Since James Heartfield and no doubt others who thought my psychoanalysis of Leo Strauss was improper, I thought I'd render Strauss in a different way. These two posts, the first and now the second are two faces of the same man.
One of the problems in studying Strauss, is that most American biographers and academic writers do not know the history of the ideas which is central to Strauss's world. I wasn't very conversant myself. Ideas in western history, flow and branch from theme to theme very much like art history. That's were I began with the general approach. It is a standard variation in some continental art history. You depict the key features of the period and its general controversies, its political and social milieu. Then you discuss the nature of the works and how they are related to the forces of the period. You can take the Marxist approach and show these works are an expression of the reigning ideology of the period or not. In effect you understand the period in order to understand the works and other productions. This is in effect a relativistic historicism, the view that Strauss oppossed.
Many Anglo-American art historians are quite conservative and oppose the continental style of cultural history as practiced in the traditions of Burckardt, Hegel, and Nietzsche, or the later Cassirer, Benjium, Hauser and Malraux. I had to discover all these on my own. I left school long ago and have no idea if their postmodern descendants get any better treatment. I doubt it.
In general terms of the above sort of cultural history, Strauss can be seen as a rightwing romantic modernist reaction, and an anti-Hegelian. Strauss believed that the works he studied could stand alone, in isolation from their milieu, in completely atemporal and idealist fashion. This view is very much like the formalist school of art history. In art history classes, the professor puts the work up on a slide and tells the audience what to think about it as art and leaves the world of the painter and the painting completely behind.
In the history of ideas, the development of a cultural historicist view of ideas was principally the invention of Hegel and others in the 19thC and grew out of the larger neo-classical revival and the various movements of romanticism. Shelley and others made a trip to Italy de rigur. The Germans had their oven version.
The political importance of neo-classicism as opposed to romanticism, is found in the development of the modern secular nation state. The neoclassical architecture of public buildings are the most obvious signs, especially in the US and France, and to a lesser degree England and Germany. It's the secular nature of this architectural style that is important to understand. The grand urban style was intended to signify the public space of a secular republic merging the concept of the Roman Senate and Plato's Agora, mostly ignoring that Athenia and other pagan gods were lurking in the great temples. These latter day temples were places of debate and contention where there would be no encyclicals or decrees handed down from kings and popes, in effect, no absolutes. There were also the estate styles of neoclassicism in the US and England. We'll go into the political significances of those below.
Strauss went to school during the early phase of Weimar and wrote his thesis on F.H Jacobi (1743-1819). The thesis isn't translated as far as I know. From the few bits and pieces quoted in Michael Zank (Leo Strauss, The Early Writings) it sounded like Strauss didn't dissect Jacobi's philosophy and critique it, rather he attempted to summarize it and outline its general intentions.
Strauss's academic milieu was training in the history of ideas in the German university system which layed heavy stress on the classics, and German literary contributions from the 19thC. Jacobi's historical importance was, he formed part of the German literary and philosophical circles during the time of Kant and later, and included Goethe, Lessing, and Mendelsshon. These figures were central to the German branch of the Enlightenment, transcendental idealism and the romantic reactions. Kant is generally considered the founder, while Fichte, Schelling and Jacobi are intermediaries of various stripes and the whole transcendental idealist movement culminates in Hegel. That's the crude picture. The tensions within these circles had great variation.
The internal tensions of transcendental idealism leave out Kant's major contribution which was to unify the knowledge derived from reason following Descartes, and knowledge derived from experience or empiricism following the English schools. This was the big foundation for modern empirical science from a philosophical perspective. As far as I can tell most of the subsuqent transcendental idealists lived in eternal dread of our concept of science as a methodological combination of theory and empirical observation. Or even worse the positivists schools developing around what the French called the new sciences of man. In contrast, the transcendental idealist's concept of science was almost exclusively the older view that philosophy was the queen of the sciences, that it was possible to reason the way to understanding how the world worked. When either Strauss or Hegel talk about science, what they mean is reason, rationalism logic, and the history of ideas. All of that, does not include the more limited scope of the empirical sciences.
In any event, here is a quote from Hegel on Jacobi:
``By reason, however, mediate knowledge merely is on the one hand understood, and on the other the intellectual perception which speaks of facts (supra, pp. 413-415). In this respect it is true that reason is the knowledge and revelation of absolute truth, since the understanding is the revelation of the finite (Jacobi's Werke, Vol. II. pp. 8-14, 101). "We maintained that two different powers of perception in man have to be accepted: a power of perception through visible and tangible and consequently corporeal organs of perception, and another kind of power, viz. through an invisible organ which in no way represents itself to the outward senses, and whose existence is made known to us through feeling alone. This organ, a spiritual eye for spiritual objects, has been called by men - generally speaking - reason. He whom the pure feelings of the beautiful and good, of admiration and love, of respect and awe, do not convince that in and with these feelings he perceives something to be present which is independent of them, and which is unattainable by the outward senses or by an understanding directed upon their perceptions alone - such an one cannot be argued with" (Jacobi's Werke, Vol. II. pp. 74, 76). But by faith Jacobi likewise understands all that has immediacy of Being for me: "Through faith we know that we have a body, we become aware of other actual things, and that indeed with the same certainty with which we are aware of ourselves. We obtain all conceptions through the qualities which we receive and accept, and there is no other way of attaining real knowledge; for reason, when it begets objects, begets phantoms of the brain. Thus we have a revelation of nature."(11) Hence the expression faith, which had a deep significance in religion, is made use of for different contents of every kind; this in our own time is the point of view most commonly adopted.''
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20-%20Hist%20Phil/jacobi.htm
I take the important point of the quote on Jacobi to be that belief is not only prior to reason in the order of understanding, but belief is also essential for reason to proceed. And, we must maintain belief in the Absolute because we can not attain it through reason alone. This is more or less the way I think Strauss viewed the opposition between revelation v. reason, using general concepts from his study of Jacobi
Here is Hegel's critique:
``Everything which has been written upon God since Jacobi's time, by philosophers such as Fries and by theologians, rests on this conception of immediate intellectual knowledge, and men even call this revelation, though in another sense than the revelation of theology. Revelation as immediate knowledge is in ourselves, while the Church holds revelation to be something imparted from without.(10) In the theological sense, faith is faith in something which is given to us through teaching. It is a sort of deception when faith and revelation are spoken of and represented as if faith and revelation in the theological sense were here in question; for the sense in which they are used, and which may be termed philosophic, is quite a different one, however pious an air may be assumed in using the terms.''
Strauss made exactly the mistake that Hegel outlines above. I found this passage from Hegel a few days ago, and I am surprized Strauss either didn't read it or didn't agree at the time of his early writing. He may have discovered the distinction between a religious revelation, and a philosophical belief later in his transistion from Judaism to classical philosophy.
The next quote is out of temporal order because it comes later in Strauss's writing. Strauss would continue the Jacobian line in later works. In `What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies', Strauss writes:
``...there is no need for having recourse to a miracle in order to understand Hegel's moral and political teaching. Hegel continued, and in certain respects radicalized, the modern tradition that emancipated the passions and hence `competition'. That tradition was originated by Machiavelli and perfected by such men as Hobbes and Adam Smith. It came into being through a conscious break with strict moral demands made by both the Bible and classical philosophy; those demands were explicitly rejected as too strict. Hegel's moral and political teaching is indeed a synthesis: it is a synthesis of Socratic and Machiavellian or Hobbesian politics. Kojeve knows as well as anyone living that Hegel's fundamental teaching regarding Master and Slave is based on Hobbes's doctrine of the state of nature. If Hobbes doctrine of the state of nature is abandoned en pleine connaissance de cause (as indeed it should be abandoned), Hegel's fundamental teaching will lose the evidence which it apparently still possesses for Kojeve. Hegel's teaching is much more sophisticated than Hobbes's, but it is as much a construction as the latter. Both doctrines construct human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that guided by nothing but a desire for recognition.''
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2006/05/strauss_hegel_t.html
(Read the first comment contra-Strauss)
Returning to the Twenties. Jacobi was an important influence on Strauss. Toward the end of the 1920s Strauss's studies culminated in a book of essays called Spinoza's Critique of Religion. Strauss was led to Spinoza from the letters where Jacobi engaged with Lessing and Mendelssohn on Spinoza's athetism or pantheism. There is a great similarity between these discussions and various discussions in the Anglo-American world over Theism, followed by many of the US founders. Nobody wanted to take Spinoza's radical leap into the godless world of materialism. Or in the other pole the spiritual leap into the abyss. Shelley about this time got kicked out of Oxford for his pamphlet on athetism and rumored anti-monarchy writings.
The main line of Strauss's argument against Spinoza followed from his studies of Jacobi. Strauss in middle Weimar in his Zionist essays was arguing more or less along Jacobian lines and objected to Herman Cohen's neo-Kantian project to go back through the history of Jewish thought and re-intrepret Judaism as one of the key foundations for western rationalism. When Strauss tried to tackle Cohen, his main objection was to the loss of the belief in revelation as the founding principle of Judaism. So we have the evolving controversy between revealed truth and reasoned truth.