lecture on an uneasy perdurance of three elements. Continued perdurance of these three elements out into our future seems to be the responsible political option Strauss proposes for late moderns educated by his writings: liberal democracy in perpetual theoretical crisis imagining itself securely founded on premodern Athens and Jerusalem whose foundations are mutually contradictory. Continued theoretical crisis is a political option because “theoretical crisis does not necessarily lead to a practical crisis.” The truth about modern civilization—it believes that it derives support from contradictory premodern

36. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 225.



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traditions—comes to light as its noble delusion. And for any civilization to be sustained, its delusion must be sustained. Strauss’s Cornell lecture ends not with a denunciation designed to awaken a prejudice but on a not quite explicit moral imperative: Auditor, sustain the noble delusion. That imperative is implicit in all of Strauss’s mature writings and was made explicit only at the end of the unpublished fragment he wrote during his 1938–39 discoveries in exotericism: the force of noble lies “cannot be maintained if the nonsuperstitious minority does not voluntarily refrain from openly exposing and refuting the ‘superstitious’ beliefs.”37 Strauss’s work of recovery, the enduring work of his maturity, is sustained by a hope: a responsible reader, taught to be skeptical by his writings, will, he hopes, learn as well the necessity of voluntarily keeping silent to sustain the noble delusion. The great engines of this necessity had to be left unspoken. Spoken, they say: Reader, let self-knowledge, self-interest, and responsibility guide your acceptance of these gifts of insight into what philosophy has always been and must continue to be. Learn and maintain silence.

ON NOT MAINTAINING SILENCE Nietzsche did not maintain silence on the reigning delusion. He judged instead that outspoken attack on Platonism, Christianity, and the modern virtues they spawned was the proper means to recover from two millennia of detour and to restore the direction civilization had attained as a beginning in Greece and Rome. That beginning was attained by the development of science, particularly its “sense for facts,” and its method of inquiry, particularly “the incomparable art of reading well . . . that presupposition for the tradition of culture, for the unity of science.”38 Any voluntary agreement between Strauss and his nonsuperstitious followers to refrain from exposing the false beliefs of modern liberal democracy—Platonism and the Bible—faces the great problem of Nietzsche. His open, alluring writings aim to further, even to lead, the modern science of nature. For Nietzsche belongs to modern rationality in that way too: the truly Napoleonic strategy of the founders of the modern Enlightenment did not preclude, it instead anticipated future philosophers who would understand the necessity of the philosophic leadership of science. Francis Bacon even gave them a name, these future heirs of his revolution: “Joabin,” philosophers whose spiritual travels 37. “Exoteric Teaching,” 59. 38. Antichrist, aph. 59.

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would enable them to understand the spiritual situation of their time and to learn that they too would need to rule, need to direct what Bacon called “the House of Solomon,” the scientific institution that seemed to rule his imaginary future society by virtue of its being honored as the source of daily blessings.39 Nietzsche, that “Joabin” of the late nineteenth century, judged that the trajectory of modern times dictated breaking once and for all the spiritual grip of Jerusalem and Platonic Athens. He advanced the Baconian strategy of widening the horizon in every direction, leaving not only the impregnable fortresses of orthodoxy in the rear but also the modern virtues of equality and the end of suffering that were their heir. And he too recognized the need for poetry in order that truth might make its way in the world; even the modern experiment of founding society on the truth needed poetic approximation of the truth in its aspiration to be the thousand and first goal for a now global humanity.40 Nietzsche is Strauss’s exemplary figure for modernity’s “third wave.” The trajectory of his thinking life shows one more reason—not mentioned by Strauss—why he is exemplary: on the way to his maturity as a thinker he consciously made the choice no longer to maintain silence about the truth. For Nietzsche, that notorious exposer of superstitious beliefs, began as a thinker who held to the necessity of keeping silent about truth because truth is “deadly”: Nietzsche began as a Straussian avant la lettre. But then, in the books of his early to mid-thirties, Nietzsche affords us a rare privilege, and what an electric aspect of his exemplarity this is: we watch as the thinker of the wave that bears us now undergoes a sea change, a turning around from being a “Straussian” critic of the modern Enlightenment to advocating the Enlightenment project of founding society on the truth. Early on, as a student of the Greeks and devotee of Wagner, Nietzsche held the old conviction: healthy social order depends on life-giving lies; art alone—poetry and music—can weld a people to noble purpose. Truth, the Nietzsche of his first five books held, was “deadly” in its three prime tenets: 39. Joabin pluralizes Joab, wise counselor of King David; in New Atlantis he is the emblem of philosophic rule in its serial character. Bacon makes the brief dialogue between Joabin and the narrator of New Atlantis the means whereby the new science and its wise rule are introduced into Europe: a civilization wisely founded is wisely guided by the Joabin through the crises that even the wisest founder cannot foresee. See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 48–60. 40. Eve Adler showed that founding a world-dominating society on the truth appeared as a possibility in Rome at the end of the Republic: in brilliant exegetical accounts of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (c. 49 BCE) and Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 19 BCE), made possible by Strauss’s recovery of exotericism, she demonstrates how these two thinkers and poets of the highest rank mounted arguments for and against founding Roman society on enlightenment (Adler, Vergil’s Empire).



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“the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds, and the lack of any cardinal difference between man and the animals.”41 Looking back on this beginning from his maturity, he could say, “Leering out of the writings of my first period is the grimace of Jesuitism: I mean the conscious holding on to illusion and forcibly incorporating that illusion as the basis of culture.”42 Jesuitism is an aggressive version of the Platonic notion of the noble delusion, and Nietzsche wrote his first books as a kind of adherent to it—as he acknowledged again in a late book, Twilight of the Idols. He opened its five-part chapter “Those Who ‘Improve’ Humanity” by saying that his “demand on philosophers is well-known . . . that they put the illusion of moral judgment beneath them.” After outlining his new evidence—the “Law of Manu”—for holding that morality has served as the most effective cultural instrument ever for generating particular kinds of obedient humans, he ends by reporting the “small and basically modest fact that first gave me access to this problem: the so-called pia fraus . . . Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius, nor the Jewish and Christian teachers, have ever doubted their right to lie.”43 In a note also written in 1888, Nietzsche once again looked back to his beginning to make a confession: “It was on the relationship between art and truth that I first became serious: and even now I stand before this rift with a holy horror. My first book [was] dedicated to it.”44 That first book, The Birth of Tragedy, he now reports, “believes in art against the background of another belief: that it is not possible to live with the truth; that the ‘will to truth’ is already a symptom of decadence.” The “art” he believed in is art in its most comprehensive sense, art as that kind of poetry or imaginative making that allowed Plato to view religion as falling within poetry. The last third of that first book elevated Wagner as the artist creating the imaginative world within which, Nietzsche wanted to believe, German humanity and eventually modern humanity generally could thrive. Nietzsche’s early belief that it was not possible to live with the truth lasted through Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, his fifth book, published in early July 1876. His hopes for Wagner the artist there receive their most extreme expression, for

41. On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, sec. 9. After stating these three “true but deadly” insights, Nietzsche argued that if they were inflicted on the public for another generation in the modern craze for education, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism and greed. 42. KSA, 10: 16 [23], fall 1883. 43. Twilight of the Idols, “Improve,” aph. 5. 44. KSA, 13: 16 [40, 7] (spring–summer, 1888). Georg Picht provides indispensable insight into this opening sentence of Nietzsche’s note; see Picht, Nietzsche, 160–69.

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Wagner, aiming at “influence, incomparable influence,”45 composed the works that would compose the new, postmodern people. Wagner would be for modern humanity what only the very greatest artist can be, the founder of a “people.” Gathering modern humanity from their dispersal into mere commerce and fruitless entertainment, Wagner’s art would restore “to myth its manliness” and provide humanity with the needed horizon of purpose and uplift. But then, a few weeks after Richard Wagner in Bayreuth was published, Nietzsche’s presence in late July 1876 at the rehearsals for the first Bayreuth Festival shocked him out of this grotesque fiction and compelled him almost overnight to embrace a new way of thinking about the possibility of living with the truth. This most important turn of Nietzsche’s life led him, already an avid student of modern physics and anthropology, to embrace the radical innovation of the modern Enlightenment, its “experiment” of founding communal life on the truth. The most important turn of Nietzsche’s life was this break with the “Straussianism” of his first five books. In February 1888, looking back yet again to this most important event, Nietzsche could tell Georg Brandes, the Danish culture critic who was one of his first intelligent readers, “Between the Untimely Meditations and Human, All Too Human lies a crisis and a change of skin.”46 The crisis was his break with Wagner, his terminating his dependence on the artist Wagner. Just what his change of skin was is suggested by the way he chose to open Human, All Too Human. “In Place of a Preface,” he set a passage he translated from Descartes’s Discourse on the Method in which Descartes relates how he reviewed the various occupations which people pursue in this life and made the attempt to choose the best of them . . . Nothing appeared better than to remain strictly with what I had already chosen, that is, that I would spend the whole period of my life cultivating my reason and advancing on the path of truth in accordance with the method I had prescribed to myself . . . The result was finally that my soul was so filled with joy that all other things could no longer touch it.47

45. Wagner in Bayreuth, sec. 8. 46. Kritische Studienausgabe: Sämtliche Briefe, 8: 260. Subsequent references will be to KSB by volume and page number. 47. The classicist Nietzsche added after his translation, “From the Latin of Cartesius,” evidently the Latin translation of 1656 (after Descartes’s death) instead of Descartes’s French original. I have translated Nietzsche’s German. Descartes set his statement on his choice of a way of life in the central paragraph of the Discourse.



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Nietzsche chose to open Human, All Too Human with Descartes’s resolve to face Socrates’s question of the right way of life and to choose what Socrates chose, the philosophic way of life, the independent way of life of the philosopher who consciously sets out to know life and judge life on the basis of reason alone. What stands in place of a preface in Human, All Too Human suggests that with this book Nietzsche began the right way of life for him, the independent life of the philosopher.48 And that meant, given the content of Human, All Too Human, that the philosopher Nietzsche, slipping into his new skin, was compelled to slip out of the skin he had previously adopted, the skin in which all previous philosophers enveloped themselves, the art or poetry of the noble lie they used to advance philosophy. Arriving late in the Enlightenment project that Descartes helped found, the exemplary thinker of the third wave of modernity saw early the coming crisis of European civilization. It was an unparalleled crisis due to that unparalleled feature of the Enlightenment project which he identified: its experiment of living with the truth. Any hope of sustaining modern society on the foundation that had sustained the thousand peoples hitherto, some noble lie, was destroyed by the public pursuit of truth in the sciences. Beginning with Human, All Too Human and including Dawn of Morning and The Gay Science, the books of Nietzsche’s “middle period” trace his deepening understanding of the implications of the scientific pursuit of truth and its consequences for modern civilization.49 Nietzsche began Human, All Too Human in the summer of 1876. He rushed it into print in May 1878 in order to pay tribute to Voltaire right on 48. Starting out as Descartes did on the way to independence of mind, Nietzsche could later, after his great discoveries, exult in being “in all probability the most independent man in Europe” (letter to Franz Overbeck, April 21, 1884 (KSB, 6.497), repeated in letters to his publisher Theodor Frisch, August 29, 1886 (KSB, 7.237), and to Carl Spitteler, July 25, 1888 (KSB, 8.310). 49. In Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period, Paul Franco performs the outstanding service of demonstrating how and to what degree Nietzsche became a friend and advocate of the modern Enlightenment. He shows first that Nietzsche’s earliest books presumed a view similar to Strauss’s according to which culture could flourish only on the basis of popularly believed noble lies sustained by religion and art. Then, in careful exegeses of the three books of Nietzsche’s “middle period,” he shows “a rational Nietzsche, a Nietzsche who is a friend of the Enlightenment and of science” (x) and who embraced the Enlightenment project of “the possibility of erecting a genuine culture upon knowledge” (ibid.). Third and equally important given the current misunderstandings of Nietzsche, Franco shows that the perspective of these great books of Nietzsche’s mid-thirties was sustained and deepened in the still greater works of his maturity. Also highly instructive in showing Nietzsche to be consciously advancing the Enlightenment is Picht, Nietzsche, especially, “Der Zwiespalt zwischen Kunst und Wahr­ heit,” 160–69: “The philosopher of the future is the free mind who is allied with the science of the positivist age, above all with modern natural science, and who knows, with sovereign authority, how to employ all the weapons of this science” (162).

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the front cover under the title: “Dedicated to the memory of Voltaire in commemoration of his death-day, 30 May 1778.” The back of the title page reported that the book “might not have been published just now” had it not served the purpose of paying homage to “one of the greatest liberators of the human spirit.” If Nietzsche could praise Voltaire in 1878 as a hero of the Enlightenment—in part to separate himself from Wagner—he could not stay satisfied with this champion of the moderate Enlightenment but would come to advocate the genuine radical Enlightenment of the one he discovered later as his “precursor, and what a precursor!” Spinoza.50 Explicitly embracing the Enlightenment, Human, All Too Human already sought the “enduring institutions intended to last for centuries” that would provide “the final, ultimate foundation upon which the whole future of humanity [could] establish and construct itself” (aph. 22). Alluding to the church in earlier times, Nietzsche asked, “Can science, too, awaken such faith in its conclusions?” The very nature of science ruled that out: science “needs doubt and distrust for its closest allies.” Still, “the sum of unimpeachable truths—truths, that is, that had survived all the assaults of skepticism and disintegration—can in time become so great . . . that on the basis of them one may embark on ‘everlasting’ works.” A critic of the facile doctrine of progress that ruled public discourse in his time, Nietzsche could still argue that progress was possible (aph. 24) and that working for progress as he understood it was the great challenge of his time. Demise of the belief that “a God broadly directs the destinies of the world . . . leading humanity gloriously upward” means that “humanity itself must set itself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth” (aph. 25).51 Setting such goals depends on adequate knowledge: “if humanity is not to destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first of all attain to a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great minds of the coming century.” Human, All Too Human is rich in setting out the particulars of this future task and of the knowledge already arrived at for reaching the great goal,52 but a single image can show just where Nietzsche’s first book advancing the Enlightenment stands in relation to the books of his maturity: 50. KSB, 6: 111 (July 30, 1881). This postcard to Overbeck prefaces these words with: “I’m totally astonished, totally delighted!” 51. See Human, All Too Human, vol. 2, Assorted Opinions and Maxims (1879): “In respect to the future, there opens out before us, for the first time in history, the tremendous, far-flung prospect of human-ecumenical goals embracing the entire inhabited earth” (aph. 179). 52. Particularly important are the remaining aphorisms of the first part, aphs. 26–34.



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“Culture came into being like a bell, inside a mold of cruder, more common material, a mold of untruth [and] violence.”53 Nodding thus to Platonic delusion, Nietzsche asks of his own age: “Is now the time to remove this mold? Has what was molten solidified?” Are horizon-closing fictions still necessary or “[h]ave the good, useful drives, the habits of nobler hearts, become so secure and general that there is no longer any need to depend on metaphysics and the errors of religion, on harsh and violent acts, as the most powerful bond between human and human, people and people?”54 To answer this question of enlightenment “no sign from a god can help us any longer: our own insight must decide. The earthly government of humanity as a whole must be taken into humanity’s own hands; his ‘omniscience’ must watch over the future fate of culture with a sharp eye.” Nietzsche’s image of a horizoning bell jar enclosing a happy humanity reappears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as perhaps its most beautiful chapter, “Before the Sunrise.”55 Having set sail for his ultimate challenge, the poetic essence of the already attained new understanding of reality, Zarathustra stands on board ship in that moment before dawn in which the sky is an abyss of light with no objects to focus the eye. He addresses a hymn to a sky freed of any possible teleotheology, the heavenly portents and judging gods with which humans have burdened and maligned it. Zarathustra sees the open sky as a sheltering vault of innocence and silence that confers a blessing on earth, permitting everything earthly to be the mortal thing it is. At the same time, open sky confers on the thinker Zarathustra responsibility for a teaching that endorses in words the letting-be, the allowing, of the open sky. The horizoning bell of Human, All Too Human has had its mold removed to reveal that it is transparent in all directions. The open sky commissions the teaching toward which Zarathustra is journeying, the highest possible affirmation of the earth, the desire that it eternally return, an affirmation made possible in part by clearing the sky of the theological and teleological inventions by teachers who believed society needed the strict parlance of divine punishment. The hymn to the open sky in Thus Spoke Zarathustra heralds the new form of the main precondition of human

53. Human, All Too Human, aph. 245, “Casting the bell of culture,” trans. Marion Faber, with modifications. 54. Metaphysics in this sentence stands for the alleged “metaphysical need” that Kant and then Schopenhauer found basic to humans and that their own metaphysical postulations were designed to satisfy. 55. Zarathustra, part 3. On the pivotal character of this chapter, see my Nietzsche’s Teaching, 173–80.

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culture as pictured in Human, All Too Human, the new horizoning teaching to enhance and shape what is given in humanity.

DAWN OF MORNING AND THE MODERN EXPERIMENT OF FOUNDING SOCIETY ON THE TRUTH Writing in his last year to a new correspondent in Evansville, Indiana, Nietz­ sche described Dawn of Morning and The Gay Science as the books of his that he “liked best” and that were “the most personal.”56 Having resigned his professorship in May 1879 on grounds of ill health, Nietzsche began work in early 1880 on what became Dawn of Morning: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, completing it in early 1881. The book’s title came from the Rig Veda: “there are so many mornings that have not yet dawned,” and Nietzsche said later that the particular morning whose dawn he sought with this book was “a transvaluation of all values, a liberation from all moral values, saying Yes to and having confidence in all that has till now been forbidden, despised, and damned.”57 He saw this book as a watershed in his authorship, for it turned to “the question concerning the origin of moral values . . . for me a question of the very first rank because it is crucial for the future of humanity.”58 “Humanity has so far been in the worst of hands,” he added, ruled by moralists of a particular kind, “slanderers of the world and violators of humanity”; the preface to Beyond Good and Evil made Plato their greatest representative. This pioneering book on the origins and history of morality drew the 1886 preface that described the kind of reader Nietzsche’s art of writing demanded, the kind Strauss’s writings train, for Nietzsche says he is “a teacher of slow reading,” of philology, that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is the goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not 56. KSB, 8: 339–41, to Karl Knortz, June 21, 1888; “liked best” translates “am sympa­ thischsten.” 57. Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Dawn of Morning,” aph. 1. Such declarations must be read with at least a minimum of intelligence. See Dawn of Morning, aph. 103 end: “It goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged—but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently—in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” 58. Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Dawn of Morning,” aph. 2.



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achieve it lento . . . This art . . . teaches to read well . . . to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously fore and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers . . . My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!

Dawn of Morning seeks the origins of morality in the deep human past in order to understand the spiritual situation of the present and to look to tomorrow knowingly, to the dawn of a morning that revived the Enlightenment after nearly a century of cultured opposition to it. In his central chapter, Nietzsche indicted the classical education he received for not instilling in him a hunger for the sciences and a reverence for the great men of the past who struggled to gain the scientific truths that are now commonly known (aph. 195),59 and he asked why that system of education never allowed the question of truth as a way of life even to be raised (aph. 196). Moving then to analyze “German hostility to the Enlightenment” (aph. 197) during “the first half of this century,” Nietzsche said, “German philosophers . . . retreated to the first and oldest stage of speculation” and “brought to life again a pre-scientific species of philosophy . . . German historians and romantics … [brought] into honor older, primitive sensibilities and especially Christianity.” German “natural scientists . . . fought against the spirit of Newton and Voltaire.” “The whole tendency of the Germans was against the Enlightenment . . . the cult of feeling was erected in place of the cult of reason.” And finally, “German composers built at the new temple more successfully than any of the artists of words or ideas.” But now, “Let us breathe freely again: the hour of this danger has passed.” It is strange, he says, but “the study of history,” begun in “the spirit of obscurantism and reaction,” now reinforces “that very Enlightenment against which [it was] first conjured up.” He can therefore end this aphorism on the Enlightenment summing up a century of European spiritual history: “This very Enlightenment we must now carry further forward”; now that “the ‘great

59. For the rest of his life Nietzsche worked to recover from this educational crime: he remained avid to the end to learn what science had discovered and was discovering about man and the world, for as he noted, the truths pursued by science were hard to discover but easy to learn once discovered. Nietzsche’s acquaintance with his contemporary science has become a theme of recent Nietzsche scholarship; see, e.g., Moore and Brobjer, Nietzsche and Science; Ansell Pearson, Companion to Nietzsche; Small, Nietzsche in Context; Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism; Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History; Heit, Abel, and Brusotti, Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie.

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revolution’ and the ‘great reaction’ against it have taken place,” we can give ourselves to “the truly great flood which bears us along.” Nietzsche’s first contributions to that great flood of a revived Enlightenment based on the modern science of nature appear especially in the final chapter of Dawn of Morning and show how he understood what a philosopher could contribute to that movement to a new future.60 Perhaps its most important statement is this: The new passion.—Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? Because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves!— The reason is that our drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as his unrequited love is to the lover . . . Knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction . . . Perhaps humanity will even perish of this passion for knowledge!—even this thought has no power over us! . . . Yes . . . we would all prefer the destruction of humanity to a regression of knowledge! and finally: if humanity does not perish of a passion it will perish of a weakness: which do you prefer? This is the main question. Do we want humanity to end in fire and light or in the sand? (aph. 429)

Three years later Nietzsche repeated the main point: “We’re conducting an experiment with the truth! Humanity may perish because of it! On with it!”61 The we conducting the experiment is we moderns bred by the culture of the Enlightenment; we are fated to live a momentous cultural experiment to test if the truths long known to philosophers and held to be deadly are in fact deadly. Nietzsche did not invent this experiment, he witnessed it, embraced it, and worked to advance it.

60. Picking out select passages in this chapter does unavoidable violence to the coherent movement Nietzsche built into its 153 aphorisms; they open on the temptation to fall silent in the face of the new truth of the incapacity of speech and thinking to do without error; they close on the necessity of halting where others will fly further into truth; and they everywhere sing of the exhilaration and melancholy of forced restless motion into truth that is not whole not consoling not adequate to what it glimpses and dreams and yet means the world to souls that are powerful and harmless and full of joy and peace as was the soul of Aristotle (aph. 424). 61. KSA, 11: 25 [305], spring 1884.



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Danger to society as a whole still meant special danger for “Investigators and experimenters” (aph. 432): “We investigators are, like all conquerors, discoverers, seafarers, adventurers, of an audacious morality and must reconcile ourselves to being considered on the whole evil.” The most extreme investigator is judged most evil: The evil principle.—Plato has given us a splendid description of how the philosophical thinker must within every existing society count as the paragon of all wickedness: for as critic of all customs he is the antithesis of the moral man, and if he does not succeed in becoming the lawgiver of new customs he remains in human memory as “the evil principle.” (Aph. 496)

Neither social nor personal danger was enough to make Nietzsche think, as Strauss would, that the future lay in the past, in a return to the custom of teleotheology. Nietzsche’s task of truth telling touches the core of Strauss’s project by telling free minds what a philosopher is. “Do not renounce” (aph. 440) tells the truth about “the vita contemplativa of the thinker,” a truth known to Socrates: it is the highest form of activity and yields the greatest pleasure. “When [the thinker] chooses that [life] he is renouncing nothing,” although it looks as if he is because he is renouncing the vita practica, which everyone else thinks is most satisfying. The philosopher forgoes that because “he knows himself.” Nietzsche later put the philosopher’s nonrenunciation in a positive way to describe his own case: “Abstract thinking is for most a tribulation,—for me, on good days, feast and frenzy.”62 In Dawn of Morning, as in every book after it, Nietzsche aims to restore philosophy as the peak of the human order of rank, the human activity that so far from renouncing human passion and pleasure is the deepest indulgence and refinement of them. Aiming always to understand the spiritual situation of the present, Nietz­sche concluded that we occupy a “[m]oral interregnum” (aph. 453) between the ten-thousand-year-old “moral period,” as he called it in Beyond Good and Evil (aph. 32), and the coming postmoral period. No one now is “in a position to describe that which will one day take over from moral feelings and judgments,” however sure one is “that their foundations are all defective and their superstructure is beyond repair.” But beware: “their obligatory force must diminish from day to day, so long as the obligatory 62. KSA, 11: 34 [130], April–June 1885.

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force of reason does not diminish!” As for now, “to construct anew the laws of life and action—for this task our sciences of physiology, medicine, sociology and solitude are not yet sufficiently sure of themselves: and it is from them that the foundation-stones of the new ideals (if not the new ideals themselves) must come.” How to live and act in a time between rulers? “We live an existence which is either a prelude or a postlude, and the best we can do in this interregnum is to be as far as possible our own reges and found little experimental states. We are experiments: let us also want to be them!” Nietzsche’s own experimental states led him more quickly than he expected to the foundation of the postmoral ideal.63 “Mortal souls!” (aph. 501) claims that “perhaps the most useful achievement” in the modern advancement of knowledge “is the abandonment of belief in the immortal soul,” and the reason is surprising: “Now humanity can wait, now it no longer needs to rush precipitately forward or gulp down ideas only half-tasted, as it formerly had to do.” Belief in an immortal soul required its eternal destiny to be settled on short notice, in a lifetime, and therefore “knowledge possessed a frightful importance.” Abandoning that belief means “we have reconquered our courage for error, for experimentation, for accepting provisionally—none of it is so very important.” The result is a transformed perspective: “now individuals and generations can fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness and a trifling with Heaven and Hell.” And a transformed selfimportance: “We may experiment with ourselves! Yes, humanity now has a right to do that!” The final sentence gives the ground of the new right we grant ourselves: “The greatest sacrifices have not yet been offered to knowl63. Franco shows that for his investigations into the origins of morality for Dawn of Morning Nietzsche studied “the most advanced anthropological knowledge of his day” in order to ground his history of morality in the true history of the species (Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 63). Over the course of ten years of study and reflection Nietzsche arrived at his genealogy of morality (GM, preface. 2), recognizing that this was not the end of the task. Knowing that only science could recover the particulars of the human past on which a philosophical account of human spiritual history could be grounded, he added a note to the first treatise of his Genealogy in order “to express publicly and formally” his desire that some university formally offer “a series of academic essay contests” that would “advance historical study of morality and engage philologists, historians, professional philosophers, as well as physiologists and doctors.” He ends his appeal by stating the most direct link between science and philosophy: “All the sciences have from now on to prepare the way for the future task of the philosophers: this task understood as the solution of the problem of value, the determination of the order of rank among values.” Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published in 1859, and Nietzsche was more than simply well acquainted with the debates surrounding Darwinism, for as John Richardson shows in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Nietzsche took Darwinian explanatory principles further than Darwin and the Darwinians ever did, applying them effectively to the history of human culture and making them the basis for an evolutionary step into a new human future.



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edge . . . yes, in earlier times it would have been blasphemy and the loss of eternal salvation even to have an inkling of such thoughts as nowadays determine our actions.” Now we can experimentally sacrifice ourselves to the thought of the long-term goal of humanity as a whole. And with that Nietzsche invokes the constant mood pervading Dawn of Morning as expressed in “Final argument of the brave” (aph. 494): “There are snakes in those bushes.” “Good. I’ll go in and kill them.” “But they may get you and not you them.” “What do I matter!”

“What do I matter!” is not mere personal courage but bespeaks the great opportunity the present age grants to attach oneself to something infinitely greater than one’s immortal soul: “ ‘What do I matter!’—stands over the door of the thinker of the future” (aph. 547).64 The thinker of the future says, “What do I matter!” while recognizing a responsibility toward “The practical” (aph. 505), those living the vita practica. “We thinkers have to determine the palatableness of things first and if necessary decree it. Practical people in the end take it from us.” That dependence of the practical on the thinker is “the most ludicrous spectacle in the world,” for the practical judge the thinker’s life useless. Discovery of this origin of morality assigns its knower a particular practical task: gradually to train the practical in the palatability of the earthly and mortal. Rule by the philosopher through determining the palatable is described in “Knowledge and beauty” (aph. 550).65 People have traditionally reserved “their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling”— noble delusions. The opposite of “imagination and dissembling,” science, “makes them feel cold and disconsolate.” The feelings of gloom or sadness or despair elicited by the discoveries of science make the title of Nietzsche’s next book, The Gay Science, a play on the customary feeling about science. But tastes can be changed: “Science as it is now bestows so abundantly and

64. “Final argument of the brave” is one of hundreds of moments of levity and joking that help make Nietzsche’s books such a pleasure to read. The jokes serve the advancement of the Enlightenment (“God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist”) and show that in Nietzsche the old Enlightenment weapon of ridiculing the idiocies of the orthodoxies is alive and well. See my “Nietzsche’s Best Jokes.” 65. Nietzsche too pictured the philosopher’s responsibility to rule in the Platonic metaphor of a passenger on board ship discovering “that the captain and steersman are making dangerous mistakes and that he is their superior in nautical knowledge” (aph. 436).

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already upon so many . . . the rapture produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge.” But not yet on most, for “this rapture is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depth of appearance.” The task is to make the rapture of the thinker still more general. “The knower enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things—may future humanity bear witness to the truth of this proposition!” That future is a long way off, and “in the meantime” it is useful to recall the uniform experience of philosophers; Nietzsche recalls two ancients and two moderns. Even thinkers as different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for humanity but in itself, even for gods of the highest empyrean: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a welltrained inquisitive and inventive mind . . . Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion; how they must all have savored knowledge.

Nietzsche’s last sentence of aphorism 550 grants that the philosophers’ unanimity on the deep happiness of knowledge was always arrived at in socie­ ties where the happiness of the vast majority could be found only in works of imagination and dissembling, thus forcing them into exotericism: “And what a danger for their Redlichkeit to become eulogists, praise singers, of things!”66 Here lies the task of the future thinker, to change the taste of things, the general taste.67 Dawn of Morning aptly titles the book in which the project of Nietzsche’s maturity dawns. The two main tasks of that project to extend the Enlightenment are gaining fundamental or philosophic insight into what is and producing the poetry to celebrate it, tasks of intellect and imagination here left to future thinkers. Soon after, however, Nietzsche made discoveries that forced him to embrace this future project as his own responsibility and to write the books that were its first installments, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

66. Redlichkeit plays a special role in Dawn of Morning, where it appears for the first time in Nietzsche’s published work. He toyed with the idea of using Redlichkeit in its title: “On the History of Redlichkeit,” “The Passion of Redlichkeit,” “Passio nova or On the Passion of Redlichkeit” (KSA, 9: 6 [457, 459, 461]). On Redlichkeit in its relation to reden, and the impossibility of capturing it in a single English word, see White, “Youngest Virtue.” 67. Gay Science, aph. 39.



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the “entrance hall” to his philosophy,68 and Beyond Good and Evil, the “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” Leo Strauss’s “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” shows that he came to understand who this Nietzsche is, the third wave of modernity, yes, the wave that bears us today, but a wave Strauss came to see as opening a perhaps plausible future through the classical strategy of Platonic political philosophy.

68. Letters to Overbeck, March 8 and April 7, 1884, and to Malwida von Meysenbug, March– May 1884.

chapter nine

Advancing the Enlightenment: Strauss’s Recovery of Nietzsche’s Theological-Political Program

NIETZSCHE, PLATONIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER

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hat Strauss achieved with Nietzsche at the end of his life and only at the end of his life repeats his earlier achievements with Halevi and Xenophon and Plato. The Nietzsche Strauss recovered is a philosopher in the full classical sense. Nietzsche, having set out in mid-career to advance the modern Enlightenment, gained fundamental insight into the way of all beings and only then glimpsed the poetry, the theological-political teaching, natural to that insight. Strauss, while not surrendering his characteristic reticence, showed in his late recovery of Nietzsche that he was a model inquirer, never his own disciple, always flying farther—here, to the recovery of the Platonic political philosopher of our time. The title Strauss gave to what he knew would be his final book, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, fits all his work after his discoveries in exotericism in 1938–39 because he discovered then that “what is nearest to my heart about Plato is independent of the specifically platonic philosophy”—independent of “Platonism” and its ideas, moral gods, immortal souls, et cetera. That understanding of Platonic political philosophy—a theological-political teaching in the service of philosophy—allowed Strauss to move Nietzsche to the center of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, out of chronological order, obtrusive and willful and demanding a reason. The reason is that Nietzsche is the Platonic political philosopher of our time, opposed above all to the specifically Platonic philosophy. Strauss’s

. GS, 3: 557, October 20, 1938.

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“Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” shows the philosopher Nietzsche claiming a knowledge of nature, but it pursues one issue above all, the theological-political project entailed by Nietzsche’s philosophy. In our time Nietzsche belongs at the center of studies in Platonic political philosophy as the latest philosopher to practice on the grand scale the Platonic art of advancing philosophy through religion, advancing the simply highest and best through the common highest and best. Measured by this late essay, Strauss’s earlier statements on Nietzsche betray an incomplete understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy, whether in 1935 when he invoked a nameless Nietzsche to help arouse a prejudice against the Enlightenment, or in 1955 when he denounced Nietzsche by name in Jerusalem. Completing his “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” in his seventy-fourth year with eight months more to live, Strauss could place this essay at the center of the book whose title is the last name he gave to his lifelong topic, the theological-political problem: Nietzsche ended up being just where he belonged in Strauss’s studies in Platonic political philosophy. Begun on March 18, 1972, and finished on February 12, 1973, Strauss’s late Nietzsche essay is the last truly creative recovery in his lifework of opening the hidden history of philosophy to informed inspection. The two essays he wrote after it simply extend what he had already written, first on Thucydides and then on Xenophon in that fitting finale to his life, a last beautiful essay on his Liebling. As far as his work is concerned, Strauss lived long enough to die at the right time. His Nietzsche essay is a milestone in Nietzsche studies, recovery of the genuine philosopher Nietzsche by the greatest reader of the twentieth century, recovery both from the dominant interpretations and from his own earlier judgments against him.

. “Das theologisch-politische Problem ist seitdem das Thema meiner Untersuchungen geblieben”—that is, since his early studies of Spinoza and Hobbes on whether the critique of orthodoxy deserved to be victorious. This statement appears in Strauss’s October 1964 Vorwort to the first publication of the German original of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (GS, 3: 8), a manuscript completed in 1935. . My 1996 book Leo Strauss and Nietzsche dealt exegetically with the whole of Strauss’s essay. I will not repeat here what I wrote there but instead use some of Strauss’s judgments in his essay to show how his recovery of Nietzsche adds a last great chapter to the guidance he offered to the genuine history of philosophy, and to argue that Strauss’s insight into Nietzsche’s philosophy and political philosophy can serve as part of a larger argument in defense of the modern Enlightenment.

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“PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION, IT SEEMS, BELONG TOGETHER” Strauss reveals the primary purpose of his essay by the odd way he describes the structure of Beyond Good and Evil. He says that “philosophy is surely the primary theme of Beyond Good and Evil, the obvious theme of its first two chapters.” Then he opens a new paragraph to say, “The book consists of nine chapters. The third chapter is devoted to religion” (6). Then, after laying out the rest of the book’s structure, he opens his next paragraph saying, “Nietzsche says very little about religion in the first two chapters” (7). Religion is Strauss’s primary theme even where Nietzsche’s obvious theme is philosophy. But a philosopher’s religion is political philosophy. Therefore, by singling out religion in Beyond Good and Evil, Strauss investigates the solution to philosophy’s theological-political problem set out by the philosopher of the wave that bears us today. That is the purpose of Strauss’s essay. The plan of Nietzsche’s book, its separation into two main parts, leads Strauss to say that “[p]hilosophy and religion, it seems, belong together— belong more closely together than philosophy and the city” (6). Nietzsche thus differs from the classics, Plato and Aristotle, on the “fundamental alternative”: for them it was “the philosophic and the political life,” whereas for Nietzsche it is “the rule of philosophy over religion or the rule of religion over philosophy.” “[M]orals and politics,” to which Nietzsche devoted the second of the two main parts of his book, belong “to a lower plane than either philosophy or religion.” Does Strauss judge Nietzsche wrong to differ from Plato and Aristotle on the fundamental alternative? Putting philosophy and religion together, separating them from morals and politics, and making the issue between them one of rule simply acknowledges that Nietzsche and the classics occupy worlds made different by the irruption of revelation into the Greek and Roman world: revelation altered forever the decayed Homeric world Plato and Aristotle faced. Politics now belongs on a lower plane as a secondary phenomenon ruled either by philosophy or by religion. Natural Right and History clearly states that the new religion meant a new fundamental alternative:

. SPPP, 176, paragraph 5. Subsequent references will be to paragraph numbers in parentheses in the text. . See Pangle, introduction to SPPP, 24–25, and Meier, Leo Strauss and the TheologicoPolitical Problem, 7–9.



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The fundamental question, therefore, is whether men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided effort of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance. (NRH, 74)

Nietzsche is a latecomer to the view that the fundamental alternative is the rule of philosophy or religion. Strauss showed that Halevi judged that the fundamental alternative was no longer that of the philosophic and the political life but that of human guidance or divine guidance. Halevi consciously broke with the founders of political philosophy in their politics for philosophy, their rational nomoi, while maintaining an almost invisible alliance with his true kin, the community of philosophers. By calling attention to how Nietzsche differed from the classics on the fundamental alternative, Strauss reconfirms what is philosophic in the history of Platonic political philosophy: a philosopher employs practical reason to judge what the times call for regarding the social responsibility of the philosopher. Responsibility to philosophy and derivatively to the society it inhabits meant in the age of sovereign religion a break with the founders of political philosophy. Halevi was not the first to break with the classics on the fundamental alternative: he followed Alfarabi, the most outstanding of the Aristotelian philosophers of his period (PAW, 98–99). The leading Straussian student of Alfarabi, Muhsin Mahdi, opens the final chapter of his great book on Alfarabi by quoting at length Nietzsche’s statements in Beyond Good and Evil on the necessity that philosophy rule sovereign religion (aphs. 61–62). Mahdi comments: “If these statements on the relation between philosophy and religion seem somewhat bold, they are not, I suggest, revolutionary. Nor do they represent an innovation, but only a renovation, restoration, or revival of a strain in the philosophical tradition.” Alfarabi traced the view that philosophy is responsible for ruling religion back to Plato and Aristotle while tracing to Christianity the effort to wipe out memory of philosophic rule. He taught that “human religion . . . should come after philosophy in time and teach the multitude the theoretical and practical matters that had been discovered in philosophy by means of persuasion and/or image making.” For Alfarabi the philosopher’s responsibility for religion is “the natural, internal development” of wisdom: “the instrument” of preserving . Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 229–30. . Ibid., 235; the italics are Mahdi’s.

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such wisdom “is the philosopher-lawgiver who establishes the human religion, so that the theoretical and practical things discovered by demonstration and prudence are taught to the multitude through rhetorical and poetic methods, and everyone is persuaded to accept correct opinions and perform salutary practices.” While the fundamental alternative is no longer the philosophic or the political life for Nietzsche (or Alfarabi or Halevi or Bacon or Descartes or etc.), the fundamental difference between the two ways of life remains, the way of life of inquiry and the way of life of belief, and Strauss leaves no question that Nietzsche lived the life of inquiry: the chief point of his essay’s account of philosophy is to show that Nietzsche’s life of inquiry led him to see that philosophy entailed political philosophy, a theological-political teaching, a religion. In 1935 Strauss silently employed Nietzsche’s distinction between being moved fundamentally by virtue, by a merely moral Redlichkeit, and being moved by the passion of love of truth; in 1972–73, Strauss explicates the crucial aphorisms dealing with Redlichkeit and the love of truth to show that Nietzsche is a philosopher. Here at the beginning, setting out to pursue religion in the philosophy chapters, Strauss makes it apparent that the religion ruled by Nietzsche’s philosophy aims to be as ministerial to philosophy as Plato’s was. Still, he will maintain silence on the two aphorisms that close Nietzsche’s religion chapter on the explicit imperative that philosophy rule religion (aph. 61), that it disarm the “uncanny dangerousness” of the sovereign religion that ruled the Christian era and extended its rule in post-Christian modern times (aph. 62).

“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE EXOTERIC AND THE ESOTERIC, FORMERLY KNOWN TO PHILOSOPHERS” It is remarkable that Strauss made no comment on the aphorism in which the words of this subheading appear, Nietzsche’s words, not Strauss’s.10 What Nietzsche says in his aphorism on exotericism is the distilled fruit of lifelong reflection on philosophy’s careful treatment of the “true but deadly” insights it generates—for Nietzsche too recovered exotericism. A brief look at his statement on exotericism helps show just how much he

. Ibid., 236. . Paragraphs 31–35. 10. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 30. Strauss did put “(cf. aph. 30)” into an important sentence to be discussed later.



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shared with Strauss on this primary topic of the relation of philosophy to social or political life.11 Nietzsche broached exotericism in his second chapter only after thinning his audience at the end of the first: he invited all to lay his book aside who can. Those who can’t because they’ve already drifted into this dangerous territory are named in the title of the second chapter, “The Free Mind”: Nietzsche’s proper, select audience are modern minds produced by the democratic Enlightenment.12 What modern minds need to learn first is what a philosopher is because one of the two chief virtues of modern times, equality of rights, ruled out an order of rank and with it the supreme singularity of that highest human type. Strauss’s recovery of exotericism helped show philosophy to be possible by showing it to have been actual; Nietzsche too aimed to show modern free minds that philosophy was possible, if only for the rarest minds, and that a philosopher had reason to speak exoterically in order to hide or partially hide his unwelcome high singularity in the somewhat more common. Nietzsche wants his select audience of free minds to know first that the philosopher “can never cease wondering” about one specific wonder: “In what strange simplification and falsification man lives!” (aph. 24). As a spectator on that great play, the philosopher is an exception who must avoid the temptation of acting too soon and becoming a martyr: he must not insist that all see the truth about their simplifications and falsifications (aph. 25). He resembles other exceptions, who all “strive instinctively for their citadel and secrecy where they are permitted to forget the ‘rule’ among men, as its exception” (aph. 26). But he is an exception among exceptions: “as a seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense,” he will be “pushed straight back to these men of the rule.” Abandoning the citadel of the exception, he goes down to study the many and their opinions—he 11. Recognition of exotericism is everywhere in Nietzsche, as is natural in a philosopher who began by holding that society must be defended against deadly truth. In a lengthy passage, he described the “emergency conditions” under which philosophy first appeared that required philosophy “to use as a mask and cocoon the pre-existing established types of the contemplative man—priest, sorcerer, soothsayer, and in any case a religious type—in order to exist at all” (Genealogy of Morality 3.10). In the present, philosophy faces new emergency conditions demanding different measures: philosophy’s historic efforts to appear aligned with pious belief in a moral world order now faces the fact that “that’s all over now; it has man’s conscience against it” (Gay Science, aph. 357). The new emergency conditions led Nietzsche to warn “you who understand” that “soon the time will be past when you could be content to live hidden away in forests like shy deer” (Gay Science, aph. 283)—shy deer: Nietzsche’s warning to a future Strauss. 12. “Free mind” is Strauss’s translation of der freie Geist; it is superior to the customary “free spirit” because, as important as the connotations of free-spiritedness are, it is more important to capture, as the first impression of Nietzsche’s meaning, free-mindedness.

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makes the Socratic turn—partly to know his difference, partly to know where he is. Study of the common man teaches the philosopher that “it’s difficult” to understand him “because he thinks and lives gangastrotagati among men who think and live differently, namely, kurmagati or in the best case, ‘the way frogs walk,’ mandukagati” (aph. 27). Nietzsche knew his readers would not know the three Sanskrit words in his sentence—he didn’t know them himself.13 As foreign words they express beautifully the communication problem he faced, for he ends his little play with Sanskrit words by asking: “—I myself do everything I can to be hard to understand?” No, he just showed that he does everything he can to make his foreign way of living and thinking understandable—he translated one of the foreign words. Leaving two untranslated is part of his communication: to understand him we’ll have to work at translating the inexorably foreign into our own very different way of living and thinking. A philosopher thinks and lives gangastrotagati—as the sacred Ganges flows, swift, steady, relentless. Such a thinker must communicate across ineradicable difference to those who think and live as the tortoise creeps or, in the best cases among us, as the frog hops. There is offense in claiming to be exceptional. Therefore, wanting to communicate what his exceptional experience gained him, the philosopher must be playful and gracious; he must seduce and enchant the offended into exercising the necessary subtlety that will be our sole means of translating his foreign experience into our own—and into exercising the necessary hardness with ourselves that is our sole means of bearing the offense.14 To explain the offense a philosopher cannot avoid, Nietzsche opened a closed chapter in the history of philosophy, exotericism—Nietzsche preceded Strauss in this great strategic decision and for the same reason, to advance philosophy. “Our highest insights [those of the exception among exceptions] must—and should!—sound like follies and sometimes like crimes

13. He had to copy them out in his notebook with reminders of what each meant (KSA, 12: 3 [18]). 14. A fine exercise in seduction and enchantment is found in an aphorism Nietzsche wrote a half year later, “On the Question of Being Understandable,” an aphorism on exotericism that helps close his new reflections on science in book 5 of the Gay Science (aph. 381). There, the qualities that both hide and display the philosopher are jauntiness and ignorance. “It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just anybody.” But Nietzsche wants to be “understandable for you, my friends,” and he explains his jauntiness and ignorance in one of the peaks of playfulness in his writings, a glance into his exotericism out of the profound reserve of humor, the pokes to the ribs he always kept on hand for the most serious topics (Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 34). See my Nietzsche and Modern Times, 306–10.



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when they come without permission to the ears of those who are not the kind for them” (aph. 30). Having turned to the Many to study their ways and wanting to communicate his conclusions, the philosopher always learned that he would be ridiculed as mad or persecuted as criminal.15 Because they would (and should!) be judged mad or criminal, philosophers invented a practice modern minds forgot but Nietzsche rediscovered, as Strauss would: “the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly known to philosophers.” All philosophers before modern times, those of “India like those among the Greeks, Persians, and Muslims,” distinguished exoteric and esoteric and did so because they knew that their highest insights would and should be judged mad or criminal. Nietzsche explains the old distinction as itself exoteric: it “does not so much consist in this, that the exoteric [thinker] stands outside and from outside, not from inside, views, evaluates, measures, judges; the more essential is that he sees things from below—the esoteric, however, down from above!” The outer-inner distinction is faulty because it suggests that entering the esoteric requires only permission or instruction. The more essential distinction suggests that the esoteric view can be attained only by ascent, making it inaccessible to those who are not the kind for it, almost all. In modern times exotericism is a high crime because it presumes an order of rank in what matters most, knowing. Nietz­ sche tells democratically disposed moderns about exotericism, aware that we cannot help but feel offense and feel predisposed to disbelieve it and hate it: he knows we will be inclined to judge him mad and criminal for this truth deadly to the modern teaching of equality and equal rights. Nietzsche’s criminal insight into exotericism’s order of rank is prelude to a criminal insight still worse, the single thing he says the esoteric sees from above. “There are heights of the soul where, looking out from them, tragedy itself ceases to have a tragic effect.” The view from above does not abolish tragedy but liberates from its effects, pity and fear. Nietzsche put the consequence as a question: “and taking all the woe of the world together, who may dare decide whether its sight would necessarily seduce and compel precisely to pity and thus to doubling the woe?” Who? The exception among exceptions. Looking down from above on all the woe of the world, he alone may dare to judge that it is not necessarily to be pitied. But that judgment is especially mad or criminal because pity for all that suffers is, with equality of rights, the primary modern moral teaching; it is

15. As Socrates also taught: after he claimed that the philosopher had a right to rule, Adeimantus objected, saying that people commonly judge the philosopher either useless or vicious. “It looks to me as if they’re speaking the truth,” Socrates replied (Republic 6.487d).

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the ultimate ground for virtuous action and the very meaning of history, progress toward the end of suffering. This modern view of meaning is the last of the thousand fictions of escape from suffering within which humanity has housed itself, one last bell jar of culture enclosing humans within a comforting fiction of some comedy of escape from tragedy, from what human life simply is.16 Nietzsche thus reports that the view down from above is transformative; its gaze down into what has been interpreted as a tragedy from which an escape is necessary not only sees the fictive character of all escape but sees too that the whole of suffering can be viewed otherwise, viewed as falling within a totality that can be affirmed. The affirmation of suffering is Nietzsche’s most criminal thought. Here in particular his reader will want to close his book. But to keep on reading, to dare to hear what he dares to say, is to learn that Nietzsche sees this affirmation of tragedy as progress that is both imaginable and possible for the species. The modern Enlightenment’s belief in progress, its form of fictive deliverance, is destined to fall victim to the modern Enlightenment’s experiment with the truth. Still, a certain kind of progress is possible, a maturity of outlook that is a new understanding of tragedy in accord with the truth. With that maturing outlook in the experiment with the truth, a whole new horizon of human possibility opens up, which the remainder of Nietzsche’s chapters on philosophy and religion treat. Strauss does not mention Nietzsche’s statement on exotericism, but it is pivotal. Can all the woe of the world be lived communally without the fear and pity that generate fictions of escape? This is the core of the new philosopher’s problem of communication: how to translate the view from above into simplifications and falsifications within which humans inescapably live. The solution is the one Nietzsche attempts in the rest of his book: the man of insight, gaining the fundamental insight, becomes a man of action whose persuasive words beautify the truth without falsifying it.

16. Nietzsche’s publishing career began with The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, a reflection on Socrates’s role in killing off Greek tragedy or the Homeric view of things with a new, nontragic view of the world. A brief statement of Nietzsche’s key thought on tragedy and how tragedy can generate an affirmative poetry is found at the end of Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” aph. 5. Seth Benardete included an appreciation of Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy in his little-noticed review of a book on Nietzsche unworthy of Nietzsche. By showing at every step just what would be worthy of Nietzsche, Benardete shows his intimate acquaintance with Nietzsche and may even suggest that the cure he discerns in Nietzsche is something worth swallowing (Benardete, “Review of Michael Tanner, Nietzsche”).



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Nietzsche’s next two aphorisms treat the problem of exotericism, the philosopher’s problem of communicating insight, as a problem of the maturity of his audience, individual maturity (aph. 31) and that of the species (aph. 32). The free minds have matured out of youthful dogmatism into skepticism, but Nietzsche will lead them to a maturity beyond skepticism: modern free minds must learn that philosophy is possible. Is a corresponding growth in the maturity of the whole species possible? The species too has passed through a maturation process, one that may have placed it on the threshold of a new maturity regarding truth, a new experiment with self-knowledge that could move humanity into a “postmoral” period, beyond the belief basic to the punitive or moral view that intention directs our actions, making reward or punishment our just desert. Aphorism 32 shows where Nietzsche thought progress to be possible and desirable on the grand scale: progress in understanding, already well begun on a public scale by modern natural science, meant that moral progress had to be dared, postmoral progress that celebrated the innocence of becoming. Strauss allowed his 1955 words about “a new nobility which would be able to rule the planet” to sound as if they referred to the Hitler regime (WIPP, 54–55); for Nietzsche such words refer to those who teach a new spiritual rule true to the earth, philosophical rule of the sort achieved by Socrates in his supposedly noble lie of teleotheology, that pampering teaching no longer believable or worthy of belief. Nietzsche’s look into the future, his extension of the great experiment with the truth as the next stage in the moral history of the species, prepares the aphorism he placed at the center of his chapter.

“THE GRAVE APHORISM 34 AND THE LIGHTHEARTED APHORISM 35” Strauss notes that aphorism 34 is “the central aphorism of the second chapter” (8), but he touches “the grave aphorism 34 and the lighthearted aphorism 35” (7) only briefly and only with respect to the relation between the two. The reason is his focus on aphorisms 36 and 37, whose relation repeats that of 34 and 35: in each pair the second follows the first as a brief response to its reasoning. Strauss says, “At first glance there does not seem to be a connection between” aphorisms 34 and 35; then, not having said what the connection is, he says that “[t]he connection between aphorism 34 and 35 is a particularly striking example of the lucid, if somewhat hidden, order governing the sequence of the aphorisms: the desultory character of Nietzsche’s argument is more pretended than real.” Strauss focuses on the

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order governing 36 and 37, and no wonder: the order governing those two is the order connecting philosophy to religion—there, after giving the reasoning behind the core claim of his philosophy, Nietzsche shows his philosophy generating a theological-political program. Still, despite the overriding importance of this pair, Nietzsche made 34 and 35 central, and it is worthwhile to consider their content before moving to the pair Strauss recognized as even more basic. Aphorism 34 acknowledges that the “epistemological skepticism” of the free minds rightly dominates modern intellectual life but argues that the philosopher must now extend skepticism from the object of thought to thinking itself. This extension of skepticism puts the philosopher at risk again, because “in civil life ever-present skepticism may be considered a sign of ‘bad character’ and hence belong among the imprudencies.” But among ourselves, beyond the civil world and its Yeses and Nos,—what prevents us from being imprudent and saying: the philosopher has nothing less than a right to ‘bad character’ as that being on the earth which till now has always been most made a fool of?

Among ourselves—in the relative privacy of a philosopher’s book now addressing his narrowed and prepared audience, his “bad character” can give itself the right to pursue relentlessly the mistrust natural to it while leaving the civil world outside. Privately, the philosopher has “the duty to mistrust, to the most malicious cross-eyed squinting up out of every abyss of suspicion.” With “the little joke of this dismal grotesque,” Nietzsche interrupts his defense of dutiful mistrust. Is the philosopher only a fool of extreme skepticism, some frog peering up out of a swamp of suspicion? No, but Nietzsche’s grotesque proves that he is not above making the philosopher seem a fool, for he always keeps “at least a few pokes to the ribs for the blind rage with which philosophers resist being deceived”—blind rage because skepticism now threatens to make epistemological skepticism a dogmatism. This first poke to the ribs leads to a second: philosophers, tricked by grammar, find a fixed thinking subject where there is only process and activity. “Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar? All due respect to nannies, but hasn’t the time come for philosophy to renounce the faith of our nannies?—” A dash ends this long central aphorism on the crime of breaking faith with modern trust in skepticism, a dash binding it to the next, tiny aphorism where Nietzsche quotes one of our Enlightenment nannies and directs



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a third poke to the ribs, inviting a crime against the most important of all beliefs inherited from our Enlightenment nannies: O Voltaire! O Humanity! O Nonsense! There’s something about the ‘truth,’ and the search for truth; and when a human being goes about it too humanly—‘il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien’—I bet he finds nothing!

Here is the chief theme of philosophy: le vrai—truth, the search for the truth that always moves philosophy. And here is its chief rival: le bien—the good, what counts as the good in itself. These are the classical terms, the True and the Good, and Nietzsche states openly (if in a foreign language) the classic, esoteric, criminal insight shared by philosophers since Socrates: belief in the Good blinds one to the True. Blinded by “Humanity,” today’s Good, the Good of the democratic Enlightenment, today’s searcher for the True— finds nothing. But Nietzsche’s point is that the searcher wants to find nothing, he needs his skepticism to excuse his clinging to belief in the modern Good. Epistemological skepticism is justified by faith alone. No wonder that “when a philosopher these days lets it be known that he is not a skeptic . . . everyone is annoyed”17—an annoyance that a century of NietzscheRezeption confirms: free minds have been unable to credit Nietzsche’s claim to have discovered the true. But free-minded skepticism, Nietzsche charges, is not skeptical enough, it is dogmatic about its Good. Value dogmatism is given refuge by epistemological skepticism and the ontological skepticism it entails. Principled ignorance about the ultimate character of the world lets enlightened moderns hold onto our Good. This is “lighthearted”—a lighthearted hammer blow to the self-deception of the modern mind. And it creates an opening: if our Good prohibits our finding out something about the True, then a philosopher free of our Good and exercising a criminal mistrust of thinking itself could, perhaps, find out something about the True. And if he could, would the True imply a new Good? These are the questions that the central aphorism and its little follow-up provoke. And these questions prepare the next two aphorisms, the ones Strauss recognized as the most important in the book, for there a philosopher’s mistrust of thinking leads in fact to a new conclusion about the True. And that in turn raises the possibility of a new Good. Discovering that, discovering the very core of Socratic philosophy and political philosophy in this pair of aphorisms rising 17. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 208.

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out of the central pair, Strauss makes his greatest contribution to Nietzsche studies, the greatest contribution possible.

“THE DOCTRINE OF THE WILL TO POWER . . . IS IN A MANNER A VINDICATION OF GOD” Philosophy is Nietzsche’s obvious theme in the first two chapters of Beyond Good and Evil, whereas Strauss’s is religion. But religion leads Strauss into the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, for the “single aphorism” on religion in the first two chapters, aphorism 37, is a kind of corollary to the immediately preceding one in which he sets forth in the most straightforward and unambiguous manner that is compatible with his intention, the particular character of his fundamental proposition according to which life is will to power or seen from within the world is will to power and nothing else. (7)

Nietzsche’s fundamental proposition is a claim about life where life must be understood in the way of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: life stands for “the world,” the whole, the totality of beings. To be is to be will to power and nothing else. For Strauss’s intention in this essay, the crucial matter is that there is a religion corollary to Nietzsche’s philosophy, merely corollary of course, merely a consequence of the ontology gained independently of religion by reasoning alone. But despite the prominence Strauss gives to religion in his essay, what he does next points to the primacy of ontology for him too: he introduces Plato in order to see Nietzsche in the light of his proper rival, the Plato of the Symposium, where Socrates gives his most explicit account of the nature of nature. “The will to power takes the place which the eros—the striving for ‘the good in itself’—occupies in Plato’s thought.” The place that eros as striving occupies is ultimately the place of an ontology, a claim about beings as a whole: to be is to be eros or striving for the good in itself; the good in itself is therefore a satisfaction of striving that can only be the initiation of new striving and not satiation, not the transition into some more fundamental state of being, satiatedness. The great rivals Plato and Nietzsche share a perspective on what a philosopher can infer about the being of all beings. Strauss proceeds dialectically: things said here about will to power—“prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be,” the “impure mind . . . is the sole source of truth”—are subject to deepening interpretation as he pursues the reasoned conclusion of Nietzsche’s argu-



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ment on behalf of will to power, for aphorism 36 “presents the reasoning in support of the doctrine of the will to power” (8). Nietzsche there “sets forth with what is at the same time the most intransigent intellectual probity and the most bewitching playfulness his reasons, i.e. the problematic, tentative, tempting, hypothetical character of his proposition.” How else could the reasoning on behalf of the fundamental proposition about reality proceed except this way, given what Nietzsche said in aphorism 34 about skepticism and the limits of human knowledge? Strauss glances at the actual content of aphorism 34, “the central aphorism of the second chapter,” where Nietzsche “had drawn our attention to the fundamental distinction between the world which is of any concern to us and the world in itself, or between the world of appearance or fiction (the interpretations) and the true world (the text).” In the reasoning of aphorism 36, however, “[w]hat he seems to aim at is the abolition of that fundamental distinction: the world as will to power is both the world of any concern to us and the world in itself.” That both leads to the final sentence of Strauss’s paragraph, his chief statement about the ontological conclusion of Nietzsche’s argument in aphorism 36: Precisely if all views of the world are interpretations, i.e. acts of the will to power, the doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact, for, in contradistinction to all other interpretations, it is the necessary and sufficient condition of the possibility of any ‘categories.’ (Italics added)

Strauss neither assents to this proposition nor criticizes it; he simply employs it to get to religion in the next paragraph. But it is Nietzsche’s basic ontological claim put in terms true to that claim. Philosophy, the passion to know the truth about the world, is itself an event in the world and therefore necessarily a form of will to power, that form which is “the most spiritual [der geistigste] will to power (aph. 9).” The way in which the world is “known” by humans—the “categories” by which humans voluntarily and involuntarily sort the world into an order—is itself necessarily an expression of what the world is. The will to know of the philosopher, recognizing itself as will to power, extends its recognition of itself experimentally under the hypothesis that the causality at work in the philosopher must be the causality at work in the whole. Is that hypothesis true? As Nietzsche presents his reasoning in aphorism 36, the philosopher’s self-understanding, his “know thyself,” must be pushed to its limit; the principle of parsimony dictates the logically necessary “experiment of making do with a single

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kind” of causality. It is an ontological experiment by a philosopher immersed in a cultural world of experiments in the sciences whose conclusions he respects: the possible truth of the ontological experiment must also be tested for its adequacy as an ultimate explanation of the behavior of the phenomena described in their particulars by the sciences of physics, biology, and psychology—“quanta” of energy, alive beings, and human beings. The philosophical leadership of science at which Nietzsche aimed thus entails a philosopher’s hypothetical positing of ontological truth, which can itself never be subject to scientific proof, however legitimate the reasoning is that leads to it, and however compatible it must prove to be with scientific knowledge.18 Strauss thus provides a very spare account of the aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil on epistemology and ontology, aphorisms in which Nietzsche moved from the limits on knowledge (aph. 34) to what can nevertheless be inferred by a particular kind of knower (aph. 36), Nietzsche’s own highly condensed move from the primary epistemological problem to his primary ontological claim. Strauss well knew that Nietzsche had elaborated this move in his just completed Zarathustra. There, after a long preparation, the Songs at the center of part 2 present a conflict of loves that has been growing in Zarathustra: the conflict between his love of a skeptical Wild Wisdom and his love of Life herself. In the climactic song, “The Dance Song,” Life intimates to her pursuer Zarathustra that her rival, Wild Wisdom, was wrong about her: she can be fathomed. And with that intimation, that seduction, Life wins Zarathustra for herself. After the Songs, addressing only “you wisest,” Zarathustra shows how Life led him to fathom her, to discover that to be is to be will to power and nothing else (“On SelfOvercoming”). Nietzsche expected that readers tempted by Beyond Good and Evil and its extreme economy on what matters most to the very fewest would study Thus Spoke Zarathustra.19 As for Strauss, after touching the

18. Beyond Good and Evil states that will to power is “as theory an innovation,—as reality it is the Ur-Faktum of all history” (aph. 259). (See also KSA, 13: 14 [79], spring 1888.) In the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche presented the fundamental fact “only in the way of bald assertion, not to say dogmatically” (8); he made four assertions: will to power is the Ur-fact of the most spiritual phenomenon, philosophy (aph. 9), of organic phenomena (aph. 13), of the totality of nature (aph. 22), and of human nature (aph. 23); will to power is therefore the ultimate subject matter of philosophy, biology, physics, and psychology. With respect to the last, will to power is the truth of the human soul that makes it possible for Nietzsche to end the chapter saying, “For psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems” as it was for Socrates. 19. Genealogy of Morality, preface, no. 8, explicitly states that his earlier writings must be read to understand the later, and he calls special attention to “my Zarathustra.” I treat the great event of the Dance Song in Nietzsche’s Teaching, 100–120.



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ontology Nietzsche argued for just once in Beyond Good and Evil, he turns to what that ontology entails by taking up the only aphorism on religion in the philosophy chapters. Strauss’s presentation of Nietzsche’s basic ontological claim has not been so spare as to omit its most outstanding historical precedent, eros in Plato’s thought. Strauss described the place of eros in Plato’s thought in his course on the Symposium: “Eros, we can say, is the nature of nature, the essence of nature” (OPS, 196). Seth Benardete elaborated Strauss’s fundamental insight in exegetical detail in his commentary on the Symposium.20 The challenge then is to think the kinship between eros and will to power as attempts by an ancient and a modern philosopher to label and characterize the fundamental phenomenon and then, necessarily in Nietzsche’s view, to investigate the pertinence of such an ontological claim for contemporary physics, biology, and psychology. What Strauss himself intimates here is the deep continuity between ancient and modern philosophy, a shared perspective on what the human mind can grasp about the whole. And as he now turns from ontology to religion, his primary concern in his Nietzsche essay, he pursues the second most important continuity between ancient and modern philosophy as he shows again that a philosopher by the very logic of inquiry comes to recognize the need for a theological-political program to advance philosophy by reshaping the social order to philosophy’s advantage. “After having tempted some of his readers (cf. aph. 30) with the doctrine of the will to power . . .”—Strauss’s parenthetical invitation to “cf. aph. 30” suggests that the “some” are the few whose ears are fit for what Nietzsche can tell them about the view from above, those whom he now brings to speech in the little dialogue on which Strauss, master interpreter of dialogue, places all the emphasis—“. . . Nietzsche makes them raise the question as to whether that doctrine does not assert, to speak popularly, that God is refuted but the devil is not.” Nietzsche anticipates that his proper audience, modern free minds, will hear his ontological claim with horror. That audience has already heard his bare assertions that the three basic sciences, physics, biology, and psychology, plus philosophy itself, can trace their subject matters to will to power. How will Nietzsche’s rational reductionism be heard by schooled contemporaries when they first get wind of the reasoning that makes it comprehensive? In the way every high insight of philosophy must—and should!—be heard, as folly or crime (“cf. aph. 30”). Nietzsche allows shocked contemporaries to denounce his view in his own book—“God is refuted but the devil is not.” Their outcry 20. See above, chap. 8, n. 9.

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betrays a truth about them: the free minds are bound minds, bound to the old good. Your will to power ontology, they say in effect, commits the highest crime, making everything sacred demonic and everything demonic sacred. The free minds “speak popularly,” they employ the common religious language of God and Devil in which they no longer believe, because the more sophisticated language proper to these offspring of the Enlightenment lacks extremes vehement and absolute enough to express their horror at his teaching as an ontological crime against nature and humanity. Nietzsche knows that his only possible audience is still prey to “old metaphysical birdcatchers” who say “you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin” (aph. 230). But he had to speak: “the terrible basic text of homo natura must again be recognized.” Already “hardened in the discipline of science” to stand before the rest of nature as nature is, his enlightened audience must now, “with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears,” stand before itself as the piece of nature that it is. Can modern free minds learn to do what even Oedipus and Odysseus apparently could not? Oedipus plucked out his eyes when they beheld the awful truth, and Odysseus opened his ears to metaphysical bird catchers not worthy of even being heard. Strauss only paraphrases the words of Nietzsche’s tempted readers; he quotes Nietzsche’s reply. That reply legitimates the shift made by his friends from ontology to theology, from all beings to the highest being: “On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And, to the devil, what forces you to speak popularly?” From this most pregnant reply Strauss draws one inference only, the most important: “The doctrine of the will to power—the whole doctrine of Beyond Good and Evil—is in a manner a vindication of God.” Strauss says vindication of God four more times, using the phrase as a kind of guide to the chapter on religion to which he now turns. But there is more to Nietzsche’s reply than this one inference, and it is useful to consider it because it too points to Nietzsche’s new theological-political program. Nietzsche’s “On the contrary!” informs his friends that in his teaching the devil is refuted but God is not. Made emphatic by its repetition and by his appeal to friends, his contrary schools them by forcing them to reflect: Your feeling is right, it implies, the will to power teaching does refute God, the God of our tradition, but is that God God? On the contrary, that supernatural God can now be seen as the Devil, an all-powerful Tyrant who set the world under a curse, assigning it to the Prince of this World, the socalled Devil. What Strauss does not say is that Nietzsche invites his friends to think the most extreme blasphemy about our God. Far beyond the historical judgment that God is merely dead, we are to judge our supernatural God to have been a crime against nature. The will to power teaching refutes



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that God and—your feeling is right again, Nietzsche implies—it does not refute the devil, or what that God assigned to the devil, the world of incessant change. But is the world the devil’s? On the contrary, what was cursed as the devil’s is vindicated as divine. Strauss’s phrase “vindication of God” suggests that Nietzsche’s little dialogue with his friends opens a whole new dimension for theological thought: can the divine be thought within a view that knows the world to be will to power and nothing besides? If it can, one correction to the old theology can be indicated by a more emphatic translation of what Strauss did quote: “And as to the devil, goddamn it, who compels you to speak in the common language!” Who but that old Devil himself, God, dead but not gone, lingering on for centuries as a powerful shadow on the wall of our cave dictating the language of divinity even to modern free minds.21 The new theology accepts no devil except, for now, the devil-creating dead God, but Nietzsche’s reply suggests that the new, devil-abolishing theology leads to gods as yet unnamed. In moving from aphorism 36 to aphorism 37, Nietzsche’s reasoning about all beings moves to the highest being at the outcry of the offended being. Of course the new philosophy breaks with the old religion, but what matters now for philosophy, judging by Nietzsche’s reply, is that it break with the relics of the old religion that still rule modern free minds and that it look to the new possibility for religion. In a book for free minds, this is the indispensable dialogue as the new philosopher first communicates the view from above, the ontological conclusion about beings as a whole, and shows how modern free minds inevitably measure its truth by the old good. For while 37 follows from 36, it mimics 35: modern “free” minds measure the True by the Good, by what they take to be the good as unbelievers in the monotheism that still rules its atheists. The little dialogue between Nietzsche and his friends, the one aphorism on religion in the philosophy chapters, shows why the philosophy chapters must be followed by a chapter on religion: the deepest insight is bound to be misheard by Voltaire’s children. Our antitheological ire, justified ire of post-Christian atheists, must be schooled into a new appreciation of religion, the postmonotheist religion that can arise from the truth. We must learn how the True generates a new Good that vindicates god but not that God. Beyond Good and Evil is a Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, and Strauss mines its philosophy chapters for one prelude only, the theologicalpolitical program implied by the new philosophy, for he jumps from the one aphorism on religion in those chapters directly to the religion chapter. 21. Gay Science, aph. 108.

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Strauss’s selectivity suggests that the future of the new philosophy hinges on a private dialogue about religion between the new philosopher and his only possible friends. Initially, modern free minds react to the new ontology with fear and hate; but invited to reflect on the possibility that that very reaction is dictated by the idea of the good that still rules us, Nietzsche’s natural friends can see the need to free ourselves from the power of that good. And then, the plan of Beyond Good and Evil suggests by moving from the philosophy chapters to a religion chapter, then the new philosopher will lead his fit readers to the fit response to the new ontology: his chapter on religion will show how the true implies a new good. Here Strauss finds Nietzsche on his own ground, for here again, with Nietzsche, he watches a philosopher pursue the fundamental question and glimpse the theologicalpolitical program natural to it—and act to instruct the instructors of new generations. Here Strauss finds in Nietzsche a repetition of the link between philosophy and political philosophy that he found in Xenophon and Plato and Halevi. By centering a chapter on Nietzsche’s theologicalpolitical program, Strauss makes his studies in Platonic political philosophy demonstrate the shared perspective of ancient and modern philosophy. Strauss states of Nietzsche’s “vindication of God” that it is “atheistic, at least for the time being” (11), and that “atheism is only a transitional phase.” To what? “Could atheism belong to the free mind as Nietzsche conceives of it while a certain kind of non-atheism belongs to the philosopher of the future who will again worship the god Dionysos?”—worship as a philosopher worships, honoring what it is edifying for nonphilosophers to worship. “This ambiguity is essential to Nietzsche’s thought; without it his doctrine would lose its character of an experiment or a temptation.” The tempted are to wonder with respect to the religion of the future: can it move beyond the compulsory atheism attendant to the death of God toward a reinstatement of the god Dionysos? Nietzsche placed at the center of his chapter on religion the contemporary crisis in religion, atheism and the assassination of the old soul concept (aphs. 53 and 54), a crisis inevitably generating what he pictured next, nihilism (aph. 55). Strauss describes that nihilism by contrasting it with what some could think was a possible religion of the future, “something like Vedanta philosophy”: [Nietzsche] anticipates a more Western, a sterner, more terrible and more invigorating possibility: the sacrificing from cruelty, i.e. from the will to power turning against itself, of God which prepares the worshipping of the stone, stupidity, heaviness (gravity), fate, the Nothing. (12)



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This means, Strauss suggests, that “the better among the contemporary atheists will come to know what they are doing . . . they will come to realize that there is something infinitely more terrible, depressing and degrading in the offing than the foeda religio or l’infâme”—the shit religion or infamous thing fought by Roman and Enlightenment thinkers alike. Some of Nietzsche’s modern readers will follow him in seeing that even worse than the Christianity dying at the hands of the Enlightenment is the nihilism its death brings, that “most uncanny of guests” that Nietzsche diagnosed as our fate, “the history of the next two centuries.”22 Nietzsche is the diagnostician of nihilism, but he “does not mean to sacrifice God for the sake of the Nothing, for while recognizing the deadly truth that God died he aims at transforming it into a life-inspiring one or rather to discover in the depth of the deadly truth its opposite” (13). Strauss thus traces the tight logic of the central aphorisms of Nietzsche’s religion chapter from the death of God and the assassination of the immortal soul through the consequent nihilism and on to aphorism 56, the only mention in Beyond Good and Evil of the teaching with which Nietzsche wanted to be identified, eternal return. Strauss pursues in exact detail the precise logic whereby Nietzsche arrived at the affirmation of eternal return, and his exactitude is exhibited in his little correction: Nietzsche aimed not at transforming the deadly truth that God died but at discovering in the depth of the deadly truth its opposite: Nietzsche’s thought is a discovery, not some willful imposition or invention.

“THE IDEAL BELONGING TO THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE” Strauss stays close to the words of aphorism 56 in order to trace the path of the “whoever” Nietzsche depicts penetrating nihilism to its depth, and he says at the crucial point that “a man who has taken this road has perhaps without intending to do this opened his eyes to the opposite ideal—to the ideal belonging to the religion of the future” (13). Perhaps without intending to? Did he intend to find a new ideal? Was he primarily a moralist, that is, looking for a new good? Strauss says precisely what he needed to say: “It goes without saying that what in some other men was ‘perhaps’ the case was a fact in Nietzsche’s thought and life.” This does not go without saying for those of Strauss’s followers who read his 1935 introduction as implying 22. KSA, 13: 11 [411], November 1887–March 1888; Will to Power, preface, aph. 2.

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that Nietzsche was merely a moralist. Strauss says it: Nietzsche’s intention is that of an inquirer, not that of a moralist; he aimed to understand, not to be edified or edifying. As an unintended consequence of thinking pessimism to its depth in will to power, he glimpsed the new ideal, the core of the new religion. Strauss quotes the end of aphorism 56—“And this would not be circulus vitiosus deus?” —and says that it “reminds us, through its form, of the theological aphorism occurring in the first two chapters (37) where Nietz­ sche brings out the fact that in a manner the doctrine of the will to power is a vindication of God, if a decidedly non-theistic vindication of God” (13). Strauss invites his reader to interpret the end of aphorism 56 the way he interpreted aphorism 37; we are to imagine Nietzsche replying to those who object that the teaching of eternal return is a vicious circle made god: On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! The contrary is that eternal return is the virtuous circle made god. The ideal opposite to that of world denial is an ideal for those naturally in love with life; lovable life eternally returns precisely as it is. The new ideal draws an immediate challenge as Strauss notes in his next paragraph: “the vindication of God is only the inversion of the sacrificing of God to stupidity”—it just divinizes the Nothing or makes the Nothing into something “in itself lovable” (14). And isn’t that “a relapse into Platonism, into the teaching of ‘the good in itself’?” Strauss ends a string of dialogic questions on a final question: “But can we avoid such a relapse altogether?” We cannot. Nietzsche relapses into “Platonism” in the precise and singular sense that the new “good in itself” is “not the stone, the stupidity, the Nothing” that nihilism interpreted the world as being while still infected with the old Platonism that elevated otherworldly transcendence. How did the new good arise? “The transformation of the world-denying way of thinking into the opposite ideal is connected with the realization or divination that the stone, the stupidity or the Nothing to which God is being sacrificed, is in its ‘intelligible character’ the will to power (cf. aph. 36).” Seeing the world as will to power and nothing besides, that seeing alone, makes the world worthy of unbounded affirmation. Relapse into “Platonism” follows from insight into the true ontology. That the world is will to power and nothing besides is the life-inspiring truth. The new True is seen, not imposed, and the new Good is discovered as the fit response to the True, not as the cause of its being true. So the pleasant mockery of aphorism 35 is justified: seeking the True for its own sake and not for the sake of the Good, the post-Voltaire philosopher finds something, the new Good, and without really intending to do so. The reasoning that leads through self-



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knowledge to the insight that the world is will to power and nothing else draws its ultimate conclusion: it is entirely reasonable to want that world exactly as it is an infinite number of times. The two chief themes of Nietzsche’s mature thinking, will to power and eternal return, are linked in a way that came to light for Leo Strauss, student of philosophy’s theological-political problem. Will to power and eternal return are linked as philosophy and political philosophy, insight into what is and affirmation of what is. Will to power and eternal return are linked as fact and value, and the manner of that linkage is crucial: fact grounds value. In the classical language that Nietzsche restores, the true is related to the good as its ground; insight into the true, will to power, generates the good, eternal return. Eternal return is not itself an ontological claim but the ideal arising out of the fundamental ontological discovery. As Beyond Good and Evil suggests by the structure of its first three parts, will to power stands to eternal return as philosophy stands to religion. As understood by philosophy, religion elevates an ideal out of roots in the passions, particular passions among rival passions. The new ideal is rooted in the passion of love and gratitude for life and world as they are. Nietzsche interrupted his critique of Christianity in the religion chapter in order to say that gratitude lay at the heart of Homeric religion (aph. 49), the religion supplanted in Greece by a religion based on the rival passion of fear—otherworldly moral religion put to use by Plato for a philosopher’s ends. Plato introduced into Greek civilization a teleotheological religion of immortal souls taught to fear the judgment of punitive gods. The religion whose ideal is eternal return advances the passions foundational to the Homeric, the religion that generated the greatest cultural achievements of our species till now, the religion supplanted by the still-reigning Platonic religion, whose God is dead. Nietzsche’s penetration of the spiritual situation of the late-modern present granted him insight into the indispensable element of the theologicalpolitical program natural to his philosophy, the new ideal it naturally elevates. Strauss’s pursuit of Nietzsche’s understanding of the religious situation of the present brings to light in Nietzsche the same pattern of philosophy and political philosophy that he discovered in Xenophon and Plato and Halevi. And Nietzsche, like his predecessors, acknowledges a continued need for exotericism of a certain sort, not an exotericism selling the lie of a cosmic moral order guarded by punishing and rewarding gods—a view of things that “has been rendered incredible by the experiences of the last centuries” (TM, 299). The new exotericism poetically beautifies and celebrates the world as it is, a beautification that Nietzsche would take so far as to reintroduce gods, Dionysos and Ariadne, divinizations of the natural

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passions that regenerate life sexually. Here too, then, Nietzsche does what a philosopher alone can do, posit out of the fundamental fact values that look to culture as a whole, housing humanity within a view of things that helps advance the dominant modern project, the scientific investigation of nature. The philosophic leadership of science that Nietzsche set out to exercise involves then not only the true, an ontology beyond the capacity of the sciences to posit, but the good as well, the new good appropriate to the new true. The philosopher Nietzsche horizons the vast scientific enterprises of inquiry within the transparent dome of human-created meaning that lends them their ultimate rationale. Strauss’s late Nietzsche interpretation is the culmination of a life spent investigating the theological-political problem, that consequence of philosophy that treats the relation of philosophy to social or political life. For Strauss, the philosopher is, by virtue of being a philosopher, a philanthropist (WIPP, 31); in his Nietzsche interpretation too the philosopher is the ultimate gift giver, the central node of the whole economy of being and value. A product of the world’s superfluity, the philosopher gives back the gift in an ideal that blesses the world. That is the enduring contribution to Nietzsche studies made by the rediscoverer of the theological-political projects of the greatest thinkers. And that changes everything as far as exotericism, the theme of my book, is concerned: for the world as it is can now be affirmed as it is. The new philosopher, advancing the Enlightenment experiment of basing society on the truth, can say: “We’re proud not to have to be liars any more, not slanderers, not accusers of life.”23 But that pride in a negative, denied previous philosophers, is overwhelmed by the positive: philosophy can at last be in the open what it is, the experimental, inquiring restlessness that Nietzsche so often and so eloquently pictured as “Our new ‘infinite,’ ”24 our extension of the modern experiment, for what do we matter? After he had stated the conclusion of Nietzsche’s reasoning in the aphorism devoted to eternal return, Strauss applied the old political categories: “By saying Yes to everything that was and is Nietzsche may seem to reveal himself as radically antirevolutionary or conservative beyond the wildest wishes of all other conservatives, who all say No to some of the things that were or are” (13). Strauss, that famously “conservative” thinker, wonders for a moment if Nietzsche’s new ideal could be the most extreme possible conservatism, the desire to conserve everything just as it was in the eternity of its repetition. But imagining that conservative extreme triggers a thought: 23. KSA, 13: 15[44], spring 1888. 24. Gay Science, aph. 374.



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“Remembering Nietzsche’s strictures against ‘ideals’ and ‘idealists’ we are reminded of Goethe’s words to Eckermann (November 24, 1824) according to which ‘everything idea-like (jedes Ideelle) is serviceable for revolutionary purposes.’ ” Is Nietzsche’s new ideal “conservative” or “revolutionary”? The answer is that its radical conservatism is its revolutionary purpose. It is impossible to be more comprehensively conservative than that “whoever” who “wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo . . . to the whole play and spectacle” (aph. 56). His passion to conserve springs, Nietzsche reports, from love of the world seen as it is, will to power and nothing else. To glimpse the world as it is ignites the desire to conserve every item in the totality of items, the necessary whole bereft of transcendence or meaning. This conservatism does not single out any particular ancestral heritage but is serviceable for the revolutionary purpose of celebrating them all as human efforts to enclose some fragment of humanity under some dome of meaning. According to aphorism 56, to affirm the whole spectacle is at bottom to affirm the one who desires the spectacle: this is totalizing conservatism out of love of the world and love of the self. This is the new bell jar humans place over the whole as the azure dome of shelter and protection for everything that was and is; the affirmation of eternal return is true to the earth as the most revolutionary conservatism. Nietzsche put the affirmation of eternal return in the religion chapter, positioning it as the historic possibility arising out of the crisis in Western religion caused by the Enlightenment—the death of God (aph. 53), the assassination of the old soul concept (aph. 54), and the consequent nihilism (aph. 55). Only after that sequence of historic shocks could the thinker, the “whoever,” think nihilism to the bottom and glimpse the new ideal as eternal return. Strauss makes the essential comment; eternal return is “the ideal belonging to the religion of the future”—affirming eternal return is an event in the history of religion. By showing how Nietzsche linked eternal return to will to power, Strauss showed how the religion of the future belongs, with philosophy, to a higher plane than morals and politics. Nietzsche looked to that lower plane at the end of his religion chapter in aphorisms on which Strauss made no comment. After lamenting a specific ignorance of modern free minds—“they no longer even know what religions are good for” (aph. 58)—Nietzsche says what religions are good for: they “are means of cultivation and education in the hand of the philosopher” (aph. 62). Guided by a philosopher’s understanding, a religion can do well—do for the sake of reason—what religions do in any case, cultivate and educate souls from their plastic beginnings onward, allowing particular dispositions of soul to flower and flourish in the light of an ideal while other dispositions

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of soul wither or are blocked. It belongs to religions to breed and weed by identifying the high and holy and the low and base, firing aspiration and aversion. Religions provide the grounds of morals and politics, which look to the particular advancement of what their adherents all already know to be worthwhile, having learned from the beginning just what that is. With the religion whose ideal is the revolutionary conservatism of eternal return, Nietzsche looked to the advancement of the Enlightenment as the advancement of the experiment with the truth. But religions are typically more than pictures of hope and belief stemming from fundamental desire; religions typically avow gods. After asking if eternal return implied conservatism or was serviceable for revolutionary purposes, Strauss turned to the “concluding ambiguous question” of the aphorism on eternal return, noting that it “again shows” that Nietzsche’s “atheism is not unambiguous, for he had doubts whether there can be a world, any world whose center is not God (aph. 150).” Strauss’s again refers back to paragraph 11, which opens, “Nietzsche’s vindication of God is then atheistic, at least for the time being,” and almost ends by asking, “Could atheism belong to the free mind as Nietzsche conceives of it while a certain kind of non-atheism belongs to the philosopher of the future who will again worship the god Dionysos or will again be, as Epicurus might say, dionysokolax (cf. 7)?”25 After leaving the chapter on religion and turning to “Sayings and Interludes,” the chapter separating the two main parts of the book, Strauss notes the “atheistic implications” of its first aphorisms, finding that there are “nine references to God” in the chapter, but “only one of them points to Nietzsche’s own theology (150)”26 (17). Aphorism 150 runs: “Around the hero everything turns to tragedy, around the demigod everything turns to satyr play; and around god everything turns to—what? Perhaps to ‘world’?—” The expected answer is comedy, for Nietzsche is invoking the great days of theater in classical Athens on which a tragedy led to a satyr play and finally to a comedy. But he says world, and Strauss takes this to show that Nietzsche had doubts that there can be any world whose center is not God. And that new world, then, that new comedy following the atheism consequent upon the death of God? Would Nietzsche’s all-conserving revolutionary affirmation of eternal return also need gods for its “everything” to become a “world”?

25. Dionysokolax is Strauss’s marvelous play on a venomous joke by Epicurus against Plato that Nietzsche reported; see my Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, 50–51. 26. Aphorism 150 is arguably the central aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil. See my Nietz­ sche’s Task, 142.



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“I HAVE NOT SPOKEN AND SHALL NOT SPEAK” Strauss’s great contribution to the study of Nietzsche shows his ontology implying the ideal of a possible new religion—but how far was Strauss willing to go with Nietzsche on the new religion proper to the advancement of the Enlightenment? He drew the line at the gods. For Nietzsche did in fact think that the new religion needed more than the ideal of eternal return, and he dedicated the end of Beyond Good and Evil to that: Dionysos and Ariadne return in its penultimate aphorism 295, just as they returned namelessly at what was meant to be the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Strauss brings his account of the religion chapter to an end by acknowledging that Nietzsche went further: “There is an important ingredient, not to say the nerve, of Nietzsche’s ‘theology’ of which I have not spoken and shall not speak” (15). This vow of silence, this adamant refusal to speak about the nerve of Nietzsche’s theology, is most disappointing. The premier student of philosophy’s theological-political programs, the rediscoverer of Socrates’s teleotheology, its historic variants in the monotheisms, and the link between Nietzsche’s philosophy and religion—that man says No, I will not speak about the nerve of this latest venture by a philosopher to outfit philosophy with the religion appropriate to it. The master of philosophy’s insight into what religions are good for refuses to speak on the theoi of the most contemporary instance of a philosopher’s theological-political program. He gives a reason for so disappointing his reader: “I have no access to it.” He adds that “[i]t has been worthily treated by Karl Reinhardt,” but “no access” forbids any verdict that it has been worthily treated by anyone, and certainly Reinhardt’s treatment is as unworthy of Dionysos and Ariadne as it is of Strauss’s great gain, that Nietzsche’s philosophy generates a religion or vindicates God.27 When the issue is divinity, the godhood of Dionysos and Ariadne, what can it mean to claim “no access”? Divinities can always only be imaginary beings and Strauss did not lack imagination. His claim 27. Reinhardt’s initially insightful and sympathetic reading of Nietzsche’s poem “Klage der Ariadne” falls victim to his misreading of the role of one of its speakers in Nietzsche’s two versions. Reinhardt calls the second version an Umtaufe, a rebaptism, when the song sung by the Old Sorcerer in Zarathustra 4 (1884) is sung by Ariadne herself in Dionysos Dithyramben (1888). But the point of having the Old Sorcerer sing it in Zarathustra is to show him up as a fake, a mere actor for whom Ariadne’s true song is only an occasion for a born performer to impress his audience—and Zarathustra sees through him just as Nietzsche saw through the Old Sorcerer’s original, Wagner. Reinhardt does not treat Ariadne worthily because he fails to see the praise of woman, the deification of woman entailed in her complaint: because no suitor knows her as she is, none loves her for what she is—until Zarathustra shows himself the exception: he loves what other suitors feared and hated, and she reciprocates.

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must be a confession that he lacks those aspects of soul and intellect that could feel or think that Dionysos and Ariadne divinize what is best in humans. He would then be indicating that he is an atheist of monotheism who sees no advantage in polytheism such as the one Nietzsche praised as “The greatest advantage of polytheism,” namely, “the plurality of norms.”28 Nietzsche saw in polytheism the primary difference—not a cardinal difference—between humans and other animals, all of whom are monotheists in Nietzsche’s nice conceit. Strauss’s “no access” indicates that even after understanding that Nietzsche is a Platonic political philosopher who arms philosophy with religion, he sees no persuasive argument for the claim that a new teaching about the gods could be preferable to a Lone Legislator of categorical imperatives. Strauss stands with Plato, whose “good in itself” tends to moral monotheism. Nietzsche stands with Homer: “Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the genuine antagonism.”29 As an atheist of monotheism and in that sense a theist, Strauss’s refusal to speak on Nietzsche’s theology would be strategic and moral. The judgment that ended his Halevi essay holds to the end: there’s no God like our God for categorical imperatives enforcing an imagined moral law and maintaining social order. But maybe Strauss’s claim of no access is not so broad as to include both Dionysos and Ariadne for he did in fact speak of Dionysos. His first substantive point about the plan of Beyond Good and Evil noted that it began with Nietzsche’s charge against Plato: Plato’s “fundamental error was his invention of the pure mind and of the good in itself” (4). From this premise Strauss is easily “led to Diotima’s conclusion that no human being is wise, but only the god is; human beings can only strive for wisdom or philosophize; gods do not philosophize (Banquet 203e–204a).” From this beginning Strauss leapt to “the penultimate aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche delineates ‘the genius of the heart’—a super-Socrates who is in fact the god Dionysos.” By means of his super-Socrates “Nietzsche divulges after the proper preparation the novelty, suspect perhaps especially among philosophers, that gods too philosophize.” Strauss the philosopher suspects that Nietzsche’s “novelty” was also suspect to the philosopher Plato, for “Diotima is not Socrates nor Plato, and Plato could well have thought that gods philosophize.” The two passages he references suggest that the only gods are the philosophers. Nietzsche’s introduction of Dionysos at the end of Beyond Good and Evil allows Strauss to suggest at the beginning of his essay that the ultimate theological-political question sepa28. Gay Science, aph. 143 (Nietzsche’s emphasis). 29. Genealogy of Morality 3.25.



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rating Plato and Nietzsche is not gods or no gods but whether gods should openly be said to philosophize, thereby implying that nothing is eternal. A philosophizing god like Plato has Platonic reasons for arguing that gods do not philosophize, and those reasons seem perpetually persuasive for Strauss. Strauss did have access to the divinity of Dionysos and Plato. But if he had access to those philosophizing gods, what he had “no access” to would have to be divine Ariadne. Strauss is then confessing no access to the instinct that divinizes womanliness. His only gods are the philosophers. Ariadne is not a philosopher. Ariadne is not a god. That seems to be what Strauss confesses he has no access to in Nietzsche’s theology. And that may very well be the nerve of Nietzsche’s theology: the nerve to claim superior divinity for womanliness even over philosophizing Dionysos. Who then are the gods Ariadne and Dionysos about whom Strauss so adamantly refuses to speak, the gods Nietzsche thought could return with his philosophy? Here in particular Nietzsche’s effort to advance the modern Enlightenment through a religion appropriate to it takes a step on which Strauss offers no help. When Strauss first stated that the will to power is in a manner a vindication of God, he said, “Cf. aph. 150 and 295, as well as Genealogy of Morals, Preface Nr. 7” (9). Aphorism 150 suggests that “there cannot be a world, any world whose center is not God” (13). Aphorism 295 has Dionysos speak for the first time in Nietzsche’s books—and he permits his “latest disciple and initiate” to say, to “whisper,” that Dionysos is a philosopher. And the disciple adds, “that gods too philosophize seems to me to be a novelty that is not harmless.” A philosophizing god fatally harms what Plato chose to divinize, the permanent and transcendent, for if gods too philosophize there is no such realm or they would already know it. To whisper that gods philosophize is to forbid philosophy the lie of the permanent and transcendent, a lie made unbelievable by the advances of Enlightenment science and made base by the sensibility naturally in love with what is. Viewed positively, a philosophizing god raises highest what is highest, divinizing in humanity the passion to understand and raising to the highest possible affirmation the world as understood, the world as will to power and nothing else. The logic of this affirmation, this double divinizing of an activity and its object, Nietzsche pictures by having the philosophizing god and his disciple speak in the presence of Ariadne. As a mortal raised to divinity by Dionysos, Ariadne divinizes philosophy’s object. In one of her appearances in Nietzsche’s notes Ariadne can even mock her consort for his passion to understand and suggest, partly by “fiddling impatiently with the famous thread which once led her Theseus through the labyrinth,” that she already knows far more

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than he does, even that she is in a way the mystery he wants, needs, to understand. And Ariadne’s presence suggests what Nietzsche’s theology intimates in other ways: a divine womanliness complements a divine manliness while enjoying a relative completeness that restless divine manliness always lacks.30 The third passage to which Strauss called attention is in the Genealogy of Morality, the book that Nietzsche said on its title page was “Added to My Last-published Beyond Good and Evil for Its Completion and Clarification.” The passage Strauss refers to brings the argument of its preface to its end on Dionysos—an end made possible by the seriousness with which Nietzsche took the problem of morality: “to me, there seems to be nothing more worth taking seriously.” The reward of a “long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness [is] cheerfulness—or in my own language gay science.” That deep disposition to gaiety, that experienced result of his decade-long subterranean burrowing into the problem of morality, enables Nietzsche to make a promise: on the day however, on which we can say with all our hearts, “Onward! Our old morality too is part of the comedy!” we shall have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of “The Destiny of the Soul”—and one can bet that the grand old eternal comic poet of our existence will be quick to make use of it!

What new moral use would the god of that theater find for the comedy now opening? Strauss seems to take morality seriously only in its old form, the God-reinforced punishment and reward now becoming laughable as part of the larger comedy. But the philosopher Nietzsche, having gained insight into the larger comedy and into the uses and indispensability of the highest beings, was compelled to become a theologian for the sake of the “morals and politics” to which he devoted the second main part of Beyond Good and Evil. He therefore began preparing new words and scenes to show how Dionysos and Ariadne could use the occasion offered by post-Christian nihilism to devise a new complication in the human experiment. Strauss offers indispensable insight into Nietzsche’s theological-political task: Nietzsche’s theology arose naturally with his glimpse, not really intended, of the new 30. KSA, 11: 37 [4], June–July 1885. Ariadne’s other appearances in Nietzsche’s writings are: David Strauss, sec. 12; Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes,” aph. 19; Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Zarathustra,” aph. 8; Dithyrambs of Dionysos. In the notes of KSA Ariadne appears at 7: 8 [37], 1870; 10: 4 [55], 1882; 10: 13 [1 (at p. 433)], 1883; 11: 37 [4], 1885; 11: 41 [9], 1885; 12: 1 [163], 1885–86; 12: 1 [231], 1886; 12: 9 [115], 1887; 12: 10 [95], 1887; 12: 16 [40], 1888.



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ideal consequent upon seeing that to be is to be will to power and nothing else. And Strauss could, like no other, show how this theological-political program fit the classical pattern of Platonic political philosophy, a poetry to accompany philosophy in the world. But Strauss’s refusal to venture into Nietzsche’s theology, or into Ariadne’s part in it, forces us to puzzle out on our own the meaning of the return of Dionysos and Ariadne for a new, postrevelation moral order, a return Nietzsche himself had begun to picture in the proper poetic fashion at the end of the two completed books of his maturity that are not polemics, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.31 Why did Nietzsche think Dionysos and Ariadne the gods proper to philosophy in its newly gained cheerfulness? The serial character of Nietzsche’s argument in Beyond Good and Evil helps. For if the new ideal arises out of the historical situation brought about by the welcome wreckage of Western religion, any talk about gods has to be delayed until Nietzsche has prepared his own proper audience for the truth about gods unwelcome to them, the indispensability of gods to any “world.” Gods therefore appear only at the end of his book and may even then come “too early” to an audience not yet ready to hear of them. Still, having only one lifetime but looking forward to being born posthumously, Nietzsche was forced, for the sake of the philosophy of the future, to speak his thoughts on the future of religion. The key point suggested by the full sweep of Beyond Good and Evil is that new gods, when they do appear, are the gods true to the new ideal, the gods appropriate to that kind of human being most in love with earthly life, “the most highspirited, most alive, most life-affirming human being” (aph. 56). Dionysos as the philosophizing god divinizes philosophy itself, impassioned pursuit of the elusive, always veiled, always withdrawing object of that passion, the True. And the elusive, veiled, fleeing quarry in that great hunt who eventually yields herself to her Hunter or suggests how she can be fathomed—she

31. The book Nietzsche planned while writing his timely polemical books of 1887 and 1888 was to be his second magnum opus, meant to stand as the chief work to which Zarathustra is the “entrance hall.” Its prospective titles include The Transvaluation of All Values and The Will to Power, and its planned conclusions invariably touch the return of Dionysos and Ariadne. Effective initial guidance to Nietzsche’s Dionysian theology is provided by the Protestant theologian Georg Picht. The almost total neglect of Picht’s great book shows that the scholars of Nietzsche’s writings still do not know what religions are good for. Picht the theologian offers insight into the Dionysian as a reasonable religion of the future, for he understood the Dionysian historically as the way truth affirmed itself after the millennia of living the metaphysical lie had played themselves out and after the consequent nihilism had threatened any worthwhile future. See Picht, Nietzsche, 162, 183–84, 198–200, 248–50, 254–56, 312. But even Picht fails to account for Ariadne’s divinity.

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is at least as worthy of a divine name: Ariadne. Dionysos the philosophizing god divinizes the inquiring spirit itself. Ariadne divinizes what that divine inquirer discovers: what is is lovable for itself. Dionysos and Ariadne are pictorial embodiments of the philosophic passion and of the still greater object of that passion. “Assuming truth is a woman—” Beyond Good and Evil opens with these words, taunting philosophers as unworthy lovers whose dogmatism did violence to their supreme beloved, truth. And Beyond Good and Evil unfolds in a way that shows the love of truth expanding and deepening immeasurably—becoming cheerful—at the point at which it can become love of the true. Love squandered on truth becomes love reciprocated by the true, and both loves transfigure into divinizations via the god-making instinct. Dionysos and Ariadne are the divine pair in whom philosophy can now be pictured, and if Beyond Good and Evil pictures that pair with great economy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is more generous if more ecstatic and hence less palatable to the severe students of philosophy. Zarathustra refrains from using their Greek names, portraying them instead as Zarathustra and Life, hunter and hunted in the dance that is their most evident self-display. What is evident there—and what Nietzsche everywhere intimates—is that Ariadne is more than Dionysos’s quarry, she is his superior, and Dionysos finds it good so. But Dionysos and Ariadne must be more than that, must, as divine, be worthy of honor and celebration by those who are not philosophers. In Nietzsche, Dionysos and Ariadne are glimpsed first at the peak, picturing passion and passion’s object in the passion that is philosophy. But Nietzsche shows that they divinize something more general, the twofold character of human love as such: Dionysos and Ariadne confirm and celebrate human love as gendered, as male and female. They are the divine shapes of maleness as such and femaleness as such. As gender divinized, Dionysos and Ariadne gather into divine personhood the natural fecundity of male and female humanness and, in their divinity, become the focus of human gratitude and celebration for what humans are in being sexual and reproducing sexually. But the sexual fecundity of humans is only one form of the infinitely more general sexual fecundity of life on earth; humans share with other animals and with plants what Dionysos and Ariadne represent as gods. Honoring them as divine honors nature’s way of endlessly reproducing life, nature’s way of making life eternal through sexual reproduction. But even that degree of generality is insufficient, for as Strauss’s insight into the ground of the new ideal shows, the affirmation by the most spirited being is an affirmation of the whole as will to power and nothing else. Nietzsche’s way



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of presenting the new gods, as divinizations of the peak on down to the broadest, enabling base of the peak, mirrors the ladder of loves that Plato’s Diotima described from the bottom up. Nietzsche’s ladder of loves, like Plato’s, has its highest rung in the rarest, philosophy, and its lowest in the most general, the way of all beings, named eros by Plato and will to power by Nietzsche. And both present the hierarchy of love as the true ontology. Dionysos and Ariadne therefore represent true religion; they are divinizations of the true, approximations of the truth who crown and celebrate what true philosophy sees by making it a “world.” As the divine male and female who dance, court, make love and war, marry, have progeny, Dionysos and Ariadne divinize human eros as part of eros as a whole, nature’s process as a whole. They are the gods natural to the ideal of eternal return, a pair who already have names and natures, although the long traditions of Dionysos and Ariadne include accretions that falsify their natures, like the promise of otherworldly immortality that followed upon their being placed among the stars. When Nietzsche noted how Homeric religion, the hymn of Greek cheerfulness, was true to the profound desire to affirm, he was interrupting his critique of Christianity in order to state that “what is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude that it exudes” (aph. 49). At the end of the last book he saw through publication, he spelled out what was implicit in the divinity of Dionysos and Ariadne as embodiments of Homeric gratitude: What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself with [the Dionysian] mysteries? . . . the eternal return of life . . . true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality . . . I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism of the Dionysian festivals. Here the most profound instinct of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously.32

By having this pair and only this pair return at the end of his two most important books, Nietzsche prepares a welling up again of Homeric gratitude, the instinct to celebrate what we are and what we can know we are a part of. And if looking back can give Nietzsche’s theology an honorable ancestry in Diotima’s ladder of loves and in Homeric gratitude, his is above all a theology that looks forward as the theological-political program that belongs to Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future. By picturing the return of Dionysos and Ariadne, Nietzsche invites his genuine audience, offspring of the 32. Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” aph. 4.

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Enlightenment and advocates of the science of nature, to think the possibility of true religion, beliefs and practices true to what is and seeking celebration in festival and song. A religion of Dionysos and Ariadne would do well what religions are good for: cultivate and educate in correct opinion and salutary practice from childhood on up, stamping into plastic souls love of the true and the good through similitudes of the true and the good. Dionysos and Ariadne are exemplars who are already what the best of humans would most dearly love to be like—not permanent and fixed but dying and rising, not all-powerful but striving and vying, not all-knowing but philosophizing, not needing worship or groveling but modeling what is most worthy of imitation and emulation. A religion of Dionysos and Ariadne contributes to Nietzsche’s leadership of science a satisfaction of the religious instinct of humanity that is compatible with science; he thus brings to an end the long warfare between science and religion made necessary by the rule of the God who prohibited knowledge of good and evil, the God with the hellish fear of science. But more than that, a religion of Dionysos and Ariadne contributes to the advancement of science by underwriting and celebrating what science is: the work of the passionate, the labor of lovers on this or that feature of the beloved. By heralding the return of Dionysos and Ariadne Nietzsche did what Alfarabi said a philosopher had to do: point to the religion that would come “after philosophy in time and teach the multitude the theoretical and practical matters that had been discovered in philosophy by means of persuasion and/or image making.”33

“MAN IS CONQUERING NATURE AND THERE ARE NO ASSIGNABLE LIMITS TO THAT CONQUEST” The religion ministerial to Nietzsche’s advancement of the modern Enlightenment has a third indispensable element besides gods and an ideal, a moral element, a principle of action that directs just initiative and just restraint. That new moral element is recognizably contemporary or late modern: looking back from our present we see in Nietzsche’s unity of philosophy and religion rational grounds for a comprehensive ecological way of thinking and acting. Rising naturally out of Nietzsche’s thought is the moral imperative that can curb the modern rage to master and possess nature—Be true to the earth!—the imperative rooted in the disposition of a certain kind of human. Strauss refused to provide help on the gods, but he is as instructive on the moral issue as he is on the new ideal. 33. Mahdi, Alfarabi, 235.



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The morality of the future makes its appearance in paragraphs 33–36, near the end of Strauss’s account of “Our Virtues.” He reviews Nietzsche’s understanding of nature in paragraph 33 and sees a new teaching on virtue rising naturally out of that new understanding. His focus is Nietzsche’s great aphorism 230, but he gathers key points from across Nietzsche’s works. Nietzsche, he says, aimed to see again “ ‘the terrible basic text homo natura,’ ‘that eternal basic text,’ ” and to understand how “man is to be ‘retranslated into nature,’ ” how man can be “made natural (vernatürlicht).” “That retranslation is altogether a task for the future” that falls to “the philosopher of the future” as his conscious creation of values “on the basis of the understanding of will to power as the fundamental phenomenon.” This act of the philosopher of the future—the founding creator of the human future—can occur only now for it is dependent upon history, upon a human past that was itself constituted in part by great foundings, interpretive acts that have collectively brought humanity to this moment; it is therefore a past that must be affirmed (34). Strauss then does what Nietzsche did not do in “Our Virtues,” introduce “the affirmation of eternal return” (34). “Instead of explaining why it is necessary to affirm the eternal return”—as Strauss intends—“Nietzsche indicates that the highest achievement, as all earlier high achievements, is in the last analysis not the work of reason but of nature” (35). Strauss has therefore moved from aphorism 230 to 231 without noting Nietzsche’s thought-provoking transition: he asked near the end of aphorism 230, “Why knowledge at all?” and his question, given the content of aphorism 230, asks: “Why philosophy at all?” Why this cruel passion to know when it is so contrary to the passion that moves nonphilosophers, the passion for appearance and simplification, for comfort and ignorance? And why this cruel passion to perform the action consequent upon this knowing, “to translate man back into nature?” “Why did we choose this insane task?” Asking this of himself again and again Nietzsche gives his best answer in his next aphorism (231): he did not choose it, he was compelled to it by what he is. As Strauss says, “it is not the work of reason but of nature”—it is the nature of the philosopher to think and act this way. Strauss quotes Nietzsche’s seemingly frivolous but actually profound way of referring to the compelling element of his nature: “something unteachable ‘deep down’ . . . a fundamental stupidity.” Strauss then goes beyond this quoted part of Nietzsche’s answer in order to explain just why the philosopher of our time found it is necessary to affirm the eternal return. “There is an order of rank of the natures,” Strauss says; “at the summit of the hierarchy is the complementary man” (35). The complementary

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man, a term Nietzsche used once,34 is used five times by Strauss to describe the philosopher, the summit of the order of rank of the natures. Why philosophy at all then, with its compulsion to insight and its compulsion to take on the insane task? Because it belongs to the nature at the summit of the natures. Strauss says of that summit of the natures, “His supremacy is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem.” The fact that he solves it? Yes, Strauss will show that to be a fact. He repeats himself: “for Nietzsche nature has become a problem and yet he cannot do without nature.” Nietzsche does not do without nature: seen from within, nature is will to power and nothing else. Strauss then states in his own words what the highest, most difficult problem now is, the problem of our time: “Nature, we may say, has become a problem owing to the fact that man is conquering nature and there are no assignable limits to that conquest.”35 This greatest problem of late modernity arose over time out of the character of the modern founding, out of the promises made by the founding teachers in order to make the modern project sound supremely desirable to expectations stamped in by the Christian dream. But now, in late modernity, assignable limits to the conquest of nature must be found and for one reason only, Nietzsche’s reason: “people have come to think of abolishing suffering and inequality.” “Come to think of” is mild: abolishing suffering and inequality are, Nietzsche taught, the two fundamental goals driving modern virtue. Strauss repeats Nietzsche’s reason for condemning modern virtue: it threatens what is best in humanity because “suffering and inequality are the prerequisites of human greatness.” The two aphorisms Strauss references, “239 and 257,” could not be more pregnant: they refer to two crucial aspects of Nietzsche’s solution. Aphorism 239 is the great aphorism that ends “Our Virtues,” capping Nietzsche’s series of aphorisms on “woman and man” with an appeal to woman to save European civilization; 257 opens Nietzsche’s final chapter, “What Is Noble?,” on what is needed to establish publicly the genuine order of rank of the natures. Strauss states the explicit demand of Nietzsche’s critique of modern virtue: “Hitherto suffering and inequality have been taken for granted, as ‘given,’ as imposed on man. Henceforth, they must be willed.” Then, to end his 34. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 207. 35. Strauss used the phrase “no assignable limits” two decades earlier in a discussion of Aristotle’s account of justice and the common good (NRH, 160). The phrase there has a positive or permissive sense: for the preservation of a decent society in the extreme situations of war, “there are no assignable limits to what might become just reprisals.” After opening this gap for unlimited reaction, Strauss leaves “these sad exigencies covered with the veil with which they are justly covered.”



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argument, he reaches out to the greatest event of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the pivotal chapter in which Zarathustra faced up to the problem of what must be willed in willing suffering and inequality, the indispensable step on Zarathustra’s way to the affirmation of eternal return. Strauss does not trace the drama of Zarathustra to its successful conclusion but instead says only what its successful conclusion is: “Nature, the eternity of nature, owes its being to a postulation, to an act of the will to power on the part of the highest nature.” The highest, most difficult problem is solved by a philosopher’s postulation, the teaching that alone can ensure the eternity of nature, ensure the prerequisites of greatness or of the order of rank of the natures whose summit is the complementary man. Nietzsche’s teaching of eternal return solves the greatest modern problem by providing the foundation for assigning limits to the conquest of nature where that conquest means abolishing suffering and inequality.36 “Postulation.” The Kantian ring of that word must not be allowed to obscure its range: postulation describes each of the great theological-political teachings of Platonic political philosophers back to the paradigm postulation, Socrates’s teleotheology. Strauss exposed that teleotheology as a philosopher’s salutary advance on the inchoate theology postulated by Ischomachos and on the Phoenician boatswain’s more articulated form of that postulation. That pre-Socrates theology had been devised by the order-imposing imperative in males: Strauss invited us to watch Xenophon’s Socrates learn the lessons that taught him the need for an order-imposing male to postulate a teleotheological order to nature—wild and unpredictable nature, female nature. And he invited us to watch Socrates learn the artfulness of Ischomachos’s wife, her learned mastery over her mastering husband, female means to master male mastery—with these means, order-imposing Socrates exerted the philosophic rule that compelled nature to take on the ordered look of a teleotheology. And now? Now is the time of the death of that postulated teleotheology because it “has been rendered incredible by the experiences of the last centuries.” And now is the time in which the modern postulation of a paradise at the end of history has become the promise of abolishing suffering and inequality; the moral commandment to conquer nature for that end leaves us now with no

36. This act of the complementary man is, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the act of the Übermensch, perhaps the worst-understood main point of Nietzsche’s much misunderstood philosophy. Übermensch belongs to the drama of Zarathustra as the name Zarathustra gives to the future teacher he anticipates in part 1 before recognizing in parts 2 and 3 that the task of that teacher falls in fact to him. The Übermensch is singular, the one man responsible for the new teaching that solves the highest, most difficult problem.

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way to assign limits to that conquest. Strauss saw clearly that Nietzsche’s postulation of eternal return provides the way. Just how affirming eternal return assigns limits to the conquest of nature can be seen by going back to trace Strauss’s remarks on the complementary man. He first used the term to refer to Nietzsche’s only use of it in Beyond Good and Evil: in “the complementary man . . . not only man but the rest of existence is justified (cf. aph. 207); he is the peak which does not permit and still less demand to be overcome” (30). Strauss’s second use occurs in his next paragraph, the first on “Our Virtues”; it concludes his most important observation about morality. Nietzsche, he reports, “is willing to grant” a significant role to “moral qualities”: “a high spirituality (intellectuality) is [their] ultimate product . . . the synthesis of all those states which one ascribes to men who are ‘only moral’ ” (31). That ultimate spiritual/intellectual product “consists in the spiritualization of justice and of that kind of severity which knows that it is commissioned to maintain in the world the order of rank, even among the things and not only among men.”37 That act is the highest act of the highest man: “Being the complementary man . . . standing at the summit, nay, being the summit, the philosopher has a cosmic responsibility.” The complementary man is the philosopher in his compulsion to act; he acts not out of mere justice but out of the spiritualization/intellectualization of justice, justice understood and combined with spiritualized/intellectualized severity, severity known. The complementary man transcends morality as its ultimate product who understands morality’s foundational character as the ground of every other decent person’s action—and he acts, acts transmorally out of a “cosmic responsibility,” intervening on behalf of morality in the human world he has understood. He takes that action knowing himself commissioned, given a mission by his nature which first drove him to understand the human and his own times and now drives him to act. That mission requires him to maintain the order of rank whose peak he is. It is clear from the whole arc of Strauss’s writings at least since the time of his recovery of exotericism in 1938–39 that the complementary man is the philosopher as understood by Socrates: Xenophon’s Socrates knew himself commissioned to postulate a teleotheology in order to ground the virtuous actions of humans in a graspable rationale and, thereby, to sustain the civic order in which alone philosophy is possible. That responsibility cannot be grounded in morality because it is a responsibility for morality, for the ground of decent action for all others, which can always only be moral. 37. This is Strauss’s near translation of the end of aphorism 219 in “Our Virtues.”



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In his third or central use of “complementary man,” Strauss states Nietzsche’s particularity in the history of responsible acts by philosophers and for the only time uses a modifier: “the truly complementary man . . . is the first man who consciously creates values on the basis of the understanding of the will to power as the fundamental phenomenon” (33). Transcending all moral states, not denying them but being their ultimate transmoral product who understands them, Nietzsche consciously creates values that accord with the fundamental fact—he sets out to rule through the creation of values consonant with the ideal of eternal return. Nietzsche is the truly complementary man in whom the late modern problem of the conquest of nature becomes aware of itself; he solves that problem by a new teaching on what is moral. That new teaching on justice maintains the natural order of rank by desiring nothing more than the eternal return of nature as it is. With this final element—a moral teaching consonant with a lover’s disposition toward nature—Strauss shows Beyond Good and Evil to be structured by the unitary character of Nietzsche’s complex and comprehensive thinking: the new moral teaching has a rational ground in the new understanding of nature and in the religion that that understanding demands. Insight into will to power leads naturally to affirming eternal return, and that combination of insight and affirmation grounds the new morality. Strauss has thus prepared his fourth use of “complementary man,” and there his account culminates: the supremacy of the complementary man “is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem” (35). By then bringing eternal return into “Our Virtues” as Nietzsche did not, Strauss suggests that the solution to the problem of assigning limits to the conquest of nature arises out of the same disposition that generated that new ideal—love of nature as will to power, nature as it is. Our virtue, rooted in love and gratitude for nature as it is, culminates in the moral desire to be just to the beloved, to let beloved nature be what it is. What first appeared as the mere imperative of the new virtue—“Be true to the earth!”—proves to have a deeper rationale than simple obedience, the deepest of all rationales for it is rooted in human nature, in the natural passions of the soul. “Psychology is once again the path to the fundamental problems,”38 including the problem of assigning limits to the conquest of nature, for that problem can be solved only by grounding its solution in the same source as the problem itself, the passions of the soul. Nietzsche’s study of the soul led him to see that the solution to the human attempt to conquer nature lay in “translating

38. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 23.

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the human back into nature.”39 For, “hardened in the discipline of science” to view nature as it is, humans can come to view themselves as they are and to ground their response to what they are in the natural passions of love and gratitude, just as the traditional responses to nature and human nature have been grounded in the passion of revenge. It is no accident that at this point of his explanation of aphorisms 230 and 231 of Beyond Good and Evil Strauss introduced one source only, the “On Redemption” chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There, Zarathustra used the word revenge comprehensively to name the passion that generated the teachings of the West, the passion Nietzsche articulated in the precise senses of hate and ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morality and other works.40 “On Redemption” showed how the passion of revenge generated and supported the teachings of transcendence whether supernatural or at the end of history. But now, hardened in the discipline of Enlightenment science, humans can live a new moral teaching. Morals belong “to a lower plane than either philosophy or religion” (6), and if for Nietzsche himself the new justice is grounded in philosophy, in insight into nature, for almost everyone else, the new justice will be grounded in the new religion—and the religion whose ideal is the eternal return of everything that was and is cannot tolerate, it finds vicious, the conquest of nature that threatens what is naturally highest and best in human nature. In either case, with the philosopher or with the rest of us, our virtues and in particular the comprehensive virtue of justice arise out of the nature of a certain kind of human being, as Nietzsche attested when first announcing eternal return: when the thought of eternal return takes possession of you, it will, depending on who you are, either crush you or transform you; either you will find it “the heaviest burden” or you will say, “Never have I heard anything more divine.”41 The religion whose ideal is eternal return does what religions are good for. Inculcated early, as religions are, it acts as a principle of selection among the available natures. In the cruel wording Nietzsche did not shy from, it cultivates and educates, it weeds and breeds, enhancing and advancing a certain kind of nature while discouraging and condemning its opposite.42 The virtues intrinsic to the religion of the future no longer cultivate the passion to alter and conquer a nature judged wild and wicked or to bring into 39. Ibid., aph. 230. 40. Strauss’s fifth and final use of complementary man also occurs in paragraph 35, in his conclusion to what “On Redemption” implies: “While paving the way for the complementary man, one must at the same time say unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples.” 41. Gay Science, aph. 341. 42. Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 62.



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being a heaven on earth where suffering is over because all are equally wise and happy; postmodern virtue cultivates instead the passion of eros toward nature. Man cannot “escape imitating nature as he understands nature” (TM, 298). Understanding nature as will to power and nothing else means understanding humans as wholly natural beings evolved as that particular kind within the natural order of kinds that is most conscious and in that consciousness capable of basing its actions on judgments of good and bad. Imitating nature so understood means becoming as conscious as possible and acting as far as possible on behalf of nature judged good. Our virtues will therefore assign limits to the conquest of nature, not ruefully or resignedly but joyously, knowing nature’s grace and celebrating humanity’s continuity with the rest of nature and its specific difference as the most spiritual/intellectual being. The virtuous actions that arise reasonably out of Nietzsche’s understanding of nature culminate in the justice of allowing, of letting things be what they are. Strauss therefore has every right to say that the supremacy of the truly complementary man “is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem.” With Strauss’s help therefore, we are in a position to see the great moral gain of Nietzsche’s philosophical leadership of science: Nietzsche secures within human nature itself active grounds for assigning moral limits to the conquest of nature.43

“WOMAN AND MAN” Strauss’s paragraphs on “Our Virtues” are dominated by the actions of the complementary man, and they end with a short paragraph on the subject to which Nietzsche devoted the whole last third of “Our Virtues,” “woman and man” (36). Noting Nietzsche’s “apparently clumsy transition to that subject,” Strauss shows the transition to be in fact masterful, for Nietzsche moved to woman and man from “his ‘fundamental stupidity deep down’ ”: the subject of woman and man rises naturally from what is given in the philosophic manliness of the complementary man. What is given is, in part, recognition that “the state of nature, the eternal war between the sexes, gives [woman] by far the first rank”44—a late-modern repetition of Socrates’s recognition of the natural superiority of Ischomachos’s wife, a 43. Strauss’s concern with assigning limits to the conquest of nature focuses on preserving the philosopher, the peak of the natural order of rank. But by recognizing that eternal return is the ideal of a new religion, he tacitly acknowledges that preserving the philosopher depends upon a comprehensive, society-wide concern for the preservation of the natural order as a whole, as far as that falls to humans. 44. Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” aph. 5.

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recognition that taught Socrates to be womanly-effective. When Nietzsche speaks of his “fundamental stupidity,” he “indicates that he is about to continue the theme of nature, i.e. the natural hierarchy, in full awareness of the problem of nature”; the most difficult contemporary problem, assigning limits to the conquest of nature, is linked directly to “woman and man.” Nietzsche’s aphorisms on woman and man argue that modern woman is surrendering her superiority to the modern ideal of mere equality and, even worse, to equality with the debased modern ideal of manliness. Nietzsche ends these aphorisms by appealing to the Phoenician princess with whom it all began, calling on “Europa, Europa,” to rescue Europe from the future threatened by the modern male conquest of human nature: “once more an immense stupidity might become master over you and carry you off. And this time no god would hide in it; no, only an ‘idea,’ a ‘modern idea’!”—not Zeus disguised as a white bull who carried off Europa to begin European history in Minoan Crete, but the idea of abolishing suffering and inequality, the threatening end of European greatness. The philosopher of the present age knows himself commissioned to maintain the natural order of rank in an age in which the conquest of nature has no assignable limits. Nietzsche embraced that commission, partly by developing a new teaching on virtue but also by beginning to develop that additional way about which Strauss refused to speak, invoking new gods. Like the philosopher Socrates, the philosopher Nietzsche looked to religion directly to further his philosophic project, in Nietzsche’s case, a religion opposed to any teleotheology like that of Socrates. To a Dionysian sensibility in love with nature as it is, viewing it as Ariadne, the conquest of nature is rape, violence against nature no lover can permit. Dionysos assigns himself limits on his supposed conquest of Ariadne whom he loves as she is, having glimpsed her as she is. And Ariadne, for her part, is a beloved who will never have nothing more to give her lover. As Nietzsche expresses it in “Our new infinite,”45 the lovable character of the world displays itself in part in the ineradicable mysteriousness that relentlessly beckons an inquirer onward. Emulation of the gods appropriate to the religion whose ideal is eternal return thus offers a further, religious ground for assigning limits to the modern conquest of nature. The philosopher of will to power, so eagerly caricatured perhaps especially among Strauss’s students as a monster of merely willful dominance, comes to light as a lover driven by love to assign limits to the conquest of nature. And then, as an additional, most unexpected shock, the philosopher 45. Gay Science, aph. 374.



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of the problem of woman and man, so easily, so universally caricatured as a misogynist, comes to light as the thinker who raises to divinity womanliness and manliness while knowing that in the eternal war between the sexes nature gives woman by far the first rank. And all those repulsive remarks on “woman as such”? They must be read again, thought again from the perspective of Dionysos and Ariadne, keeping in mind that they are written by a male aware of the eternal war between the sexes, written by a warrior who knows the uses of male swagger, male cosmetics. And in fact they come to light as the thoughts of a lover.46 Nietzsche spoke as a theologian to welcome the return of Dionysos and Ariadne, but he found it important to say, in the book that openly said he expected to be a turning point in history: “there is nothing in me of the founder of a religion.”47 As a philosopher, religion is foreign to him: “ ‘God,’ ‘immortality of the soul,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘beyond’—without exception, concepts to which I never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child.”48 But as a philosopher, a student of the beings, he was in a position to speak of the highest beings and, further, had the duty to speak of them. And as a philosopher, a student of the human soul, he recognized the indispensability of religion and recognized as well the conflicting drives that religion could cultivate and what kind of religion could best cultivate souls disposed to love life. Nietzsche’s teaching on religion names the ideal, the two gods, and the new justice befitting a religion of the future, the religion ministerial to advancing philosophy and the social order of the Enlightenment with its experiment with the truth. But Nietzsche could no more direct the actual future of that religion than Plato could direct the future to which Platonism was fated. Plato, to whom as a philosopher religion was foreign, could outfit Platonism with a good in itself beyond being in dignity and power, with ideas fixed in being to secure the virtues, and with nameless gods to reward justice and punish injustice—a revelation to Glaucon, an instruction to philosophers. But not even Plato could anticipate that Platonism would become our fate by being fit to the laws of Yahweh. It was therefore appropriate that just before he had Socrates launch the religion that would accompany his philosophy in the world, Plato had him perform the sole act of obeisance befitting a philosopher: it is the most dramatic moment in the Republic when Socrates, knowing now that he will introduce the core of

46. I tried to do justice to this profound topic in Nietzsche and Modern Times, 376–87, and Nietzsche’s Task, 233–42. 47. Ecce Homo, “Destiny,” aph. 1. 48. Ibid., “Clever,” aph. 1.

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Platonism to this company and uncertain whether he is ultimately doing good to his friends or harming them, prostrates himself before Adrasteia, dread Necessity, yielding to her the outcome of what he alone launched into the world.49 Just so, Nietzsche, the philosopher of the wave that bears us today, must leave to Necessity the future of the religion that serves the human passion in love with what is. The enduring importance of Leo Strauss rests on his recovery of the true history of philosophy. His last recovery, Nietzsche as the philosopher of our age, of the crisis of the modern conquest of nature, is the recovery of most immediate concern to us, the one that most looks to our future from out of our philosophic past and present. Gaining insight into the spiritual situation of our age, Nietzsche glimpsed the global solution to the deepest modern problem, the solution according to nature and according to reason, the solution, Strauss shows, with precedent in the other great Platonic political philosophers, the solution grounded in the deepest insight and generating the new poetry that comes naturally to humans as lovers of what we are and of what we can know we are a part of. How can you not love Leo Strauss?—benefactor of humanity through his revelation of the benefaction of the philosophers.

49. See my How Philosophy Became Socratic, 350–54.

epilogue

Strauss’s Farewell

S

trauss’s few late letters to Gershom Scholem glow with warmth and regard; there’s an intimacy here between men of high attainment not customarily present in Strauss’s letters. In one of them, written in German three and a half months before he died, Strauss described the state of his life and work: “I’m now living again completely in the . . . [Greek wisdom] and writing my farewell to science = world in the form of an essay on Xenophon’s Anabasis” (GS, 3: 770, July 7, 1973). It is important that Strauss was, at the end, living completely in the Greek wisdom and not in the biblical wisdom Scholem embraced. It is even more important that he thought of “Xenophon’s Anabasis” as the form his farewell to science = world would take. As a work of love on his Liebling, his essay needs no explanation. But as his farewell—his last writing act, bringing to a conscious close a lifetime of such acts that exhibits a deepening sense of purpose plus an ever-increasing mastery of the rhetorical means to his ends—as Strauss’s farewell “Xenophon’s Anabasis” demands explanation. Why did Leo Strauss think this essay fit to be the form his farewell to science = world would take? The centers, I believe, say why. Paragraphs 31 and 32 span the center of the 62 paragraphs; together they unite Xenophon’s “native ascendency” with his having “saved the Greeks.” The two paragraphs show Xenophon ruling the ten thousand by keeping “to the right mean,” and they give an instance of his core tactic, rule through a Spartan general where Spartan hegemony is commonly acknowledged. Xenophon, a Socratic, a master of cosmetics, rules by “shrewd calculation” and “by means of a feint, of ‘stealing.’ ” The Spartan general, put in good humor by Xenophon’s wit, pronounces . In the notebook in which he wrote out his essay, he dated it June 6, 1973–September 19, 1973; he died on October 18.

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a truth about Athenian rule whose depth he will not have plumbed, but Xenophon’s Anabasis proves him right: Athenians “prefer to have the best thieves for their rulers.” The central paragraphs end on the most moving and memorable event in the Anabasis, the sight of “The sea! The sea!” that meant salvation for the army. Strauss is less concerned with the event than with Xenophon’s role, Xenophon who commanded the rear and “was so to speak the last Greek who was vouchsafed this deeply moving and beautiful sight.” Strauss can end on “the greatness of his achievement: it was his prudent counsel which had saved the Greeks from . . . barbarians’ attempts to destroy them,” and he can also intend by these words the more comprehensive greatness of Xenophon’s achievement, his successful saving of philosophy. For who is Xenophon, doer of these great deeds? At the center of the first half of 31 paragraphs, paragraph 16, Strauss returns to and answers the question he raised earlier (14), whether Xenophon must be understood in the light of Socrates. Unlike Socrates, Xenophon was a man of action who successfully pursued the economic art, and in “this respect he resembles Ischomachos who taught Socrates the economic art, not exercised by Socrates, rather than Socrates.” Strauss can conclude that “the principle which individualizes Xenophon in the Anabasis comes to sight by the contrast between him and Socrates.” That contrast is the essay’s core. The center of the second half, paragraph 47, returns to the issue of individualizing Xenophon in contrast to Socrates. Strauss has brought Xenophon to light as a man who pursues not only wealth but also a great name and great power with the ambition to found a city, a Greek city in a barbarian place. His men opposed that ambition and brought him to trial for his suspected ambition and compelled him to make a defense speech. After concentrating closely on that defense speech, Strauss states that “Xenophon’s trial leads . . . to a complete acquittal.” Acquittal individualizes Xenophon: “Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the difference between him and Socrates than the fact that Socrates’ trial culminated in his capital punishment.” Strauss brings this very short paragraph (45) to an end on what cannot but appear as another way to individualize Xenophon: “But we must not forget that Xenophon’s plan to found a city failed.” Socrates failed to save himself from capital punishment, but did he succeed in founding a city? A paragraph of one sentence on oaths pronounced by Xenophon separates this short paragraph from the central paragraph of the second part, further reflection on the trial of Xenophon. This third center begins with the consideration that the “dissatisfaction of the army which led to Xenophon’s accusation was not altogether unfounded.” That leads to the issue of Xenophon’s identity or how he may



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have viewed himself in light of his two ideals, the older Cyrus and Socrates. In his defense speech, “Xenophon has . . . succeeded perfectly in vindicating his piety” for all but pious fanatics. But “did he vindicate his justice? Did he meet the implicit charge that he esteemed something more highly than Greece?” Noting that there are grounds for preferring “the best human beings” to “the children of the fatherland,” Strauss moves to the other way of individualizing Xenophon: how he may differ from the older Cyrus. Xenophon lacked what Cyrus had, descent from long lines of hereditary kings. But he possessed the chief qualification: “from the highest point of view only knowledge of how to rule gives a man a right to rule.” Still, “does not knowledge of how to rule need some iron alloy, some crude and rough admixture in order to become legitimate, i.e., politically viable?” Strauss repeats a point made often in his writings, the two senses of justice, “the virtue of the man which consists in” doing good to friends and harm to enemies and “the virtue of a Socrates whose justice consists in not harming anyone even in a little thing.” “While Xenophon undoubtedly possessed the justice of a man, he can hardly be said to have possessed the justice of Socrates.” Individualized from Socrates in this way, Xenophon is individualized from Cyrus not only by his lack of Cyrus’s descent but by his lack of Cyrus’s cruelty, which enabled him to enjoy looking at the faces of his slain enemies. “Xenophon stands somewhere in between the older Cyrus and Socrates.” Standing there, Xenophon presents “the problem of justice: justice requires both the virtue of a man (and therewith the possible emancipation of cruelty) and the virtue of Socrates.” Links exist between the two: “the virtue of the man points to Socratic virtue and Socratic virtue requires as its foundation the virtue of the man.” Those links highlight the problem of justice: “both kinds of virtue cannot coexist in their plenitude in one and the same human being.” Did Xenophon, standing between his two models, know himself as an individualized way of solving the problem of justice? “Xenophon may have regarded himself as the closest approximation best known to himself to their coexistence in one and the same human being.” Xenophon’s selfknowledge seems to animate his whole body of writings: is Xenophon in his self-knowledge, his knowing himself as standing between Socrates and Cyrus, the highest solution to the problem of justice? The final sentence of Strauss’s paragraph answers that question: “Surely, Xenophon (does not equal Plato) presents himself in his difference from Socrates.” What individualizes Xenophon, making him the philosopher he is, is his singular mix of Socrates and Cyrus, a mix he was bent on displaying by presenting himself in his difference from Socrates. In precisely this respect “Xenophon

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(does not equal Plato)” is true: Plato did not present himself in his difference from Socrates. Plato submerged himself in Socrates. Or perhaps Plato melted Socrates into himself. In either case a great deal more than this precise difference hides in Strauss’s transfixing parenthetical phrase. Xenophon does not equal Plato— the words are surely meant also to stand alone. Xenophon’s defense speech succeeded, but Xenophon failed to found a city. The defense speech of Plato’s Socrates failed to spare him capital punishment, but Plato’s Socrates did not fail to found a city. Xenophon does not equal Plato. Plato’s Socrates saved philosophy in Athens and made himself immortal by founding a city in speech in which philosophy had a place. And that successful founding led to the founding of Greek cities in barbarian places in a way that Xenophon alone, individualized from Cyrus and from Socrates, never could have—despite the teleotheology, one must perhaps add. Who then is the Leo Strauss who says farewell to science = world in the form of “Xenophon’s Anabasis”? His essay traces Xenophon’s ascent and peaks by pointing to the limit on his ascent relative to Plato’s. Leo Strauss is the philosopher who recovered Platonic political philosophy and with it the problem of Socrates as a problem of justice, the problem of the proper way for the philosopher to found the rule that is naturally his by right of superior knowledge, the problem of settling the highest civility in barbarian places, the problem addressed differently by the two great auditors of Socrates whose work survives. With “Xenophon’s Anabasis” as his farewell, Strauss ends his life work uncharacteristically if still bashfully pointing to himself, to Mr. Strauss. Strauss does not equal Plato, that is clear, the Plato who aimed to found a city and was successful, almost certainly too successful as Strauss too seems to judge. But in his way, Strauss equals Xenophon. He learned from both Plato and Xenophon and from a whole succession of their like what it was possible, what it was necessary for philosophy to strive to do. And while he did not aim to found a city, he did aim to save the Greeks, save philosophy from contemporary barbarism, and can even be thought to have succeeded in that aim. He wrote books that will endure and instruct as long as books are studied, for they give access to what endures, the history of philosophy as the written record of the great thinkers and actors most responsible for our civilization. Strauss’s farewell essay, individualizing Strauss among the great Socratics, intimates Leo Strauss’s ascent.

works cited

works by strauss The Argument and the Action of Plato’s “Laws.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. The City and Man. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. “Correspondence of Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss.” Trans. George Elliott Tucker. Independent Journal of Philosophy/Unabhängige Zeitschrift für Philosophie 5/6 (1988): 177–92. “Existentialism.” In “Two Lectures by Leo Strauss.” Interpretation 22, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 303–20. “Exoteric Teaching.” Interpretation 14, no. 1 (January 1986): 51–59. “Farabi’s Plato.” In Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, 357–92. New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Heinrich Meier and Wiebke Meier. 3 vols. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996–2001. History of Political Philosophy. Ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss. Ed. Hilail Gildin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Ed. Kenneth Hart Green. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932). Trans. and ed. Michael Zank. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency.” Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 195–227. On Tyranny. Ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press, 1991. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1952. Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors. Trans. Eve Adler. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

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Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss. Ed. Hilail Gildin. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1975. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis. Trans. Elsa M. Sinclair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952 (German original, 1936). “Preface to Hobbes politische Wissenschaft.” Interpretation 8, no. 1 (January 1979): 1–3. “Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maimonide et de Fârâbî.” Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 125–58. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss. Ed. Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Socrates and Aristophanes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Trans. Elsa M. Sinclair. New York: Schocken, 1965. “The Spirit of Sparta and the Taste of Xenophon.” Social Research 6 (1939): 502–36. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Ed. Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Xenophon’s Socrates. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972. Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse: An Interpretation of the Oeconomicus. With a translation of Oeconomicus by Carnes Lord. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970.

other works Adler, Eve. Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the “Aeneid.” Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003. Alfarabi. Book of Letters. Trans. Muhsin Mahdi and Charles Butterworth. http://www .scribd.com/search?query=alfarabi+book+of+letters Ansell Pearson, Keith. A Companion to Nietzsche. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Armada, Pawel, and Arkadiusz Gornisiewicz. Modernity and What Has Been Lost: Considerations of the Legacy of Leo Strauss. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2010. Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. ———. The Price of Monotheism. Trans. Robert Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010 (German original, 2003). Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. Ed. G. W. Kitchin. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001. ———. An Advertisement Touching a Holy War. Ed. Laurence Lampert. http://books .google.com ———. New Atlantis and The Great Instauration. Ed. Jerry Weinberger. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1989. ———. The Works of Francis Bacon. 1870; Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denton Heath. New York: Garrett Press, 1968 (1870). Baron, Salo. “Yehudah Halevi: An Answer to an Historic Challenge.” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 3 (July 1941): 243–72. Bartlett, Robert C. The Idea of Enlightenment: A Post-Mortem Study. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.



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Batnitzky, Leora. Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Behnegar, Nasser. “Reading What Is Political Philosophy?” Perspectives on Political Science 39, no. 2 (2010): 66–71. Benardete, Seth. The Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Readings of Ancient Poetry and Philosophy. Ed. Ronna Burger and Michael Davis. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2012. ———. The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Edited with an introduction by Ronna Burger and Michael Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. The Being of the Beautiful: Plato’s “Theaetetus,” “Sophist,” and “Statesman.” Translated and with Commentary by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the “Odyssey.” Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. ———. Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. Ed. Ronna Burger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. “Review of Michael Tanner, Nietzsche.” In Benardete, Archeology of the Soul, 347–50. ———. Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s “Republic.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Bittlestone, Robert, with James Diggle and John Underhill. Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bolotin, David. “Leo Strauss and Classical Political Philosophy.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 129–42. Brann, Eva. Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad.” Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002. Brook, Kevin A. “A Brief History of the Khazars.” In The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, 31–44. Trans. N. Daniel Korobkin. Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2009. Brown, Alison. The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Brown, Norman O. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. 1947; New York: Vintage Books, 1969. Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Trans. Tim Parks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Chacón, Rodrigo. “Reading Strauss from the Start: On the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy.’ ” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 3 (2010): 287–307. Craig, Leon. The Platonian Leviathan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Trans. Stephen Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. ———. Philosophical Letters. Trans. Anthony Kenny. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Ebert, Theodor. Der rätselhafte Tod des René Descartes. Aschaffenburg: Alibri, 2009.

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Emden, Christian J. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Franco, Paul. Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Green, Kenneth Hart. “Religion, Philosophy, Morality: How Leo Strauss Read Judah Halevi’s Kuzari.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 225–73. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton, 2011. Halkin, Hillel. Yehuda Halevi. New York: Schocken, 2010. Haller, Benjamin. “The Gates of Horn and Ivory in Odyssey 19: Penelope’s Call for Deeds, Not Words.” Classical Philology 104 (2009): 397–417. Heit, H., G. Abel, and M. Brusotti, eds. Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2011. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. A. T. Murray. Revised by William F. Wyatt. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. The Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Perennials, 1965. Israel, Jonathan I. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Janssens, David. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. ———. “The Problem of Enlightenment: Strauss, Jacobi and the Pantheism Controversy.” Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003): 605–31. Lampert, Laurence. How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato’s Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ———. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. ———. “Nietzsche’s Best Jokes.” In Nietzsche’s Futures, ed. John Lippitt, 65–81. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. ———. Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of “Beyond Good and Evil.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. ———. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. ———. “Socrates’ Defense of Polytropic Odysseus: Lying and Wrong-doing in Plato’s Lesser Hippias.” Review of Politics 64, no. 2 (2002): 231–59. Mahdi, Muhsin S. Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Trans. Shlomo Pines. Introductory essay by Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.



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index

Abravanel, 10n7 Achilles, 23, 139n Adeimantus (in Republic), 132–40, 136n, 145– 48, 150, 232n, 275n; long speech of, 133, 136, 139, 147 Adler, Eve, 190nn5–6, 210n, 254n40 Adrasteia (in Republic), 310 Advertisement Touching a Holy War (Bacon), 204, 204n, 224n, 238 Aeolus (in Odyssey), 159–60; curse of, 160 Alcibiades, 24, 182 Alcinous (in Odyssey), 158–59, 159n4, 163– 64, 176 Alfarabi, 8–9, 10n7, 12n11, 148, 271–72, 300 Anaxagoras, 16 ancient philosophy. See classical philosophy ancient political philosophy. See classical political philosophy Andrologia (Strauss), 107–27; and adornments, 116–17; and centering, 115nn4–5, 117, 121, 124; and corruption of young, 117–19; and cosmetics, 114, 122–24; and dancing, 125–26, 125n; and gentlemanship, 114–19, 118n; and happiness, 114– 17, 115nn4–5; and household management, 115, 117; and inquiry, 113, 122, 124, 126–27; and Lamprokles, 123–24; and marriage, 120–21; and Memorabilia, 115n5, 122n; and nature, 113–14, 118–19, 122–26; and real real man, 107, 110, 126; and two ways of life, 110, 114–17, 115n5, 119–20, 122, 124–25 Antisthenes, 125 “anti-theological ire,” 235–42, 237n, 239n, 248, 285

Apology (Plato), 14–15, 228–29; and Andrologia, 119, 123; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 39–42, 41n Ariadne, 171, 289–90, 293–300, 293n, 296n, 297n, 308–9 Aristippos, 85, 115n5 Aristophanes: and Andrologia, 114, 117–19, 122; and Gynaikologia, 110; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 16 Aristophanes, works of: Clouds, 118–19 Aristotle: and Andrologia, 114, 117n; Cohen on, 12n10; and “Exoteric Teaching,” 29; God of Aristotle, 71; and Great Tradition, 98–99; and Gynaikologia, 98–99; and Homer, 165–66; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 34–35, 34n; and Nietz­ sche, 270–71, 302n35; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 128, 143; and PL introduction, 208n33, 210, 221n; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 15, 22; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 229, 241, 262n60, 266 art/arts: and artful rule, 133; hierarchy of, 133, 142n15; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 132–33, 138–39; of moneymaking, 132–33, 142n15; of persuasion, 142n15; philosophy as art of arts, 133; of ruling, 142n15; universal art, 142n15; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 254–57, 257n48, 261. See also art of writing; poets/poetry art of writing, 1–2; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 31, 36–38; and Maimonides, 9; and PL introduction, 201, 210, 212; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 9, 18, 31; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 238,

323

324

index

art of writing (cont.) 260–61; and Xenophon, 73, 75–77, 88. See also centering atheism, 7; and Nietzsche, 43, 221, 285–87, 292, 294; and PL introduction, 189n1, 200, 213, 218–19, 218n, 219n, 221; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 225, 237n Athena (in Odyssey), 170, 173, 181, 210 Athens: army of, 182; and Bacon, 204; Laco­ nism of, 16; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 69; and Nietzsche, 254, 292; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141, 146–48; and Parmenides (Plato), 96; Periclean Athens, 13–14; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 13–14, 16–18; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–30, 228n4, 238–39, 245–47, 252, 254; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 311–12, 314 Atlantis, 205–7, 205n28, 206n29, 254n39 audiences: and Alfarabi, 148; and Andrologia, 124; and Gynaikologia, 76, 101; and Homer, 164; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 45, 49, 57, 64, 66; naturally pious, 45, 49, 57, 64, 66; and Nietzsche, 244, 244n, 246, 248, 273, 277, 283–84, 297, 299–300; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141, 147–48; rare auditors, 18, 273; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 11, 18, 27; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 234–35, 239, 244, 244n, 248, 253; and Xenophon, 76, 314. See also readers authorship: and Homer, 162, 171; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 35–36, 36n, 38, 41, 49–50, 53, 54n, 55, 58, 62n29; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 9, 14, 16, 20, 22, 25–26; and superstitious nomoi, 58; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 260; and Xenophon, 14, 20, 25, 77, 88. See also art of writing Autolycus (in Odyssey), 161n6, 166n, 167, 183 Averroes, 8–9 Avicenna, 58 Bacon, Francis, 3, 51n19, 272; and PL introduction, 184, 192, 196, 196n14, 201n, 202–10, 204n, 216–17, 217n, 224, 224n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 236–38, 241–42, 242n18, 253–54 Bacon, Francis, works of: Advertisement Touching a Holy War, 204, 204n, 224n, 238; “Cassandra; or Plainness of Speech,”

209–10; “Cupid, or the Atom,” 206; “Letter of Dedication to Bishop Andrewes,” 204; New Atlantis, 205–7, 205n28, 206n29, 254n39; The New Organon, 242n18; “Typhon; or the Rebel,” 209; The Wisdom of the Ancients, 206, 209 Baron, Salo, 32n1, 37n8, 38n Barth, Karl, 194n Batnitzky, Leora, 50n beauty/beautiful: and art of writing, 1; and cosmetics, 103–4, 107; genuine beauty, 103, 107–8; and Gynaikologia, 80–91, 85n, 102–4, 107–8; and kallipolis (beautiful city), 19; and kalokagathia (gentlemanship), 17; and kalon pseudos (beautiful lie), 19; and kalos (beautiful/ noble), 85; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 46–48; and Nietzsche, 265–66, 289; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129; and order, 80–91, 85n, 102–4, 107–8; portrait of beautiful woman, 102; spurious beauty, 104, 107; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 13, 17, 19; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 265–66 Benardete, Seth, 156–81, 228n4, 276n, 283; dissertation on Iliad, 157; and Homer, 73, 156–81; and Plato, 142n14, 148n19, 156–58, 181, 184n25; and Strauss, 73, 142n14, 145n16, 148n, 156–58, 163 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 269–310, 282n18, 292n25; “Sayings and Interludes,” 292; “What Is Noble,” 302; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 131, 214–15, 220–22, 223nn48–49, 226, 244, 246n24, 248, 250n34, 260, 263, 267 Bible, 9; Christian Bible, 246; eschatology in, 243; and garden of Eden, 216–17; and guardian of brother, 68; miracles in, 58, 193–94, 197, 211–12; morality of, 219, 219n; and murder prohibition, 63; parody of, 11; and PL introduction, 193–94, 197– 98, 210–13, 216–17, 219; as poetry, 38n; sum of books of, 137n9; tradition of, 198, 200; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230, 233, 236, 241, 246, 253; wisdom of, 311 biology, 207, 232–33, 282, 282n18, 283 Bittlestone, Robert, 159n4 Bloom, Allan, 247 The Bow and the Lyre (Benardete), 156–81; and centering, 162–63, 162n, 169, 173, 177, 179; and “Hades,” 158, 162–63,



index

162n, 169, 173–81, 177nn17–18; “Helen and Menelaus,” 165n, 171n13; last sentences of, 158–59; and “Nature,” 158, 159–73, 162n; “Nestor,” 165n, 171n13; “Nonfated Things,” 178n20, 179; “Odysseus’s Own Story,” 162, 162n; “Pattern and Will,” 165n; preface to, 157–58; “The Slave Girls,” 179 Brandes, Georg, 256 Brann, Eva, 177n18 Buber, Martin, 194, 199 Calasso, Roberto, 184 Calvin, 43, 194n, 204 Calypso (in Odyssey), 163–64, 167, 172 categorical imperatives, 68–69, 229, 236, 245, 294 cave image, 12n10, 46, 46n, 69, 132, 148n, 151–52, 198, 198n, 209–10, 285; and second cave, 12n10, 198, 198n centering: and Andrologia, 115nn4–5, 117, 121, 124; and The Bow and the Lyre (Benardete), 162–63, 162n, 165, 169, 173, 177, 179; and Gynaikologia, 77, 82–86, 91–93, 95–101, 106–7, 109, 109n; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 36–37, 39–40, 54–57, 59, 62, 65; and Nietzsche, 220, 268–69, 277–82, 286–87, 292, 292n25, 295, 305; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 132–36, 140–41, 142nn14–15, 144, 149; and Republic, 55, 115n4, 133, 168; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–30, 256n47, 261; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 311–12 Chacón, Rodrigo, 221n charity (Liebe): and PL introduction, 195–96, 196n14, 207, 224; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236–37 Christianity, 117n, 187; and anti-Christian project, 196, 228, 239; and Apostle Paul, 195, 204, 228; Catholic Christians, 12, 28–29, 28n, 204, 207–8, 208n35, 255; and charity, 195–96, 196n14, 207, 224, 236– 37; Crusade in Holy Land, 37n8; and Jesuits, 207–8, 255; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33–34, 37, 37n8, 42, 50, 61n; and Nietzsche, 220, 246, 253, 255–56, 261, 271–72, 285, 287, 289, 296, 299, 302; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141; and papal despotism, 28–29, 28n; and PL introduction, 193, 193n10, 194n, 195–97, 195n13, 200–209, 206n29, 208n35,

325

216–17, 220, 224, 224n; Protestants, 193n10, 204, 297n; and salvation, 236; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 230, 236–40, 246, 253, 255, 261 Cicero, 29–30 Circe (in Odyssey), 159, 161–64, 162n, 166–68, 166n, 170, 172–75, 180, 182 city: and Andrologia, 114–17, 115n4, 119–20, 125; “city of pigs,” 168; and good city, 142–44, 150, 153; guardians of, 68–69, 68n36; and Gynaikologia, 86, 105–6, 111; and Homer, 168; and just city, 148–55, 217, 227, 235, 237–38, 250; kallipolis (beautiful city), 19; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 49, 51, 51n21, 68–69, 68n36; and Nietzsche, 250, 270; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–30, 133, 140, 142–44, 146, 148–55, 152n; and PL introduction, 204, 217; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 14–15, 19, 23n23, 27; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227, 235–38, 240n, 242, 250; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 312, 314 classical philosophy, 1, 7, 30, 187; and Andrologia, 114, 117n, 126–27; as asocial, 53, 59, 64, 67; changed circumstances demand changes in strategy of, 49–50, 57, 72; and contemplation, 51, 67–68, 98, 106, 141–42, 223, 236, 240n, 242n18; as dangerous, 37, 46–49, 68–70, 72; and defensive politeness, 42; denial of, 69–70; going underground, 70; and Great Tradition, 98–99; and Gynaikologia, 77, 83–85, 90–100, 90n, 105–7, 109–10, 109n, 113; and “Hades” (Benardete), 158, 162n, 173; and Homer, 156–59, 159n4, 161, 162n, 163–64, 166–69, 184–85; and human managing, 100, 109–10, 114; knowing knowing, 148n, 227–28; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33–72, 51nn20–21, 52n, 56n24, 57n26, 60n, 62n29, 67n34, 68nn36–37, 70n; and “Nature” (Benardete), 158–59, 162–64, 162n, 166–69; and nature of highest beings, 92, 98, 131, 133, 137, 206–7; and Nietzsche, 2–3, 231, 245, 268, 270–71, 273–74, 275n, 279–80, 282n18, 283, 286, 288–89, 293–95, 297, 299, 303–4, 307–10; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 128–33, 135, 137–44, 137nn10–11, 147–55, 152n; and philosopher king, 12n10, 51, 55, 131, 149–50, 168; and philosophic hermit,

326

index

classical philosophy (cont.) 53, 67, 67n35; and philosophic rule (see philosophic rule); and philosophizing gods, 137, 137nn10–11; and pleasure garden, 89–91, 98, 106–7, 110, 114; and PL introduction, 194–97, 206, 209–11, 223, 224n; quarrel with poetry, 1, 128–29, 131, 157–58; religious indifference of, 51–52, 57–59; and rules of conduct, 52–54, 67–68, 67n34, 68n37; and sovereign philosophy, 131–32; as spiritual hell, 46, 48; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 7, 11, 13–19, 24, 26–29, 26n, 45; and two ways of life, 41, 53, 109–10, 109n, 115–17, 115n, 117n, 119–20; and the unscrupulous, 70–72; and “what a philosopher is,” 33–35, 39, 63, 68, 71–72, 233; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–32, 236, 240n, 242n18. See also classical political philosophy; names of philosophers classical political philosophy, 1, 4; and Andrologia, 128; as antidemocratic, 231; and Gynaikologia, 73, 76, 98, 100, 107, 114; and “Hades” (Benardete), 158–59, 162n, 173; and Homer, 156–59, 159n4, 162n, 163–64, 173, 185; and “Nature” (Benardete), 158–59, 162n, 163–64; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141, 148–49, 154–55; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 14–15, 14n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–46, 240n, 241n16, 242nn18–19, 248n30, 249– 55, 257, 259–60, 263, 265n65, 266–67. See also Platonic political philosophy Cohen, Hermann, 199 complementary man, 301–7, 303n, 306n40 Confucius, 255 contemplation, 187; and Gynaikologia, 98, 106; and Nietzsche, 223, 263, 265–66, 273n11; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141–42; and PL introduction, 51, 67–68, 223; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236, 240n, 242n18, 263, 265–66. See also inquiry conversion: and “Exoteric Teaching,” 46n; and Halevi, 33n5, 38–39, 45–47, 49, 54, 56–57; to Judaism, 33n5, 38–39, 46, 49, 54; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 38–39, 45–47, 49, 54, 56–57, 66; and periagôgê, 45–46, 46n; to philosophy, 28, 45–47, 46n, 56–57, 66, 70; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 28

Copernicus, 232 cosmetics: and Andrologia, 122–24; and Gynaikologia, 86, 91, 101–8, 112–14, 177n18; and Homer, 177n18; and Nietzsche, 309; and PL introduction, 207; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 311 cosmos/cosmology, 16, 22, 44; and Andrologia, 123–24; and Gynaikologia, 93, 97, 99, 114; and Homer, 160, 167, 176; management of, 93, 124; and Nietzsche, 289, 304; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 139, 141; and PL introduction, 207; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 231–34, 241 courage, 195–96, 196nn15–16, 218, 264–65 Craig, Leon, 192 creation, 8, 46; and PL introduction, 193–94, 202–3, 209, 214; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232–33, 244, 249 criminal insight, 99, 172, 245, 275–76, 279, 283–84 Critias (in Charmides), 140n13 Cropsey, Joseph, 156 cruelty: and Nietzsche, 220, 222, 252, 286, 301, 306; and PL introduction, 220, 222; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236–38, 236n, 252; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313 culture, 141, 216; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 249–50, 253, 255, 257n49, 258–60 Cyrus (in Xenophon), 15, 83–92, 90n, 101–2, 105, 111, 113; and adornments, 84, 101; as “almost a king,” 84, 91; and cosmetics, 102, 105, 113; death of, 88; Great Cyrus, 86–87, 102, 105, 313–14; Ischomachos same as, 111, 113, 115; as model ruler, 83, 86, 88–92, 101, 105; and pleasure garden, 83–86, 92, 101, 111; and two ways of life, 111, 113, 115; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313–14; younger Cyrus, 87–88 Darwin, Charles: and Darwinism, 264n; Origin of Species, 264n deception: and Andrologia, 122; deceit/ lying, prohibition against, 63–66, 71; and Gynaikologia, 103–5, 107; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 49–50, 63–66, 71; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 137 deeds: and Andrologia, 122; erga (deeds), 20; and Gynaikologia, 84, 90, 107; kalon pseudos (beautiful lie) as, 19; and “The



index

Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 52, 56, 68; and “Nature” (Benardete), 162, 168; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 150; relationship to speech, 14, 15n15, 52, 56, 68, 150 Delphic oracle, 40–41, 119, 140n13 delusion: and Nietzsche, 223n48, 253, 255, 259, 262, 265; and PL introduction, 213, 216–17, 223n48; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 252–53, 255, 259, 262, 265 democracy: classical political philosophy as antidemocratic, 230; crisis of, 252; and golden age, 245–46; and Homer, 162, 168, 179; liberal democracy, 252–53; and Nietzsche, 252–53, 273, 279; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230, 245–46, 252–53 Democritus, 3, 206 Descartes, René, 3, 28n, 272; death of, 208n35; and “the master and owner of nature,” 216–17, 217n; and PL introduction, 192, 192n8, 196n14, 201, 201n, 202n, 203–4, 206n29, 207–10, 208n33, 208n35, 216–17, 217n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232, 236, 238, 241, 247, 256–57, 256n47, 257n48, 266 Descartes, René, works of: Discourse on the Method, 192, 203–4, 232, 238, 256–57, 256n47; Meditations, 192, 208, 208n33; Meteorology, 206n29 dialogues: and Bacon, 204, 224n, 254n39; dialogic questions, 288; and “Exoteric Teaching,” 29; and Halevi, 33, 33n5, 35–36, 36n, 37n9, 38, 43–45, 50, 64; and Nietzsche, 283, 285–86, 288; and Plato, 14–16, 14n13, 15n15, 18, 25, 26n, 29, 35–36, 38, 55, 73, 128, 132, 141, 147n, 182, 228, 230; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 14–16, 14n13, 15n15, 18, 21, 25, 26n; and Xenophon, 21, 25, 35–36, 75, 78–79, 87, 100, 103, 112, 120–21 Dionysos, 286, 289–90, 292–300, 297n, 308–9 Diotima, 25n27, 96n, 294, 299 disguises, 15, 20–23, 25; and Andrologia, 127; and Gynaikologia, 104; and Odyssey (Homer), 178n20, 183 divine law, 39–43, 52, 56, 58, 60, 62. See also gods doubt: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 41–42, 48–50, 55–58, 56n24, 70; and Nietzsche, 56n24; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232, 258

327

Ebert, Theodor, 208n35 education: and Andrologia, 118, 124–25; and Gynaikologia, 77–78, 81, 86, 89–90, 93, 95, 97, 100–103, 107, 109; and Homer, 147n, 155; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 45–46; and Nietzsche, 255n41, 261, 261n, 291–92, 300, 306; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133, 141, 147n, 151; and PL introduction, 207–8; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 241n16, 255n41, 261, 261n Elpenor (in Odyssey), 162, 170, 173–75, 178 Epicurus, 3, 30, 114n, 292; and dionysokolax, 292, 292n25; Epicureanism, 213, 216, 218, 219n epistemologies: epistemological idealism, 197; “epistemological skepticism,” 278–79; and Nietzsche, 278–79, 282; and PL introduction, 197, 210–11, 220 equality/inequality, 24, 153, 242; and Nietz­ sche, 244, 251, 254, 273, 275, 302–3, 307–8 Eros, 25n27, 141–42, 206 eros, 64, 107; and Nietzsche, 280, 283, 299, 307; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 140–42, 151, 153; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 234 esotericism, 2–3; and double meanings, 17, 19; and Gynaikologia, 91; and Homer, 181; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 49; and Nietzsche, 234, 275–76, 279, 283, 285; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 12–15, 17, 19, 21–24, 26–28; and view from above, 275–76, 283, 285; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 234, 238. See also exotericism eternal return, 287–93, 299, 301, 303–8, 307n43; and PL introduction, 215, 222– 23, 223n48; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 248n30, 250–51, 250n34, 259 Eumaeus (in Odyssey), 159n4, 179 Eurylochus (in Odyssey), 162, 172–73 evil: cessation of evils, 150, 152n, 153–54; evil principle, 263; and Gynaikologia, 82, 94; and Homer, 162; and Nietzsche, 131, 263, 300; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 131, 150, 152n, 153–54; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 17; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236, 263 exotericism, 2–3, 5; and Andrologia, 126–27; and Bacon, 196, 204; and Gynaikolo

328

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exotericism (cont.) gia, 91, 107; and Herodotus, 14; and Hesiod, 22–23; and Homer, 156, 171, 181, 184; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 32–33, 49, 54, 57, 57n, 64, 64n, 67–68, 71–72; and Lessing, 28–29; and Maimonides, 7, 9–12, 10n7, 17, 24n25; and Nietzsche, 3, 72, 184, 268, 272–77, 273n11, 274n14, 289–90, 304; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 155; and Plato, 12, 14, 17–20, 19n, 64n, 187, 207; and PL introduction, 189–90, 192, 196–97, 200, 201n, 204–5, 207–10, 208n33, 216–17, 217n, 224–26; and repetition, 47–48, 47n, 58; and secret words, 17, 19; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 7–26, 28–30, 28n, 73, 156; Strauss’s recovery of, 5, 7–8, 8n2, 11n, 15, 17, 20, 22, 25–27, 32, 155, 201n, 209, 254n40, 273, 304; and Thucydides, 13–14; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 238, 240, 240n, 242, 253, 266; and Xenophon, 14–17, 20–21, 73, 75–76, 187, 207. See also esotericism fact/value separation, 191, 213–15; and Nietz­ sche, 214–15, 222–23, 249–50, 289 fear: and Andrologia, 114n, 126; of death, 18, 197; and Gynaikologia, 84; and Homer, 175–76, 177n17, 180; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 45, 69; of lie in soul, 138, 140; and Nietzsche, 175, 262, 275–76, 286, 289, 300; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 138, 140, 147; and PL introduction, 197, 205, 213, 215; religious terror, 114n, 176–77, 185, 213, 216–17, 219; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 10, 18; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235, 237n, 262 Ferdinand of Aragon, 236 Franco, Paul, 257n48, 264n freedom: and Andrologia, 115n5; and Gynaikologia, 105, 105n; and Homer, 158, 168, 173, 175, 179, 180n, 185; inner freedom, 70, 105, 105n; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 70; and Maimonides, 8; natural freedom, 240n, 241; and Nietzsche, 1–2, 173, 201–2, 223n48, 249–50, 279, 286; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 134, 140, 148–49, 153; and PL introduction, 195, 201–2, 209, 213, 216, 223n48, 224; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230,

240n, 241, 249–50, 257n49, 263. See also free minds free minds: and Homer, 175, 185; and Maimonides, 8; and Nietzsche, 175, 257n49, 263, 273, 273n12, 277–79, 283–86, 291–92; and Socrates, 185 fundamental fact (Ur-Faktum), 215, 221, 223, 249, 251, 282n18, 290, 305 future: and Andrologia, 125; and Gynaikologia, 96–97, 106, 112; and Homer, 174–75, 177, 185; and Nietzsche, 131, 222, 245– 46, 250–54, 257n49, 258–59, 258n51, 260, 262–63, 265–66, 277, 286–87, 291–92, 297, 297n, 299, 301, 306, 308–10; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 131; and PL introduction, 189, 191, 197, 205, 218n, 222, 226; post-Enlightenment future, 226; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 5, 10, 24; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 229, 237, 240–41, 245–46, 250–54, 257n49, 258–60, 258n51, 262–63, 265–66 Galileo, 192n8, 210 gang of robbers, 52, 59–61, 63–64, 64n, 65, 68, 68n37; and community of philosophers, 63–66, 64n, 70; and most noble community, 52, 63–65 Geist, 220, 273n12, 281 gentleman/gentlemanship (kalokagathia): and Andrologia, 114–24, 118n; doings of perfect gentleman, 110, 112–13, 117–22, 118n; double meaning of, 17, 90–91; and Gynaikologia, 76–78, 77n, 80, 83, 85–87, 89–91, 93, 95, 97–98, 100–106, 109–10, 112–13; management of, 123; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141; Socrates contrasted with, 77, 80, 83, 85, 90, 109–10, 113, 118, 118n, 120; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 250. See also Ischomachos (in Xenophon) genuine philosopher: and Andrologia, 114; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 38–39, 52, 64; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 131, 251; and PL introduction, 198, 222; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242n19, 250n34, 251 Glaucon (in Republic), 19, 138–39, 142–49, 145n16, 232n God: assimilation to, 71; and categorical imperatives, 68–69, 236, 294; death of God, 147, 175, 244, 284–87, 289, 291–92;



index

duties toward, 59–65; and genuine morality, 68–70; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 42–43, 51n20, 59–65, 69–70; and Nietzsche, 175, 222, 244–45, 247, 258, 265n64, 283–89, 291–96, 300, 309; omnipotence of, 200, 212–13; and PL introduction, 193–94, 200, 203–4, 206–8, 211–13, 218–19, 222; Universal God, 155; vindication of, 284–86, 288, 292–93, 295; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–29, 231–33, 235–38, 244–45, 247, 258, 265n64 gods: and Andrologia, 115–17, 117n, 124, 126; and Bendideia festival, 146–47, 183; and bestial/divine split, 163–68, 164n; birth of Olympian gods, 136–37; and Charmides, 140n13; cosmic gods, 135; death of Homeric gods, 147, 155, 250; disappearance of, 176, 177n17; and eros, 140–42; and “Exoteric Teaching,” 29–30; genesis of, 171; of Getae, 182; and Gynaikologia, 78, 81–84, 86, 90–98, 101, 103, 106–7; and Hades, 158, 173–81, 177n17, 180n; and ideas, doctrine of, 145–48, 145n16; ignorance of ancient things, 134; invisible gods, 170, 175–77, 177n17, 181; and lying, 134–40, 147; and management of cosmos, 93; and nature of highest beings, 92, 98, 131, 133, 137; new laws for, 131–42, 137nn9–11, 139n, 145, 239; and Nietzsche, 285–86, 289–90, 292–300, 296n, 308–9; noble lies about, 133, 135; and noticing/punishing by, 18–19, 81–82, 94, 106, 114n, 126, 139, 141, 147, 153, 176–79, 177n17, 259, 277, 289; Olympian gods, 135–37, 137n9, 140n13, 158, 173, 176, 177n17, 180–81; omniscience of, 81–82; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 131–42, 137nn10–11, 139n, 145–48, 145n16, 153; philosophizing gods, 137, 137nn10–11; and pity, 172; sacrificing to, 175–76, 185; as self-subsisting beings, 144–45, 147; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 14, 18, 22, 27; and Theogeny (Hesiod), 22, 23n23; truths about, 133–36; visible gods, 135–36; and “what a god is,” 133–40, 145, 148; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232n, 249, 259, 266; why believe in them, 136. See also names of gods Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 43–44, 44n, 291

329

Gogarten, Friedrich, 194n good/goodness: absence of, 180; construed as pleasure, 85; and good city, 142–44, 149–50, 153; and Gynaikologia, 85–86, 85n; and Homer, 178n20, 180; and ideas, doctrine of, 143; and kalokagathia (gentlemanship), 17; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 60; and Nietzsche, 271, 279–80, 284–90, 300, 302n35, 307, 309– 10; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 131, 137–45, 147–50, 152–54, 152n; and PL introduction, 218; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313 Greek enlightenment, 24, 128, 129n, 238 Greeks: and Nietzsche, 197, 248n30, 253–54, 270, 275, 276n, 289, 298–99; and nonGreeks, 24, 69, 83, 111; ontology of, 171–72; and PL introduction, 196–97, 200, 208; post-Homeric Greek civilization, 147; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 17, 22–24; in Strauss’s letter to Scholem, 311; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 232, 238, 242, 248n30, 254; wisdom of, 24, 171; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 311–13. See also classical philosophy; classical political philosophy Greenblatt, Stephen, 207n Guide for the Perplexed (Maimonides), 9–10, 10n7, 11, 27, 58, 190, 225 Guttmann, Julius, 24n25 Gynaikologia (Strauss), 76–113, 118, 120, 123–24, 126; and aptness/inaptness, 78–83, 105–7; and centering, 77, 82–86, 91–93, 95–101, 106–7, 109, 109n; and cosmetics, 86, 91, 101–8, 112–13, 177n18; and farming, 83, 87–89, 93n; and gentlemanship, 76–78, 77n, 80, 83, 85–87, 89–91, 93, 95, 97–98, 100–106, 109–10, 112–13; and the good, 85–86, 85n, 111; and household management, 76–78, 87, 89, 93, 109–10, 114; marriage according to gods/law, 77–80, 86; and masculine mind, 103–5, 113; and Memorabilia, 82, 85–87, 92–94, 93n, 110–11, 112n; and model rulers, 83, 86, 88–92, 101, 105; and order, usefulness/beauty of, 80–91; and order itself, 91–101, 106–7, 111; and philosophers, 83–85, 90–100, 90n, 105–6; and Phoenician merchantman, 81–84, 86, 90, 93–94, 100, 113; and poverty, 110–11; and queen bee comparison, 78–80,

330

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Gynaikologia (cont.) 105–7; and rank, 83, 85–86, 89, 91, 105; and “Socrates’ story,” 15, 83–90, 90n, 92–93, 111; and storytelling, 87–90; and two ways of life, 86–87, 89–91, 104, 107, 109n, 110–11, 113; and utility, 84–86, 90; and virtues, 101–5, 105n “Hades” (Benardete), 158, 162, 162n, 169, 173–81, 177nn17–18; and centering, 169, 173, 177, 179; and Circe episode, 174–75, 180; and Elpenor, 162, 173–75; Odysseus’s journey to, 167, 169–70, 173–77; and Teiresias, 167, 174, 176–77, 179, 181 Hades (in Odyssey), 163, 167, 169–70, 172–81, 177n18, 183, 185 Halevi, Yehuda, 32–72, 32n1, 37n8, 155, 268; death of, 37n8; as internal emigrant, 67–68; and Nietzsche, 268, 271–72, 286, 289, 294; and PL introduction, 225–26; as poet, 32, 32n1, 38, 38n, 43; restraint of, 50, 70–71, 71n; return to Jewish fold, 54, 57, 59, 61, 68–71, 232; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232, 240. See also Kuzari (Halevi); “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” (Strauss) Halkin, Hillel, 32n1 happiness: and Andrologia, 114–17, 115nn4–5; and Nietzsche, 2, 242n19, 262, 265–66, 307; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 143, 150–51, 153; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242, 242n19, 262, 265–66 harm, 137, 139–41, 169–70, 295, 310, 313 Hegel, 203, 243, 250; post-Hegelian thought, 248 Heidegger: and PL introduction, 203, 211–13, 215, 220n, 221, 221n, 223; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240n, 246–48, 248n30 Hermes (in Odyssey), 157, 159, 161, 163, 165–66, 166n, 182 Herodotus: and esotericism, 12–13; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 69n; and Sophocles, 15; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 12–13, 15, 20, 24 Hesiod: and “Exoteric Teaching,” 30; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133, 136, 138; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 22–25, 156 Hesiod, works of: Theogeny, 22–23; Works and Days, 23

historicism, 27; and PL introduction, 197–98, 211–12, 215, 221, 223; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242, 247 history of philosophy, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 27, 310, 314; and Gynaikologia, 77, 96; and Homer, 156–85; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33, 64, 71–72; and Nietz­ sche, 4, 72, 269, 269n3, 271, 274–76; and PL introduction, 194 Hitler, Adolf, 246, 248, 277 Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 19n, 29, 197n, 269n2; and PL introduction, 192, 192n8, 195–97, 195nn12–13, 196n14, 196n16, 202n, 209; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235, 238–39, 242–43; and works of, Leviathan, 192, 238 Homer, 2, 4, 156–85; and The Bow and the Lyre (Benardete), 156–81; death of Homeric gods, 147, 155, 250; and Nietzsche, 170–71, 175, 184–85, 270, 276n, 284, 289, 294, 299; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 128, 130, 133, 135–36, 138, 139n, 147, 147n, 155; and Plato, 147n, 157, 181–84, 184n25; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 19– 20, 22–24, 73, 156; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 239, 244, 250 Homer, works of: Iliad, 157, 161n5, 184; Odyssey, 22–23, 139n, 156–85, 235–36 household management, 76–78, 87, 89, 93, 109–10, 115, 117 human nature, 2–3; and Andrologia, 126; and Gynaikologia, 99–100, 114; and “Hades” (Benardete), 173–74, 181, 184; and “Nature” (Benardete), 157, 164–65, 167–69, 172; and Nietzsche, 282n18, 284, 305–8; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141–42, 149, 152–53; and PL introduction, 207n, 216, 220; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235 Husserl, Edmund, 191 Ibn Tibbon, Judah, 33n5, 63 ideal/idealism, 291; andreia-ideal, 24n24; epistemological idealism, 197; feasible replaces ideal, 160–62, 165; German idealistic philosophy, 242–43; and Homer, 160–62, 165; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 36–37; moral idealism, 197; and Nietzsche, 223, 249–50, 264, 287–93, 297–300, 305, 307n43, 308–9; and PL



index

introduction, 191, 196–97, 203, 209–11, 213–18, 223; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 8–9, 15, 24n24; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242–43, 249–50, 264; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313 ideas, doctrine of: as fantastic, 144, 147–48; and Gynaikologia, 96–97, 99; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 132, 137, 142–49, 145n16, 148n; participation of particulars in separateness, 144; separateness of ideas, 144; transcendent ideas, 96–97; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232, 232n imitation: and Andrologia, 117–18; and Gynaikologia, 90, 102, 112; and Maimonides, 11, 27; and Nietzsche, 300, 307; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–30; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 11, 27; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 243 immortality: and Gynaikologia, 97; and “Hades” (Benardete), 178, 180–81, 185; and Homer, 160, 167, 171, 178, 180–81, 185; and “Nature” (Benardete), 160, 167, 171; and Nietzsche, 249, 264–65, 289, 299, 309; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 147; and PL introduction, 208, 217; of souls, 97, 147, 185, 208, 236, 239, 249, 264–65, 289, 309; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 18–19; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236, 239, 241, 249, 264–65; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 314 innovation: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 66, 67–71; and Nietzsche, 215, 221, 256, 271, 282n18; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 155; and PL introduction, 207, 215, 221; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 256 inquiry, 187; and Andrologia, 113, 122, 124, 126–27; and Gynaikologia, 86, 95, 98–100, 107; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 41, 52, 68; and Nietzsche, 252–53, 268, 272, 283, 288, 290, 298, 308; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141–42, 144; and PL introduction, 191; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230, 233, 236, 242n19, 252–53. See also contemplation Inquisition, 236 intellect: and Gynaikologia, 75, 111; intellectual conscience, 218; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 34, 36–38, 37n8,

331

43, 63–64, 66; and Nietzsche, 43, 218–23, 225, 247, 260n57, 266, 266n66, 294, 304, 307; and PL introduction, 190n6, 193n10, 207, 207n, 212, 218–19; Redlichkeit (intellectual probity), 43, 218–23, 225, 266, 266n66, 272, 281; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 229–30, 232–33, 247, 260n57, 266, 266n66 irony: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 42–43; and Maimonides, 17; and Plato, 15, 17, 19, 42–43; and secret words, 17, 19; and Socrates, 17, 19, 42–43; and Xenophon, 15 Ischomachos (in Xenophon), 76–83, 79n, 86, 91–95, 97–107, 109–24, 312; and “all kinds of speaking,” 120–22; Cyrus same as, 111, 113, 115; and happiness, 114–17, 115n5; lectures on order, 80–83, 86, 91–92, 94–95, 100–106; separating indoor things, 92–93; Socrates as pupil of, 110, 115–18; Socrates’s correction of, 115, 115n, 117, 117n, 122–23; and two ways of life, 111, 113–17, 117n, 120, 122; wife of, 77–81, 91–92, 95, 100–107, 105n, 109–10, 113, 121–23, 170, 177n18, 303, 307 Islam: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33, 37, 37n8, 42, 52; and medieval Islamic philosophy, 7; and PL introduction, 204, 224n Ithaca, 159n4, 160, 162, 173, 177 Jacobi, Friedrich, 7, 28–29, 42, 193, 193n9 Jerusalem, 17, 24n25, 37n8, 69, 204; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–30, 228n4, 232–33, 235–36, 238–39, 244–48, 248nn30–31, 252, 254, 269 Jesuits/Jesuitism, 207–8, 255 Judaism: apostate Jews, 42, 52; and doubting Jew, 49–50; and exile, 37n8; and God of Abraham, 71; Halevi’s return to, 54, 57, 59, 61, 68–71, 232; incompatibility with philosophy, 9, 39; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 32n1, 33–63, 33n5, 36n, 37n8, 61n, 62n29, 68–70; and Maimonides, 8–9, 11, 27, 191; and Moloch, 61; and PL introduction, 190n6, 191–94, 191n, 194n, 199–203, 209, 216, 218, 218n, 224–26; present situation of, 9, 191–94, 191n, 194n, 225–26; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 246, 255;

332

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Judaism (cont.) and Yahweh, 61, 309. See also medieval Jewish philosophy justice, 138; adikia (unjust), 19; and Andrologia, 120, 122; dikaiosunê (justice), 19–20, 19n; and Gynaikologia, 97; and Hades, 173, 176, 179–80, 180n; and just city, 148–55, 217, 227, 235, 237–38, 250; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 60, 64, 64n; and “Nature” (Benardete), 165–66, 168–69; and Nietzsche, 214, 223, 304–7, 309; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 128–30, 133, 137–41, 143–55; as pattern, 143; and PL introduction, 195, 214, 217, 223; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 19–20, 19n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–28, 235, 237–38, 250; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313–14 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 209, 211, 216, 243, 259n54, 303 Kierkegaard, Søren, 203 Klein, Jacob: letters to Strauss, 11n, 22n21, 189, 189n2; Strauss’s letters to, 5, 7–26, 8n2, 10n7, 15n15, 24nn24–25, 26n, 30, 45, 73, 90, 156; at University of Mar­ burg, 8 knowledge, 3; and Andrologia, 114, 124; and dualism, 233; and Gynaikologia, 81, 87– 88, 93, 98–99, 109–11, 109n; and Homer, 157–58, 160, 162, 165–72, 176, 180, 182; knowing knowing, 148n, 227–28; and “knowledge of the whole,” 227, 231–34; and Know Thyself, 140n13, 220, 281; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 36–37, 40–41, 44n, 47, 51n20, 59, 61; and Nietzsche, 212, 220–23, 233–34, 243, 247, 249–50, 257–58, 257n49, 261–66, 265n65, 269, 271, 273, 277, 281–82, 288–89, 300– 301; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 134, 136–40, 145, 147–49, 148n, 151, 152n; and PL introduction, 191, 196–98, 202–7, 209–11, 214, 217n, 220–23; selfknowledge, 111, 140n13, 166, 180, 191, 197, 220, 234, 253, 263, 277, 281, 288–89, 313; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 11, 15, 26; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–28, 231–34, 243, 247, 249–50, 253, 257–58, 257n48, 261–66, 265n65; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313–14 Kojève, Alexandre, 189, 213

Kritoboulos (in Xenophon), 76–77, 83, 87–92, 88n, 96, 100, 110, 118–19, 124, 239 Kriton (in Xenophon), 87, 98, 119 Krüger, Gerhard, 109n, 218 Kuzari (Halevi), 32–72, 33n5; and absent philosopher, 44–45, 47–48, 57, 62–64; disputation between scholar/philosopher omitted, 38–39, 41–45, 47–48, 62; and Jewish scholar, 33, 36–44, 36n, 47–49, 53–66; and Kuzari (King of the Khazars), 33, 36–38, 40–41, 44, 47–51, 54–55, 57; literary character of, 35–50, 36n; and Philosopher, 37–38, 37n9, 43, 50–54, 51nn20–21, 52n, 60n. See also “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” (Strauss) Laertes (in Odyssey), 173, 177n18, 180n Laestrygonians (in Odyssey), 159, 161–62, 161n5, 165, 168 lawgivers, 8, 69, 263, 272. See also legislators “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” (Strauss), 30–31, 32–72, 226, 233; and centering, 36–37, 39–40, 54–57, 59, 62, 65, 77; epigraph of, 33; and framework of every code, 59–66; and innovating in political theology, 66, 67–71; and Jewish scholar’s approving of philosopher’s rational nomoi, 59–67; and Jewish scholar’s oppos­ ing of philosopher’s rational nomoi, 53– 59, 66; literary character of Kuzari, 35– 50, 36n; and natural law (ius naturale), 34–35, 34n, 67–71; and Philosopher’s stance toward religion, 50–53, 51nn20– 21, 52n; as theatrical performance, 33; and two ways of life, 41, 53 laws: and Andrologia, 124; divine law, 39, 78; and Gynaikologia, 78, 82, 100, 104, 106; and Homer, 169–70; of human origin, 78, 82, 100, 106, 141, 209, 230; new laws for gods, 131–42, 137nn9–11, 139n, 145, 239; and Nietzsche, 2, 131, 264, 294, 309; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130–42, 137nn9–11, 139n, 148, 155; patriarchal laws, 13; penal law, 18–19; and PL intro­ duction, 193–94, 197, 197n, 209, 216, 225; and Socrates, 16, 18–19, 78, 82, 100; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 13, 16, 18–19; unwritten law, 78; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–30, 239, 264 Laws (Plato), 12, 14–16, 14n, 18–19, 69, 196, 196n15, 228–30



index

legislators: ideal legislators, 8; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130–31, 131n7; poetlegislators, 131n7; prudent legislators, 130–31; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230, 250. See also lawgivers Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 7, 29 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 7, 28–30, 30n33, 201 lies/lying: and gods, 134–40, 147; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 68–69, 68n36; lie in soul, 138, 140; moral lie, 69, 140–41; and Nietzsche, 254–55, 257, 257n48, 266, 289–90, 295, 297n; and noble lies, 68–69, 68n36, 133, 135, 253–54, 257, 257n48; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133–41, 147; “true lie,” 138; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 253–55, 257, 257n48, 266 Locke, John, 209, 242 loves: and Andrologia, 122n, 124, 126; and Gynaikologia, 103, 108; and Homer, 166, 170, 171n12, 172, 173n16, 183; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 64, 71; love of existence, 251; love of good, 300; love of honor, 183; love of justice, 138; love of life, 288–89, 297, 309; love of man, 122n, 166, 229; love of nature, 126, 305; love of self, 291; love of truth, 138, 218, 221, 223, 227, 272, 298, 300; love of wisdom, 233; love of world, 251, 291; and “Nature” (Benardete), 166, 170, 171n12, 172, 173n16; and Nietzsche, 221, 223, 250–51, 262, 272, 282, 288–91, 293n, 295, 297–300, 305–6, 308–10; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 138; and PL introduction, 206, 218, 221, 223; self-love, 64; sexual love, 170, 171n12, 172, 290, 298–99; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227, 229, 233, 246, 250–51, 262. See also eros; philanthropy Löwith, Karl, 218 Lucretius, 114n; On the Nature of Things, 207n, 254n40 Lysander, 88, 111, 113 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 235–42, 247 Mahdi, Muhsin, 271 Maimonides, Moses: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 35, 58; and PL introduction, 190–91, 198, 198n, 213, 224–25; and rationalism, 10n7, 35, 190–91; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 7–12, 10n7,

333

12n10, 17; Strauss’s writings on, 8, 10–11, 10n7, 24n25, 27, 47n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240 Maimonides, Moses, works of: Guide for the Perplexed, 9–10, 10n7, 11, 27, 58, 190, 225; Mishneh Torah, 11 manliness: and andreia (manly spirit), 23–24, 24n24; and Andrologia, 109–10, 113–14, 120, 125–26; and courage, 196; and Homer, 170, 171n12, 172; and male correction of nature, 126; and masculine mind, 103–5, 113, 170; and Nietzsche, 296, 298–99, 303, 307–9; and PL introduction, 196; and real real man, 107, 110, 126. See also complementary man marriage: and Andrologia, 120–21; and Gynaikologia, 77–80, 86 Marsilius of Padua, 34–35 Marx, Karl, 245, 250 medieval Islamic philosophy, 7, 209 medieval Jewish philosophy, 7, 29, 32n3; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 32, 32n3, 34–36, 34n, 46, 55–56, 62; and PL introduction, 189n1, 195, 197, 209, 213, 225–26; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235 Meier, Heinrich, 8, 10n7, 27n31, 29, 30n33, 45n, 189, 191n, 200n23, 220n, 242n19 Mendelssohn, Moses, 7, 30n33 Menelaus (in Odyssey), 164–65, 171n13 mind: anonymous mind (mêtis), 167; and Geist, 220, 273n12, 281; and Gynaikologia, 95, 103, 105, 113; and Homer, 166–69, 174–75, 177, 178n20, 180–81, 185; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 70–71; and masculine mind, 103, 105, 113; and Nietzsche, 220, 257nn48– 49, 258, 263, 266, 284; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 143; and PL introduction, 210, 220; rarest minds, 273; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 8, 15; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227, 229, 231–32, 232n, 237–39, 241–42, 257nn48–49, 258, 263, 266. See also free minds ministerial poetry, 131–32, 141, 147–48, 153–55, 184, 187 miracles, 39, 58, 193–94, 197, 211–12 mockery, 201–2, 202n, 205, 288 model rulers, 83, 86, 88–92, 101, 105 modern Enlightenment, 1–4, 187; failure of, 197, 202–3, 208–9; foundation (Grund)

334

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modern Enlightenment (cont.) of, 210–15, 210n, 212n; justification (Rechtfertigung) of, 210–11, 210n, 212n, 214–25; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 42–43; Napoleonic strategy of, 203–10, 204n, 217, 241, 253; and Nietz­ sche, 3–4, 43, 72, 175, 187, 197, 201, 205, 215, 221, 223–26, 247–67, 248n30, 257n49, 264n, 265n64, 268–310, 269n3; and PL introduction, 190–95, 193nn9–10, 197–205, 198n, 200n23, 207–19, 221, 223–26; quarrel with orthodoxy, 199–211, 208n35, 215–16, 218–19, 225; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 28–29; success of, 192, 202–3, 208, 210–11, 212n, 213, 215–16; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–67, 257n48, 265n64 modernity: “cave of modernity,” 198n; and Nietzsche, 248, 250–51, 254, 267, 272, 302, 310; and PL introduction, 195, 197–98, 198n; three waves of, 242–48, 248n31, 254, 257, 267, 270, 310; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242–48, 248n31, 250–51, 254, 257, 267 modern philosophy: and contemplation, 223, 263, 265–66, 273n11; continuity in, 184; and Geist, 220, 273n12, 281; and Gynaikologia, 98–100, 107; and nature of highest beings, 206–7; and Nietzsche, 268–310; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 154; origins of, 3, 26, 100–101, 195, 197–98; and PL introduction, 190–92, 194–98, 202, 205–26, 206n29, 223n48, 224n; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 9–10, 12n10, 16, 26. See also modern political philosophy modern political philosophy, 1, 4; and Nietzsche, 270–71; and PL introduction, 192, 195, 202, 209, 217; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227, 233–67, 240n, 241n16, 242nn18–19 moly (herb), 157, 161, 164–69, 166n, 182 monism, 234, 242n19 monotheisms, 17, 53, 69n, 185, 236, 236n, 285, 293–94. See also names of religions Montaigne, Michel de, 198n, 236, 238; Essays, 238 morality, 3; and Andrologia, 122–23, 126; Außenmoral, 65, 65n, 67n34; biblical morality, 219, 219n; Binnenmoral, 65–66;

consistency of, 139–40; genuine morality, 68–70; and Gynaikologia, 97, 106, 113; and Homer, 164, 177, 179–81; and “Law of Manu,” 255; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 45, 59–71, 62n30, 69n; moral imperative, 253; moral lie, 69, 140–41; moral minimum, 59–67, 62n30, 71; “moral universe,” 113; moral utility, 233; moral virtue, 220–22, 236; natural morality, 68; and Nietzsche, 131n7, 220–23, 223n48, 245, 247, 247n29, 255, 260–61, 260n57, 263–65, 264n, 270, 272, 273n11, 275–77, 287–89, 291–92, 294, 296–97, 300–301, 304–7; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130–31, 131n7, 135–36, 139–41, 147, 153, 155; and PL introduction, 43, 218–23, 219n, 223n48, 226; and poets, 130–31, 131n7; and postmoral period, 263–64, 277; and Socrates, 17–18, 21, 45, 97, 106, 113, 135; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 17–18; vs. religion, 65– 70, 69n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 233, 235–36, 239, 245, 247, 247n29, 253, 255, 260–61, 260n57, 263–65, 264n Moses, 9, 244 Muses, 22–23, 30, 158–59 Muslims: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33, 37, 50; and Nietzsche, 275; and PL introduction, 200, 209. See also Islam myths: and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133, 135, 154; and PL introduction, 206–7, 209; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 15, 19, 21, 24–25, 25n27; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 256 Napoleonic strategy, 203–10, 204n, 217, 241, 253 Natorp, Paul, 12n10 natural law (ius naturale): and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 34–35, 34n, 67–71 “Nature” (Benardete), 158, 159–73; and Aeolus episode, 159–60; and Aristotle, 165–66; and bestial/divine split, 163–68, 164n; and centering, 162–63, 162n, 165, 169, 173; and Circe episode, 159, 161–64, 162n, 166–68, 166n, 170, 172–75, 182; feasible replaces ideal, 160–62, 165; and Laestrygonian episode, 159, 161–62, 161n5, 165, 168; and mind (nous), 166–



index

69; and neutrality, 161–62, 161n5; and Phaedo, 160; and pity, 172; and Republic, 168; and “second sailing,” 160, 165 nature/natural, 2–3; amorality of, 180–81; and Andrologia, 113–14, 118–19, 122–26; conquest of nature, 302–8, 307n43, 310; and cosmetics, 103–4, 106–8; discovery of, 159–60, 165, 167, 172–73; and divine natures, 139–40; ecological way of thinking/acting, 300; and eros, 141–42; and eternal nature, 211; and Gynaikologia, 78–79, 81–84, 86, 91–92, 94–101, 103–4, 106–8, 111–14, 112n; and “Hades” (Benar­ dete), 173–74, 181, 185; and Homer, 157, 159–67, 169–71, 171n13, 172–74, 182, 184; love of, 126; management of, 124; and “the master and owner of nature,” 216–17, 217n; “natural attitude,” 191; and natural freedom, 240n, 241; and natural history, 185, 232, 251; and natural man, 252; and natural order, 81, 250–51; and natural origins, 3, 26, 100–101, 195, 197–98; and natural philosophy, 232; and natural right, 197, 197n, 202; and nature of highest beings, 92, 98, 131, 133, 137, 143, 206–7; and Nietzsche, 126, 214–15, 222, 269, 280, 282n18, 283–84, 289–90, 298–310, 307n43; and “no assignable limits” to conquest of, 302–5, 302n35, 307, 307n43; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141–42, 144, 149, 152–53, 155; physis, 157, 163, 166; and PL introduction, 191– 92, 194–98, 197n, 202, 205–17, 207n, 217n, 220, 222–23; and Socrates, 16, 78– 79, 79n, 84, 94, 99–101, 103–4, 106–8, 111–14, 118–19, 123–26, 141–42, 160, 182; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 16; and Symposium (Plato), 141–42; and torturing nature, 241; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 231–32, 234–36, 241–44, 242n18, 247, 249–52. See also human nature; sciences/natural sciences Nazism, 246–47 necessity: and Homer, 159–60, 162, 166, 168–69, 172, 180–81; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 69; and Nietzsche, 222, 250, 253–54, 262n60, 271, 310; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 140, 155; and PL introduction, 197, 209, 217, 217n, 222; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 17; and

335

“What Is Political Philosophy?,” 250, 253–54, 262n60 Nestor (in Odyssey), 164–65, 171n13 Newton, Isaac, 210, 261 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–4, 187, 268–310; and affirmation, 215, 222–23, 231, 251, 259, 276, 276n, 287–89, 291–92, 295, 297–99, 297n, 301, 303–5; and Andrologia, 126; caricatured as misogynist, 309; and centering, 220, 268–69, 277–82, 286–87, 292, 292n25, 295, 305; and complementary man, 301–7, 303n, 306n40; and Darwinism, 264n; and eternal return, 215, 222–23, 223n48, 248n30, 250–51, 250n34, 259, 287–93, 299, 301, 303–8, 307n43; and experiment of founding society on truth, 3, 72, 254, 256–57, 260–67, 276–77, 281–82, 286, 290, 292; and fundamental fact (Ur-Faktum), 215, 221, 223, 249, 251, 282n18, 290, 305; and Gynaikologia, 107–8; and history, 215, 221, 247–49, 251; and Homer, 170–71, 175, 184–85, 270; joking of, 201–2, 265n64, 274n14, 278–79; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 43, 56n24, 67n35; and nihilism, 155, 244, 286–88, 291, 296, 297n; on philosophic hermit, 67n35; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–31, 131n7, 137, 137n10, 142, 155; and order of rank, 129–31, 223, 250–51, 263, 264n, 273, 275, 301–5, 307n43, 308; as perspective of book, 2, 72; and Platonic political philosophy, 108, 155, 267–69, 271, 279, 286, 289, 294, 297, 303, 310, 314; and PL introduction, 43, 191, 197, 201–2, 205, 212, 214–15, 215n38, 219–26, 220n, 223nn48–49; and Redlichkeit (intellectual probity), 43, 218–23, 225, 266, 266n66, 272, 281; and spiritual situation of present, 72, 187, 220–21, 253–54, 261, 263, 289, 310; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 10, 10n5, 13; Strauss’s writings on, 126, 137, 170–71, 184, 214–15, 221–22, 268–69; and Übermensch, 250–51, 250n34, 303n; and “what a philosopher is,” 71–72, 263, 273; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232–34, 242n19, 243–67, 244n, 246n24, 248n30, 250n34, 255n41, 257nn48–49, 261n, 262n60, 264n; and will to power, 107, 185, 214–15, 215n38, 221–22, 234,

336

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Nietzsche, Friedrich (cont.) 246–47, 246n24, 249, 250n34, 251, 280–89, 282n18, 291, 295, 297–99, 301–3, 305, 307–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works of: Beyond Good and Evil (see Beyond Good and Evil [Nietzsche]); The Birth of Tragedy, 255, 276n; Dawn of Morning, 257, 260–67, 260n57, 264n, 266n66; The Gay Science, 131n7, 201, 257, 260, 265, 274n14; Human, All Too Human, 185, 256–60, 256n47; “Klage der Ariadne,” 293n; On the Genealogy of Morality, 264n, 282n19, 295–96, 306; “Our Virtues,” 220–22, 301–2, 304–5, 307; Richard Wagner in Beyreuth, 255–56; Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Nietzsche]); Twilight of the Idols, 255, 276n; Untimely Meditations, 256 nihilism, 155, 244, 286–88, 291, 296, 297n Nike, 145, 145n16, 147–48, 232n noble/nobility, 17; and Andrologia, 116, 118n; and Gynaikologia, 77n, 85–86, 93, 111; and “Hades” (Benardete), 180; and kalokagathia (gentlemanship), 17; and kalos (beautiful/noble), 85; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 52, 63–65, 68–69, 68n36; most noble community, 52, 63–65; and Nietzsche, 254–55, 257, 257n49, 259, 265, 277, 302; “nobility of character,” 133; noble lies, 68–69, 68n36, 133, 135, 240, 253–54, 257, 257n48, 277; “nobly dwell,” 111; and “On Plato’s Rep­ ublic,” 133, 135, 147; and paradoxical thesis, 85; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240, 245, 252–55, 257, 257n48, 259. See also beauty/beautiful obedience, 18, 41, 64; and Gynaikologia, 101, 104–5, 109n; and Nietzsche, 305; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 229–30, 233, 236, 238, 255 Odysseus (in Odyssey), 23, 139n, 157–85, 159n4, 161nn5–6; and Alcinous, 158–59, 159n4, 163–64, 176; alteration in, 161–63, 161n5; and anger, 161n6, 167; and bestial/ divine split, 163–68, 164n; bow of, 179– 80; choice of home/mortality, 164, 164n; despair of, 160, 174–75; discovery of nature, 159–60, 165, 167, 172–73; disguised as beggar, 178n20, 183; and enchantment,

166–68, 172, 182; and Hades journey, 167, 169–70, 173–77; journey with oar, 175–77; and moly (herb), 157, 161, 164–69, 166n, 182; names of, 161n6, 167, 178n20, 183; and “Nature” (Benardete), 158–73, 171nn12–13; and Nietzsche, 185, 284; as outis (nobody), 161n6, 167, 178n20; and pity, 172; and Plato, 182–85, 183n; pride of, 178n20; rescue of crew, 162–69, 172, 182; and resignation, 160; and speech, 160–64, 161n5, 168–69, 175–76, 180; teaching of, 169, 172–73; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235–36; wife of, 171n12, 177, 177n18, 178n19, 180n, 183 Odyssey (Homer), 22–23, 139n, 156–85; and Aeolus episode, 159–60; and Charmides (Plato), 182–83; and Circe episode, 159, 161–64, 162n, 166–68, 166n, 170, 172–75, 180, 182; and “democratic concessions,” 162, 168, 179; and “Hades” (Benardete), 158, 162, 162n, 169, 173–81; imaginary geography of, 159n4; and Laestrygonian episode, 159, 161–62, 161n5, 165, 168; and “Nature” (Benardete), 158–73; and Nietzsche, 284; and nobodies, 161n6, 162, 167, 178–79, 178n20; oar as winnowingfan, 175–77; and slave girls, 179–80; and suitors, 173–75, 177–80, 177n18, 178n19, 180n, 182, 184, 210, 236, 245; and vengeance, 177–80; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235–36, 245 “On Plato’s Republic” (Strauss), 14n, 128–55, 128n, 130n3; and Adeimantus, 132–40, 136n, 145–48, 150; ancestors of Olympian gods, 136–37; and Bendideia festival, 146–47; and centering, 129, 132–36, 140–41, 142nn14–15, 144, 149; and eros, 140–42, 151, 153, and Glaucon, 138–39, 142–49, 145n16; and harm, 137, 139–41; and ideas, doctrine of, 129, 132, 137, 142–48, 145n16, 148n; and justice, 128– 30, 133, 137–41, 143–47; and ministerial poetry, 131–32, 141, 147–48, 153–55; and new laws for gods, 131–42, 137nn9–11, 139n, 145; and poets/poetry, 128–33, 135, 141, 147–48, 153; and Polemarchus, 137, 139, 150; and Symposium, 141–42; and temporal setting of Republic, 146–48, 146n17, 147n; and Thrasymachus, 128, 129n, 130, 142n15, 146, 150–51; and



index

Timaeus, 134–37, 137n9; and “what a god is,” 133–40, 145, 147–48 ontology: and Gynaikologia, 82, 92, 100–101, 107–8; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 34; and “Nature” (Benardete), 171–72; and Nietzsche, 107–8, 212, 215, 223, 234, 246n24, 279–86, 288–89, 293, 299; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141–42; ontological skepticism, 279; and PL introduction, 206, 215, 220–21, 223; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 8, 21; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232, 234, 234n9, 242n19, 246, 246n24, 249, 251 order, 80–104, 106–7, 111, 115; and adornments, 84–86, 90–91, 101; and Andrologia, 115, 124, 126; and beauty, 80–91, 85n, 102–4, 107–8; and gods, 78, 81–84, 86, 90–98, 101, 103, 106–7; and the good, 85–86, 85n; and Gynaikologia, 80–104, 106–7, 111; and “Hades” (Benardete), 173, 177, 180; hierarchic order, 133, 142n15; of human origin, 82–83, 106–7; and nature, 78, 81–84, 86, 91–92, 94, 96–101, 103–4, 106–7, 165, 167; and “Nature” (Benardete), 162–63, 165, 167, 169; and Nietzsche, 129–31, 223, 250–51, 263, 264n, 273, 275, 277–78, 281, 289, 294, 301–5, 307, 307n43, 308–9; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–31, 133, 138–41; order of rank, 129–31, 223, 250–51, 263, 264n, 273, 275, 301–5, 307n43, 308; and “order of the whole,” 98–100, 106, 165; and PL introduction, 223; and “Socrates’ story,” 15, 83–90; usefulness/beauty of, 80–91; and utility, 84–86, 90; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 243–44, 250–51, 263, 264n. See also cosmos/cosmology orthodoxy, 16, 43, 50; “neo-orthodoxy,” 194; and Nietzsche, 265n64, 269n2; and PL introduction, 193–94, 194n, 199–212, 215–16, 218–19, 224–25, 224n; quarrel with Enlightenment, 199–211, 208n35, 215–16, 218–19, 225; refutation of, 29, 193, 200–203, 200n23, 208; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 254, 265n64 passions, 184; and Andrologia, 116, 126; and Gynaikologia, 84, 86, 94, 105, 111; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 51,

337

55, 58–59, 69; and Nietzsche, 220–21, 245, 262–63, 272, 281, 289, 291, 295, 297–98, 300–301, 305–7, 310; and “On Plato’s Re­ public,” 130, 138, 140, 152; and PL intro­ duction, 197, 219–21; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227–28, 231, 237, 237n, 242, 245–46, 262–63 Paul, Apostle, 195, 204; in Athens, 228 Penelope (in Odyssey), 171n12, 177, 177n18, 178n19, 179, 180n, 183 Persians, 275; Persian wars, 13, 146. See also Cyrus (in Xenophon) persuasion: and Andrologia, 123; art of, 142n15; and Gynaikologia, 86–89, 106; and Homer, 175; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 38, 44, 49; and Nietzsche, 271–72, 276, 294–95, 300; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 134–36, 138–40, 142n15, 143, 149–53; and PL introduction, 190, 207, 209, 213, 224; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 229, 240 Pheidippides (in Aristophanes), 117–18 philanthropy: and Bacon, 196; and Gynaikologia, 77, 94–95, 106; and “Nature” (Benardete), 166; nature as philanthropic order, 94; and Nietzsche, 290; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 153–54; and PL introduction, 196; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 229 philosopher king, 12n10, 51, 55, 131, 149–50, 168 philosophic rule: and Andrologia, 109n, 113–14, 115nn4–5, 117n6, 123–24, 126– 27; and Gynaikologia, 90–91, 100, 105–7, 113, 123; and Homer, 169, 172–73, 177; and Nietzsche, 243–46, 246n24, 253–54, 254n39, 265, 270–73, 275n, 277, 303; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–33, 138–44, 142n15, 148–54, 152n; and PL introduction, 205–7, 209, 217, 217n, 224; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 238, 242–45, 246n24, 253–54, 254n39, 265; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313–14 Philosophy and Law (Strauss), 7, 10n7, 24n25, 43; and atheism, 189n1, 200, 213, 218–19, 218n, 219n, 221, 225; and delusion, 213, 216–17, 223n48; and fact/value separation, 191, 213–15, 222–23; and fear, 197, 205, 213, 215; and foundation (Grund) of modern Enlightenment, 210–15, 210n, 212n; and idealism, 191, 196–97, 203,

338

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Philosophy and Law (cont.) 209–11, 213–14; and intellectual probity, 218–23, 225; introduction to, 189–226, 190n6, 236, 238; and Judaism, 190n6, 191–94, 191n, 194n, 199–203, 209, 216, 218, 218n, 224–26; and justification (Rechtfertigung) of modern Enlightenment, 210–11, 210n, 212n, 214–25; and Laws, 196, 196n15; and Maimonides, 190–91, 198, 198n, 213, 224–25; and miracles, 193–94, 197, 211–12; and mockery, 201–2, 202n, 205; and modern Enlightenment, 189–226, 193nn9–10, 198n, 200n23; and modern philosophy, 190–92, 194–98; and Napoleonic strategy, 203–10, 204n, 217; and nature, 191–92, 194–98; and Nietzsche, 43, 191, 197, 201–2, 205, 212, 214–15, 215n38, 219–26, 220n, 223nn48–49; and present situation of Judaism, 191–94, 191n; and Protagoras, 195–96, 195n13, 196n15; and Timaeus, 205; and virtues, 195–96, 195n13, 196nn15–16, 207, 218–22 Phoenician merchantman, 81–84, 86, 90, 92–94, 100, 113; and boatswain, 81–84, 92, 94, 106, 111, 115, 303 physics, 208–9, 208n33, 233, 256, 282–83, 282n18; atomic physics, 206, 207n Picht, Georg, 255n44, 297n piety/pious, 15; and Andrologia, 118n, 119; filial piety, 114n, 119; of guardians of city, 68, 68n36; and Gynaikologia, 93; and Homer, 173, 177n18; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 40–41, 45, 49, 57, 61, 64, 66, 68–69, 68n36; and naturally pious auditors/readers, 41, 45, 49, 57, 64, 66, 69; and Nietzsche, 273n11; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133; pious cruelty, 236; and PL introduction, 195– 96; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313 pity, 172, 275–76 Plato, 4, 7, 268; as “accuser” of Socrates, 24, 24n26; Alfarabi on, 12n11; and Andrologia, 114, 119, 123; Benardete on, 142n14, 148n19, 156–58, 181; and cave image, 12n10, 46, 46n, 69, 132, 148n, 151–52, 198, 198n, 209–10, 285; and chronology, 16, 97, 182, 268; and exotericism, 12–14, 17–20, 19n, 64n, 187, 207; and “Exoteric Teaching,” 29–30,

46n; and Great Tradition, 98–99; and Gynaikologia, 85–86, 95–99, 96n, 107–8; Herodotus as model for, 13; and Hesiod, 22–23; and Homer, 147n, 157, 181–84, 184n25; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 38–43, 39n, 41n, 45–46, 49, 55, 63–64, 64n, 66n, 68–69, 68n36, 69n; mutual influence with Xenophon, 21, 95–96; and Nietzsche, 250, 256, 268, 270, 280, 283, 286, 288–89, 292n25, 294–95, 299, 309–10; and noble lie, 68–69, 68n36; and Platonism, 13, 145, 147, 148n, 155, 209–10, 253, 268, 288, 309–10; and PL introduction, 196, 205, 207, 209–10, 217, 224n; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 12–24, 12n10, 26n; Strauss’s writings on, 12n10, 16, 19n, 62n29 (see also “On Plato’s Republic” [Strauss]); in Symposium (Xenophon), 21–22, 24n26; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–30, 233–35, 234n9, 237–38, 240, 242, 245–46, 250–51, 253–55, 254n40, 259–60, 263, 265n65, 266–67; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313–14. See also Platonic political philosophy Plato, works of: Apology, 14–15, 39–42, 41n, 119, 123, 228–29; Charmides, 69n, 140n13, 147n, 182–84; Cratylus, 23; Critias, 205; Crito, 14, 16, 228–29; Gorgias, 12n10; Hippias Minor, 139n; Laches, 12n10; Laws, 12, 14–16, 14n, 18–19, 69, 196, 196n15, 228–30; Letters, 25, 29; Par­ menides, 23–24, 96–99, 182n23; Phaedo, 15, 18, 95–97, 160, 182n23; Phaedrus, 13, 29, 158; Protagoras, 13, 147n, 182, 182n23, 195–96, 195n13, 196n15; Re­ public (see Republic [Plato]); Seventh Letter, 246; Sophist, 14n; Statesman, 14n; Symposium, 15, 24, 25n27, 141–42, 142n14, 182n23, 234, 234n9, 280, 283; Theaetetus, 22–23, 156, 171–73, 171n14; Timaeus, 22, 22n21, 29, 134–37, 137n9 Platonic political philosophy: and Nietzsche, 108, 155, 267–69, 271, 279, 286, 289, 294, 297, 303, 310, 314; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141, 148–49, 154–55; and PL introduction, 209; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240, 242n19 pleasure garden: and Andrologia, 114, 125; of Cyrus, 83–86, 92, 101, 111; and Gynaikologia, 83–86, 89–92, 98, 101, 106–7,



index

110–11, 114; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–30; of philosophers, 89–91, 98, 106–7, 110, 114, 125, 129–30 poets/poetry, 1; and autonomous poetry, 131–32; and Gynaikologia, 102, 110; and “Hades” (Benardete), 176, 179; and Homer, 156–58, 168–72, 176, 179; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 32, 32n1, 38, 38n, 43, 69; and ministerial poetry, 131–32, 141, 147–48, 153–55, 184, 187; and “Nature” (Benardete), 168–72; and Nietzsche, 3, 130–31, 131n7, 184, 187, 226, 244, 254–55, 257, 259, 266, 268, 272, 296–97, 310; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 128–33, 135, 141, 147–48, 153–55; and PL introduction, 209, 226; poet-legislators, 131n7; as “valets of some morality,” 130–31, 131n7; quarrel with philosophy, 1, 128–29, 131, 157–58; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 22–23, 26; in Theaetetus, 171; tragic poets, 13, 157, 171; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240, 244, 254–55, 254n40, 257, 259, 266; wise poets, 158, 179, 183n Polemarchus (in Republic), 137, 139, 150 political philosophy. See classical political philosophy; modern political philosophy; Platonic political philosophy politics/political life, 1, 3; and Andrologia, 115, 115n5, 117n; and Außenpolitik,65, 65n, 67; and Gynaikologia, 85–86, 98, 110, 114; and Homer, 163, 169, 173, 180; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 31, 33–34, 39, 50n, 51–55, 57–59, 63, 65–68, 271; and Nietzsche, 245–46, 250, 252, 270–73, 290–92, 296; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130, 130n3, 131, 141, 146, 150, 152; and PL introduction, 192, 195, 195n13, 200, 218, 218n, 224n, 225; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 8, 18–19, 28–29; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 230, 235, 239–42, 240n, 245–46, 252; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313. See also theologicalpolitical program Polyphemus (in Odyssey), 161nn5–6, 167, 172, 176, 180 Poseidon (in Odyssey), 175–76, 181 prejudices: and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 55; and Nietzsche, 269; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 151; and PL intro-

339

duction, 190, 194, 212–13, 219, 225; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 16, 26–28; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232, 239–40, 247, 253 present: and Nietzsche, 131, 248, 250, 261, 263, 265, 273n11, 289, 308, 310; and PL introduction, 190–94, 194n, 197–98, 202, 208, 220–21; present situation of Judaism, 9, 191–94, 191n, 194n, 225–26; spiritual situation of, 3, 71–72, 187, 190–91, 197, 202, 208, 220–21, 253–54, 261, 263, 289, 310; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 248, 250, 253–54, 261, 263, 265 probity. See Redlichkeit (intellectual probity) progress: and Homer, 184–85; and Nietzsche, 185, 249, 258, 265–66, 276–77; and PL introduction, 193, 205; postmoral progress, 277; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 243, 249, 258, 265–66 propaganda, 218n, 239–40, 247–48 prophets: and Homer, 185; and Maimonides, 8, 12n10; and PL introduction, 209; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228 prudence: and Andrologia, 115–16; and Leib­ niz, 29; and Nietzsche, 272, 278; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130–31; prudent legis­ lators, 130–31; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 312 psychology, 221, 234, 282, 282n18, 283, 305 punishment: and Andrologia, 114n, 126; and Gynaikologia, 81–82, 94, 106; and Homer, 176–79, 177n17; and Nietzsche, 259, 277, 289, 296; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 139, 141, 147, 153; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 18–19 rank: and Gynaikologia, 83, 85–86, 89, 91, 105; and “The Law of Reason in the Ku­ zari,” 33, 36, 70n; and Nietzsche, 129– 31, 223, 250–51, 263, 264n, 273, 275, 301–5, 307, 307n43, 308; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–31, 138; order of rank, 129–31, 223, 250–51, 263, 264n, 273, 275, 301–5, 307n43, 308; and PL introduction, 223; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 250–51, 263, 264n rationalism, 1; “intransigent rationalism” of Lessing, 28; and Maimonides, 10n7, 35, 190–91; medieval rationalism, 191; and Nietzsche, 283, 290, 300, 305; and PL introduction, 190–91, 200, 200n23, 203–4,

340

index

rationalism (cont.) 207, 212–13, 215, 221, 223; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242, 244, 248–49, 252–53. See also rational nomoi; reason rational nomoi, 12–14; ambiguity of, 52–55, 54n, 59, 62n29; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33–36, 42–43, 51–66, 68–70, 271; as “religion of philosophers,” 52–59, 60n; as rules of conduct, 52–54, 67–68, 67n34, 68n37; scholar’s approving of, 59–67; scholar’s opposing of, 53–59, 66 readers: and access, 73, 77, 142n14; art of reading well, 253; exacting readers, 11, 18, 33, 55–56, 63–65, 256, 286; as general public, 11–12, 21, 49; and Gynaikologia, 82, 85–86, 89, 91, 96–97; and Homer, 160, 162; as hunters, 63–65; independent reflection by, 44–45, 47–48, 57, 62–63, 238; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33, 37, 39, 41–45, 47–48, 55–57, 56n25, 59–60, 62–67, 71; and Nietzsche, 220, 245, 269, 274–76, 274n14, 282–84, 286–88, 293; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 142n14, 146, 148, 155; and PL introduction, 43, 189, 190n6, 199–201, 213, 220, 225; and “slow reading,” 260–61; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240n, 245, 252–53, 256, 260–61; and Xenophon, 75–76. See also audiences reason, 3; circular reasoning, 136; and Gynaikologia, 97–98, 101, 105; and Homer, 163, 165, 174; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 39n, 42–49, 43n, 55, 57–58; and Nietzsche, 221, 249, 252, 256–57, 261–64, 268, 271, 278, 280–83, 285, 288–91, 301–2, 310; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130–31, 136, 138, 152–53; and PL introduction, 43, 193, 198–201, 200n23, 208–9, 212–13, 221; practical vs. theoretical, 57–59, 64–66, 70; self-destruction of, 221; sovereign reason, 131; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–30, 238–39, 241–42, 246, 249, 252, 256–57, 261–64. See also rationalism; rational nomoi reason’s refutation of revelation, 42–45, 43n, 48–49, 58–59, 193, 200n23 Redlichkeit (intellectual probity), 43, 218–23, 225, 266, 266n66, 272, 281 regime (politeia), 14, 230, 235–36, 245–46 Reinhardt, Karl, 293, 293n

religion, 3, 53; civil religion, 205–6, 206n29, 237; and cruelty, 236–38, 236n; direct experience of, 17, 40–41; ecclesiastical despotism, 28–29, 28n; and Homer, 172, 175–76, 179, 185; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 37–45, 37n8, 50–62, 51nn20–21, 62n29, 65–70, 69n; and Nietz­ sche, 67n35, 131, 175, 245–46, 246n24, 250, 269–72, 273n11, 276–81, 283–89, 291–95, 297, 297n, 299–300, 305–6, 307n43, 308–10; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 131–32, 147; pagan religions, 40, 233, 235; and PL introduction, 193, 195–213, 206n29, 216–20, 224–26; religious fanaticism, 37, 37n8, 70, 204, 238, 313; religious terror, 114n, 176–77, 185, 213, 216–17, 219; shit religion, 287; sovereign religion, 131, 217, 238, 271–72; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 9, 16–17; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235–38, 245, 246n24, 251, 255, 257n48, 259. See also gods; orthodoxy; theology; names of religions Renaissance, 205, 238 repetition: and Andrologia (Strauss), 109; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 47–48, 47n, 58; and “Nature” (Benardete), 166; and Nietzsche, 284, 286, 290, 307; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 131, 149 Republic (Plato), 128–155; and centering, 55, 115n4, 133, 168; and Gynaikologia, 85–86; and Homer, 168, 181–85, 183n; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 45–46, 46n, 49, 55, 63–64, 64n, 66n, 68– 69, 68n36, 69n; and Nietzsche, 309–10; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 12n10, 14, 19–20, 24; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235, 239, 254n40 responsibility, 314; and Homer, 162; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 49–50; and Nietzsche, 245–46, 248, 252, 259, 265–66, 265n65, 271, 304–5; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 245–46, 248, 252–53, 259, 265–66, 265n65 restraint: and Andrologia, 124; divine punishment as, 114n; and Gynaikologia, 109–10, 114n; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 50, 70–71, 71n; and “Notes on Lucretius,” 114n; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130 revelation, 12n10, 17, 187; and Gynaikologia, 109n; and Judaism, 49–50, 56, 68–69;



index

and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 35, 39–45, 39n, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 56–59, 62, 65, 67–70; and Maimonides, 35; and natural law 68–70; and “Nature” (Bena­ rdete), 159, 163–66, 168–69; and Nietz­ sche, 201–2, 212, 233, 270–71; and PL introduction, 193–95, 200–202, 200n23, 209, 211–13, 218–19; and “Reason and Revelation” (lecture), 43n; and refutation by reason, 42–45, 43n, 48–49, 58–59, 193, 200n23; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230, 233 rhetoric, 1–2, 311; and Andrologia, 122; and Bacon, 196; and Gynaikologia, 107; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 55–56; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 146, 153; and PL introduction, 190, 190n6, 196, 200–201, 203–4, 215, 219, 221, 223; and Socrates, 16, 122, 122n; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 16; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 238–42, 246–48 Richardson, John, 264n romanticism, 28–29, 219, 243, 261 Rome/Romans, 246, 253–60, 254n40, 270, 287 Rosenzweig, Franz, 194, 199 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 185, 241–44, 242n19, 252 scholars: in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 12, 16 Scholem, Gershom, 75, 311 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 259n54 sciences/natural sciences: cognitive status of, 207, 210; experimental science, 241, 242n18; as “House of Solomon,” 254; and Nietzsche, 2–3, 201, 205, 212, 215, 243– 44, 253–54, 254n39, 257–58, 257n49, 261, 261n, 264–66, 264n, 274n14, 277, 282–84, 290, 295, 300, 306–7; origins of, 214; and PL introduction, 192, 192n8, 199, 201–7, 209–15, 217–18; scientific-technological project, 204–6; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 15; in Strauss’s letter to Scholem, 311; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 230–34, 237, 241–44, 253–54, 254n39, 257–58, 257n49, 261, 261n, 264–66, 264n; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 314 secrecy: and Homer, 172, 177n18; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 40, 71; and modern academy, 71; and Nietzsche, 201, 273; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 130; and PL introduction, 201, 217n; secret words,

341

lexicon of, 9–10, 10n7, 17, 27; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 9–10, 10n7, 17, 23–24, 23n23, 26–27 Seneca, 11 Sheppard, Eugene, 45n silences: and Andrologia, 117; and Gynaikologia, 79, 81–82, 90, 92, 94, 96–97, 106; and Homer, 160; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 47, 64; and Nietzsche, 253–54, 259, 262n60, 272, 293; and Socrates, 23n23, 81–82, 92, 94, 96–97, 117; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 13–14, 23n23; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228, 253–60, 262n60 skepticism, 232, 239, 258, 277–79, 281–82; “epistemological skepticism,” 278–79 society/social life, 3; and Andrologia, 117n; experiment of founding society on truth, 3, 72, 254, 256–57, 260–67, 276–77, 281– 82, 286, 290, 292; and Gynaikologia, 98, 106; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 31, 33–34, 39, 51–53, 58–63, 66–68, 70–71; and Nietzsche, 3, 67n35, 72, 245, 254, 256–57, 259–67, 271, 273, 273n11, 283, 290, 292, 294, 309; and persecution, 70–71; and Socrates, 53, 67–68, 98, 106; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 240, 245, 254, 254n40, 257, 259, 263, 266 Socrates, 1–2; of Aristophanes, 16, 110, 114, 117–19, 122; behaving like a woman, 105–6; as con man, 17; contrasted with perfect gentleman, 77, 80, 83, 85, 90, 109–10, 113, 118, 118n, 120; and cosmetics, 104–7, 113, 122–24; and Cyrus (in Xenophon), 15, 83–84, 86–88, 113; and dancing, 125, 125n; death of, 18–19, 88, 97, 119, 228–30, 312, 314; and Delphic oracle, 40–41, 119, 140n13; as ethicist, 15, 21, 100, 118; fiction of escape from prison, 16, 228–30; as founder of poli­ tical philosophy, 196, 209, 228, 232; and Homer, 160, 167–68, 171–72, 181–85, 184n25, 276n; and immortality, 18–19, 97; investigation of beings, 92–95, 97– 101, 106–7, 113, 124; Ischomachos corrected by, 115, 115n, 117, 117n, 122–23; joking of, 112–13, 112n; and just city, 148–55; Know Thyself, 140n13, 220; and Lamprokles, 123–24; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 39–42, 39n, 41n, 49, 53, 63–64, 64n, 67–69, 69n; and male

342

index

Socrates (cont.) correction of nature, 126; and Memorabilia (Xenophon), 17, 82, 85, 92–93, 93n; method of, 93–94, 99; and ministerial poetry, 131–32, 141, 147–48, 153–55; and model rulers, 83, 86, 88–92, 101, 105; and “Nature” (Benardete), 160, 167–68; and new laws for gods, 132–42, 137nn9–11, 139n, 145, 239; and Nietzsche, 245, 249– 50, 257, 263, 275n, 276n, 277, 279–80, 282n18, 293–94, 303–4, 307–8, 310; and “order of the whole,” 98–100, 106; as philosophical hermit, 53, 67–68; of Plato, 15–16, 20, 69, 96n, 187, 280, 313–14 (see also “On Plato’s Republic” [Strauss]); and PL introduction, 190–91, 196–97, 206, 209, 220, 223, 224n, 225–26; and question of the right life, 12n10; reputation of, 110–12, 114, 118; and “second sailing,” 160, 165; and secret words, 17, 19; Socrates-Odysseus, 20; Socratic circle, 15, 17, 21, 90; Socratic Enlightenment, 4, 156, 187, 225–26, 238; and “Socratic problem,” 99–100, 118; Socratic turn, 77, 95–97, 100–101, 112–13, 117–19, 123, 126, 152, 155, 160, 273–74; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 15–21, 24; as teachertrickster, 21; teaching of, 82–86, 92–102, 93n, 110, 117–18, 125, 139, 140n13; trial of, 120, 141, 312, 314; and two ways of life, 41, 53, 109–10, 109n, 115–17, 115n5, 117n, 119–20, 122, 124–25; and “what a god is,” 133–40, 145, 148; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 228–34, 238–39, 245, 249–50, 257, 263; and “what is . . .” questions, 94–98, 101, 105, 136n, 144, 227; of Xenophon, 4, 15, 20–21, 95, 141, 187, 223, 249, 303–4, 311–14 (see also Andrologia [Strauss]; Gynaikologia [Strauss]); and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 311–14; “You must go down,” 209 sophistry, 30; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 56–57; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141, 147; and PL introduction, 212–14 Sophocles, 15 souls: assassination of old soul concept, 286–87, 291; and Gynaikologia, 97–98, 103, 111; and Homer, 166, 169–70, 174, 177n17; immortality of, 97, 147, 185, 208, 236, 239, 249, 264–65, 289, 309;

and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 51, 55, 59, 63; lie in soul, 138, 140; “by nature good,” 111, 112n; and Nietzsche, 215n38, 221, 234, 247, 249, 256, 262n60, 264–65, 275, 282n18, 286–87, 289, 291–92, 294, 300, 305, 309; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 131–32, 138, 140, 144, 146, 153; and PL introduction, 208, 215n38, 221; and three-part soul, 55; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 233–34, 236, 239, 247, 249, 256, 262n60, 264–65 Spanish Inquisition, 236 Sparta/Spartans, 16, 88, 164, 229, 311 speech: “ambiguous speech” (polynoia) in Plato, 12; and Bacon, 196; disguised speech, 23; and Gynaikologia, 80–81, 89, 96, 100, 103; and “Hades” (Benardete), 175–76, 180; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 49, 52–54, 52n, 56, 62n29, 67–69; and “Nature” (Benardete), 160–64, 161n5, 168–69, 171; and Nietzsche, 245, 283, 293–95, 308; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133, 136, 139–40, 140n13, 142, 147, 150–53; Pericles’s funeral speech, 13–14; and PL introduction, 196, 196n15, 209–10; and Protagoras, 13, 182; relationship to deeds, 14, 15n15, 52, 56, 68; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 12–14, 15n15, 18–19, 21, 23, 23n23, 30n33; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 245–46, 262n60; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 312–14 Spinoza, Benedict, 7–8, 28n, 42–43, 52n, 269n2; and PL introduction, 190n4, 193, 193n10, 198n, 199–200, 203, 213, 216, 219, 219n, 224–25; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235, 258, 266 Spinoza, Benedict, works of: TheologicoPolitical Treatise, 8, 199, 224 Stoics, 214 Strauss, Leo, 7–8, 12n10; and atheism, 7, 43, 189n1, 200, 213, 218–19, 218n, 219n, 221, 225, 237n, 294; and Benardete, 73, 142n14, 145n16, 148n, 156–58, 163; enduring importance of, 1, 72–73, 209–10, 310, 314; friendship with Klein, 8, 12, 26n; joking of, 9, 13, 24, 109, 292n25; letters to Klein, 5, 7–26, 8n2, 10n7, 15n15, 24nn24–25, 26n, 30, 45, 73, 90, 156; Xenophon as Liebling of, 16, 18, 20, 27, 73, 269, 311



index

Strauss, Leo, works of, 28n; The City and Man, 19, 128, 132, 135; “Cohens Analyse der Bibel-Wissenschaft Spinozas,” 10n7; “Cohen und Maimuni” (lecture), 12n10; “Einleitung zu ‘Morgenstunden’ und ‘An die Freunde Lessings,’ ” 30n33; “Exoteric Teaching,” 28–30, 28n, 30n33, 46n; “A Giving of Accounts,” 11n, 12n10, 30n33; History of Political Philosophy, 18–19, 156–57; “How to Study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” 224; “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 30–31, 32– 72, 77, 226, 233; Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 219; “The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed,” 10–11, 27; “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy” (lecture), 248n30; “Marsilius of Padua,” 237n; Natural Right and History, 270–71; “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” 222, 226, 248, 268–309; “Notes on Lucretius,” 114n; “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency,” 10n7; “On Plato’s Republic,” 14n, 128–55; “On the study of classical political philosophy,” 14; Persecution and the Art of Writing, 10–11, 30, 32n3, 71, 224, 226; “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” 30, 50, 71n; Philosophy and Law (PL), 7, 10n7, 24n25, 43, 189–226; The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 19n, 195, 195nn12–13, 269n2; “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” 190n6, 216n41, 219, 219n, 221; “Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maimonide et de Fârâbî,” 10n7; “Reason and Revelation” (lecture), 30n33, 43n, 200n23; “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart” (lecture), 12n10, 198n; Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 42–43, 190n4, 200, 216, 219; “The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon,” 16–17, 16n, 25, 27, 27n31, 75; Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 268–69; “The Three Waves of Modernity” (lecture), 247–48, 248n31; What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227; “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 226, 227–67; “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 76, 311–14; Xenophon’s Socrates, 75, 109; Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 24, 75–127, 209; “Zur Ideologie des politischen Zionismus,” 218n

343

suffering, 244, 252, 254, 275–76, 302–3, 307–8 Symposium (Plato), 182n23, 234; and Nietzsche, 280, 283; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141–42, 142n14; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 15, 24, 25n27; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 234n9 technology, 3, 204–7; scientific-technological project, 204–6; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 237 Teiresias (in Odyssey), 167, 174, 176–77, 179, 181, 184, 184n25 Telemachus (in Odyssey), 162, 164, 173, 177, 179, 183, 236 teleotheology: and Andrologia, 115, 117n, 123–24, 126; and Gynaikologia, 93–101, 93n, 106–7, 114; of human origin, 100, 106–7; and Nietzsche, 126, 223, 245, 249–50, 259, 263, 277, 289, 293, 303–4, 308; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 141, 154; and PL introduction, 209–10, 223, 226; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 232–33, 239, 245, 249–50, 259, 263; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 314 Theoclymenus (in Odyssey), 185 theological-political program, 1, 3, 184–85; and Andrologia, 117n, 119; and Gynaikologia, 98, 107, 114; and Homer, 172–73, 176; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 53–59; and Nietzsche, 131, 142, 155, 184, 223, 243, 268–70, 272, 278, 283–86, 289–90, 293–97, 299, 303; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129, 131, 138, 141–42, 154–55; and PL introduction, 190n6, 205–7, 217, 223–24; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 243 theology: and Andrologia, 115, 117; anthropocentric theology, 95; and “anti-theological ire,” 235–42, 237n, 239n, 248, 285; and Gynaikologia, 82, 92–101, 93n, 106; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 35, 50n, 51, 51n20, 53–54, 66–67, 69n; misanthropic theology, 94–95; and “Nature” (Benardete), 171–72; “neo-orthodoxy,” 194; and Nietzsche, 171, 284–85, 288, 292–97, 297n, 299, 303, 309; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 133–35, 137–38, 137nn10–11, 141, 145; and PL introduction, 194–95, 194n, 198–99, 202, 207, 224; political theology, 53–54, 66–67, 69n; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 18, 21;

344

index

theology (cont.) and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235–42, 237n, 239n, 259. See also teleotheology; theological-political program Thomas Aquinas, 34–35 Thrasymachus (in Republic), 19, 63–64, 64n; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 128, 129n, 130, 142n15, 146, 150–51; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 239 Thucydides, 13, 128, 269; and Gynaikologia, 87; and Periclean Athens, 13–14; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 13–14, 20, 24 Thucydides, works of: Hellenica, 87; History, 87 thumos, 19, 185 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 11, 243– 44, 249–51, 250n34, 259–60, 266–67, 280, 282, 293, 293n, 297–98, 297n, 303, 303n, 306; “On Redemption,” 306, 306n40; and Songs, 282, 282n19 tragedy/tragedians, 13, 157, 171, 275–76; affirmation of tragedy, 275–76, 276n; and Nietzsche, 292 transcendence, 26–27; and Gynaikologia, 93, 96; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 70; and Nietzsche, 288, 291, 295, 304–6; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 144–45, 147; and PL introduction, 218; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 231, 237 true/truths, 2–3; and Andrologia, 114, 122, 126; deadly truths, 62n29, 72, 141, 184, 223, 254–55, 262, 272, 273n11, 275, 287; disguised presentation of, 15, 20–23; eternal truth, 199, 211; experiment of founding society on truth, 3, 72, 254, 256–57, 260–67, 276–77, 281–82, 286, 290, 292; and Gynaikologia, 97, 100, 103–4, 112–13; and Homer, 169, 172, 181; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33, 40–41, 45–46, 50, 62n29, 64, 70, 72; love of truth, 138, 218, 221, 223, 227; and Maimonides, 27; and Memorabilia (Xenophon), 20–21; and Nietzsche, 155, 205, 221, 223, 225, 247, 249, 252, 254–59, 261–63, 261n, 262n60, 272–73, 273n11, 275–77, 275n, 279–82, 282n18, 284–92, 297–300, 309; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–30, 133–36, 138–41, 139n, 148n, 153, 155; and PL introduction, 190, 192, 199,

204–5, 208, 210–11, 213, 218, 218n, 221, 223, 225; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 15, 20–23, 26, 28–29; in Theogeny (Hesiod), 22–23; transcendent truths, 232; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227, 232, 235, 239–42, 244, 247, 249, 252, 254–59, 254n40, 261–63, 261n, 262n60 Übermensch, 250–51, 250n34, 303n useful: and Gynaikologia, 80–91; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–30, 134; order as, 80–91 utility: and Gynaikologia, 84–86, 90; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 51; and Lucretius, 114n; moral utility, 233; and PL introduction, 217; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 233 utopia, 154, 235 Vedanta philosophy, 286 Velkley, Richard, 240n virtues: and Andrologia, 114–15, 120, 125; conventional virtue, 112, 114–15; and Gynaikologia, 101–5, 105n, 110–13; of a horse, 110–12; male virtue, 113; moral virtue, 220–22, 236; natural virtue, 112, 114; and Nietzsche, 220–21, 251, 253, 272–73, 275–76, 301–2, 305–8; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 129–30, 138, 140, 145, 147, 152n; and PL introduction, 195–96, 195n13, 196nn15–16, 207, 218–22; and sôphrosunê, 17; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 17, 19n; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 235–36, 251, 253–54; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 313 Voltaire, 201, 216, 257–58, 261, 279, 285, 288 Wagner, Richard, 131, 254–56, 258, 293n Wahrheitsliebe (love of truth), 138, 218, 221 war: and Bacon, 204; and Christianity, 196– 97, 202; holy war, 204, 224n; and Homer, 159, 161, 173; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 142, 146–47; Peloponnesian War, 88; Persian wars, 13, 146; and PL introduction, 189, 196–97, 202, 204, 204n, 211, 224n; between sexes, 309; spiritual warfare, 51, 189, 204n, 211, 237–38, 246; and warriors, 129, 159; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 237–38, 245 wealth: and Andrologia, 116–17; and Gynai-



index

kologia, 103, 111–13; and “Xenophon’s Anabasis,” 312 Weber, Max, 65n Western civilization, 147, 155, 159n4, 205, 314; and Nietzsche, 252–53, 286, 291, 297, 302, 306; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 236, 238, 252–53, 254n39 “What Is Political Philosophy?” (Strauss), 227–67; and “anti-theological ire,” 235–42, 237n, 239n, 248; Athens in Jerusalem, 227–30, 228n4, 232–33, 235–36, 238–39, 244–48, 248nn30–31, 252, 254; and centering, 228–30, 256n47, 261; and delusion, 252–53, 255, 259, 262, 265; experiment of founding society on truth, 254, 256–57, 260–67; and fact/value separation, 249–50; and history, 243, 247–49, 251, 258n51, 260–61, 264n; and Homer, 235–36, 239; and Machiavelli, 235–42, 247; and Nietzsche, 232–34, 242n19, 243–67, 244n, 246n24, 248n30, 250n34, 255n41, 261n, 262n60, 264n; and Plato, 228–30, 234–35; and PL introduction, 236, 238; and propaganda, 239–40; and regime (politeia), 230, 235–36; and silence, 253–60, 262n60; and three waves of modernity, 242–48, 248n31, 254, 257, 267; and virtues, 235–36, 251, 253–54; and “what is human in man,” 230–34 will to power, 107, 185, 280–89, 282n18, 291, 295, 297–99, 301–3, 305, 307–8; and PL introduction, 214–15, 215n38, 221–22; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 234, 246–47, 246n24, 249, 250n34, 251 wisdom: and Andrologia, 124, 126; and Charmides, 140n13; Divine wisdom, 39, 41–42; of fathers, 66; and Gynaikologia, 106; and “Hades” (Benardete), 173–74, 176–77, 179–81; and Homer, 24, 158–59, 161, 167, 169–74, 176–77, 179–81; human wisdom, 39, 43; and “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” 33, 39, 41–43, 66, 68; and “Nature” (Benardete), 159, 161, 167, 169–72; and Nietzsche, 226, 271–72, 282, 307; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 136–37, 152–54; and PL introduction, 195, 196n16, 200, 204–5, 209, 226; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 19, 22–24, 26; in Strauss’s letter to Scholem, 311; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 227,

345

233, 240, 254n39; Wild Wisdom, 282; and wise poets, 158, 179, 183n womanliness, 109, 120; and “Nature” (Benar­ dete), 170, 171n12, 172; and Nietzsche, 295–96, 298–99, 303, 307–9. See also Gynaikologia (Strauss) women: equality of, 24, 153, 242; and Nietz­ sche, 293n, 298–99, 302–3; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 142, 149; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 23–24; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 242 Xanthippe, 107, 109–10, 123–24 Xenophon, 4, 75–127, 268–69, 311; and authorship, 14, 20, 25, 77, 88; and bashfulness, 62n29; as con man, 16–17; and Cyrus, 15, 83–84, 86, 88–89; and “Exoteric Teaching,” 29; and Great Tradition, 98–99; as idiot, 16–17, 76; individualizing of, 312–14; joking of, 119; mutual influence with Plato, 21; and Nietzsche, 245, 249, 268–69, 286, 289, 303–4; and “On Plato’s Republic,” 136n, 141, 154; and PL introduction, 207, 223; in Strauss’s letters to Klein, 14–18, 20–22, 24; as Strauss’s Liebling, 16, 18, 20, 27, 73, 269, 311; Strauss’s writings on, 16, 20, 24, 27n31, 62n29, 311–12 (see also Andrologia [Strauss]; Gynaikologia [Strauss]); trial of, 312; and “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 238, 240, 245, 249 Xenophon, works of: Anabasis of Cyrus, 20–21, 25, 86–88, 311; Andrologia (chap­ ter XI of Oeconomicus), 24, 107–27; Cyropaedia, 21, 86; The Education of Cyrus, 15, 29; Gynaikologia (chapters VII–X of Oeconomicus), 24, 76–114; Hel­ lenica, 21; Hiero, 75; Memorabilia, 15, 20–21, 82, 85–87, 92–94, 93n, 110–11, 112n, 115n5, 122n; Oeconomicus, 73, 75–78, 87–89, 93n, 94–95, 100, 109n, 114, 115n5, 118–19; Symposium, 21–22, 22n19, 24n26, 85n, 124–25 Yahweh, 61, 309 Zalmoxis (in Charmides), 69n, 182 Zarathustra (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), 244, 249–51, 250n34, 259, 282, 293n, 298, 303, 303n Zeus, 22, 120–21, 162, 176, 180–81