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SPENGLER
The secret that Leo Strauss never
revealed
No sillier allegation
has found its way into mass-circulation newspapers than
the notion that a conspiracy of Leo Strauss acolytes has
infiltrated the Bush administration. Supposedly Defense
Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, a Strauss doctoral
student, and other lesser-known officials form a
neo-conservative cabal practicing some sort of political
black arts.
If anything, the Straussians are
dangerous not because they are Machiavellian but because
they are naive.
First of all, there is no
Straussian conspiracy, for the simple reason that no two
Straussians agree about what Leo Strauss (1899-1973)
really meant to say during his 37 years of teaching in
the United States. Anyone who does not believe this
should listen to today's Straussians searching for
hidden meanings in his works by reference to numerology,
comparative word counts, and other far-fetched devices.
At the conclusion of this essay I will reveal the secret
of the Tower of Straussian Babel.
Secondly,
there is nothing the least sinister about Strauss
himself, who spent his life attempting to square the
circle of reconciling traditional values with the modern
world.
Third, and most important, the questions
that preoccupied Strauss have no relevance whatever to
the problem which American foreign policy now proposes
to address, namely, how to respond to the hundreds of
millions of Muslims who want no part of the modern
world. Hitler and Stalin, the spawn of modernist
despair, were Strauss's life-long concerns. How to
prevent democracies from sinking into debilitation and
becoming the prey of tyrants was the subject of his
political philosophy. He spoke to an academic audience
that dismissed religion as a discredited superstition,
not to a world of enraged believers.
Strauss was
a German-Jewish theologian who lost his faith, and came
under the spell of the modernists' critique of
tradition. On the one hand, he agreed with the critics
of Christian civilization from Machiavelli through
Heidegger. On the other, he perceived that the end of
the old order of things led only to Nihilism and
destruction. Nietzsche and Heidegger refuted the
absolutes of right and wrong as taught by revealed
religion, insisting that men invented their own values
as circumstances permitted. The Nazis idolized
Nietzsche; Heidegger himself embraced National
Socialism. That left Strauss in a profoundly
uncomfortable position intellectually, given his
fascination with Heidegger, as well as personally, as he
had to flee Nazi Germany.
Caught between the
collapse of tradition and the pyromania of the
modernists, Strauss took the well-trodden path back to
ancient Athens, that is, to the political philosophy of
Socrates. Westerners who reject religion have been doing
that since the Renaissance. Strauss, the theologian who
began his career writing glosses on Jewish authorities,
restyled himself as a classicist, with a fantastic
twist. As he wrote to Karl Lowith in 1946: "I really
believe, although to you this apparently appears
fantastic, that the perfect political order, as Plato
and Aristotle have sketched it, is the perfect political
order. I know very well that today it cannot be
restored." What that means, we shall see below.
By all accounts Strauss was a persuasive exegete
of classical texts and an inspiring teacher. On American
shores, to be sure, he was playing to an easy crowd.
"Young Americans seemed, in comparison [to Europeans],
to be natural savages when they came to the university.
They had hardly heard the names of the writers who were
the daily fare of their counterparts across the
Atlantic, let alone took it into their heads that they
could have a relationship to them," wrote the late Allan
Bloom, Strauss's best-known student. Eager young
Americans were easily impressed by the erudite German.
Much is made by left-wing critics of Strauss's
"esotericism", his search for hidden meanings in classic
texts. His students bear some of the blame for this,
given their scavenger hunts for hidden messages in their
teacher's own opus. Some commentators go as far as to
allege that Strauss used esoteric exegesis to teach his
students the art of political deception. That is silly.
What author in what century was free to express himself
with unconditional freedom? Heinrich Heine commented
that Hegel wrote confusing prose because he did not want
to reveal himself as an atheist. Strauss, for example,
attempted to show that Machiavelli was an atheist who
wished to overturn existing mores, and cloaked himself
in commentary upon Roman authors. To whom is this is a
surprise? Machiavelli was accused of this for centuries.
All the Renaissance humanists were freethinkers of one
sort or another. Why does anyone think that there was a
Counter-Reformation?
Americans want happy
endings, and the enterprising Leo Strauss provided them
with this one: Reason as taught by the Athenian
political philosophers can provide solutions to modern
problems of statecraft. His student Harry Jaffa spent a
lifetime portraying the Founding Fathers of the United
States as well as Abraham Lincoln as master logicians.
To Jaffa, Lincoln was "the greatest of all exemplars of
Socratic statesmanship". "Never since Socrates has
philosophy so certainly descended from the heavens into
the affairs of mortal men."
And yet there is the
nagging problem of Heidegger, who rejected all tellers
of absolute truth and Socrates most vehemently. As an
impressionable young man, Strauss fell under Heidegger's
influence and never quite shook it. Considering
Heidegger's grandiose reputation, it is depressing to
consider how cheap was the trick he played. What is
Being?, he demanded of a generation that after the First
World War felt the ground shaky under their feet. It is
a shame that Eddie Murphy never studied philosophy, for
then we might have had the following Saturday Night
Live sketch about Heidegger's definition of Being
with respect to Non-Being, namely death. The use of
dialect would make Heidegger's meaning far clearer than
in the available English translations:
"What be
'Be'? You cain't say that 'Be' be, cause you saying 'be'
to talk about 'Be', and it don't mean nothing to say
that 'Be' be dis or 'Be' be dat. 'Be' be 'Be' to begin
wit'. So don't you be saying 'Be' be 'Be'. You wanna
talk about 'Be', you gotta talk about what ain't be
nothin' at all. You gotta say 'Be' be what ain't
'ain't-Be'. Now when you ain't be nothing at all? Dat be
when you be daid. When you daid you ain't be nothing,
you just be daid. So 'Be' be somewhere between where you
be and where you ain't be, dat is, when you be daid. Any
time you say 'Be' you is also saying 'ain't-Be', and dat
make you think about being daid."
That is all
there is to Heidegger's Existential idea of
Being-towards-death. Metaphysical pettifogging of this
sort appeals to people whom the disintegration of social
order has made uncertain about their sense of being. The
enunciation of the concept "Being" dredges up the
problem of mortality, Heidegger continued. Men confront
their mortality under particular circumstances, in what
came to be called "radical historicism", that is, the
complete absence of absolute truths. What remains is
subjective Existential choice. Heidegger's was to join
the Nazis.
That left Strauss in the prickly
position of preaching the absolute truth of Socratic
philosophy while giving credence to Nietzsche and
Heidegger, who rejected all absolutes and Socrates more
than anyone. The Straussians come out on every side of
this question, leading to the charge that Strauss
secretly taught a cynical, value-free theory of power to
his inner sanctum of acolytes. No such thing is the
case. Strauss is neither a Heideggerian Historicist nor
a Greek rationalist, but exactly the opposite. He was
confused, but confused in a very special way. He was a
confused Jew.
That is the secret that Strauss
never revealed to any of his students (how many teachers
admit to confusion?). A Jewish atheist, an old joke
goes, tells God: "Look at all the terrible things you
have permitted to happen! Just for that, I refuse to
believe in you - so there!" To advance a solution to
mankind's problems (in this case Socratic political
philosophy) in the full knowledge that it cannot
possibly succeed is a peculiarly Jewish gesture, a
perversely stubborn statement of faith in the face of
all the known facts.
Despite his atheism,
Strauss remained occupied with Jewish issues throughout
his life. He is buried in the cemetery of the Knesseth
Israel Synagogue in Annapolis, Maryland. What
characterizes Strauss's diverse group of followers is
not a penchant for conspiracy, but a kind of optimism, a
faith, if you will, that statecraft can improve the
human condition. What will happen to his legacy?
Demography soon will solve Europe's Existential crisis,
as the Europeans die out. The issues that occupied
Strauss are dying out with them. He left his students no
tools to apply to a world of civilizational and
religious war. It was not the philosophers, but the
theologians who sorted out Europe in the religious wars
of the 17th century. If Washington really is in the
hands of the Straussians, the United States is flying
blind.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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