Abstract

GERMAN SOKRATES:
HEIDEGGER, ARENDT, STRAUSS

by
Rodrigo Chacón

This dissertation traces the genesis of three conceptions of political

philosophizing in the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss. I draw on recently

published works to shed light on their respective turns to ‘political philosophy’ as

responses to the crisis of the Weimar Republic. I argue that the philosophical,

theological, and political dimensions of the crisis led to a rediscovery of Socratic

philosophizing.

Heidegger rediscovered the Socratic project of a ‘philosophy of human

affairs’ in his early lectures on Aristotle, which Strauss and Arendt attended in

1922 and 1924/25 respectively. Heidegger’s project was to refound philosophy on

its existential basis by redirecting the ‘care’ of philosophy away from attempts to

secure universal and binding knowledge to the self-illumination of life in its

historical ‘facticity’. In an unprecedented effort to understand the phenomena to

which Plato and Aristotle referred, Heidegger showed that philosophy grows out

of a world of common practical concerns, opinions, and passions. He thus

inadvertently refounded philosophy as ‘political philosophy’ and made possible

the projects of Arendt and Strauss.

 Strauss was particularly affected by Heidegger’s confrontation with the

problem of ethics or of providing a rational answer to the question concerning the

right or the good way of life. Strauss understood this problem Socratically as the

question of the necessity and possibility of a techne politike or political science. I

argue that Strauss’s work as a whole responds to this question. Like Heidegger,

Strauss was aware of the fact that a rational justification of one’s way of life—

especially when it is shared with a political community—may be impossible.

Beyond this, it may be unnecessary—if faith or divine revelation are sufficient for

achieving human perfection.

Drawing on Arendt’s Denktagebuch and her dissertation on Augustine, I

argue that her project emerged from a similar ‘theological-political predicament’:

whether or not we should be completely at home in this world is the guiding

question of Arendt’s oeuvre. This question grew out of Arendt’s condition as a

Jew born and raised in Germany and her discovery of neo-orthodox ‘dialectical

theology’.

Thus read, the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss appears in a fresh

light. It becomes the source of a conception of neo-Socratic political philosophy.

 GERMAN SOKRATES:

HEIDEGGER, ARENDT, STRAUSS

by

Rodrigo Chacón

September 2009

Submitted to the New School for Social Research of the New School in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.

Dissertation Committee:
Dr. James E. Miller
Dr. David Plotke
Dr. Richard J. Bernstein
Dr. Andreas Kalyvas
 UMI Number: 3396646

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© Rodrigo Chacón 2009
 Acknowledgments

I discovered the work of Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger almost fifteen years

ago in Mexico City in the lectures of professor Eric Herrán. I wish to thank him at

the outset for introducing me to political philosophy in such an excellent and rare

way.

My graduate studies were made possible by the support of the Fulbright-

García Robles scholarship fund, the McArthur-Ford-Hewlett Foundation, and the

Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. I owe it to these institutions that my

greatest debts are moral—particularly to Mexico and the United States of

America—and not financial.

Professor Steven B. Smith suggested to me several years ago that a good

dissertation was waiting to be written comparing Hannah Arendt’s The Human

Condition and Strauss’s Natural Right and History. I am grateful for this and

other cues, and for his encouragement over the years.

I learned much about Socratic dialogue and friendship from my students at

Eugene Lang College and the TU-Dresden. I thank Rafael Khatchaturian in

particular for helping me edit and improve the manuscript.

At various moments friends provided support when I was losing my

way—and listened patiently when I was too excited to keep my findings to

myself. Gracias de todo corazón a Paula Ramírez, Fernanda Ezeta, Melissa

iv
Amezcua, Carolina Gallegos-Anda y Oi Yen Lam. Thank you, Kang Chen, for

sharing your intelligence and passion for the most important things, and for your

careful comments which saved me from more than one embarrassment. Santiago

Chacón, Lupita Vizcarra, Alejandro Rodiles, and Paola Karam provided a home

and loving friendship, and I wish to thank them as well.

Mario Chacón read everything I sent him. I never imagined that reading a

PhD dissertation could help transform filiality into friendship.

I owe it to Kaicho T. Nakamura and the Sangha at state street to have

pointed to what words cannot express about the essence of ethics.

Professors Claudia Baracchi and Yirmiahu Yovel rekindled my love of

philosophy every time I saw them lecture.

I thank Richard J. Bernstein for his trust, for his honest critique, and for

his example of committed scholarship. I thank Andreas Kalyvas for preventing

me from becoming complacent with my ideas. Thanks, finally and most

especially, to my mentors David Plotke and Jim Miller.

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments iv

INTRODUCTION
The Problem of a Political Philosophy, Or Why Socrates? 1

I. Why Arendt and Strauss? 7

II. What is Socratic Political Philosophy? Some Preliminaries 14
III. Concluding Remarks 35

CHAPTER ONE
The Young Heidegger’s Political Philosophy (1922-1924) 38

I. “Wie Du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben”?: 43

Heidegger’s Turn From Theology to Philosophy
to Political Philosophy (1911-1922)
II. Who is the True Philosophos? Heidegger’s Reading of 52
Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha, 1-2 (1922)
III. Who is the True Politikos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s 61
Politics and Rhetoric (1924)
IV. Heidegger’s Two Conceptions of Political Philosophy 73
V. Concluding Remarks 94

CHAPTER TWO
Descending the Magic Mountain to Begin a Socratic Ascent: 102
Leo Strauss in Weimar (1929-1931)

I. “Ethos anthropoi daimon”?: Strauss Becoming Strauss 108

II. Political Science, Political Liberalism and Political Theology 113
in the Dwindling Days of Weimar
III. Götterdämmerung: the Davos Disputation Between Martin 123
Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer
IV. Descending From Davos—What Did Leo Strauss Do? 128
V. Concluding Remarks 156

vi
CHAPTER THREE
Hannah Arendt in Weimar: 160
Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament? (1928-1929)

I. The ‘Theological-Political Predicament’ 164

II. Philosophy and Theology: “for me they belonged together” 169
III. Liberal Theology: The Religion of Culture 172
IV. Dialectical Theology: Destroying the Gods of this World 181
V. Arendt in Marburg: Between Bultmann and Heidegger 188
VI. Love in Augustine 196
VII. Arendt’s Theological-Political Predicament 201
VIII. Concluding Remarks 216

CHAPTER FOUR
Strauss’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1931-1936) 219

I. Maimonides in Weimar and his Critique of Heidegger: 221

Strauss’s “Cohen and Maimonides” (1931)
II. Hobbesheidegger is Heideggerhobbes: Strauss’s Studies in 248
Hobbesian Political Philosophy (1931-1936)
III. Strauss’s Second Sailing (1935/36) 294
IV. Concluding Remarks 305

CHAPTER FIVE
Arendt’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1950-1958) 311

I. Political Philosophy in Arendt’s Denktagebuch 313

II. Arendtian (Anti-)metaphysics 316
III. The Ethical-Political Implications of Arendtian (Anti-) 325
metaphysics
IV. Arendt’s Critique of Platonic Political Science 332
V. Political Philosophy: Out of the Sources of Socrates and 358
Heidegger?
VI. Concluding Remarks 380

CONCLUSION 386

BIBLIOGRAPHY 404

vii
 INTRODUCTION

The Problem of a Political Philosophy, Or Why Socrates?

[M]odern philosophy, brought to its end, appears to me to lead

to the point where Socrates begins.

Leo Strauss to Gerhard Krüger

[T]he West never really had a proper political philosophy.

Hannah Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld

This dissertation can be read as an exploration of the claim that “modern

philosophy, brought to its end … leads to the point where Socrates begins.” 1 The

dissertation seeks to bring to light the consequences of this thesis, which implies

that the future of philosophizing is not ‘the end of philosophy’, and particularly of

humanism, but a rediscovery of the ‘philosophy of the human things’ pioneered

by Socrates.

As a study of the history of ideas, this work seeks to deepen our

understanding of the common experiential and philosophical grounds that gave

rise to three of the most powerful currents of contemporary political and

philosophical thought. To this end, it traces the genesis of the work of Martin

Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss as three thinkers who at the

beginning of the twentieth century turned to classical ‘political philosophy’ as a

1
Letter of December 12, 1932 from Leo Strauss to Gerhard Krüger. In Leo Strauss, Gesammelte
Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und Zugehörige Schriften – Briefe, edited by
Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2001), 415. (Hereafter, GS3.)

1
response to the crises of the Weimar Republic. Given the nature of those crises—

political, theological, and philosophical—‘Socratic’ philosophizing proved to be

the best response. I explore this convergence on Socrates, first of all, to make

possible a dialogue—itself leading to reciprocal illumination—between three

philosophical radicals with rival views of the role of religion and politics in the

life of the mind and the life of the citizen. The systematic aim of the dissertation

is to develop a concept of neo-Socratic political philosophy from the work of

Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss.

The structure of the dissertation is chronological, both for simplicity’s

sake and for the sake of understanding the genesis of neo-Socratic political

philosophizing without prejudging its content. I shall therefore refrain in these

introductory remarks from justifying my attempt to read Heidegger as a ‘Socratic’

who turned to classical ‘political philosophy’, and to further suggest that Arendt

and Strauss were, so to speak, twin disciples of the same master forming an

alliance for the future of ‘Socrates’. Instead, I shall introduce the general problem

of the dissertation—viz., the necessity and possibility of Socratic political

philosophy in our time—by referring to the puzzle that gives rise to it.

To judge from the views of the most authoritative philosophers, the

twentieth century seems to have been the first to recognize the importance of

evaluating the legacy of Socrates to know what we are doing. For Nietzsche

Socrates was “the most questionable phenomenon of antiquity,” the first

“theoretical man” who brought to the world the “profound delusion … that

2
thought … reaches down into the deepest abysses of Being, and is capable not

simply of understanding existence, but of correcting it.”2 Socrates is the “origin

and prototype of the theoretical optimist,” “the first, who guided by the instinct of

science” “made existence comprehensible and thus justified.”3 Channeling “the

instinctive lust for life” towards science, Socrates diverted humanity from a path

that would have led to “universal wars of annihilation and continual migrations of

peoples,” had “the whole incalculable sum of energy used up for this world

tendency [of science] been used not in the service of knowledge but for practical,

i.e., egoistic aims of individuals and peoples.” Socrates is “the single turning point

and vortex of so-called world history.” 4 But “[t]he time of Socratic man has

gone.”5

For Martin Heidegger Socrates was “the purest thinker of the West.”6

Though, as we shall see, this unique reference to Socrates does not exhaust the

meaning that Socratism had for Heidegger, it suffices to convey the same kind of

ambivalence that one also finds in Nietzsche. Socrates is the prototype of

2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, in Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds.),
Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 1 (Munich: DTV, 1999),
90, 98-99.
3
Ibid., 100, 99.
4
Ibid., 100
5
Ibid., 132. Needless to say, these are not Nietzsche’s last words on Socrates, but they suffice to
introduce the ‘problem of Socrates’ as Nietzsche understood it.
6
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row,
1968), 17. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Part I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1978 [1971]), 174 (Arendt notes that this is “the only point in his work where [Heidegger] speaks
directly of Socrates”).

3
‘thinking’—indeed, the sole exemplar of thinking in its ‘purity’—and yet, for all

practical purposes, this thinking is no different from Plato’s or, at any rate,

Heidegger does not distinguish between Socratic and Platonic thought. Plato, in

turn, appears throughout Heidegger’s writings as a thinker possessed by precisely

the “metaphysical delusion” denounced by Nietzsche that thought is capable of

securing, orienting, and even correcting existence. Such a delusion is the germ of

a technical interpretation of thinking that has led to the extreme homelessness and

inhumanity of contemporary civilization.7

Nietzsche and Heidegger seem to have been the first great thinkers to

place the center of gravity of Western civilization in Socrates. And yet, for all

their sagacity and depth, or perhaps because of it, they failed to address the

problem inherent in the surface of his teaching—namely, not ‘metaphysics’, not—

as Heidegger would have it—‘what is a thing?’, but ‘politics’, or the fact that

Socrates became “the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history”

because he was “the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it

in cities.”8

7
M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, revised and
expanded ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 217-265. See esp. 218 (technical thinking),
233-34 (humanism “does not set the humanitas of man high enough”), 242-43 (homelessness as
“the destiny of the world”). For a reading of Heidegger as the thinker of a post-Socratic and post-
humanistic age in which Socrates stands for the turn toward man and thus towards humanism see
Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987).
8
Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, V, 4, 10: “Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from
the heavens and to place it in cities, and even to introduce it into homes and compel it to enquire
about life and standards and good and ill.” On this motif, see J. Kerschensteiner, “Socrates
philosophiam devocavit a caelo,” in W. Suerbaum and F. Maier (eds.), Festschrift für Franz
Egermann zu seinem 80. Geburtstag… (Munich, 1985), 41-56.

4
 Socrates is said to have been the founder of political philosophy.9 But one

looks in vain in the writings of those who knew him for a reference to ‘political

philosophy’. This may be the problem inherent in the surface of his teaching: that

‘political philosophy’ is necessary to understand what we are doing but that it

may be an impossible undertaking—at least in the way that Socrates originally

intended it.

What follows in this introduction is a closer examination of this problem

that begins from the surface. I introduce the problem with a preliminary and

mainly biographical approach to the Socratic commonalities between Arendt and

Strauss. I suggest that the possibilities of thought developed in their work are best

understood comparatively. The reason for this is simply a matter of fate that led

two German-Jews born and raised in Germany to Heidegger and thence to

Socratic ‘political philosophy’. I then turn to the problem of political philosophy

9
The locus classicus is Cicero Tusc. Disp. V. 10. For the reception of Socrates as “moralis
philosophiae auctor” in antiquity, more generally, see Hermann Diels, Doxographie graeci
(Berlin: Berolini G. Reimeri, 1879), index s.v. Socrates. For the reception of Socrates in Islam, see
Ilai Alon, Socrates in Mediaeval Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1991). For his reception in
Christianity, see Jean L. de Balzac, Le Socrate Chrétien (Paris: H. Gautier, 1894). Among modern
thinkers, the view that Socrates originated “civil science” was upheld notably by Hobbes. See his
preface to De Cive. Cf. also Kant’s remark that “[t]he most important epoch of Greek philosophy
finally began with Socrates. It was he who gave an entirely new practical direction to the
philosophic spirit and to all speculation.” I. Kant, Logic, trans. R. S. Harman and W. Schwartz
(Indianapolis and New York, 1974), 34. Cited in Richard L. Velkley, Being after Rousseau
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 4: “On Kant’s Socratism,” 65. For a
comprehensive bibliography on Socrates, see Andreas Patzer, Bibliographia Socratica. Die
wissenschaftliche Literatur über Sokrates von den Anfängen bis auf die neueste Zeit in
systematisch-chronologischer Anordnung (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1985). See also Olof Gigon,
Sokrates: sein Bild in Dichtung und Geschichte (Berne: Francke, 1979). For an alternative account
of the history of moral philosophy as beginning with Pythagoras, see J.B. Schneewind, The
Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Epilogue: “Pythagoras,
Socrates, and Kant: Understanding the History of Moral Philosophy.” Cf. Leo Strauss, Natural
Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 120.

5
as it is commonly understood, namely, as, at core, a problem of the relation

between philosophy and politics. By specifying the traditional origins of our

philosophical and political vocabularies, which, I shall argue, still determine how

Arendt and Strauss are read, I seek to begin to explain why a critique of the

tradition of political philosophy as made possible by the thought of Heidegger is

necessary, and why, if consistently followed it necessarily leads back to the point

where Socrates begins.

6
 Why Arendt and Strauss?

Political philosophy (according to the traditional account) originated in Socrates

as a praxis lacking a concept. Socrates seems to have spent his whole mature life

reflecting on ‘the human things’ or ‘the political things’—whether in themselves

or as a clue to ‘all things’—without ever calling what he did political philosophy.

The same can be said of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Like Socrates, they

believed that the one thing needful for our time is a philosophy of human affairs,

and like Socrates they devoted their mature lives to an examination of the human

or political things. Like her Athenian predecessor, Arendt did not call what she

did political philosophy. As for Strauss, he made ‘political philosophy’ the object

of a Socratic quest which, just as Socratically, yielded no final answer. In spite of

this, both became—willingly or not—founders of two of the most powerful

schools of contemporary political thought.

What may first come to mind when these thinkers are mentioned is that

their aims were exactly opposite. The aim of Arendt’s work as a whole may be

said to be the rehabilitation of the active political life, the vita activa, from the

neglect to which it has been subjected by a philosophical tradition that has

typically seen the contemplative life as the only one truly worth living, as well as

from the modern privatization of life—the modern turning inward or

subjectivization of life—which has made us blind to the inherent dignity of the

7
life of action. Without such a rehabilitation, without the life of action, which is the

sine qua non for the constitution of a world as a common world, Arendt would

argue, the right to have rights, that is, the right to live in a world that could

become our home, could never be made a reality. Strauss’s aim, by contrast, can

be said to have been the rehabilitation of philosophical contemplation as the

highest life and indeed as the essential means—paradoxical as this may sound—to

keep the political life in motion. That is, his aim, one could argue, was to affirm

the freedom of the mind to raise the one question that matters, viz., the question

concerning the right life, or the question, How should I live?, not only by

defending the life of free insight from the subjection to any authority (political,

religious, moral or even philosophic) but by proving the superiority of such a life.

Further differences become apparent when one considers some basic facts

about their lives. Strauss (1899-1973) grew up in the small rural town of

Kirchhain, Hessen in what he characterized as a “conservative, even orthodox

Jewish home,”10 and seems to have been affected his whole life by the necessity

of becoming an atheist in order to become a philosopher.11 Arendt (1906-1975),

by contrast, grew up in cosmopolitan Königsberg, in a non-religious family of

10
See Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss,” in
Kenneth Hart Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in
Modern Jewish Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 459-460. (Hereafter JPCM.) On
Strauss’s youth see Michael Zank’s Introduction to his edited volume of Strauss’s early writings:
Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921-1932) (New York: SUNY Press, 2002).
11
See Christian Wiese (ed.), Hans Jonas. Erinnerungen (Frankfurt, a. M.: Insel Verlag, 2003), 93-
94.

8
German-Jewish progressives.12 Strauss took an early interest in religion and

politics; specifically, in political Zionism and in the dialogues of Plato.13 Arendt

took an early interest in German philosophy—in the philosophy of Kant.14 In his

youth Strauss became an anti-revolutionary conservative, and, according to Hans

Jonas’ memoirs, an early supporter of Mussolini.15 Arendt was the daughter of a

fervent admirer of Rosa Luxembourg and would later become engaged to a

communist Spartacist (Heinrich Blücher). Both Arendt and Strauss were driven

into politics, we may say, by a combination of world-history and their Jewish

origins, yet their valorization of the political life (at least in their later years) was

altogether different. Strauss, who was politically active in his youth, came to see

political life—according to one of his students—as but a potentially tyrannical

expression of self-love.16 Arendt, who was uninterested in politics at first—very

much like other intellectuals she would then rebuke17—vowed in the early 1930s

12
On Arendt’s youth see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 5-41.
13
“A Giving of Accounts,” in Green (ed.), JPCM, 458, 460.
14
“A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 8.
15
Jonas, Erinnerungen, 262: “[I]mmerhin war Strauss frühzeitig Mussolini-Anhänger gewesen,
als dieser noch nicht antisemitisch war.”
16
See Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 22: 58-84,
(September-December, 1968): 281-328, 308.
17
Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Portrait of a Period,” The Menorah Journal, XXXI (Fall 1943): 307-14.
(Review of Stephan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography.) Reprinted in Ron H.
Feldman, Hannah Arendt: The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age
(NY: Grove Press, 1978), 112-125.

9
“never again [to] get involved in any kind of intellectual business”18 and became

politically active for twenty years, expressing soon thereafter in 1958 that an

inactive life that was not engaged with the ‘public things’, was as good as “dead

to the world.”19

Not coincidentally, the work of Strauss and Arendt found resonance in

rather different intellectual circles as they emigrated to the United States

(respectively in 1938 and 1941). Arendt’s work found an early audience among a

circle of highly influential Berkeley political theorists, including Norman

Jacobson, John Schaar, Sheldon Wolin, and Hannah Pitkin. These theorists read

Arendt as engaged in their own quest to rescue “the political” from behaviorism

and from the “unpolitical” political theories of thinkers such as Michael

Oakeshott or John Rawls. These theorists, they argued, either viewed politics with

hostility or saw it as merely instrumental (i.e., as a means for attaining order and

stability) and thus failed to value and to understand the political as the creative

potentiality of an egalitarian demos.20 Strauss, on the other hand, became the

founder of a school of thought whose leading representatives—at least in the

public mind—have been cultural conservatives and aristocratic liberals.21

18
Hannah Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” 11: “I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I
also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak. But
not among others. And I never forgot that…”
19
Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1958], 1998), 176.
20
See Emily Hauptmann, “A Local History of ‘The Political’,” Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 1,
February 2004: 34-60.
21
Yet it would be a mistake to characterize all ‘Straussians’ as conservatives. As Steven Smith
points out, “Even recently, a distinguished student of Strauss [William Galston] served as a

10
 And yet, all of these differences are part of a broader context of equally

striking coincidences. Arendt and Strauss both belonged to the same generation

which still experienced the relatively peaceful and hopeful nineteenth century.

They were both part of the same intellectual milieu, first around Martin Heidegger

and his circle of students at the universities of Freiburg and Marburg and later

among the Zionist youth in Berlin where they had common acquaintances such as

Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. Their way of thinking was shaped and

would later develop in dialogue with members of the same philosophical

community (to which belonged Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, as well as their

students: Günther Stern, Jacob Klein, Gerhard Krüger, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas,

and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others). They were both émigrés who became

American citizens, and they both became professors of political philosophy at the

New School for Social Research and at the University of Chicago. Even though

they seem to have known each other personally from their Berlin years22 and even

though they also coincided at the University of Chicago,23 Arendt and Strauss

prominent member of the first Clinton administration.” Also, it must be mentioned that there were
among Strauss’s students some, most notably Seth Benardete and Stanley Rosen, who became
among the most highly respected classicists and philosophers of our time, whose work does not
directly address political questions. On the relation of Straussianism to political conservatism, see
Steven Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3-4.
22
According to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “Strauss … met with Arendt at the Prussian State
Library and made an effort to court her. When she criticized his conservative political views and
dismissed his suit, he became bitterly angry. The bitterness lasted for decades, growing worse
when the two joined the same American faculty at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. Strauss
was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged his assessment of
National Socialism: she had pointed out the irony of the fact that a political party advocating
views Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him.” Young-Bruehl, For Love of the
World, 98.
23
Arendt taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967; Strauss from 1949 to 1968.

11
were not on friendly terms with each other and did not discuss each other’s

views—at least not openly.24 Then again, it is hard to think of two political

thinkers as united as they were in the view that Heidegger is the most important

thinker of our time.

24
Even though Arendt disliked Strauss, she had a very high opinion of him as a scholar.
Responding to Karl Jaspers’ query in 1954 concerning “Leo Strauss … an orthodox Jew of strong
rational powers?”, Arendt responds: “Leo Strauss is professor of political philosophy in Chicago,
highly respected. Wrote a good book about Hobbes (as well as one about Spinoza). Now another
about natural law. He is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don’t
like him.” Several years later, in 1963, the year she joined the University of Chicago where
Strauss had been named (in 1960) Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and in the midst of
what Arendt called the “Eichmann affair” she writes to Jaspers from Chicago: “The Eichmann
affair continues on its merry way … I spoke on the campus here, with very good success … The
only person here on campus who is agitating against me is Leo Strauss, and he would have done it
in any case.” See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, Edited by Lotte
Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992), 241, 244, 535. Arendt had good reasons to believe that Strauss would have
agitated ‘in any case’. In 1956, after returning from Chicago where she delivered the lectures that
would result in The Human Condition, she reports to Kurt Blumenfeld that even though, “people
were at first quite perplexed [verblüfft] about a new ‘approach’ [one must bear in mind that Strauss
himself in 1949 and Eric Voegelin in 1951 had given their own programmatic Walgreen Lectures
presenting their approach to political philosophizing], they then became after all quite satisfied.”
Again, however, it was Strauss who had reacted critically to her approach (“Inzwischen bin ich aus
Chicago (wo mich Leo Strauss schönstens geschnitten hat) wieder zurück…”). This
notwithstanding, Arendt contined to express her appreciation of Strauss’s scholarship. In 1956 she
writes: “He is very useful in this land, whatever one may otherwise think about him. He has
learned something and teaches the youth to read. That then some of them come to the ‘insight’ that
one can find everything, but then really everything, in Aristotle, that is not exactly a catastrophe
that the world will not survive. Most human beings have by far more absurd views.” See Ingeborg
Nordmann and Iris Pilling (eds.), Hannah Arendt, Kurt Blumenfeld, “In Keinem Besitz
Verwurzelt” (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), 141, 149-50. Arendt also regularly assigned Strauss’s
works in her courses, and considered his work, together with that of Voegelin and Alexandre
Kojève, as among the only existing attempts to do political philosophy. In a course she taught at
the New School in 1969, under the title, “Philosophy and Politics: What is Political Philosophy?,”
she thus suggests that “So far as political philosophy still exists it is being taught by
traditionalists—Voegelin, a Platonist, Strauss, an Aristotelian, and Kojève, a Hegelian. Each of
them believes that tradition is valid…and that the main problems are being solved.” See Hannah
Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Courses---New
School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.---“Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political
Philosophy?” lectures and seminar---1969, 24420.

12
 What is Socratic Political Philosophy? Some Preliminaries

Why were Arendt and Strauss so lastingly affected by Heidegger—a thinker who,

as Strauss once put it, “was philosophically the counterpart to what Hitler was

politically”?25 And what drove them to Socrates? To begin to see this, one must

consider the origins of two problems that became central to their work: the

relation between philosophy and politics and the possibility of a philosophy of

human affairs.

We begin by noting a central difficulty. The way the western tradition has

understood the meaning of philosophy and politics—or, more generally, of

(philosophical) theory and (political) praxis—has been a function of their relation,

and that relation, it seems, has always remained a puzzle.26

25
Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College
in Honor of Jacob Klein,” in JCPM, 450.
26
According to Nicholas Lobkowicz, the author of perhaps the most thorough analysis of the
concepts of theory and praxis in Western thought: “…contrary to all appearances, when taken in
the strict sense there never was an account of theory and praxis, in any event not of their relation
to one another. There were discussions of various types of praxis and various sorts of theory; there
were discussions of the relation between theory and production, between theory and history, and
between theory and experience. But the real problem, which the famous passage in the
Nicomachean Ethics poses, has never really been genuinely discussed: namely, is it possible to
develop a theory relevant to praxis which actually is a theory and which is actually relevant just to
praxis and not to every other possible thing?” “Origins: On the History of Theory and Praxis,” in
Terence Ball (ed.) Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1977), 25. (For Lobkowicz’s larger treatment of the problem of theory and
praxis see his Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).) For similar arguments, see Günther Bien, “Das
Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und Aristoteles,” Philosophisches
Jahrbuch, vol. 76, 1968-1969, 264-314, 268; Franco Volpi, “The Rehabilitation of Practical
Philosophy and neo-Aristotelianism,” in Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (eds.), Action and

13
 The main difficulty seems to be the following. As an activity that takes

place within a political society, philosophy must confront the problem of its own

definition and justification within the totality of social practices. In justifying and

defining itself philosophy indirectly or negatively defines the meaning of political

life. This was done with such effectiveness by the founders of the philosophical

tradition—mainly Plato and Aristotle, who first used and defined the term

‘philosophy’—that our understanding of ‘philosophizing’ and ‘politicizing’, both

before that founding moment and after it, has been, strictly speaking, derivative:

before that founding moment because the pre-history of the ‘Socratic school’27

was largely written by that school itself, and after that moment because—as we

shall see—from very early on western thought began to understand itself in terms

of categories borrowed from the classic thinkers, and in particular in terms of a

distinction between theory and praxis and ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ lives that

did not exist—at least in those terms—for the founding thinkers.28

Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle (Albany: SUNY Press,
1999), 18. Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Basel: Schwabe, 1963), 11.
27
I use this term to refer to what Gadamer calls the ‘Wirkungseinheit Socrates-Plato-Aristotle’,
even though strictly speaking there was no such thing as a ‘Socratic school’ and Socrates’
teachings had a broader impact that cannot be reduced to the work of Plato and Aristotle. On the
Socratic movement generally, see, e.g., Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The
Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). (Arendt
refers to “the political philosophy of the Socratic school,” for example, in “What is Authority?,” in
Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1993),
116, 120.)
28
Of this achievement it has been argued that it set the terms of what the western tradition has
deemed to be both (philosophically) thinkable and (politically) doable. Consider, on the one hand,
Martin Heidegger’s argument that “the fate of philosophy proper in the west” was decided by an
arbitrary interpretation that named what Aristotle understood to be the core of philosophy or the
“first philosophy,” ‘metaphysics’. This is a term, Heidegger argues, that not only Aristotle does
not use, but that could never have meant for him the “turn[ing] away from the physika” towards

14
 Given this difficulty, that is, given the fact that one cannot speak of the

meaning of philosophy and politics and their relation without posing a question to

thinkers for whom this question did not exist in the terms we use, we shall limit

our discussion, first, to recalling the temporal origins of our philosophical and

political vocabularies and, second, to specifying on this basis why it is necessary

to return again to the question of the possibility of a ‘political philosophy’.

‘Politics’ and ‘Praxis’

Our political vocabulary dates back to the rise of democracy in the fifth century

B.C. Terms such as politeia—the constitution or the regime broadly speaking—

politeuma—a closely related idea—and politeuesthai—being politically active—

were coined during the years in which the citizen body began to assume control

“knowledge of the suprasensous” implied by the Latin sense of ‘meta’, namely: beyond the
physical, or “the place and the order of those beings which lie behind and above other beings.”
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans.
W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1929/30], 1995), 39, 40, 43.
Consider, on the other hand, the argument, whose most extreme manifestation is perhaps found in
the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, that the fact that the core of philosophy began to be understood
as ‘meta-physics’—and that such metaphysical thought began to rule over politics, nay, obliterated
all genuinely political thought—was not simply the fault of the first interpreters of Plato and
Aristotle but of Plato’s and Aristotle’s own ‘politics of philosophy’: that is, of their own political
attempts to define what it means to think philosophically and what it means to act politically.
Thus, according to Castoriadis, the defeat of the Athenian democracy (in 404) which gives rise to
the philosophy of Plato “fixed the course of political philosophy for twenty five centuries.” Or as
he puts it more explicitly, “Profoundly hating the democratic universe and its arborescences
(‘sophistry’, rhetoric, political activity, even poetry) [Plato] constructs—by strokes of historical
falsification, rhetoric, sophistry, theatrical scenes, and demagogy—a false image of it that was
later to have weighty historical effects: when referring to Plato, one still talks about ‘Greek
political thought’, whereas he is the total negation thereof … Greek political thought is to be
sought, rather, in democratic political creation, and that creation ends basically in 404 (or 399).”
See Castoradis’ lectures of 1982-83 edited as Ce Qui Fait La Grèce. 1, D'Homère à Héraclite:
Séminaires 1982-1983 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 286 (Plato “fixed the course of political philosophy for
twenty five centuries”), and his course On Plato's Statesman, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), xxii.

15
over the affairs of the polis.29 The idea of human praxis, referring more

generally—at least in one of its meanings—to human activity as guided by

deliberation (in the political, ethical-individual, or economic domains), began to

be used terminologically by Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.). Thus, it is notably absent

from the work of Thucydides’ (ca. 460 - 395 B.C.) who was one of the first

thinkers to try to account for the laws governing human action, and it was also left

largely unexplored as such by Plato (424 - 348 B.C.).30 Finally, the notion of a

political life, or bios politikos, as part of a general discussion concerning the best

way of life (viz., whether it is political, philosophical or something else) also

dates back to the Socratic school and to Plato in particular.31 It must further be

noted that this discussion did not refer to the more general difference between

bios praktikos and bios theoretikos (let alone ‘active’ versus ‘contemplative’

lives), which are distinctions that became relevant—and apparently only began to

make sense—for post-Aristotelian thought.32

29
See Christian Meier, “Politeia,” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel (eds.), Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2007), Vol. 7, 1034-1036. (Hereafter HWPh.)
The terms ta politka (politics) and e politike (‘the political’) which are substantivized forms of the
adjective politikos, itself derived from polites, also date back to that period. Meier, “Politik,” in
Ibid., 1038.
30
Günther Bien, “Praxis, Praktisch,” in HWPh, Vol. 7., 1277.
31
See Werner Jaeger, “On the Origin and Cycle of the Philosophic Ideal of Life,” in his Aristotle:
Fundamentals of the History of His Development, trans. Richard Robinson (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, second ed., 1948), 426-461.
32
Günther Bien, “Praxis, Praktisch,” in HWPh, Vol. 7., 1282.

16
 ‘Philosophy’ and ‘theory’

As for our philosophical vocabulary, though it also began to be developed in the

fifth century Periclean age, it was only completed or consolidated after the demise

of the Athenian democracy in 404. The verbal and adjectival forms ‘to

philosophize’ and ‘philosophical’ appeared towards the end of the fifth century,

while the noun ‘philosophy’ only emerged around the 380s, that is, after the trial

of Socrates in 399.33 Finally, theoria only began to be used as a technical term of

philosophical knowledge by Plato, and the adjective ‘theoretical’ was not used

before Aristotle.34

‘Philosophizing’ and ‘politicizing’

Herodotus (c. 490 B.C. - 420 B.C.) refers to the Athenian lawgiver Solon (c. 638 -

558 B.C.) as someone who ‘philosophized’ and ‘theorized’,35 and, insofar as his

quest was for ‘the invisible measure’ of human affairs—namely, justice—he

33
W. Halbfass, “Philosophie,” in HWPh, Vol. 7, 573. (The earliest reputed ‘philosophers’ from
Ionia referred to their investigations as istorie (=inquiry). Pythagoras (c. 582-500 B.C.) is
reputedly the first thinker who called himself a ‘philosopher’ and was also known in antiquity as
such, yet that was a Platonic myth as the term did not exist during his lifetime. Ibid. See also
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 15.
34
G. König and H. Pulte, “Theorie,” in HWPh, Vol. 10, 1128-1129. Cf. Plato, Statesman, 258 e 3
(“divide all science into two arts, calling the one practical, and the other purely intellectual
[gnostiken]”) and 259 d (where practical science is characterized as “manual”).
35
Herodotus, Histories, I, 30. “My Athenian guest, the rumor of your wisdom [sophie] and your
travels has reached us. We hear that since you have a taste for wisdom [philosopheon], you have
visited many lands because of your desire to see [theories eineken].”

17
could be seen as the first to both philosophize and ‘politicize’, or as the first to

philosophize about the (political) order of human life.36 Yet again, though, quite

obviously, the fact of living together in community and the act of thinking existed

prior to the emergence of self-consciously ‘political’ living together and

‘philosophical’ thinking, there seems to have been no reason for the existence of

‘political philosophy’ or of an ‘art’ or ‘techne’ of politics during the pre-

democratic times of Solon because there was no need for general political

education.

‘Political science’

The term ‘political science’ appeared in the second half of the fifth century.37

Athens’ successes in the Persian Wars (490 - 479) and the coming Peloponnesian

36
The first political articulation of the idea of ‘measure’ (and of the related notions of moderation
and temperance) dates to Solon. K. Mainzer, “Mass,” HWPh, Vol. 5, 508. According to Solon,
“What is most difficult is to perceive the invisible measure, which nevertheless alone has the
limits of all things.” Fragment D 16. In Solon, Dichtungen (Munich: Heimeran), 1945, 46f.
37
Initially by linking together the adjective politike to techne, episteme, or dunamis. Meier,
“Politik,” in HWPh, Vol. 7, 1038. See, e.g., Plato, Protagoras, 319 a (“You appear to be talking
about the art of citizenship [πολιτικὴν τέχνην], and to be promising to make men good citizens”);
Gorgias, 521 d (“I am one of the few Athenians, not to say the only one, to undertake the true
political art [πολιτικὴ τέχνη]”); Euthydemus, 291 c (“We had the idea that the stateman’s art [ἡ
πολιτικὴ] and the kingly art [ἡ βασιλικὴ τέχνη] were the same”); Charmides, 170 b; Statesman,
259 c, 275 c-d, 303 e (“all that is different and alien and incompatible has now been eliminated by
us from the science of statesmanship [πολιτικῆς ἐπιστήµης]”); Plato, Laws, 650 b (“the knowledge
of the natures and the habits of souls”; “the art whose business is to take care of souls”). On the
meaning of a political ‘art’ or science, see A.W.H. Adkins, “Arete, techne, Democracy and
Sophists: Protagoras 316-328d,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 93 (1973): 3-12; A.M. Bayonas,
“L’art politique d'après Protagoras,” Revue philosophique 157 (1967): 43-58; David Roochnik,
“Socrates’ Use of the Techne-Analogy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986): 295-310;
Reinhart Maurer, “Der Zusammenhang von Technik und Gerechtigkeit und seine metaphysische
Grundlegung in Platons Politeia,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 82 (1975): 259-84; and Charles
Griswold, “Politike Episteme in Plato’s Statesman,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy III, ed.
John P. Anton and Anthony Preus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). According
to Griswold, “in the Platonic dialogues only two characters claim to possess the true episteme or

18
war (431 - 404) made the question of the right order of living together an urgent

one. The thinkers associated with the Sophist movement seem to have been the

first political scientists, insofar as they began to apply their purported wisdom to

the world of human experience and specifically to the experience of living in

community. From what is preserved of their writings, and from the (admittedly

biased) records of Plato and others, we find in the work of some of the most

notable Sophists, such as Protagoras, Callicles and Thrasymachus, a political

science that raises such questions as the origins of the political community, the

basis of the ‘social contract’, and the nature of justice and political equality.38 It is

only at this point in western history, it seems, that one can begin to speak of a

self-conscious relation between systematic thought (and/or knowledge or wisdom

in general) and political practice.39

techne of politics: Socrates (Gorg. 221d), and Protagoras (Prot., 319a)” (162, n.4). Cf. Plato,
Apology, 20 b-c where Socrates claims not to understand anything concerning “knowledge of that
kind of excellence, that of a man and a citizen.” And yet, “perhaps I really am wise in [a sort of
wisdom],” which is “perhaps human wisdom” (20d).
38
Protagoras (c. 490-420 BC) was born in Abdera and put on trial by the democracy somewhere
around the year 411. He supported Pericles around the years 450 to 444, under whose approval he
drafted laws for the colony of Thuroi (founded in 443 in southern Italy). Of Callicles, we only
know through Plato’s dialogue Gorgias and an occasional reference in Aristotle. He is often seen
therefore as a fictitious character. Still, his views exercised considerable influence on thinkers of
the stature of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Thrasymachus (c. 459-400 BC) was born in Chalcedon
in the Bosphorus. He appeared in Aristophanes’ “Diataleis” in 427 and was well-known in Athens
at that time as a Sophist. His conversation with Socrates in the Republic can be fixed to the year
413. Little else is known about his life. His epitaph names ‘Sophistry’ as his profession (he techne
sophie).
39
On this point and more generally on the Greek ‘discovery of the political’ see Christian Meier,
Athens: A Portrait of the City in its Golden Age (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 14-15, as
well as Ernst Vollrath, Was ist das Politische?: Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner
Wahrnehmung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 24.

19
 In pondering the origins of ‘political philosophy’, the following question

arises. What kind of ‘thought’ was the political thought of the Sophists? Was it

‘philosophical’, ‘scientific’, or ‘technical’? And wherein did its interest in

political practice lie? These are questions that have been disputed ever since the

meaning of philosophy itself became a question, most notably with Plato in his

dialogue on the Sophist. On one extreme, it can be argued that the thinking of the

Sophists was concerned with almost everything except for wisdom for its own

sake. Sophistic thinking from this perspective is the expression of the liberation of

the will from the traditional order of goods and values that had constrained the

free shaping of individual and collective lives.40 On the opposite extreme, it could

be said that the Sophists were really no different from Socrates, insofar as they

were concerned with ‘the human things’ but also with ‘all things’41 and insofar as

their quest was—arguably, just like Socrates’—not (or at least not only) cynically

‘technical’ (e.g., overcoming a geometrician in debate without knowing anything

about geometry), but ‘emancipatory’ (e.g., showing that ‘justice’ really means the

advantage of the stronger). Thus, there seems to be no safe way of distinguishing

the relation between ‘wisdom’ (sophia) and practice (especially political practice)

in the work of the ‘Sophists’, on the one hand, and of the ‘philosophers’ on the

40
Ralf Elm, “Ethos, Vernunft und Freiheit. Zum Zusammenhang von praktischer und
theoretischer Lebensform in der klassischen griechischen Philosophie,” in R. Elm (ed.), Vernunft
und Freiheit in der Kultur Europas: Ursprünge, Wandel, Herausforderungen (Freiburg: K. Alber,
2006), 20, 23.
41
Thus, for instance, Gorgias could write a treatise “On What is Not, or On Nature.”

20
other.42 This must be taken into consideration in order to establish the precise

sense in which it can be said that Socrates (and not the Sophists) originated

‘political philosophy’ or the ‘philosophy of the human things’.

‘Philosophy of the human things’ I: Socrates

The traditional view is that Socrates was the first philosopher to make ‘human

affairs’ the center of philosophical attention.43 More particularly, it can be said—

inaccurately but not altogether misleadingly—that it was Socrates who first

attempted a ‘theory of praxis’ or who first made human praxis a matter—and

perhaps the matter—of philosophical investigation by famously affirming—here,

at least, in sharp contrast to the Sophists—that virtue is knowledge or that sound

‘praxis’ is intimately linked, or indeed may be nothing other than sound ‘theory’.

To explain what this means it is necessary to provide at least an outline of the

42
That is to say, one cannot possibly understand the different (‘sophistical’ versus ‘philosophical’)
origins of political thought in terms of such categories as “traditional theory” –allegedly concerned
with ontology and driven by an ultimately religious interest typically ascribed to Plato and
Aristotle—, “empirical-analytic” theory driven by “technical” interests (which would correspond
to the sophists); “historical-hermeneutic” theory with “practical cognitive” interests—namely,
with the “preservation and expansion of the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual
understanding”— and “critical theory” with an “emancipatory cognitive interest” achieved
through self-reflection. The Sophists just as much as ‘philosophers’ like Socrates, one could say,
pursued all of these types of theorizing for ‘practical’, ‘technical’, ‘theoretical’, ‘emancipatory’
reasons. (Whereby the point is not: ‘they did; why can we not do this? But: ‘has it ever been
possible to dissociate ontology and ethics, metaphysics and morals, thinking and
‘building’/‘edifying’, ‘science’ and ‘weltanschauung’ and so on? And what do we miss—precisely
by way of possibilities of ‘emancipation’—when we fail to raise these questions?). For the
(contrary) view that the distinctions are sound and also necessary see Jürgen Habermas,
Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 301-317.
43
See note 9 above.

21
Socratic way of questioning, and in particular of what is known as the ‘Socratic

turn’.44

At least in Plato’s account, Socrates underwent a conversion, or perhaps a

series of conversions, as he learned his unique art of philosophical investigation.

Socrates is said to have turned away from natural philosophy to political

philosophy, whereby it is of the essence of the latter that it begins (and in a way

ends) with the investigation of human opinions. The story of this turn is told in the

Phaedo. In a very abbreviated form, and just to mention the beginning and end of

the story, it is this:

When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which
they call natural science, for I thought it splendid to know the causes of
everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes and why it exists. …
[Until] finally I became convinced that I have no natural aptitude at all for

44
On this, see more generally, Catherine Zuckert, “The Socratic Turn,” History of Political
Thought 25, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 189-219. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human
Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003),
30 ff. (Brague refers to the “Socratic revolution” (30) pointing also to the origins of this
designation the early twentieth century (232).) Jacob, Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the
Origin of Algebra (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 73 ff. J. Klein, “Aristotle: An
Introduction,” in Joseph Cropsey (ed.), Ancients and Moderns; Essays on the Tradition of
Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 178 f. Hans
Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983), part III,
chapter 1, “The Retraction of the Socratic Turning,” especially, 250. Christopher Bruell, “On the
Original Meaning of Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Lovers,” in Thomas Pangle
(ed.), The Roots of Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987): 91-110. Stuart
Umphrey, “Why Politiké Philosophia,” in Man and World 17: 431-452. Stanley Rosen, The
Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Chapter
2: “Socrates’ Hypothesis,” 46-95. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, trans. Robert
M. Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 65-83.

22
 that kind of investigation … So I thought I must take refuge in discussions
and investigate the truth of things by means of words [logoi].45

Socrates tells the story of his youthful passion for the study of nature and

subsequent turn to the human world during the last day of his life. In another late

dialogue, Theaetetus, Plato elucidates what it means to be a philosopher and in

particular to study “human affairs.”46 In perhaps the most famous passage

Socrates explains that being a philosopher means “never condescending to what

lies near at hand” and refers to Thales as “an instance”:

[T]hey say Thales was studying the stars…and gazing aloft, when he fell
into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of
him because, she said, he was wild to know about what was up in the sky

45
Plato, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato. Complete Works
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 96a7-8, 99 e: “ἔδοξε δή µοι χρῆναι εἰς τοὺς λόγους καταφυγόντα ἐν
ἐκείνοις σκοπεῖν τῶν ὄντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν.”
46
According to Xenophon, “conversation [with Socrates] did not turn on the nature of things as a
whole, as was the case with most of the others….With him, conversation was always about human
affairs [περὶ τῶν ἀνθρωπείων].” Memorabilia, I 1, 11 and I 1, 16; see also I.1, 9; 12-13; 15-16.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987 b 1-3 (“Socrates was engaged in the study of ethical matters [τὰ
ἠθικὰ], but not at all in the study of nature as a whole, yet in ethical matters he sought the
universal and was the first to fix his thought on definitions”); Parts of Animals, 642 a28-30 (“In
Socrates’ time, [the preoccupation with verbal definitions] increased, while one ceased to seek that
which concerned nature (ta peri phuseos), so that those who philosophized deviated toward useful
virtue, that is, politics.” According to Brague, “[i]t is through this passage that Arabic-language
authors learned of the ‘Socratic revolution’.” The Wisdom, 232 n. 8.) See also Phaedrus, 229 e.
(“landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that”);
Apology, 20 d 5 ff. (where Socrates refers to his reputation to wisdom as lying in “human wisdom
[ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία], perhaps” as distinguished from a wisdom that is “more than human”); cf.
Apology, 26 b and Republic vii 517 d (which suggest otherwise). Further evidence of the Socratic
‘turn’ may be found in Aristophanes’ Clouds, and Socrates’ depiction there as indeed interested in
physics—of the young Socrates, that is, whose evolution (towards the study of human affairs) he
described during the last day of his life in the Phaedo. On this peculiarity of Socratic
philosophizing and its originality see Richard Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's
Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 18. See also, Blumenberg, The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 246-48, and 621 f. (n. 10).

23
 but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet. The same
joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy. It really is true that
the philosopher fails to see his next-door neighbor; he not only doesn’t
notice what he is doing; he scarcely knows whether he is a man or some
other kind of creature. The question he asks is, What is Man? What
actions and passions properly belong to human nature and distinguish it
from all other beings? This is what he wants to know and concerns himself
to investigate.47

Here we see the relation (and the movement) between ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ that

characterizes the Socratic way. (Again, the use of Aristotelian terms is inaccurate,

but inevitable at this point.) Socrates says that his investigation is primarily of

human words (or opinions, logoi)—and what could be ‘nearer at hand’ than that?

Yet the instance of the philosopher “in the highest sense” remains Thales, in

Plato’s account, a stargazer—the ‘theoretician’ par excellence. The philosopher

asks about human praxis: “What is Man? What actions and passions properly

belong to human nature and distinguish it from all other beings?,” and yet he

“doesn’t notice what he is doing” and “scarcely knows whether he is a man or

some other kind of creature.” Socrates, like Thales, is a ‘theoretician’, yet in

contrast to Thales and the rest of his predecessors, his theory is (in Aristotelian

language) a theory of praxis (viz., of the “actions and passions [that] properly

belong to human nature”).48

47
Plato, Theaetetus, 174a1-2; a3-b5.
48
Here I draw on Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).

24
 What does a ‘theory of praxis’ do? Ultimately, as we have seen, it may be

said to show that ‘ethics is an optics’, or that somehow theory and praxis are

interdependent or may even be the same thing. But primarily, without necessarily

reaching such a conclusion, a ‘theory of praxis’ may simply be said to raise the

question of the nature of ‘true’ praxis and of ‘true’ theory.

Simply put, to raise the question of true praxis means to raise the question

of the good, that is: truly human actions and passions are supposed to make us

‘good’ and this goodness is supposed to lead to happiness or eudaimonia.49 As for

raising the question of true theory it means, similarly, to ask whether we can truly

know what a thing is without first knowing what good it is.

To see why this may be the case it is necessary to take a closer look at the

‘Socratic turn’. The main reason why Socrates turned from an investigation of

nature to an investigation of human opinions is the following. The so-called

‘natural philosophers’—to whose aims and methods presumably the young

Socrates subscribed—sought “to know the causes of things, and why a thing is

and is created or destroyed” (Phaedo, 96a ff.) on the basis of universal substances

such as breath or air or fire or blood or of fundamental principles such as ‘mind’

or ‘intelligence’ (Anaxagoras).50 However, Socrates argues, they all failed at the

point when it came to explaining the reason why it is good that things are as they

are.

49
See, e.g., Plato, Charmides, 174 a ff.
50
See Zuckert, “The Socratic Turn,” 192.

25
 Socrates’ account begins with the claim that his own actions, and

specifically the fact that he was spending the last day of his life philosophizing in

prison and not somewhere else as a fugitive, could not be explained by any

‘material’ causes—we would perhaps say today, by the chemical composition of

his brain in that particular day—but only by the fact that he thought it good to be

doing so. However, the question remains: Why make the good the criterion not

just of sound human science but of all science? The reason (as we will see more

clearly in the next chapter) is that we are related to reality in a practical way and

thus, insofar as every action aims at some good, in a way that is guided by some

opinion concerning the good. Hence our primary access to reality is through the

opinions we have of it and so through speech. Indeed, thought itself, Plato would

argue, is a form of reasonable speech.51 Any theory, however abstract, is

ultimately a human articulation of the world—an opinion, a ‘hypothesis’ or

logos—of the world as encountered in everyday practice.52 Thus, in order to place

51
“Are not thinking and reasonable speech the same, except that the former, which takes place
inside as a voiceless dialogue of the soul with itself is called by us thinking?” (Plato, Sophist,
263E).
52
Admittedly, this can hardly be said to be the case of modern mathematical science or physics—
from non-Euclidean geometry to ‘string’ theory. However, of ancient science it can generally be
said that it is a perfection and not a modification of our pre-scientific, ‘natural’ understanding of
the world. (I return to this in chapter four.) See Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the
Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (New York: Dover Publications, 1968). Klein argues that
mathematics for the Greeks “serves as a model for all teachable and learnable knowledge” (61).
“[O]bjects of mathematics fulfill the conditions set by the Greeks for objects of knowledge”—
namely, “they are not objects of the senses (aistheta), but only objects of thought (nonta)” (10). In
the paradigmatic Platonic case objects of sense are understood “as an image of (Abbild) something
‘other’, since the examining soul is compelled to sup-pose, i.e., to make to underlie, this ‘other’
which is precisely the noeton in question” (72). For example, geometers “draw certain figures and
exhibit their properties; yet they do not intend the drawn figure itself but that which is imaged in
this figure, e.g., the rectangle which is, in its purity, accessible only to thinking.” Similarly,
logisticians see “odd” and “even” in countable objects, but their thinking aims “not at these

26
any theory on a sound basis its origins in human opinions (which express our

practical encounter with the world) must be investigated. Specifically, the

question must be raised whether our theories are anything other than

reproductions of what we ‘believe anyway’. For Aristotle—who, in this respect,

follows the Socratic ‘program’—this meant to question, for example, with respect

to Thales’ claim that water is the universal primary substance, whether this does

not simply restate the Homeric notion that Ocean and Thetys are the parents of

creation.53 For us, we may say, it would mean to question whether our

understanding of the world in terms of ‘quarks’ and ‘neutrinos’ does not

uncritically presuppose that string theory—or indeed any other version of modern

mathematical science—is the highest form of science, if by ‘highest’ we mean the

particular objects but at the ‘pure’ numbers or the eide, which are ‘supposed’ in thinking and
imaged in the objects.” This way of thinking matters through to understand their foundations—
what was known as the activity of the dianoia—is not confined to geometry or logistics “but
obviously has an essential, perhaps the essential, part in all human activity and self-orientation.”
And yet—and this is the key point—“[w]e must not overlook the fact that the procedure by
‘hypothesis’ [the sup-position of a noeton to be grasped in thought] is not a specifically ‘scientific’
method but is that original attitude of human reflection prior to all science which is revealed
directly in speech as it exhibits and judges things” (73). This implies that that which is knowable
in the highest sense (viz., objects of a purely noetic character such as mathematical objects), is “in
fact always to some degree already known” (50). “Greek scientific arithmetic and logistic are
founded on a ‘natural’ attitude to everything countable as we meet it in daily life. This closeness to
its ‘natural’ basis is never betrayed in ancient science” (63).
53
Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.3. 983b27. See Joachim Ritter, “Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der
Theorie bei Aristoteles,” in Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 29. This is emphatically not to deny that such ‘myths’ as arise from our
pre-scientific awareness of the world may just as well ‘hit the truth’ in other cases—indeed in
perhaps the most important ones. See, specially, Metaphysics, 1074 b1 ff. where Aristotle claims
that the ancients’ view that the “first substances” are “gods” was in fact “divinely spoken.”

27
science that makes less arbitrary presuppositions and hence allows the most

immediate access to the ‘things themselves’.54

‘Philosophy of human things’ II: Aristotle

Socrates philosophized about “the human things” to “examine in them the truth of

realities,” and in that sense his study of ‘the political’ may have been but a means

of access to ‘the metaphysical’, or put differently: the ‘political things’ may have

been the clue to what really concerned him as a philosopher, namely, ‘all

things’.55 Aristotle, by contrast, is typically considered to have been the first

thinker to make the political things, and more systematically, human praxis, the

subject of an independent and self-enclosed science—of what he called the

“philosophy of human affairs.”56

54
For different ways of addressing this problem, see Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics,
I-II,” 293; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 68-69; Alfred N. Whitehead, “The British Association at
Newcastle. Section A. Mathematical and Physical Science,” Nature 98, (September 28, 1916): 80-
81: “science is rooted in … the whole apparatus of common-sense thought. That is the datum from
which it starts, and to which it must recur … You may polish up common sense, you may
contradict it in detail, you may surprise it. But ultimately your whole task is to satisfy it.” (Cited in
Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, 2 vols. edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg
Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 590.)
55
For the argument that Socrates, contrary to Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics, 987 b1, may not
have neglected the study of nature (even in his later years), see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
Eminent Philosophers, II, 45; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.6.1. Cf. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of
the Modern Age, 249. It must be noted that in the Phaedo itself, Socrates resorts back to
cosmology and myth (Ibid., 250-51). Cf. Plato, Laws, 803 b 4-6: “Of course, the affairs of human
beings [anthropon pragmata] are not worthy of great seriousness; yet it is necessary to be serious
about them.”
56
Nicomachean Ethics, 1181 b15 (“ἡ περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπεια φιλοσοφία”). See, for instance, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, “Die Begründung der Praktischen Philosophie,” in Gadamer, ed. and trans.
Nikomachische Ethik VI (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998). Gadamer, Truth and
Method, 2nd rev. ed. (NY: Continuum, 1989), 312 (“By circumscribing the intellectualism of
Socrates and Plato in his inquiry into the good, Aristotle became the founder of ethics as a

28
 This view is based on Aristotle’s famous distinctions between theoretical

and practical wisdom; between the political and the philosophical lives; and

between a theoretical philosophy, which deals with what happens necessarily, and

a “philosophy of human affairs,” which deals with what happens only “for the

most part.”57 Departing (at least on the surface) from the interconnection of right

seeing and right acting that is presupposed in Socrates’ negative judgment of

Pericles, Aristotle’s famous example contrasted the wisdoms, dispositions, and

scientific concerns of ‘natural philosophers’ such as Thales and Anaxagoras with

those of a statesman like Pericles. Thales and Anaxagoras, Aristotle suggested,

discipline independent of metaphysics.”); 21: (“Practical knowledge, phronesis, is another kind of

knowledge.”) Compare various other views that differ concerning the reasons that lie behind
Aristotle’s attempt to develop an independent ‘philosophy of human affairs’ but that nevertheless
agree that this was in fact his true aim (namely, to argue for the autonomy of the practical): Franco
Volpi, “The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and neo-Aristotelianism,” in Action and
Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, 6. J. Ritter, “‘Politik’ und
‘Ethik’ in der praktischen Philosophie des Aristoteles,” in Metaphysik und Politik, 106-132,
especially, 124-125. Stuart Umphrey, “Why Politike Philosophia,” 435, 441; Richard Bodéüs, The
Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics, 77-81. Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem,”
313. Since no one, it seems, would disagree that Aristotle sought to emphasize the heterogeneity
of the practical and the theoretical, perhaps the question is whether he did this merely exoterically
or not. In other words, the problem is that he clearly and openly says both things: perhaps most
clearly that theory is a form of praxis (in Politics 1325 b18). That the question needs to be
rethought from its grounds will be the argument of the next chapter.
57
More exactly, Aristotle characterized the theoretical and the practical as different manifestations
of human rationality, as different moral and intellectual dispositions, and as different sciences
dealing with different regions of being. R. Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics,
13. See, e.g., Aristotle, On the Soul, 432 b25 ff.: “mind as speculative never thinks what is
practicable.” What originates movement is rather “appetite [orexis] and practical thought [dianoia
praktike]” (433 a15 ff.). Here the distinction between different manifestations of human rationality
is clear. That “mind as speculative never thinks what is practicable,” however, seems to be
contradicted by several passages, such as, e.g., Met. 982 b4 ff. which suggests that theoretical
science “is the one which knows that for the sake of which each thing must be done, and this is the
good in each case, and, in general, the highest good in the whole of nature.” For an analysis of this
question, see Scott M. Dehart, “The Convergence of Praxis and Theoria in Aristotle,” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 33: 1 January 1995: 7-27. For an analysis referring to the broader debate
on the Aristotelian distinction between theory and praxis in the literature see Walter A. Brogan,
“Gadamer’s Praise of Theory: Aristotle’s Friend and the Reciprocity Between Theory and
Practice,” Research in Phenomenology, 32 (2002): 141-155.

29
are wise (sophos) but not prudent (phronimos); they are not after human goods

because they do not regard man as the highest thing in the world; and their

science is not of things that can be achieved by human action but of things that

cannot be other than they are.

This is why it is said that men like Anaxagoras and Thales have theoretical
but not practical wisdom: when we see that they do not know what is
advantageous to them, we admit that they know extraordinary, wonderful,
difficult, and superhuman things, but call their knowledge useless because
the good they are seeking is not human.58

What was Aristotle’s intention in developing an allegedly independent

“philosophy of human affairs”? This is a much contested and complicated issue

which cannot be fully addressed here. It will have to suffice to say the following.

When Aristotle at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics says that his aim

(there and in the Politics) is to complete “as far as possible” the “philosophy

relating to human affairs”59 he may be said to be doing several things. One

hypothesis is that Aristotle’s aim was to complete the task that Plato, for whatever

reason, neglected in his own examinations of (political) life most notably by

analyzing more than a hundred-and-fifty constitutions in order to systematize a

‘political theory’. This raises the question whether in turn this was meant, so to

speak, for theory’s sake, that is, to make ‘a better theory’ which could accordingly
58
Arisotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall,
1999), VI, 1141 b4-8.
59
NE, 10.1181b12-15.

30
be ‘applied’ in a ‘technical’ way for the preservation of political regimes be they

tyrannical or democratic, or whether this science was to serve the pedagogical-

ethical purpose of educating future legislators and was thus strictly speaking a

‘practical’ rather than ‘poietical’ (technological) science.60 Under the first

assumption, the (Socratic-Platonic) unity of the questions, ‘What is it?’ and,

‘What good is it?’ would be severed while under the second it would be

preserved. Under both assumptions the (Socratic-Platonic) view that sound theory

and sound practice are ultimately the same would be abandoned, that is, the view

that one becomes happy and good and ‘wise’ at the same time. Another

hypothesis is that the “philosophy of human affairs” comprising ethics and

politics is meant to complete the Socratic-Platonic program according to which

encountering phenomena in their disclosure “is always a matter of ethos”;61 or, in

other words, that the means of access to both ‘the human things’ and ‘all things’

is through the science Aristotle calls politike and which comprises ethics.

‘Political science’ is accordingly either a prelude to the study of ‘all things’—the

science known as ‘the first philosophy’ or ‘metaphysics’—or it is itself ‘the first

philosophy’. In any case, under this hypothesis, the rhetorical-political intention

behind Aristotle’s demarcation between the practical and the theoretical becomes

central: it is the popular or exoteric message that says that politics and

philosophy, praxis and theory belong to different worlds—whereas, we could say,

60
Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und
Aristoteles,” 280.
61
Claudia Baracchi, “The Nature of Reason and the Sublimity of First Philosophy: Toward a
Reconfiguration of Aristotelian Interpretation,” Epoché, Volume 7, Number 2, 2003, 224.

31
every true philosopher knows that ethics/politics is the all-encompassing; that it is

both the access to what is human and to what reaches beyond it.

‘Political philosophy’?

The notion of a “philosophy of human affairs” appears only once in Aristotle’s

writings.62 The same holds for the phrase “political philosophy.”63 Another term

that is often used to characterize Aristotle’s achievement, “practical philosophy,”

does not appear in the corpus. “Ethics” is similarly absent.64

A final hypothesis must be considered as to why the founders of ‘political

philosophy’ in fact pioneered the philosophy of human affairs but almost never

used the terms we used to describe it: they may have seen the task of a philosophy

of human affairs—in the fundamental sense of a theory of human praxis—as

extremely difficult, if not indeed impossible.

Yet again, what is perhaps most characteristic about the work of Socrates,

Plato and Aristotle is its attention to political reality—for both political and

philosophical reasons. This is a consequence of the close interrelation (or even

identity) between thinking, dialogue, speech, and praxis. Indeed, the most

fundamental premise of Socratic thinking seems to be that we only know what we

62
Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 10.1181 b12-15. Cf. Richard Bodéüs, The Political Dimensions of
Aristotle's Ethics, 78.
63
The sole occurrence is Politics III, 12, 1282 b23.
64
Hellmut Flashar (ed.), Die Philosophie der Antike, Vol. 3 (Stuttart: Schwabe, 1983), 336.
Aristotle refers to ta ethika (Pol. 1261 a 31) and ethike theoria (Anal. post., 89 b9) but ‘ethics’ as a
philosophical discipline is for him politike (Nic. Ethics, 1094 b 11).

32
are thinking if we know what we are talking about—for instance, when we refer

to such phenomena as acting or doing or willing or thinking itself. We only know

these phenomena, however, if we look closely at what we are doing. Insofar as we

are political beings, this requires that the focus of philosophical attention be

political affairs.

33
 Concluding remarks

Perhaps no other twentieth century thinkers devoted as much time and attention to

the question of the necessity and possibility of political philosophy as Hannah

Arendt and Leo Strauss. Arendt and Strauss also stand unique for their attraction

to Socrates for that reason, that is, for the fact that he has traditionally been

considered to be the first political philosopher.

These introductory remarks have served the purpose of beginning to

explain the problem of the necessity and possibility of ‘Socratic’ political

philosophy as it arises from the term ‘political philosophy’ itself. I have argued

that to understand the necessity and possibility of political philosophy—and, to

the extent that this was the question for Arendt and Strauss, the core of their

projects—one must step behind the traditional Aristotelian distinctions and

definitions of what concerns ‘politics’—e.g., ‘human affairs’ or ‘praxis’

generally—and ‘philosophy’—e.g., wisdom regarding what by nature ‘cannot be

other than it is’ or ‘theoria’. These traditional distinctions and definitions, which

still define the way we think, must be brought down or dismantled because of

their unquestioned premises. These premises are, for instance, that ways of life—

‘active’ versus ‘contemplative’, ‘practical’ versus ‘theoretical’—can be

meaningfully distinguished and even ranked in such terms (not to speak of such

cruder terms as ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’); that political theory

and philosophy deal with different regions of being or modes of discourse, e.g.,

34
with the ‘political, not metaphysical’; that there exists a ‘practical philosophy’

that is sufficient for orienting human praxis; or, indeed, as Strauss himself

suggests, that “[t]he meaning of political philosophy and its meaningful character

is as evident today as it always has been since the time when political philosophy

came to light in Athens.”65 Such traditional distinctions and definitions (or

characterizations) are generally inadequate when they are taken to be the true

legacy of classical thought and, in particular, when they are used as a lens to

understand the work of Arendt or Strauss.66 More importantly, they are

inadequate, as I shall try to show in the chapters that follow, because they do not

correspond—or indeed because they bar access—to the phenomena, for instance,

to the way (theoretical) insight actually relates to praxis or to the sense in which

‘the political’ is ‘the metaphysical’.

Attention to the historical and intellectual origins of the traditional

vocabulary of ‘political philosophy’ gives rise to questions such as the following.

What are the aims of a ‘philosophy of human affairs’ as allegedly pioneered by

65
Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?,” in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 10.
66
Perhaps the most common understanding of the political philosophizing of Arendt and Strauss is
that they stood for opposite traditions. According to this view, Leo Strauss represents the tradition
from Plato to Pascal according to which, in Ronald Beiner’s words, “what makes the philosopher a
political philosopher … is first and foremost the concern for his own survival.”66 See Ronald
Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue,” Political Theory, Vol.
18, No. 2. (May, 1990): 238-254, 248. Hannah Arendt, to the contrary, “represents but the latest
expression of […] [that other tradition] running from Machiavelli to Heidegger,” which
“celebrates ancient practice at the same time that it denigrates ancient theory” (239). Thus Beiner
argues that “on the decisive question” of philosophy and politics “Arendt assumes a position …
that is as radically antithetical to Strauss’s as any can be” (247). From this perspective Strauss is
said to be fundamentally a Platonist, while Arendt is said to be at bottom a Kantian (at least, as
concerns the question of the relation between philosophy and politics).

35
Socrates? Is its aim to develop a ‘theory’ of human—and specifically,

‘political’—affairs to be applied in practice, say, as technical knowledge used for

sustaining political regimes? Or is its aim, more simply and fundamentally, to

‘say what is’ or to ‘save the phenomena’ of what is more knowable and obvious

to us, viz., human life as political life, such that a ‘political philosophy’ would be

as self-evidently necessary to understanding human life as a ‘botany of plants’ is

to understanding plants? Under that assumption, would the aim of political

philosophy be to understand political life as it is, or would it be concerned with

political life in its possible perfection? If such a perfection is not naturally

determined (as we could say it is in the case of plants), would not political

philosophy be the only properly ‘meta-physical’ study (in the sense of what

considers possibilities ‘beyond nature’)? In other words, in this chapter I have

suggested that ‘political philosophy’ may not have yet begun or that we may not

be fully conscious of its import and potential.

This import and potential was illustrated by the Nietzschean and

Heideggerian references to Socrates as ‘the single turning point and vortex of so-

called world history’ and as ‘the purest thinker of the West’. Granted that

definitional problems (such as the inadequacy of referring to classical ‘political

philosophy’) and reference to authorities (such as Nietzsche and Heidegger) are

insufficient to argue for a rediscovery of the ‘philosophy of the human things’

pioneered by Socrates, the chapters that follow will point to the substantive

arguments and historical reasons that make such a rediscovery necessary.

36
 CHAPTER ONE

The Young Heidegger’s Political Philosophy (1922-1924)

Heidegger may have been the twentieth century’s greatest master of the art of

reading. Yet the uniqueness of his hermeneutical approach also marked its limits.

Thus, he famously argued that one had to understand Plato first of all as Aristotle

understood him.1 One of the consequences of this way of proceeding, it seems, is

that in reading the classics backwards—at least initially—he failed (and perhaps

also neglected) to see the political context in which classical (Platonic-

Aristotelian) thought developed. As a result, there is a glaring lacunae, or, to use a

more accurate Heideggerian term, a ‘missing’ or Versäumnis in Heidegger’s

thought whose name is Socrates.2

1
“[T]he later ones always understand their predecessors better than the predecessors understood
themselves […] What Aristotle said is what Plato placed at his disposal, only it is said more
radically and developed more scientifically […] [B]ecause Aristotle was not followed by anyone
greater, we are forced to leap into his own philosophical world in order to gain an orientation.”
Indeed, “[t]here is no scientific understanding, i.e., historiographical return to Plato, without
passage through Aristotle,” Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, [1924/25] 1997), 8, 131. See also Grundbegriffe der
aristotelischen Philosophie, GA 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1924] 2002), 140.
2
For an analysis of Heidegger’s understanding of Socrates see Francisco Gonzales, “The Socratic
Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A
Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006), 426-442.

37
 Yet beginning with Aristotle, in whose texts Heidegger dwelled for years

before even beginning to think of Being and Time,3 meant necessarily to confront

a thinker for whom, as we have seen, the “philosophy of human affairs” may have

represented the unnamed (or only once named) core of philosophy; and insofar as

the “philosophy of human affairs” is a Socratic program it meant implicitly to

discover Socrates. This, at any rate, I shall argue, is the effect Heidegger had on

both Arendt and Strauss: whether they ever saw Heidegger as a German Sokrates

or not, it was Heidegger who for them, and arguably for twentieth century

thought, ‘brought philosophy down from the heavens to the people in the city’

thus making Socratic ‘political philosophy’ thinkable again.

The literature dealing with the influence of Heidegger on Arendt and Strauss

is extensive.4 Yet the most hermeneutically sound approach to understanding this

3
See Theodore J. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
4
Recent studies of Arendt and Heidegger include: Andreas Großmann, “Rhetorik und Politik: Zu
einer unausgetragenen Kontroverse zwischen Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger,”
Philosophsiches Jahrbuch 115 (2008): 314-327; Jussi Backman, “Für das Wohnen denken.
Heidegger, Arendt und die praktische Bessinung,” in Alfred Denker (ed.), Heidegger und
Aristoteles (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2007). Peg Birmingham, “Heidegger and Arendt: The Birth of
Political Action and Speech,” in François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (eds.), Heidegger and
Practical Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 191-202. Jacques Taminiaux, “Sur deux
lettres à Heidegger”; “Performativité et grécomanie?,” in Sillages phénoménologiques: Auditeurs
et lecteurs de Heidegger (Bruxelles; Paris: Editions Ousia, 2002). Theodore Kisiel, “Rhetorical
Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt,” in Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.),
Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005); “Rhetoric, Politics, Romance. Arendt and
Heidegger, 1924-26,” in James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray (eds.), Extreme Beauty:
Aesthetics, Politics, Death (New York: Continuum, 2002), 94-109. For earlier statements (from
the 1990s), see Etienne Tassin, Le trésor perdu: Hannah Arendt: l'intelligence de l'action
politique (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1999). J. Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional
Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997); “Bios politikos and bios theoretikos
in the Phenomenology of Hannah Arendt,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4
(1996): 215-232. Dana Villa, “The Anxiety of Influence: On Arendt’s Relationship to Heidegger,”
in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999); Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton

38
influence has not been followed, that is, simply to read Heidegger from the start

up to the moment—and especially at the moment—when Arendt and Strauss

encountered him. This only began to become possible in a serious way in 1989

when the most concise statement of Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle—the

University Press, 1996). Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996). Richard J. Bernstein, “Provocation and Appropriation: Hannah
Arendt’s Response to Martin Heidegger,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and
Democratic Theory 4, no. 2 (October, 1997): 153-171. Margaret Canovan, “Socrates Or
Heidegger? Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, 1990:
135-165; Sergio Belardinelli, “Martin Heidegger und Hannah Arendts Begriff von ‘Welt’ und
‘Praxis’, in Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (eds.), Zur philosophischen Aktualität
Heideggers, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990): 128-141. For studies written in the 1980s and
70s see Lewis P. and Sandra K. Hinchman. “In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s
Phenomenological Humanism,” The Review of Politics 46, no. 2 (Apr., 1984): 183-211. Martin
Jay, “The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt,” in Permanent Exiles: Essays on the
Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981). James E. Miller, “The Pathos of Novelty: Hannah Arendt’s
Image of Freedom in the Modern World,” in Melvin A. Hill (ed.), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery
of the Public World (N.Y.: St. Martin’s, 1979), 177-208. Ernst Vollrath, “Politik undMetaphysik.
Zum Politischen Denken Hannah Arendts,” Zeitschrift Für Politik XVIII, no. 3 (1971).
For the relation between Heidegger and Strauss, see: Catherine Zuckert, “Leo Strauss:
Jewish, Yes, but Heideggerian?” in Samuel Fleischacker (ed.), Heidegger's Jewish followers:
Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Lévinas (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne Univ. Press, 2008): 83-105; Richard L. Velkley, “On the Roots of Rationalism:
Strauss’s Natural Right and History as Response to Heidegger,” The Review of Politics 70, 2008:
245-259. Arthur M. Melzer, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism,” The American
Political Science Review 100, no. 2 (May, 2006). David K. O’Connor, “Leo Strauss’s Aristotle
and Martin Heidegger’s Politics,” in Aristide Tessitore (ed.), Aristotle and Modern Politics: The
Persistence of Political Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
Stanley Rosen, “Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Philosophy,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol.
53, 2000. Steven B. Smith, “Destruktion Or Recovery?: Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger,” The
Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 2 (December, 1997): 345-377. Laurence Berns, “Heidegger and
Strauss: Temporality, Religion and Political Philosophy,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political
Philosophy 27, no. 2 (Winter, 1999): 99-104; “The Prescientific World and Historicism: Some
Reflections on Strauss, Heidegger, and Husserl,” in Alan Udoff (ed.), Leo Strauss's Thought:
Toward a Critical Engagement (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1991). Horst Mewes, “Leo
Strauss and Martin Heidegger: Greek Antiquity and the Meaning of Modernity,” in Hannah
Arendt and Leo Strauss : German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World War II
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Luc Ferry, Rights: The New Quarrel between the
Ancients and the Moderns (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Hwa Yol Jung,
“Heidegger and Strauss,” Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 17
(September, 1987): 205-218. James F. Ward, “Political Philosophy & History: The Links between
Strauss & Heidegger,” Polity 20, no. 2 (Winter, 1987): 273-295.

39
1922 ‘Natorp Report’—was recovered.5 This was soon followed, in 1992, by the

publication of the 1924/25 reading of Plato’s Sophist.6 Yet that made the picture

far from complete. Indeed, what seems to have been the most important lecture of

the time for both Arendt and Strauss, the 1924 lecture on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, was

only published in 2002,7 while the course that Strauss attended, the Summer

Semester of 1922 interpretation concerned mainly with Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Alpha, only became public in 2005.8 There are no studies to date on the impact

5
First published in English as Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect
to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation.” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25,
[1922] 1992.
6
M. Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes, GA 19 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992).
7
Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. GA 18. Despite the fact that Strauss only seems
to have audited the 1922 Summer Semester course, we know that the publication of the 1924
lecture on the Rhetoric, in particular, was possible in part thanks to the notes taken by Strauss’s
closest friend, Jacob Klein. (See the epilogue to Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen
Philosophie, 409 f.) That Strauss knew this lecture is corroborated by his students. Stanley Rosen
recalls that “…my own teacher Leo Strauss…spoke of a seminar on Aristotle’s Rhetoric that
contained an ontology of the human passions.” “Phronesis Or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger,”
in Riccardo Pozzo (ed.), The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy (Washington, D.C:
Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 11. See also Harvey C. Mansfield’s remarks
concerning Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotle’s Physics in Peter Kielmansegg et. als. (eds.),
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World
War II, 170.
Arendt met Heidegger in the Winter Semester of 1924/25 and was therefore not present
in the SS 1924 Rhetoric course. There is also no evidence that she had access to the transcript of
that course. The case that the Heidegger of SS 1924 is nevertheless the most proximate to Arendt’s
phenomenology of the political has been made by Theodore Kisiel on the assumption that
Heidegger’s mentoring of Arendt must have gone far beyond the official university courses. (See
his “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt.”) I agree with Kisiel, but I shall develop
my case beginning with the hypothesis that Arendt—like Strauss, Jonas, Gadamer, and other
students—thought largely against the Heidegger of Being and Time by going back to an earlier
Heidegger. For evidence that Arendt at least knew of SS 1924 lecture see her “Martin Heidegger
at Eighty,” in Ursula Ludz (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, trans.
Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2004), 153-54. (We shall return to this.)
8
M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles
zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1922] 2005).

40
those lectures had on Arendt and Strauss.9 A central aim of this dissertation is to

fill that gap.

9
Cf., however, the analyses that point in that direction (though only with respect to Arendt) in
Theodore Kisiel, “Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt,” as well as Daniel M. Gross,
“Introduction. Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology,” in Gross and
Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 10-11.

41
 “Wie Du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben?” Heidegger’s Turn From Theology to
Philosophy to Political Philosophy (1911-1922)

As is now well known, Heidegger began his philosophic career as a neo-

Scholastic apologist of Catholicism, and only became who he was by turning

against himself, or by what he called an eigen-Destruktion (self-Destruktion).10

Yet, as he himself conceded and as the term Destruktion suggests—not

destruction but dismantling or ‘taking down’—his turn against his earlier self was

a turn against old answers but not against the old or originary questions.11 As

Heidegger put it in one of his most telling autobiographical remarks: “Without

this theological origin I would never have arrived on the path of thinking.”12

10
Heidegger refers to his “self-destruktion” [Eigendestruktion] in a letter to Löwith written on
October 9, 1920. Cited in Otto Pöggeler, “Heideggers Luther-Lektüre im Freiburger
Theologenkonvikt,” in Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander and Holger Zaborowski (eds.),
Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens. Heidegger-Jahrbuch. Vol. 1 (Freiburg/München:
Verlag Karl Alber, 2004), 192.
11
The Freiburg professor Julius Ebbinghaus remarks in a letter to Heidegger that he “vividly
remembers that you once, in our early Freiburg days…said to me that the field in which you
would think of philosophical production at all would be the field of religious questions.”
November 22, 1950 cited in Ibid., 195.
12
Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. GA 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1959] 1985),
96. Cited in Holger Zaborowski, “‘Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.’ Anmerkungen zur
religösen und theologischen Dimension des Denkweges Martin Heideggers bis 1919,” in Denker,
et. als. (eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, 123. The publication of Heidegger’s
early lectures has made it possible for scholars to bridge a gap of more than a decade of silence
between Heidegger’s 1916 qualifying dissertation on Duns Scotus which still fell in the orbit of
neo-Scholastic thought and his existentialist masterwork, Being and Time (1927). See Theodore J.
Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993); John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994); Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the
Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).

42
 From theo-logy to ‘logic’ (1909-1915)

Heidegger’s call to scholarship as a vocation was originally a call to neo-

Scholastic theology. During his two years as a seminarian (1909-1911) and during

his early studies of philosophy and the natural sciences (1912-1915), Heidegger

looked for an answer to the questions concerning how to live and think and what

is the structure of reality in religious faith and in theory—both conceived as

complementary means of access to the eternal truths of Christianity.

Specifically, Heidegger first understood philosophy as apology:

philosophy’s mission was to defend the “basic truths of Christianity” from the

trends of modern life and thought as manifested in its “unchecked autonomism,”

immanentism, and biologistic naturalism. Philosophy was to be a “mirror of the

eternal” and as such the preserver of the “treasure of truths” of the church. 13

Gradually, however, Heidegger’s efforts to preserve the “transcendent

value of life”14 and the transcendent sense of reality (or the reality of ideality,

13
See Heidegger, “On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics,” Der Akademiker 3, No. 5
[March, 1911]: 66-67, in Theodore Kisiel, and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger: On the
Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2007), 15 (“basic truths of Christianity”). Review of Fr. W. Förster, Authority and Freedom:
Observations on the Cultural Problem of the Church, Der Akademiker 2, [May 1910]: 109-10, in
Ibid., 13 (“unchecked autonomatism”). “On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics,” in Ibid.,
14-15 (“treasure of truths”). “A strict, ice-cold logic is inimical to the refined feelings of the
modern soul. ‘Thinking’ can no longer allow itself to be confined within the unshakeable eternal
limits of fundamental logical positions. There we have it already. To strictly logical thought…to
each truly presuppositionless scientific work, there belongs a certain base of ethical power, the art
of getting hold of oneself and externalizing oneself. It is indeed already a banality: today
worldviews are cut to fit ‘life’, instead of viceversa.” Ibid.
14
“The ground-destroying rage for the new, the crazed leaping over the deeper spiritual content of
life and art, the sense of modern life oriented toward continually self-cancelling momentary
stimulations…are moments which point toward a decadence, toward a pathetic revolt against the
health and the transcendent value of life.” Heidegger, “Abraham a Sankta Clara,” GA 13 ([1910]

43
notably in the realm of logic) became less apologetic and more philosophic. That

is, Heidegger ceased to conceive theory as a way of sustaining religious faith and

instead began to see it as a placeholder for a transcendental realm of validity.15

This shift occurred under the influence of two strands of thought which, like neo-

Scholasticism but from an a-theological perspective, were also responding to the

naturalist tendencies of the time—Heinrich Rickert’s brand of neo-Kantianism

and Husserl’s understanding of philosophy as ‘rigorous science’.16 Common to

these two forms of transcendental philosophizing was the attempt to limit the

growing dominance of the natural sciences by establishing the irreducibility of

logic to the spatiotemporal reality of the physical and psychical worlds.17

1983), cited in Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding,” in Richard Wolin (ed.),
The Heidegger Controversy, 209-210.
15
See “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” in Frühe Schriften. GA 1 (Frankfurt am Main: V.
Klostermann, [1912] 1972), 24. “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy,” in Kisiel and
Sheehan (eds.), Becoming Heidegger, 20-29.
16
Rickert was Heidegger’s mentor at Freiburg from 1911 to 1916. Heidegger’s qualifying
dissertation is dedicated to him. See M. Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des
Duns Scotus. In Frühe Schriften. GA 1 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1916] 1972). For
Heidegger’s complicated relation to Rickert and Neo-Kantianism more generally, see Michael
Steinmann, “Der frühe Heidegger und sein Verhältnis zum Neukantianismus,” in Denker, et. als.
(eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, 259-293. Husserl arrived in Freiburg in 1916.
Heidegger and Husserl began to develop a very close relationship the following year. In 1919
Heidegger (by then a Privatdozent) became Husserl’s assistant; his task was to be the development
of a phenomenology of religion. See Hans-Helmuth Gander, “Phänomenologie im Übergang: zu
Heideggers Auseinandersetzung mit Husserl,” in Ibid., 296.
17
Specifically, Heidegger stressed the “irreducible atemporal validity of sense and value,” that is,
of that realm of reality of which one must say not that it ‘exists’ or that ‘it is’ but that es gilt, it
validates, it has validity. Validity, Heidegger argued, is the “transcendental condition of knowing”
beings: “I know and can only know about reality in and through what has validity.” Die
Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, 166, 23. Quoted in John Van Buren, The
Young Heidegger, 69. Thus, for instance, “The being-yellow of the bookcover always validates,
but never exists,” and what makes the statement ‘the bookcover is yellow’ true is not, or not
primarily, the psychical (spatiotemporal) activity of judging the bookcover to be yellow but the
intentional determination of the book-as-yellow which is then ‘fulfilled’ by the sensible book
itself. Die Kategorien, GA1, 170, as cited in Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 68-69. Thus,

44
 This scientific impulse notwithstanding, Heidegger’s philosophical quest

throughout these years remained driven by a religious call. As he put it in 1915,

his “scientific lifework was in the service of making Scholastic thought more

readily available for the spiritual struggle for the future of the Christian-Catholic

ideal of life.”18

From ‘theo-logics’ to ‘history and life’ (1916-1922)

Soon, however, this relation between theology and ‘scientific lifework’ would be

inverted. Heidegger began to undertake a scientific/philosophical interrogation of

religious life and thought which would eventually lead him to see in religious

faith the “mortal enemy” of philosophy.19 The nature of this transformation,

which set the direction of Heidegger’s unique philosophical undertaking, is well

captured by a letter he wrote in 1919 to the theologian Engelbert Krebs. There

Heidegger writes that “over the last two years I have struggled for a basic

clarification of my philosophical position.” Specifically, “[e]pistemological

insights that extend to the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of

“Insofar as knowledge is sought and gained of them, all regions of reality are able to be
encountered through nonsensuous valid forms of sense” (GA 1, 277-287; cited in Van Buren, The
Young Heidegger, 71. See also, 65, 60.)
18
Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (München: C.
Hanser Verlag, 1994), 63.
19
See the 1927 lecture “Phenomenology and Theology,” in M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans.
William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39-62. “…faith, as a specific
possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is
an essential part of philosophy…Faith is so absolutely the mortal enemy that philosophy does not
even begin to want in any way to do battle with it” (53).

45
Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me—but not Christianity and

metaphysics, which, however, [I now understand] in a new sense.”20

The key to this transformation was Heidegger’s discovery of historicity, or

of the fact that, as he put it in 1916, “living mind and spirit is as nature historical

mind and spirit.”21 Taking seriously that “all sense and meaning originate in man

and his history”22 meant for Heidegger that one must reject the ‘sense and

meaning’ of any supratemporal and universalistic claim, or of any claim that is

based on experiences that have somehow become historically unavailable.

Heidegger’s thinking after World War I would thus be characterized by an

explicitly anti-theoretical (and indeed ‘anti-philosophical’) impulse directed

against the supratemporal and universalistic pretensions of both theology and

philosophy.23 Christianity, or generally the quest for an authentically spiritual life

20
See “Letter to Engelbert Krebs on His Philosophical Conversion,” in Van Buren and Sheehan
(eds.), Becoming Heidegger, 96.
21
Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. GA 1 [1916], 407 [check].
22
In Dilthey’s words quoted in Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland, 169.
23
See e.g., Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. GA 60 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann,
[1918/19] 1995), 13 (“keine Theorien!”), 16 (“Theoretisierung…hat…aus der Philosophie zu
verschwinden.”) For Heidegger’s stance against the “Generalherrschaft des Theoretischen” or
“General domination of the theoretical,” see Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie
und Transzendentale Wertphilosophie. GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1919]
1987), 84-94 (here, 87). “It is my conviction that philosophy is at an end. We stand before
completely new tasks that have nothing to do with traditional philosophy.” Introduction to
Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press, [1923-24]1994), 1. This must also be understood in historical context. In 1914
the Roman congregation had named Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth century interpreter and
systematizer of Aristotle, the only valid source of doctrinal authority within the church.
Heidegger’s strange (comical, visceral) reaction is recorded in a letter to Krebs of 19 July, 1914.
The brains of these people, says Heidegger, might as well have been removed and replaced by
“italienischen Salat.” See Johannes Schaber, “Martin Heideggers ‘Herkunft’ im Spiegel der
Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte des 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Denker, et. als.
(eds.), Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, 166.

46
as the measure for a human life, and metaphysics, or the quest for understanding

‘what is on the whole’, remained Heidegger’s guiding questions—this, however,

“in a new sense.”

Henceforth, Heidegger would start from the assumption that any possible

account of a religious or spiritual life and any possible account of the whole of

being must first grasp temporality as the defining dimension of human existence.

Thus quite suddenly and radically, Heidegger’s thought turned against its earlier

focus on the a-temporal being of logical propositions as accessible through

philosophical theory towards the temporal and finite being of man as lived and

expressed in Christian religious thought. Led by his study of the great anti-

systematizers and destroyers of theological Aristotelianism, especially Luther and

Kierkegaard, Heidegger found in the spirit of early Christianity captured in the

writings of Paul, the “deepest historical paradigm of the world of inner

experience,” or as he also put it, of “live[d] temporality as such.”24

Living temporality as such means knowing oneself to be part of a

community that ‘has become’ and that anxiously and wakefully waits for a

transforming event, viz., the second coming of Christ. As Heidegger explained in

1918/19, this is a waiting which is “radically different from any other

24 Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20). GA 58 (Frankfurt am Main: V.

Klostermann, [1919/20] 1993), 61. Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. GA, 60 [1918/19], 80.
In the Winter Semester course of 1919-20 Heidegger referred to Christianity as a “great revolution
against ancient science, against Aristotle above all”—a revolution “shifting the centre of gravity of
factical life and the lifeworld into the selfworld and the world of inward experience.” Cited in Van
Buren, The Young Heidegger,168.

47
expectation.”25 It is different in that the parousia is certain to happen, but its time

and content cannot be predetermined. Hence what is decisive is how the

Christian’s life is constituted by that sense of temporality. In this regard,

Heidegger would put particular emphasis on the revelatory potentialities of the

expected moment (the kairos) or ‘Augen-blick’, literally meaning—as

Kierkegaard already had noted—a ‘blink or glance of the eye’, an eye-opening

moment in which one becomes aware of one’s situation.26

Heidegger’s discovery of lived historicity in early Christianity was

essential for the development of his thought. However, the paradigm of early

Christianity remained, after all, a remote reference that could hardly speak to what

Heidegger came to see as “the decisive problem,” namely (contemporary)

“history and life.” Thus Heidegger’s project became nothing less than a

refounding of philosophy against what he called the “tyranny of the theoretical,”

not for the sake of the “primacy of the practical” but “because the theoretical itself

points to the pre-theoretical.”27

25
Heidegger, Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens [1918/19], 102.
26
Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 193. “But your are not in the darkness for that day to surprise
you like a thief. For you are all children of the light and children of the day; we belong not to the
night and the darkness. So then let us not sleep like the others, but rather remain wakeful,
watchful, and sober” (I Thess. 5: 4-8). Cf. Mark, I, 15. For a reading of Heidegger’s thought from
the 1920s to his post-Kehre works taking the notion of the ‘Augenblick’ as leitmotif—specifically
as the point of convergence of theory and praxis—see William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye:
Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999).
27
Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 1. Die Idee der Philosophie und das
Weltanschauungsproblem. GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1919] 1987), 59. See
also 87 (against the “Generalherrschaft des Theoretischen”). For the critique of the primacy of the
practical see 138, 143: “die Lehre vom Primat der praktischen Vernunft […ist] die Fundierung des
theoretischen, wissenchaftlichen Denkens im praktischen Glauben und Willen zur Wahrheit…”
the aim is to bring together thinking and willing; 145: “Die Philosophie hat…die Bestimmung,

48
 The question, in other words, became for Heidegger, how to begin to

philosophize, and specifically, how to begin to philosophize about life—how to

understand life. Against the “tyranny of the theoretical,” this means: against the

traditional priority accorded to the objectifying gaze of theoretical seeing as the

means par excellence of encountering the world. But also against the “primacy of

the practical” or the alternative to this which claims that it is not through thoughts

aiming at objects that we discover the world but through the activity of conferring

meaning to the world through the construction of worldviews that guide our

(practical) willing and acting in it.28 Thus, beyond the primacy of the theoretical

and the practical, Heidegger’s quest was for what Franco Volpi calls “that strange

modification of life” that makes it possible to see life from within life itself, that

is, to see life without theoretically standing outside it but yet removed enough to

think and be able to say something about life.29

In the last chapter we suggested that this ‘strange modification’ was

pioneered by Socrates, and that from it resulted the project of what can

variously—though always anachronistically and hence never quite accurately—be

called ‘practical philosophy’ or ‘theory of praxis’ or ‘political philosophy’.

Strauss met Heidegger at the moment when Heidegger became a ‘political

‘das Gesamtbewusstsein von den höchsten Werten des Menschelebens zu sein’”; 146; 153:
“Entsprechend den drei Formen von in sich absolute Geltung beanspruchenden Beurteilungen gibt
es drei philosophische Grundwissenschaften: Logik, Ethik, Aesthetik.”
28
See, e.g., Heinrich Rickert, “Vom Begriff der Philosophie,” Logos 1 (1910/11), 13, 2, 6. E.
Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Quentin Lauer (ed.), Phenomenology and the Crisis
of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71.
29
Franco Volpi, “Heidegger und der Neoaristotelismus,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und
Aristoteles, 222.

49
philosopher’ in this sense. The occasion was the first of a series of

phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle which Heidegger presented in the

summer of 1922.

50
 Who is the True Philosophos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics Alpha, 1-2 (SS 1922)

As the recently published transcript of Heidegger’s summer semester of 1922

lecture shows,30 what Strauss and Karl Löwith (to name but the most famous of

this early generation of Heidegger’s students) encountered was something

deceptively simple: a sentence by sentence in-class translation of three or four

pages of a classic text that would take most of the semester.31 Not even a

commentary on how philosophy first arose according to Aristotle; just slow

reading, sentence by sentence.

When during that summer Heidegger finally finished reading and

translating into ordinary German the opening of the Metaphysics and began to

interpret it, he explained that Aristotle’s goal there was “the determination of true

understanding (sophia); its how-being in its how-becoming” (53).

30 Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles

zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62. The lecture course lasted from the first week of May to 28 July
1922. See the Epilogue in Ibid., 422.
31
The best-known auditors of the lecture are mentioned in the epilogue to GA 62, 422. That “Herr
Strauss aus Kirchhein” was present and deeply impressed is testified in a letter from Paul Natorp
to Husserl of October 30, 1922. See Karl Schuhmann (ed.), Edmund Husserl. Briefwechsel, Band
V: Die Neukantianer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 161. Cited in GA62, 422.
Natorp was professor at Marburg where Strauss was a student. Heidegger would apply for a
position in Marburg a few months later sending to Natorp what is known as the ‘Natorp report’
referred to earlier. What Gadamer called his “elektrischer Schlag” upon discovering Heidegger
was experienced thanks to this report which Natorp showed him. See “Erinnerungen an
Heidegger’s Anfänge,” (1986) in Hans Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr,
1990), Vol. 10, 4 (“Die Lektüre dieses Manuskripts berührte mich wie ein elektrischer Schlag.”).
Heidegger began teaching at Marburg in the Winter of 1923.

51
 Through his reading of the beginning of the Metaphysics Heidegger

sought to point to the following problem. Wisdom (sophia) for Aristotle is an

eminently—and in almost any conceivable sense—‘practical’ matter—except for

the fact that Aristotle explicitly calls it “theoretical.” Heidegger’s task in the

course thus became to understand Aristotle’s originary conception of the

theoretical and the practical as it emerged from the ancient Greek experience of

the world, and to show that theory was not understood as passive contemplation

but as praxis in the highest sense—indeed as the highest praxis.

Wherein, then, does the practicality of theory reside for Aristotle? And

why does it nevertheless become ‘theoretical’?

The practicality of theory

In his courses of the early 1920s and up to Being and Time (1927) Heidegger

repeatedly returned to the beginning of the Metaphysics.32 This locus classicus

mattered for Heidegger, not because, as Hegel for instance would have it, it is the

authoritative account of the history of philosophy in ancient Greece—

culminating, moreover, in the Hegelian view that philosophy is speculative

science33—but quite opposite to this, because in it the concept of philosophy is

32
On this see William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of
Theory.
33
For Hegel the definitive history of Greek philosophy was written by Aristotle, whose thinking
represents the culmination of the effort begun by the first philosophers. See G.W.F. Hegel,
Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 166-
167. Cf. Joachim Ritter, “Aristoteles und die Vorsokratiker,” Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu
Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 34.

52
found through a phenomenological account of the way the philosophizing human

being lives in philosophy.34

Most immediately indicative of this is the fact that Aristotle characterizes

the increasing degrees of understanding leading to wisdom as a ‘more’ of (our

everyday) ‘seeing’ (mallista eidenai). Thus the opening line, “All men by nature

desire to know” (pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei) says more

literally that all men by nature desire to see (eidenai). So too the difference

between he who masters an art and he who lives by experience is that the

craftsman ‘sees more’: “…we think that knowledge and understanding belong to

art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of

experience (which implies that wisdom depends in all cases rather on

knowledge)” (Met. A1, 981a24-b6): literally, on “eidenai mallon” or “seeing

more” in Heidegger’s translation (25). Again: “Hence we think that the master-

workers in each craft are more honorable and know in a truer sense [mallon

eidenai]”: Heidegger translates: “the master worker sees more … than the manual

worker.” Finally, referring to the highest degree of wisdom: “the knowledge of

everything must necessarily belong to him who in the highest degree [mallista

(einai)] possesses knowledge of the universal…” (982a23): literally, to him who

‘sees most’.

Heidegger’s central point here is that in determining the meaning of

philosophy Aristotle “goes along with the factical tendencies of interpretation of

34
See Walter Bröcker, Aristoteles (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1964), 9.

53
factical life” (78). The “‘seeing’ understanding” [hinsehende Verstehen] is “a

How of going about and a How of life [ein Wie des Umgehens und ein Wie des

Lebens]” (85). “Sophia is the malista of the … illumination that emerges from and

is bound to life [das malista der bestimmt herkünftigen und lebenverflochtenen

Erhellung]” (79). Finally: “the expression ‘to understand’ [Verstehen] … grows

out of the sphere from which every ‘looking at’ [Hinsehen] grows: from [the

sphere] of [everyday] going about [Umgehen], for example, ‘one understands

one’s craft’” (307).

Thus, there would seem to be nothing ‘theoretical’ about wisdom, if, by

theoretical we mean ‘abstract’ or belonging to a sphere that need not have any

relation whatsoever with ‘actual practice’ (as in: ‘that may be true in theory but it

does not hold in practice’).35 And yet even though wisdom has nothing to do with

abstraction, it is nevertheless characterized by Aristotle as theoretical (982b9)—

indeed, as we shall see, as ‘theological’.

35
A comparison with Kant at this point will prove illuminating. In “On the common saying: That
may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice” Kant illustrates his own understanding of
the relation between theory and practice by reference to an example drawn from modern warfare.
Kant says: if artillery fails to hit the target and it is said ‘that may be finely thought out in theory
but it doesn’t hold in practice’; this cannot be held against theory’s abstraction but exactly to the
opposite: the theory is not theoretical enough. To the mathematical theory of flying bombshells
must be added that of air resistance. Aristotle, it seems, could not possibly have said that a theory
is ‘not theoretical enough’ because, at least in the account given in the beginning of the
Metaphysics, experience is an essential step towards science, and more specifically, art or techne
functions as an essential mediation between praxis and theory. See, for instance, Met., 981a12-b3,
beginning as follows: “Experience [empeiria] does not seem to differ from art where something is
to be done; in fact, we observe that men of experience succeed more than men who have the
theory [logon echonton] but have no experience.” For a closer look at the comparison between
Aristotle and Kant see Günther Bien, “Das Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie
bei Plato und Aristoteles,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 76, 1968-1969, specially, 264-268. The
references to Kant are from Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of
the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 279-280.

54
 What, then, did Aristotle have in mind when he used the word ‘theoretical’

for the first recorded time in western history?

Heidegger insists that the term must be understood as arising from the

self-illumination of life in its everyday going about the world. This applies even

(and especially) for that other classical statement of the Metaphysics where

philosophy is described as “a science which investigates [or theorizes: theorei]

being as being and what belongs essentially to it” (1003a21 f.). As Heidegger

would repeatedly stress in what became perhaps his central interpretive point

during those years, the terms used by Aristotle to refer to being, “Ta onta—

ousia—on,” derive from the common term used to refer to ‘stock’, or the

availability of, say, grain: “Hausstand” (96). In the Greek understanding of being,

“[o]usia means … die Habe, den Hausstand. What is thereby meant is the

proximate world of [everyday] concerns…” Hence the term must be understood

“from the Greek tendency towards the illumination of one’s own life” (308).

Heidegger corroborates his interpretation by reference to other key

terms—to take but one: Aristotle famously says that it is “because of their

wondering that men began to philosophize and do so now. First, they wondered at

the difficulties close at hand; then, advancing little by little, they discussed

difficulties also about greater matters…” (982b9ff.) Again, this ‘stopping by’ to

wonder at ‘difficulties close at hand’ when one is literally ‘without a way’

55
(aporos or ‘unwegsam’ in Heidegger’s translation) expresses the movement of

everyday life out of which philosophizing arises (95-96).36

In short, then, there is nothing ‘abstract’ about philosophizing and nothing

‘metaphysical’ about it—to refer to another post-Aristotelian term used to refer to

the core of Aristotle’s philosophy—if by ‘meta-physical’ is meant a “turn[ing]

away from the physika” towards “knowledge of the suprasensous,” or towards

knowledge of “those beings that lie behind and above other beings.”37

The question, however, remains: how is it that western thought still came

to understand philosophy precisely as ‘metaphysics’ or as ‘speculation’ or

otherworldly ‘contemplation’ or (in modernity) as hypothesis construction, thus

making its province anything but life as it is lived—indeed, as it is (always

already) politically lived, as Arendt and Strauss and Heidegger (at least in 1924)

would argue?

The divinity of theory and the problem of ethics

The theory-praxis relation had a very specific Greek meaning, Heidegger argued.

The Greek understanding of theory and praxis is that theory is but an extension

and intensification of praxis. It is “the highest praxis” (111) such that for the

36
On this point, see also Grundbegriffe, GA 18, 159-162 (“Das porein hat zum Ziel das euporein,
das “in-der-rechten-Weise-Durchkommen’ zu dem, wonach gefragt ist.” ) Plato's Sophist, 88
(Aporia “characterizes the peculiar intermediate position of Dasein itself over and against the
world. It characterizes a peculiar being underway of Dasein: in a certain sense knowing beings and
yet not getting through.”)
37
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39, 40, 43.

56
Greeks “the true bios praktikos is the bios theoretikos” (309). This conception has

its roots in a particular understanding of the movement of life. Theoria is “the

How of life in which its movement, its Being comes purely to its own … in true

understanding the true movement of life comes into the open” (97). The wonder

of theoria is accordingly “no standing still, but an … intensification of the

movement of care” (308; cf. 95).

Following its own movement, however, the care of theoria advances “little

by little” beyond wonder at the surrounding world to confront the world (95). The

care of dealings becomes directed solely to what is lasting; factical life turns to a

different way of dealing with its world: the world is there differently, or rather it

“looks at all like this or that for the first time” (66; cf. 317). The “theoretical”

becomes a “new way of factical life” (317)—viz. a life of leisure—which is care-

less (112 n. 3; 115, n. 2) and which no longer observes the life in which it is

(389).

These are the origins of the separation of the theoretical from the practical

that extends all the way to Kant and our own time (309). And it is at this point

that Heidegger’s recovery of Aristotle turns into Destruktion. Heidegger traced

philosophy’s disregard of life—of its own meaning as a way rather than a

completion of life—to a particular understanding of the divine. The seeing of

theoria is the highest and most ‘divine’ praxis because it most purely resembles

57
the eternal movement of the divine.38 According to Heidegger, the pure seeing of

divine theoria is the fundamental experience in which life and the world are

‘there’ for the Greeks (251). Because being is understood from the standpoint of

theoria, and that means from the experience of completed or finished movement,

accidental being—“precisely the being other from everything else, the Being of

what is precisely now so for this factical going-about” (251-52)—is treated by the

Greeks as close to nonbeing: of such being there can be no science.

Philosophy thus reveals itself in the end not as a way of life but as an

escape from it (37, 316-17). Indeed, in its privileging of theoria as the completion

of the movement of life (110), philosophy covers over the fact that life in its

‘factical’ historical ‘there’ is open-ended possibility that can never be completed

(cf. 113). More generally, the regard of theoria for the permanent means that it

never has eyes for life as it is lived, for the destiny of man, for natality and

mortality (269 f.). Instead, from the standpoint of theoria human life starts to be

seen as one more thing in the world that can be completed and thus produced in

some ideal form. Human life begins to speak “the language of the world”: instead

of speaking “for itself on the basis of its very own factical possibilities,” it begins

to refer to the “‘nature’ of the human being’, or to ‘human Dasein in a desired

perfection and heavenly naturalness.”39 It begins to speak of ethical questions

38
M. Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der
Hermeneutischen Situation),” in Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter
Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62, 389.
39
Ibid., pp. 358, 363, 367, 356.

58
from the perspective of a science of objects. It begins to assume that a techne

politike as the quest for ‘the common good’ is possible and necessary.40

Heidegger’s project henceforth became to conceive of an alternative

genesis of theoria. Beyond the ‘natural’ genesis described by Aristotle, Heidegger

would propose an ‘existential’ genesis.41 Beyond, or prior, to the bifurcation of

the practical and the theoretical, Heidegger would show that the theoretical points

to the pre-theoretical, to life as it is lived. In Heidegger’s lectures of the summer

of 1924 his phenomenology turned to life as it is lived politically.42

40
Cf. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, GA 18, 79.
41
See Sein und Zeit and, generally, McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the
Ends of Theory.
42
In both the lectures of the summer of 1924, recently published as Grundbegriffe der
aristotelischen Philosophie (2002), and of the winter of 1925/25 which was published in 1992 as
Plato’s Sophist. Concerning the latter, Stanley Rosen has written that “I can say without hesitation
that the analysis of the Sophist is entirely superior to any subsequent Heideggerian interpretation
of Plato known to me.” The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), 317. According to Theodore Kisiel, SS 1924 is one of Heidegger’s
“greatest courses, breaking ground not merely in Greek philosophy but also for his entire path of
thought.” The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 283.

59
 Who is the True Politikos? Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Politics and
Rhetoric (SS 1924)

“No philosophy will be offered here, not even history of philosophy”—thus

Heidegger introduced his reading of Aristotle of the summer semester of 1924.

Heidegger’s lecture, Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, ran from

May 1st to July 31st.43 Several young philosophers whose thinking would be

decisively shaped by Heidegger’s lectures were present—among them, Walter

Bröcker, Jacob Klein, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith. As the stenographical notes

made by Bröcker and preserved in the archives of Herbert Marcuse until their

publication in 2002 show, Heidegger went on to note that “If philology means: the

passion to know what is spoken, then that which we will do here is philology” (4).

“About Aristotle, his philosophy, and his development, you can find everything in

the book of the classical philologist Jaeger … When it comes to the personality of

43
This lecture has received considerable attention in the literature. See Gross and Kemmann
(eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric. William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos (N.Y.:
SUNY Press, 2006), ch. 3, 77-95. Jacques Taminiaux, “Le bios politikos dans l’enseignement de
Marbourg,” in Taminiaux, Sillages Phénoménologiques. Stuart Elden, “Reading Logos as Speech:
Heidegger, Aristotle and Rhetorical Politics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2005.
Robert Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles.
Theodore Kisiel, “Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger’s Protopractical Ontology 1923–25:
The French Occupy the Ruhr,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8, no. 2 (07, 2000):
185-208. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 276-308; Paul Christopher Smith, The
Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1998); “The Uses and Abuses of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Heidegger’s
Fundamental Ontology: The Lecture Course, Summer, 1924,” in Babette E. Babich (ed.), From
Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995).
Friederike Rese, “Praxis and Logos in Aristotle. On the Meaning of Reason and Speech for
Human Life and Action,” in Epoche 9/2 (2005); Charlotta Weigelt, The Logic of Life. Heidegger’s
Retrieval of Aristotle’s Concept of Logos (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2002).
Allen Scult, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric as Ontology: A Heideggerian Reading,” in Philosophy and
Rhetoric, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1999. See also the bibliography on the general theme of Heidegger and
rhetoric in Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, op. cit.

60
a philosopher only this is of interest: he was born then and then, he worked and he

died” (4-5).44

Heidegger described the objective of the course as learning from Aristotle

what it means to pursue science as a way of “speaking with the world.” Through

an analysis of the meaning of some of the basic concepts of Aristotelian

philosophizing, such as “[l]ife, movement, knowledge, truth,” Heidegger

proposed simply to see what Aristotle is talking about when he is talking about

these things: “which things are meant in these concepts, how these things are

experienced, what they refer to…” This attempt at grasping what conceptuality

(Begrifflichkeit) means, in turn, is meant to grow into “insight and familiarity with

the requirements and possibilities of scientific investigation,” (333) which, says

Heidegger, is not (as Weber would have it) a vocation but “the possibility of the

existence of man,” the possibility namely “[for existence] to stand exclusively on

its own, to make do without belief, without religion and the like” (6).

44
Jaeger’s groundbreaking developmental approach to reading Aristotle had just appeared. See W.
Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, trans. Richard Robinson
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, second ed., [1923] 1948). For Gadamer, at least, Jaeger’s book
made it clear that one could not “trust in the results in philosophical research without any critical
resources of one’s own. Philosophical and philological questions cannot be posed independently
of each other.” Heidegger polemizes against Jaeger in the lecture and yet he is one of the few
resources he does use to illuminate Aristotle (whereas “no philosophical authorities whatsoever
are admitted as interpretive aids.”) See Mark Michalski, “Hermeneutic Phenomenology as
Philology,” in Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 68 (my emphasis).
(Gadamer’s view is quoted from Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie
(Tubingen: Mohr, 1999), 139.) On the relation between Jaeger and Heidegger in a later stage of
their career, see Frank H. W. Edler, “Heidegger and Werner Jaeger on the Eve of 1933: A Possible
Rapprochement?” Research in Phenomenology 27, (1997): 122-149. For the context of the lecture
it should also be considered what Aristotle stood for in the Marburg Mecca of Neo-Kantianism. At
least in Heidegger’s view, Professor Hermann Cohen (the father of Neo-Kantianism) “saw
Aristotle as a pharmacist, merely pasting labels on what exists.” As for Professor Natorp, he
“understood philosophy to be Plato and Kant.” See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Restricted
Conception of Rhetoric,” in Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 166.

61
 The central premise of the lecture may be said to be that thinking (through

concepts) requires a ground or a soil, that is, that concepts cannot, as it were, fall

from the sky, but rather must express some experience. Heidegger’s term for this

is Bodenständigkeit, meaning literally ground- or soil-‘standingness’. Heidegger

takes Aristotle to be the first truly bodenständig thinker, and indeed, it would

seem, the only such thinker so far: previous to him, Plato did not have this

capacity (26, 37), and the same can be said of that possibility of contemporary

thought (the reference is here to Husserl) which should presumably be closest to

‘the things themselves’, but which still seeks to find ‘essences’ without clarifying

what essence is (40).45 The aim, however, is not to learn to use and apply

Aristotelian concepts, but for students to learn “to have a true and correct and

serious relation to the matters of their respective sciences”; or differently put, “to

do what Aristotle did in the place and the context of his research with your own

research, namely to see and determine the matter in the same originality and

genuineness” (15).

Specifically, Heidegger argued that genuine, that is, bodenständig

conceptuality, and with it genuine science, arise not from seeing or from

theorizing but from the decision “radically to speak with the world” (40).46

45
See Heidegger’s critique of Plato in this regard in the lecture on the Sophist of the following
term (1924/25), especially p. 59.
46
Cf., 18: “Die in den Grundbegriffen gemeinte Begrifflichkeit ist sachgebende Grunderfahrung,
kein theoretisches Erfassen der Dinge.”

62
 Being More or Less Political: Politics, Book I

‘Speaking with the world’ through logos, Heidegger argues, is “the fundamental

determination of the Being of man as such” from which the Greek definition of

man as zoon logon echon must be understood (18). This is not only a

philosophical definition but the expression of the ancient Greek’s understanding

of man as “a living being that [as living being] possesses speech,” or as a living

being for whom “being-in-the-world is determined in its grounds by speech,” by a

“speaking with, about, of [the world]” (18).47

Heidegger refers to the opening books of the Politics as in 1922 he had

referred to the opening of the Metaphysics. Whereas two years before the aim was

to find the concept of philosophy as it grows out of everyday life, the aim now,

we can say, is to find the concept of the political through a phenomenological

account of life as it is lived politically.48 Aristotle’s famous argument to the effect

that “man is by nature a political animal” reads as follows:

[M]an is the only animal who has the gift of speech. And whereas mere
voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in

47
Cf. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research [1923-24], 13: “The Greek lived
in a special way in the language and was lived by it and he was conscious of this. The ability to
address and discuss what was encountered (world and self), something that does not need to be
philosophy, he characterizes as being a human being: logon echein, to have language.” Speaking is
not emitting a sound but pointing towards something that shows itself through speech: “The true
function of logos is apophainesthai, ‘briging-a-matter-to-sight’” (17). Logos brings to light a
being in its being. It brings to light “the ousia as the ‘Being’ of an essent [der ousia als des ‘Seins’
des Seienden]” (21).
48
More exactly—and as we will see in what follows—one would have to say that both the
determination of ‘the political’ and ‘the philosophical’ as (naturally related) human possibilities
are at stake in this course.

63
 other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and
pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power
of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and
therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man
that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the
like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a
family and a state.49

As in the discussion of theory in the Metaphysics, Heidegger’s emphasis in his

reading of the Politics is on being political as a possibility. ‘Being philosophical’

in the Metaphysics, as we saw, is neither a matter of being ‘cultivated’ nor a

matter of nature understood as something that necessarily ‘happens’ to us.

Similarly, in ‘man is by nature [phusei] a political animal’, “Phusis is not to be

taken in the modern sense of ‘nature’ standing against ‘culture’ … phusei on is a

being that from itself, on the grounds of its own possibilities, is what it is. In the

being of man lies the fundamental possibility [Grundmöglichkeit] of being-in-the-

polis” (45-46).

Later in the course Heidegger would make this point more explicit:

“…zoon politikon. That means: man is a living being that can be phusei in the

way (or manner) of the polis [in der Weise der polis], i.e., this special

[ausgezeichnet] way of being-with-one-another is not something that simply

occurs to human beings [was an den Menschen herangebracht ist], but the

possibility of Being. For the Greeks man is truly man insofar as he lives in the
49
Aristotle, Politics, trans. Jonathan Barnes. In Stephen Everson (ed.), Aristotle. The Politics and
The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1253a10-16.

64
polis [Sofern der Mensch in der polis lebt, ist er für den Griechen eigentlich

Mensch]” (my emphasis, 56).

Thus, just as in the case of theoretical seeing “all men by nature strive to

see” such that there is a latent disposition towards it which may lead to increasing

degrees of seeing culminating in wisdom, so here being-in-the-polis or being

political is a distinct possibility of being-with-one-another which can be ‘more’ or

less actualized—for indeed as Aristotle says: “man is [Heidegger adds: “merely”]

more of a political animal than bees” (politikon mallon, Pol. 1253a7-8) (50).50

But what does it mean to be more or less ‘political’? And more

fundamentally, what exactly is the ‘function’ of logos as the grounds of our

political animality?51 To what phenomenon does ‘logos’ co-respond? Is not logos,

as the root of ‘logic’, the articulation of the discourse of reason—the

philosophical discourse par excellence? Or does it rather correspond to ‘mere’

speech, to the articulation of that which ‘seems to me’ to be the case—arguably

the political discourse par excellence?

‘To see is to listen’: Rhetoric, I.11

Heidegger’s emphasis is on what he takes to be the more originary (‘eigentlich’)

meaning of logos as speech: as mentioned earlier, zoon logon echon means that

50
“Der Mensch ist nur mallon zoon politikon als z. B. die Biene” (50). (The connection between
theorein and sharing of logos is made later at 64: there is authentic and inauthentic theorizing and
being-political.)
51
As Claudia Baracchi points out logos is an essentially untranslatable term ranging in meaning
from ‘word’, ‘saying’, ‘speech’ to ‘reason’ or ‘logical structure’. Claudia Baracchi, Aristotle's
Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.

65
man is a living being for whom “being-in-the-world is determined in its grounds

by speech,” by a “speaking with, about, of [the world]” (18).

This means first of all that the “fundamental character of the Dasein of

man” is “being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein]. And in particular not being-

with one-another in the sense of being-put-beside-one-another, but in the sense of

speaking-with-one-another by way of a sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-

with [Mitteilung, Widerlegung, Auseinandersetzung]” (47). More fundamentally,

it means that neither animals nor human beings have the world ‘there’ as a set of

objects or of ‘matters of fact’, as a ‘reality’ or actuality (Wirklichkeit) of which

they then become aware or which they then cognize. Rather the world is ‘there’,

first of all, as a common world—both for animals, who through sounds intimate

pleasure and pain to one another, and for men, who through the power of speech

share with, contradict, and polemize regarding expedient and inexpedient, just and

unjust—and, secondly, as a world that either ‘pains’ us or ‘lifts us up’, that is, that

‘atunes’ us in particular ways which we then directly ‘speak into’ the character of

the world (47-48). In this sense, that the world is a common world means much

more than the fact that ‘Dasein is Mit-sein’: it means that speech—what we say to

one another—conditions what we perceive, nay, that “listening [to speech] is the

true aisthesis [perception]” (104).52

52
We note in passing that this is a most remarkable claim to make for a thinker who is said to have
been blind to political realities owing to a ‘metaphysical’ and ‘Platonic’ bias. In “Le bios politikos
dans l’enseignement de Marbourg” Jacques Taminiaux argues in reference to this lecture in
particular that it is hard to believe that such a penetrating reader as Heidegger could have missed
Aristotle’s characterization of the essence of the human as zoon politikon (50). On the basis of
what we have seen so far, however, one can say that it is hard to believe that someone who has

66
 This becomes clear, Heidegger argues, in Aristotle’s explication of the

pleasant (hedone) and the painful (luperon) in the Rhetoric as particular ways of

being in the world, of finding oneself (well or ill) in the world, and especially as

creative of particular dispositions towards the world (such that we then apprehend

it accordingly):

We may lay it down that pleasure is a movement, a movement by which

the soul as a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being;
and that pain is the opposite. If this is what pleasure is, it is clear that the
pleasant is what tends to produce [poietikon] this condition [diathesis]
while that which tends to destroy it, or to cause the soul to be brought into
the opposite state, is painful [luperon] (Rhetoric, 1369b34-1370a3).

otherwise done so much to improve our understanding of Heidegger’s early work and of his
relation to Arendt in particular could say this. Consider, more particularly, Taminiaux’s thesis in
The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker according to which Heidegger’s ‘world’ “in
what is most properly existential about it could no longer be a common one because it is being
revealed only by the encounter with nothingness experienced through anxiety by a radically
isolated existing being.” This world “could in no way be a habitat since the being-in-the-world
called Dasein is in the end unheimlich, without a dwelling.” There is finally in such a world “no
other individuation than being-toward-death” (34). However much these conclusions may be
supported by Heidegger’s Being and Time, they can hardly be derived from Heidegger’s lectures
on Aristotle. This point is decisive for an adequate understanding of the influence of Heidegger on
Arendt and Strauss, as well as on other students like Gadamer and Jonas. Strauss and Arendt both
expressed the view that what attracted them to Heidegger at the time was not his own
philosophy—he could hardly be said to have had one then—but his capacity to bring the classic
thinkers, and particularly Aristotle, “to life and light.” See Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 462,
as well as Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty”: “it is not Heidegger’s philosophy (whose very
existence can legitimately be called into question…) but rather Heidegger’s thinking that has had
such a decisive influence on the century’s intellectual physignomy’ (in Ludz (ed.), Letters, 1925-
1975. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, 152.) (On the differences between the Heidegger of
1924 and the Heidegger of Being and Time see William McNeill, The Time of Life, 79; Gross,
“Introduction. Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology,” in Heidegger and
Rhetoric, 5 (“hermeneutics subsume rhetoric after 1924”), 13.

67
Thus, in indicating pain or pleasure that approaches, animals (to begin with) put

each other at once into particular states of being—in the case of pleasure into the

normal, or more literally translated, natural, state of being—such that (and here

Heidegger adds a part that is missing from the English translation) “thereby

apprehension occurs [so, dass, dabei vernommen wird].” This means, according to

Heidegger, that pleasure and pain are not simply psychological states or ways of

feeling, but ways of being attuned to the world—Heidegger refers to a certain

‘lightness of being’ in the case of pleasure or conversely to its ‘oppressiveness’ in

the case of pain—that in turn give to the things of the world a particular timbre,

tone or ‘feel’. This also implies that the rational (logos as traditionally rendered)

and the emotional (or particular ‘states of attunement’) cannot simply be divorced

from each other.

The limits of philo-logy: ‘the philosophers are the real Sophists’

Heidegger sharpened the problem of the possibility of conceptuality or of

bodenständig thinking by referring his students to the context in which scientific

thinking first arose. This was a context, says Heidegger, that was characterized by

a passion for speech in all its forms: indeed, the Greeks were “in a way in love

with logos” (262). This fact and specifically the meaning of the notion that for the

Greeks man is a being that speaks can only be rendered approximately by saying

what would correspond to modern man: “at the most: man is a living being that

reads the newspaper” (108). What Heidegger wants to point to thereby is the

68
power that conversation and talk and rhetoric had in shaping the convictions of

human beings concerning their living together. “The Greeks existed in talk (in der

Rede). The Rhetor is the one that has the actual power over Dasein: Rhetorike

peithous demiourgos [rhetoric is a producer of persuasion].”53 Now, there is a

danger to this, says Heidegger: living in and through speech makes for the

possibility of an ever new disclosure of things through language, but just as much

it may lead to being caught up in significations that bar access to the things

themselves. This process of ‘falling’ to the world in which one lives “became for

the Greeks through speech itself the fundamental danger of their existence” (108).

The proof of this state of things “is the existence of sophistry. In sophistry this

formidable possibility of speaking is realized. Protagoras’ statement: ton etto

logon kreitto poiein54 – discussing with a geometrician about geometry even when

one does not understand a thing about geometry [means] to lead a conversation in

such a way that I overcome the other without knowledge of the matter

[Sachkenntnis].” Heidegger is thus led to conclude that “sophistry is the proof for

the fact that the Greeks had ‘fallen’ to that speech that Nietzsche once called ‘die

sprechbarste aller Sprachen’ [the most ‘speakable’ of all languages]” (108-109);

that “in the fourth century the Greeks had completely been subjected to the reign

of speech” (109).

53
Plato, Gorgias, 453a2.
54
Aristotle, Rhetoric B24, 1402 a 23.

69
 Thus the problem of a truly bodenständig conceptuality (of speaking to the

phenomena themselves) runs deeper because, insofar as logos is both disclosing

and concealing, speaking to the phenomena presupposes a quite extreme capacity

to begin from logos as our most immediate access to reality while being able

nevertheless to refine (and in effect redefine) such logos in a way that it enables

us to perceive the essence of things. As Heidegger puts it, the challenge for

philosophy was “to bring back [or to recover, zurückholen] speech from

conversation and idle talk to bring speech to that point that Aristotle can say:

logos is logos ousias, “‘speaking about the subject matter, what it is’” (109).55

Science or philosophy becomes at this point in Heidegger’s account the

capacity to transcend the opinions of one’s time not by dismissing them but

exactly by taking them seriously. We may say in other words that it is the capacity

to think para-doxically in the literal sense of contrary to prevalent opinion and yet

(doxically) beginning and never quite transcending the realm of opinion, but only

seeing further along with it. “Aristotle stood in the most extreme opposition

[Gegenstellung] to that which was alive around him, what stood before him in the

concrete world … In the time of Plato and Aristotle existence was so loaded with

babble that it took all the efforts of both men to realize the possibility of science”

(109). What is decisive here, says Heidegger, is that they did not pick up a new

possibility of existence from just anywhere, “say from India,” but rather “from

55
“Sprechen über die Sache, was sie ist.” The reference is to Metaphysics, 1017 b22 (“The
essence, whose formula is a definition, is also said to be the substance of each thing.”)

70
Greek life itself: they took seriously the possibilities of speaking. That is the

origins of logic, the doctrine of logos” (109).

The efforts of both sophists and philosophers, Heidegger suggests, consist

in taking seriously and making real the possibilities of speech. Both, in a way,

begin from the ubiquitous reality of rhetoric. Sophistry and philosophy are thus

intimately related.56 And yet, Heidegger argues in a highly provocative and

suggestive statement: it is “the philosophers [who] are the true Sophists [die

Philosophen sind die rechten Sophisten]” (136). To make this case Heidegger

proceeds by analyzing the relationship of logos as speaking-with-one-another as

set forth in the Rhetoric with both science and politics. Or more exactly, he

proposes to deepen our understanding of the possibilities of man as logon echon

as they become manifest in both science—speaking in the sense of theoretical

seeing (Betrachtung)—and political life—speaking in the sense of reflexive

deliberation (Überlegen).57 To these two possibilities of existence, I shall argue in

what follows, correspond two possible conceptions of political philosophy.

56
This is because “philosophers are supposed to know the limits of knowledge, like the true
sophists” (136). Cf. Gross, “Introduction. Being-Moved: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical
Ontology,” in Gross and Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 12.
57
With respect to ‘philosophy’ consider, 123: “Wie steht der logos als horismos, die
wissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung im Dasein des Menschen? Dafür ist die Rhetorik Leitfaden…”
As regards ‘politics’, 139: “Das Miteinandersprechen ist demnach der Leitfaden für die
Aufdeckung des Grundphänomens der Entdecktheit des Daseins selbst als Sein-in-einer-welt. Als
konkreten Leitfaden nehmen wir die Rhetorik, sofern sie nichts anderes ist als die Auslegung des
Daseins hinsichtlich der Grundmöglichkeit des Miteinandersprechens.”

71
 Heidegger’s Two Conceptions of Political Philosophy

We shall begin by referring to what seems to be the answer to Heidegger’s central

problem in the lecture—the problem of bodenständig conceptuality. As we will

see, it is most significant—even though it may lead one to think of the old

Strauss’s verdict on Heidegger: ‘a phenomenal intellect resting on a soul of

Kitsch’—that in the end, in the summer of 1924, it was all a matter of passion. It

is the passions so memorably dissected by Aristotle in the Rhetoric but also

(crucially for Heidegger) by Augustine, Thomas, and Luther, and, among the

moderns (now crucially for Strauss’s critique of Heidegger as we shall see) by

Hobbes, that constitute, says Heidegger, “the ground upon which language grows

and into which expressions return…”58 Including now the context and the

consequences of this central statement, it reads as follows:

In so far as the pathe are not the annex of psychological events, but
compose instead the ground upon which language grows and into which
expressions return, the pathe provide the fundamental possibilities in
which Dasein finds itself and orients itself. This basic Being-oriented, the
illumination of Being’s being in the world, is no knowledge, but is instead
a finding-oneself [Sichbefinden] variously determined, depending upon the

58
See Heidegger’s genealogy of the theological and philosophical concern with the pathe at 177-
178. (See also Sein und Zeit, 139 n.1 and 190 n.1). Heidegger fails to include Hobbes in this
genealogy, even though he is the subject of the Dilthey study he cites, viz. W. Dilthey,
Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, in G. Misch (ed.),
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2. (Leipzig, Berlin, 1914), 416 ff.

72
 ways Being can be there. Given first among these characteristic ways of
finding-oneself and being-in-the-world, is the possibility of speaking
about things stripped of the appearance with which they are most closely
associated. Thus we are presented with the possibility of coming to a
particular matter-of-fact that, in a certain sense, returns to the way the
world is seen as prefigured by the pathe (262-63).59

Heidegger, as we have seen, argues that the way in which the world is seen is

predetermined by the pathe. Now, these are not simply (or not only) natural

occurrences but rather ways of being attuned to the world brought about (or

literally created) by our sharing of logoi—that is, by a common discourse that

makes manifest the things of the world as expedient or inexpedient, just or unjust,

right and wrong and so on. This may be illustrated simply by recalling that our

pleasures are greater when they are illicit. Or to refer to Aristotle’s example:

because bodily pleasures alone are familiar, men think there are no others—

whereby what is important is that this familiarity is due to the ‘heritage of the

word’,60 or in other words, it is determined by the way hedone is spoken about. In

this sense, we may say, logos (and with it nomos) is king.61

59
I follow here Daniel Gross’s translation in his “Introduction,” to Gross and Kemman (eds.),
Heidegger and Rhetoric, 38. Cf. Gadamer’s comment on this claim in an interview with Ansgar
Kemman: “In this context what is the meaning of characterizing pathe as ‘ground’ and
‘fundamental possibilities’?” Gadamer: “That is the distrust of speaking. So speaking is not first!”
See “Heidegger as Rhetor: Hans-Georg Gadamer Interviewed by Ansgar Kemman,” in Gross and
Kemman (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 47-65.
60
Kleronomia onomatos, translated by Heidegger as Erbschaft des Wortes (Nic. Ethics, 1153b33).
61
Incidentally, we see that thanks to Aristotle’s insight into the way (shared) speech—literally, in
Aristotle’s terms—produces (embodied) states of being attuned to the world ‘such that thereby
apprehension occurs’, the idea that theory is a matter of ‘abstraction’ or of passive contemplation

73
 One way in which Heidegger takes this further—far further; indeed, one is

tempted to say, too far—is this: the very question of Being was (rightly) raised—

and (wrongly) answered—by the ancients beginning with Parmenides ultimately

because of a moral prejudice; specifically, because of a particular kind of fear

(and a corresponding understanding of pleasure).

First, Heidegger establishes the sense in which logos is king. This means:

Particular logoi, once spoken, can become so dominant—particularly in

times when scientific investigation is young and lively—that they can
make the beings that they refer to inaccessible for a long time. Such was
the dominance of the logos of Parmenides that ‘being is one’, en to on.
This logos was at the same time a positive stimulus to raise the question of
Being in the true sense [im eigentlichen Sinne] and to solve it as far as
Greek possibilities went (277).

Now, as Heidegger notes, Aristotle had already intimated the ‘passion’ that lay

behind this understanding of being. The ancients—this time Aristotle’s ancients,

the “natural philosophers”—failed to grasp the nature of movement because of

“fear that [the sun and the stars and the whole heaven] may sometime stand still”

(Met., 1050 b23). The revolution in thought that Heidegger found in Aristotle—a

finding which in turn revolutionized twentieth-century thought—was his

(Aristotle’s) correction of the (ancient) ancients: in a nutshell, if one understands

becomes more and more incredible. And indeed: so does the idea that correct ‘seeing’ could
‘occur’ independently of particular ways of being disposed to the world and in that sense of
particular ethical dispositions (as Heidegger will stress in a part of the lecture that cannot be
further discussed here. See 209 ff.).

74
the nature of movement correctly, one can say that not-being is in a certain way

(namely when a thing is not in actuality but in potentiality). And, as Heidegger

did, one can take this very far and claim that we only truly understand the world

and who we are by virtue precisely of that which is ‘present in its absentiality’—a

profound insight that can be reduced for purposes of illustration to the Heraclitean

claim that ‘nature loves to hide’ such that we only understand nature—and thus in

a sense ‘all things’: Being itself—in its “play of emergence in self-

concealment.”62

And yet, Heidegger argued, this discovery of Aristotle was limited.

Indeed, Aristotle’s own understanding of theoria as the highest life expressed the

very same fear: “the fear of the suddenly-disappearing-out-of-sight [of the

cosmos] presupposes a clinging to the meaning of Being as always-present. This

sense of Being is thus implicit in every discussion of the ancients … The fear that

the world could disappear is eradicated by making oneself familiar with the

world. What is threatening about Dasein is thereby put aside. Therefore the true

[eigentliche] possibility is the diagoge, that ‘dwelling’ [Aufenthalt] in the pure

contemplation of the world to which nothing can happen; the diagoge is an

hedone” (289-90).63

62
Heidegger, Heraklit (Seminars from 1943/44), GA 55 (1987), 17. Cited in Rosen, The Question
of Being, xiv. Cf. Grundbegriffe, GA18, 311. For the argument that the sole unifying “matter” of
Heidegger’s thought as a whole is contained in his interpretation of Aristotle’s kinesis/dynamis see
Thomas Sheehan, “On Movement and the Destruction of Ontology,” The Monist 64/4 (1981): 536-
537.
63
The reference is here to book X of Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a26.

75
 We note here once again the Destruktion or ‘taking down’ of divine

theoria as the highest possibility of existence. Pure and unmoved contemplation is

not the ground of logos. Rather it is passion. We also note the closeness of

Heidegger’s thinking to a certain Christian theology according to which without

passion the Word of God would remain a dead letter.64 This passion is a form of

wakeful and anxious expectation which, according to Heidegger, remained

foreign and inaccessible to the Greeks: “The Greek does not come at all to see in

this hic et nunc the authentic ‘there’ [of existence]” (223). He sees things

according to the ‘look’ or appearance with which they are most closely

associated. “Insofar as [he] sees the house … [he] sees it not isolated, not in this

and that moment, during this time of the day, under this lighting, inhabited by

such and such…” Rather, he sees, “this being-there [Daseiende] as one sees it in

averageness [Durchschnittlichkeit] as house, as one lives there in everydayness

and [he] sees […it] in the averageness of the present going-about with this being”

(223). Thus a further crucial consequence to be noted here is that the possibility of

64
As Luther put it: “Dialectica docet, Rhetorica movet.” See Klaus Dockhorn, “Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer 1980, 160-
180, 164. Dockhorn traces the genealogy of Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutics back to
Luther’s Affektenlehre as it was taken over by a certain stream of the Enlightenment. “It is now
clear that in the Enlightenment, next to the stream of rationalism, flows an equally strong stream
of irrationalism which flows through the channels of rhetoric.” Dockhorn refers to Hutcheson,
Shaftesbury, Burke, Lessing, Winckelman, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller (among others) who
“believed that sure and reliable knowledge of the human person in his sociality and of his social
affects is truer than all metaphysics” (162). This notion of “social and affective knowledge”—the
sensus communis—in turn is central to the Reformation (162). Indeed, it is what “the reformers
envisioned when they sought to replace scholastic philosophy by rhetoric as the means of
education” (161).

76
attaining the truth becomes a matter of destiny, of achieving the right (passionate)

relation to things.65

These considerations allow us to understand a key point in the statement

cited at the beginning of this section. Heidegger suggests that among the

“characteristic ways of finding-oneself and being-in-the-world, is the possibility

of speaking about things stripped of the appearance with which they are most

closely associated. Thus we are presented with the possibility of coming to a

particular matter-of-fact that, in a certain sense, returns to the way the world is

seen as prefigured by the pathe” (my emphasis, 262-63). Contrary to what we

commonly understand as science—viz. objectivity attained through detached

observation—Heidegger is arguing here that matter-of-factness or objectivity

(Sachlichkeit) depends on seeing the world as it is “prefigured by the pathe.”

Only then can we speak of things as they are “stripped of the[ir] appearance,” that

is, of the ‘look’ or the ‘idea’ (eidos), “with which they are most closely

associated.”

This raises intricate questions, for instance, concerning the relation

between philosophy and belief. Indeed, it would seem that for Heidegger Kant’s

question, ‘What can I know?’ is inseparable from the question, ‘How do I feel

65
“Wissenschaft ist eine Angelegenheit des rechten Verhältnisses zu den Sachen. Das kann nicht
erzwungen werden, sondern ist etwas, das höchstens hinsichtlich der Vorbereitungen von uns
abhängt, im Grunde aber eine Sache des Schicksals ist, inwieweit diejenigen kommen und da sind,
die dieses Grundverhältnis lebending machen” (240). See also 274 (one must be resolved
[entschlossen] to do science).

77
about this?’66 (and how I feel about something, in turn, is closely connected to

what I believe, or how I am ‘resolved’ towards something).67 And if philosophy

cannot transcend Stimmung (or feeling)—let alone opinion—we may legitimately

wonder: What remains of it and of the quest for truth? This is the predicament that

results from Heidegger’s critique of ancient theoria—that it seems to destroy its

possibility altogether. We must recall, however, that Heidegger’s early project

was not to dethrone theory in order to affirm the primacy of praxis or to proclaim

in some other way ‘the end of philosophy’. Rather, it was to provide an

alternative, ‘existential’ genesis of philosophy as it grows out of pre-theoretical

experience.

As SS 1924 makes clear, our pre-theoretical experience of the world is

essentially political. What, then, would it mean to found philosophy anew on a

‘political’ foundation?

Political Philosophy I

First it would mean to make our common (political) being-together the focus of

philosophical attention. Heidegger says nothing else in what is perhaps his best-

known definition of philosophy as “universal phenomenological ontology, taking

66
Cf. Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument, 18.
67
Cf. Sein und Zeit, 136: “Existentially-ontologically there is not the slightest justification for
suppressing the ‘evidence’ of the feeling in which one finds oneself by measuring it against the
demonstrative certainty in theoretical cognition of the pure ‘present on hand’.”

78
its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein…”68 This understanding of

philosophy has been interpreted as a relapse to Platonic metaphysics taking its

departure from a death-driven, solipsistic (hence anti-political) phenomenology of

authentic existence.69 Reading Heidegger from the start, however, results in a

rather different appreciation: “universal phenomenological ontology, taking its

departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein” is the residue of a broader project that

can be described as an anti-Platonic and anti-metaphysical phenomenology of

human existence as political existence.

To see this one must consider the meaning of hermeneutics in Heidegger.

Hermeneutics is not an art or technique of understanding but the “interpretive

laying out [Auslegung] of facticity” or the act of “facticity’s own interpretive

laying out of itself.”70 Philosophy’s taking its departure from the hermeneutic of

Dasein thus means essentially that it begins from the self-interpretation of Dasein.

Now, for reasons that are not clear (at least to me), what hermeneutics was meant

to do in 1927 was done in 1924 by rhetoric. Like hermeneutics, rhetoric’s true or

proper meaning for Heidegger is not that of an art or technique but “the laying out

[Auslegung] of concrete Dasein, the hermeneutics of Dasein itself” (110).

Crucially, however, the “concrete Dasein” of rhetoric is essentially political. This

is clear from Heidegger’s definitions of rhetoric as “the laying out of the Dasein

68
Sein und Zeit, 34.
69
See, e.g., Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, 34.
70
Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, GA, 63 (Frankfurt am Main: V.
Klostermann, [1923] 1988), 14.

79
of man with respect to the fundamental possibility of speaking-with-each-other”

(103) or, as he puts it in Being and Time (referring to Aristotle’s Rhetoric

specifically), as the “first systematic hermeneutics of the everydayness of being-

together.”71

In what sense, then, does ‘rhetoric’ (the laying out of collective existence)

fulfill the function later assigned to ‘hermeneutics’ (the laying out of Dasein’s

individual existence)? It can be said that in 1924 philosophy takes its departure

from rhetoric insofar as rhetoric provides the most fundamental and general

account of the way truth ‘happens’.72 The simplest way of elucidating this is to

say that, whereas in 1927 the disclosure of the totality of beings is primarily the

province of Dasein’s Angst-ridden existence, in 1924 the paths to being-in-truth

are more explicitly manifold. As Heidegger points out in recapitulating the goal of

the 1924 lectures, the “fundamental phenomenon we seek to approximate is

aletheuien,” that is, “a way of being-in-the-world so that one has [the world] there

uncovered, as it is” (119). This is a quest that is conceived in explicitly anti-

theoretical (and in that sense anti-Platonic) terms insofar as the phenomenon to be

approximated is an “alethes that is not disclosed through theorein but instead

71
Cf. also Sein und Zeit, 39 (rhetoric as “the basic ontological interpretation of affective life”);
138 (“die erste systematische Hermeneutik der Alltäglichkeit des Miteinanderseins”).
72
See Robert Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und
Aristoteles, 169. Rhetoric is what best exposes what life is as “a plenum of capacities and actions.”
See Nancy S. Struever, “Alltäglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program,” in Gross and
Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 106.

80
makes visible the true [das Wahre] in the verisimile” (das Wahrscheinliche,

literally: the ‘true shining’; the probable; the apparent).73

How does the laying out of existence undertaken in rhetoric make visible

the true in the apparent? Heidegger’s analysis of the Aristotelian understanding of

opinion (doxa) provides a clue to understanding this. The world, Heidegger

argues, reveals itself to us in and through common opinions. “The koinonia, our

‘being-with-one-another’, is … a sharing of certain doxai” (263). That is, the

world is revealed to us—it is ‘there’ for us as disclosed—insofar as we live in

doxa (149). Indeed, doxa reveals ‘authentic’ being-with-one-another in the world.

Heidegger argues that this is what Plato missed insofar as he could not yet see in

the phenomenon of doxa an orientation to truth. Being directed towards truth is

constitutive of doxa and that is why the possibility of falsity (pseudos) also

belongs to it.74 Doxa, then, is not what we ordinarily mean by opinion, specially

when we talk of ‘considered opinion’. For it is not the result of deliberation, nor is

it part of a process of searching for the truth (136). It is rather to already stand for

something; to say ‘yes’ to something non-reflectively (136-37). Doxa is a “going-

along with how the world shows itself”; it expresses “trust in its proximate

aspect” (150). Such is for instance the doxa of Thales “that the proper arche of

Being is ‘water’” (150). As a way of taking a stance for something, the who

behind a doxa is essential to it. Whereas who I am does not contribute to the truth
73
On Aristotle’s capacity to see what Plato did not see, viz., the disclosive capacity of non-
theoretical speech consider 140, 137, as well as Heidegger’s statements the following semester in
Plato’s Sophist, 138, 234.
74
137 (Heidegger refers to Nicomachean Ethics, 1142b11). See also 140.

81
of a valid statement, it is decisive for a doxa. This is so because the matter at hand

cannot speak for itself; it is concealed; I merely have a view of it (eine Ansicht).

In doxa, however, it is not only the thing itself that speaks for itself (insofar as it

has been uncovered) but the person or persons who do this (150).

Rhetoric as the hermeneutics of our everyday living together thus points to

the way the true is made visible in political existence in the following ways. What

is considered true is not (at least not primarily) the result of deliberation among

considered opinions aimed at valid propositions, but neither is it a matter of

merely expressing received opinions. Instead the true is what is made visible in

engaged (passionate/affirmative) speech, without which our common existence

would be ruled by apathy and unexamined belief.75 As a passionate affirmation of

belief that is nonetheless open to the possibility that the matter could also be

otherwise, doxa is the grounds of critical—we could say, agonistic—engagement.

“Doxa is the way in which the world of being-together is there [for us]. Through it

is brought into being-together the possibility of a being-against-one-another”

(138). Crucially, however, and in contrast to the spirit that dominates sophistic

speech, the ethical disposition of the speaker is decisive for the persuasiveness of

doxa. Who I am is essential to the authoritativeness of my position. Here

Heidegger’s norm seems to be Aristotle’s aletheutikos (or truthful man). Indeed,

whereas sophistic is devoted to absolute, definite conviction (115), rhetorical

speech in the Aristotelian sense remains open to all the possibilities of

75
Gross, “Introduction,” 31.

82
persuasion—while nevertheless passionately standing for something. This median

position embodied by the aletheutikos is characterized by Heidegger as a “giving

oneself as one is and as one thinks” (264).76 Ethics and politics thus belong

together (127).

This becomes clear in Heidegger’s discussion of the Aristotelian meaning

of political science. The techne that makes the agathon of human being as being-

together (Miteinandersein) expressly apparent is “the techne, the methodos, that is

related to being as zoon politikon.” This is the politike. Politike is a “knowing

oneself about in the being of man that is determined as being-together” (68). To

understand the good for man (anthropinon agathon) we must understand the

fundamental determination of man as political, and concretely his disposition (or

bearing) [sichhalten] in the world; this disposition is his ethos. Thus “politics

conceived as knowledge [or knowing about: Auskenntnis] concerning the being of

man in his authenticity [eigentlichkeit] … is ethics. Ethics as a part of politics is a

misunderstanding. Aristotle says explicitly: … “this investigation … is an

investigation that moves towards developing [ausbilden] the knowledge

76
Cf., however, 147 (ethics seems to be at stake only in choice [proairesis] leading to action rather
than in the previous deliberative stage). For a critique of Heidegger along these lines see Smith,
“The Uses and Abuses of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: The Lecture
Course, Summer, 1924,” in Babette E. Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought. For an
analysis more favorable to Heidegger in this regard see Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,”
in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles.

83
[Auskenntnis] concerning the Being of man in his authenticity” (68-69).77 In other

words, politics is an ethics that aims at the good for man.

What is that good? Aristotle does not determine the content of the agathon

(73), but rather suggests that it must be found by beginning “with the known,” and

specifically with what is “known to us” (NE, 1095b2). Aristotle characterizes his

method as “an investigation of the logoi” and proposes that “[i]t is not

unreasonable that men should derive their concept of the good and of happiness

from the lives which they lead...” (NE, 1095b13ff.). This means that he lets

“Dasein speak about itself,” specifically about the right bios or “life disposition”

(Lebenshaltung) or “way of life” (Lebensweg) (74). Beyond that, Aristotle

suggests that the good for humans is happiness resulting from actions that can

most properly be said to be ends in themselves (78; NE, 1098 b21). The good is a

telos or more exactly a teleion (79; NE, 1097a33). Yet, contrary to the common

understanding of an Aristotelian political science, the ends of human life or of the

political community are not a matter of the realization of “man-as-he-could-be-if-

he-realized-his-essential-nature.”78 Rather, according to Heidegger, the meaning

of telos in Aristotle is simply the “extreme” or the “limit” that beings may reach

when they exhaust their possibilities (such that for example a thief and a

physician may be equally ‘good’ in realizing their possibilities (82)).

77
This is Heidegger’s translation of NE, 1094 b11: “our investigation is in a sense the study of
politics.” (Note Heidegger’s identification of political life with authenticity.)
78
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1984), 52.

84
 Political Philosophy II

There is a second sense in which Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in this

lecture can be said to be essentially political. The central problem of the lecture,

as we have seen, is to investigate the ground or soil from which science (or

Wissenschaft or the theoretical disposition generally) developed. For this

Aristotle’s rhetoric—the original hermeneutics of everyday living together which

is also a compendium of early Greek beliefs (45)—serves as a guide (Leitfaden).

Thus conceived, rhetoric lays out or lays bare the way the common world is

displayed in a pre-theoretical way through speech (139). It makes manifest, in

other words, one way in which truth (conceived as the disclosure of being)

‘happens’. And yet, as the example of Thales suggests—that is, of the thinker who

developed the first theoretical ontology out of the doxa that being is water—the

disclosing capacity of pre-theoretical speech for Heidegger is broader. Indeed,

human beings hold opinions concerning human things, such as right or wrong,

just and unjust, expedient or inexpedient, but also concerning ‘all things’. And

any theoretical proposition concerning ‘all things’ (or the nature of being

generally) is ultimately an expression of the way being appears to our finite,

mortal, and embodied existence—or, in other words, it is ultimately an expression

of doxa.79

79
Cf. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), 23: “Even Aristotelian truth in science may not be…altogether
independent of human theories and conceptions.”

85
 Heidegger’s quest in SS 1924 can be said to be for that way of being-in-

the-world (with its attendant doxai) from which science—most generally

conceived as the discourse of reason (logos)—developed. More specifically, the

goal is to understand how scientific conceptuality grew out of ordinary speech;

how this was at all possible as a unique occurrence in human history; and what

are the limitations of that particular understanding of science that nevertheless—

Heidegger would argue—laid the foundations for the way we think even today

(for instance, when we speak of the ‘nature’ of the human being, or of truth as

opposed to opinion, or of being and time as opposites).80

One of the most important questions that arises in this connection

concerns the type of speech that, according to Heidegger, serves as the best guide

for understanding the emergence of classical philosophy. In the previous chapter

we referred to Socrates as the first thinker to direct the wonder of philosophy to

human affairs in order precisely to find in human opinions (“logoi”)—

particularly, in political discussions concerning right and wrong, just and unjust,

noble and base—the key to understanding “the truth of things” (Phaedo, 99 e3).

80
“It is perhaps no exaggeration to state that something like three-quarters of all existing scientific
and philosophic terminology is either determined by Aristotle’s Latinized vocabulary or can be
traced back to it.” Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in R. Williamson and E. Zuckermann
(eds.), The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 179.
This lecture of Klein’s can be read as a commentary (and response) to SS 1924. The lecture in fact
begins by invoking the way Heidegger opened the course: “Many, many years ago, I attended a
series of lectures on Aristotle’s philosophy. The lecturer began his exposition as follows: ‘As
regards Aristotle himself, as regards the circumstances and the course of his life, suffice it to say
Aristotle was born, spent his life in philosophizing, and died” (171). This statement—and at least
the theme of the lecture—was well-known to Arendt: “Heidegger himself—according to a well-
documented anecdote—once expressed this becoming-one [of passion and thinking] in one
succinct sentence, when, at the beginning of a lecture on Aristotle … he said: ‘Aristotle was born,
worked, and died’.” Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Ludz (ed.), Hannah Arendt and
Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, 153-54.

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Socrates is thus famously said to have undertaken a ‘turn’ from ‘physiology’ or

‘natural science’ to the investigation of “human affairs.”81 Most commentators

then suggest that this way of approaching ‘all things’ through ‘human things’ was

abandoned by Aristotle insofar as he began to separate ‘ethics’ from

‘metaphysics’.82 By considering Heidegger’s position on this question we shall be

able to specify more clearly the sense in which his approach to philosophy may be

said to be political.

Heidegger’s answer is ambiguous. On the one hand he clearly follows the

approach that we have characterized as Socratic. This insofar as he holds that an

adequate account of a thing—i.e., one that makes it appear in its true light—must

begin from the way that thing is spoken about (the logos) which “is very often

identical with [its] eidos [or ‘look’ or ‘shape’]” (212).83 This holds true for both

81
Xenophon, Memorabilia, I 1, 11 and I 1, 16; see also I.1, 9; 12-13; 15-16. Cf. Apology, 26 b,
Republic, vii 517d. Phaedrus, 229 e5ff.
82
Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, 234 (see also 19,
56). Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 312; Franco Volpi,
“The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelianism,” in Action and
Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, 6. Joachim Ritter,
“‘Politik’ und ‘Ethik’ in der praktischen Philosophie des Aristoteles,” in Metaphysik und Politik.
Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 106-132, especially, 124-125.
Stuart Umphrey, “Why Politike Philosophia,” 435, 441; Richard Bodéüs, The Political
Dimensions of Aristotle's Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 77-81. Günther Bien, “Das
Theorie-Praxis Problem und die politische Philosophie bei Plato und Aristoteles,” 313. See also
Richard McKeon, introduction to The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House,
1941), xxvi.
83
204: “Der erste logos gibt das eigentliche eidos her, das, was er eigentlich ist”; 205: “Derjenige
ist der rechte physikos, der das Haus so anspricht, dass er es anspricht auf das Aussehen…” (both
of these statements are in reference to Aristotle’s De Anima, 403 b2); 207: “Wichtig ist, dass
Aristoteles die Grundbestimmung eines Lebenden nicht gewinnt aus physiologischen
Betrachtungen”; 212: “Die Frage, woraus das Seiende sich bestimmt, die Frage, in welcher
Hinsicht das Seiende zuerst zu nehmen ist, wird entschieden durch den Rückgang auf den
logos”… “logos sehr oft identisch mit eidos” (these statements are in reference to Parts of

87
‘human things’ and ‘material things’—indeed, Heidegger seeks to overcome this

division underlying the distinction between ‘human sciences’ and ‘natural

sciences’. Thus for instance, to the question concerning the proper account of a

house—whether it is ‘physical’ (e.g., ‘stones, bricks, and timber’) or ‘humanistic’

(e.g., ‘a shelter against destruction by wind, rain, and heat’) Heidegger, following

Aristotle, answers as follows. “He is the true physikos [providing a true account of

the house] that speaks to the look of the house” in a way that transcends the

materialistic and humanistic explanations: “A house appears in wood, stone and

brick, so as to produce the necessary protection and shelter; it is a ‘being-built’

carried out in light of a shelter being there” (205).84 The same principle holds for

human (or other living) things. As Heidegger notes, “what is important is that

Aristotle does not arrive at the fundamental determination of a living thing out of

physiological observations. The eidos of the pathe is a way of comporting oneself

vis-à-vis other human beings, a being-in-the-world” (207). Thus for instance the

psycho-somatic affectation of fear can only be brought to light on consideration of

the fact that “in the absence of any external cause of terror we find ourselves

Animals, 639 b14); 228: “Es kommt darauf an zu zeigen, dass, wenn über die Natur geforscht
wird, sie primär nach ihrem Aussehen befragt werden muss.”
It is important to note that in this lecture Heidegger emphasizes the difference between
Aristotle’s understanding of eidos and idea and Plato’s understanding: “Idea bespeaks nothing
else than ‘look’ [Aussehen] (front against Plato)” (229). Cf. Parts of Animals, 640 b28. On the
meaning of eidos see also 33; and Introduction to Phenomenological Research: “eidos is the look,
that is to say, for the Greeks, a manner of distinguishing itself equivalent to ‘so it is’. What is
spoken as such is also characteristically designated as logos and for Aristotle logos and eidos can
be substituted for one another. Eidos is the existing entity in the way it looks. In German we say
‘that is how you look’ [so siehst Du aus] in the sense of ‘that is who you are’ [so bist Du]” (18).
84
The references are to Aristotle, De Anima, 403 b4 sqq.

88
experiencing the feelings of a man in terror.”85 (No physical or physiological but

only a phenomenological explanation can see this.)

It would seem, then, that the way a thing appears to us and the way it is

spoken about are sufficient grounds to at least start an investigation, if not indeed

to provide its fundamental principles. This, at any rate, was Aristotle’s way of

proceeding in what were arguably his most important investigations, both

‘physical’ (or ‘metaphysical’) and ‘ethical/political.’86 Thus, to the fundamental

question of the Physics concerning what is to count as a being of nature, Aristotle

responds: that which anyone can see, viz., that to be in nature is to be in motion.

(The question then becomes, what is motion or kinesis?)87 The same applies for

the most fundamental of principles—the principle of non-contradiction: no other

proof is necessary (or exists) beyond the fact that this is the way people behave

(viz., we are not indifferent between ‘a’ and ‘not a’, thus we do not walk straight

into a well but around it).88 Most importantly, however, the culminating goal of

every human endeavor or the highest human finality is the good—and this is

85
De Anima, 403 a 23 sq.
86
Cf. Topics 101a37-b4; Posterior Analytics, 71a1-2, 71b27-33; 72b19-25: “knowledge of
immediate premises is indemonstrable.” Metaphysics 984 a18 sqq. (metaphysics as “the science of
wisdom” is “necessitated and guided by…the things themselves (auto to pragma (984a18) or
phenomena (986b31).” Cited in Baracchi, Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy, 37. See also
Aristotle, Met. 1074 b1-14 (it has been “divinely spoken” that the “first substances are gods”);
1072 a29 (the good that moves (the god, the best) “we desire because it seems, rather than it seems
because we desire”).
87
“We…must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them,
in motion—which is indeed made plain by induction” (Physics, 185 a14-16). See Heidegger,
Grundbegriffe, 225.
88
Metaphysics, 1008 b17-18. (See also 1006 a1-12.)

89
because, we could say in Socratic terms, “[i]t is not said of the good things, as it is

of the beautiful and the just things, that they are so only by convention.”89

And yet Heidegger is reluctant to follow Aristotle up to the point in which

his (that is, Aristotle’s) fidelity to Socrates’ concern with the good becomes

obvious. Heidegger follows Aristotle and—in a rare explicit reference—Socrates

this far: there must be a correspondence between ethos (how one bears oneself in

life) and logos (in the general sense of what one talks or philosophizes about).90

Heidegger expresses this concordance in his reading of the Aristotelian statement

according to which “acts are called just and self-controlled when they are the kind

of acts which a just or self-controlled man would perform; but the just and self-

controlled man is not he who performs these acts, but he who also performs them

89
Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18. See Plato, Republic, 505 d. For Aristotle’s argument that
the highest human finality is the good see Nic. Ethics 1094 a3 (“the good has been beautifully
declared to be that at which all things aim.”); Metaphysics 982 b4ff. (knowing the good is not only
the task of ethical-political science but of first philosophy; concretely, the “highest good in nature”
is understood as “that for the sake of which each thing must be done.”) See also Met. 994 b9-17
(those who introduce an infinite regress are “eliminating the good”). This way of reading Aristotle
which stresses the continuity between the Stagirite and his master—and, more specifically, his
master’s master—is perhaps most closely associated with the work of Gadamer. See his The Idea
of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), specially 128: “as the creator of physics, Aristotle … fulfils the demand
made by Plato’s Socrates, that is, that we understand the world starting with the experience of the
good.” That Aristotle’s work not only is continuous in the most fundamental respects with the
work of Plato but seeks to complete Socrates’ ‘program’ was a particularly innovative claim to
make in the 1920s and 30s when Gadamer, Klein, and Strauss began to respond to Heidegger.
Most philosophical and philological authorities then emphasized the break between Plato and
Aristotle (e.g., Jaeger, Natorp and Cohen). Gadamer’s reading remains a minority position, and yet
it must be recalled that it receives powerful (almost unanimous) support from the thought of
antiquity. As Carol Poster notes “In the 15,000 extant pages of the Greek Commentaries on
Aristotle, the fundamental unity of Plato and Aristotle is almost universally acknowledged.” Carol
Poster, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric Against Rhetoric: Unitarian Reading and Esoteric Hermeneutics,”
American Journal of Philology 118 (1997), 219-249, 221.
90
For the correspondence between ethos and logos in Plato’s Socrates see e.g., Laws 653a-c;
Republic, 619c-d.

90
in the way just and self-controlled men do” (NE 1105b5-8). This, Heidegger says,

is “a strike [Hieb] against the Sophists and the majority of men who believe that

one can bring about anything for ethical action through talk about [Unterhalten

über] ethical conflicts or through moralizing” (184). Aristotle goes on to say

along similar lines that “without performing […good acts] nobody would even be

on the way to becoming good. Yet most men do not perform such acts, but by

taking refuge in argument [logon91] they think that they are engaged in philosophy

and that they will become good in this way” (1105b12 sqq.). This statement has

been read as a critique of Socrates, who in the Phaedo refers to his turn to the

human things in exactly those terms, viz., as a “taking refuge in logoi” (Phaedo

99e).92 Heidegger does not see it this way. Rather he reads Aristotle as defending

“the Socratic method” insofar as Aristotle stands for a “sharp opposition

[Gegenüberstellung] between ethical discourse [des legein über ethische

Probleme] and proper philosophizing” (184). This holds true, says Heidegger,

provided that we assume that Aristotle understood Socrates correctly, “and one

could hardly dispute this” [und das wird man ihm wohl nicht bestreiten können]

(184).93

91
Heidegger translates: Geschwätz (chatter) (184).
92
This critique would be directed against the Socratic claim that virtue is knowledge and the
overestimation of the action-guiding potential of knowledge it implies. Burger, Aristotle’s
Dialogue with Socrates, 50.
93
For a different reading, see Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,”
431 (Gonzales points to Heidegger’s translation of logos as ‘chatter’ (Geschwätz) and to his
insistence “both that the Socratic method is the target here and that Aristotle has correctly
understood Socrates.”)

91
 Heidegger claims, then, that understanding Socrates correctly means to set

apart ethical discourse from proper philosophizing—while still being concerned

in a fundamental way with the question of man’s proper ethos. In other words,

Heidegger follows Aristotle as long as his ethical-political philosophizing can be

understood as arising from a phenomenology of political existence that does not

see the good as the primary intention of every human pursuit. Heidegger makes

this clear in a later statement in the lecture which refers specifically to the

Socratic turn to the study of political affairs.

Socrates advanced the task of treating the things themselves, and yet
during this period the zetein peri physeos [inquiry into nature] slackened.
As people turned to the politike, the physei onta [natural beings] receded
into the background. This turn was not the result of a simple omission
[Versäumnis], as if the human sciences were simply studied more than the
natural sciences. Rather it was a fundamental oversight: The concepts of
Being-in-the-polis also have their foundation in the concepts of nature.
Aristotle saw this and shifted the weight of his work initially to the
investigation of physis as Being. He thereby established the foundations
for an investigation of Being as such (240-241; my emphasis).94

94
Heidegger’s commentary refers to Parts of Animals 642 a 28 sqq.

92
 Concluding remarks

In this chapter I analyzed two lectures that shed light on Heidegger as a political

philosopher. These lectures left indelible marks on a number of thinkers who

developed approaches to practical or political philosophy, such as Gadamer,

Marcuse, Arendt, and Strauss, as well as on scholars of the classics—among

them, notably, on Jacob Klein, who first convinced Strauss of the possibility of a

return to ancient philosophy and whose work has had a similarly important impact

in America.

The first lecture of the summer of 1922 famously convinced Strauss that

Heidegger was the most important thinker of his time. Thus, according to a well-

documented anecdote, returning from one of Heidegger’s lectures he visited Franz

Rosenzweig and said to him that “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber … was an

orphan child.”95 Back home in Marburg, he made similar claims to Gadamer and

Paul Natorp.96 Soon thereafter, Natorp chose Heidegger as Nicolai Hartman’s

successor in Marburg; Gadamer became his disciple; and Rosenzweig became

95
Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” 461.
96
For Gadamer’s recollection see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’
Jugendschrift,” in Günther Neumann (ed.), Martin Heidegger. Phänomenologische
Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 83.

93
convinced that he and Heidegger were heralds of a ‘New Thinking’ that would

revolutionize all of western philosophy.97

The second lecture of the summer of 1924 constituted the peak of Heidegger’s

interpretation of Aristotle. As his final attempt to produce a book on the Stagirite,

it is his most thorough analysis of Aristotelian philosophy. It is also unique in

Heidegger’s oeuvre as his only sustained engagement with Aristotle’s practical

philosophy (i.e., his Politics, Ethics, and Rhetoric). Never again, it seems, would

Heidegger agree with a Socratic-Platonic thinker to such an extent as to claim that

“it is worth nothing to say something new; it is only worth saying that which the

ancients already knew.” Like SS 1922, SS 1924 acquired quasi-mythical status

among Heidegger’s students (including Arendt and Strauss) as the occasion in

which Heidegger not only developed an “ontology of the passions”98 but

expressed “in one succinct sentence” the “becoming-one [of passion and

thinking],” when “at the beginning of a lecture on Aristotle ... he said: ‘Aristotle

was born, worked, and died’.”99

Despite their importance, these lectures have played a very minor role in

shaping our understanding of Heidegger. This is probably the case because the

lectures remained unpublished until recently, but it is also due to the habit of
97
See Franz Rosenzweig, “Transposed Fronts,” in Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (eds.),
Franz Rosenzweig. Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 146-
152.
98
See S. Rosen, “Phronesis Or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger,” in Riccardo Pozzo (ed.), The
Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy, 11.
99
H. Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Ludz (ed.), Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger:
Letters 1925-1975, 153-54. J. Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in R. Williamson and E.
Zuckermann (eds.), The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein, 171.

94
reading Heidegger’s work in the light of Being and Time, and—when it comes to

understanding his politics—in light of his 1933 Rectoral Address.

This approach has been misleading in two ways. First, it has led to the view

that Heidegger’s work is at its core affected by a “Platonic bias”—a bias which in

turn allegedly affects Strauss and against which Arendt allegedly responds. The

thesis of a Platonic bias in Heidegger’s thought may be true as a psychological

insight pointing to the philosopher’s déformation professionelle, and it may even

be the case that in the late 1920s (and later) Heidegger resorted to Plato to address

the crisis of the time.100 But there was nothing Platonic whatsoever in Heidegger’s

lectures up to (at least) 1924. Indeed, perhaps the most recurring theme in the

early lectures from 1921 to 1924 is the critique of philosophical theoria, and the

quest for a way of thinking that grows out of—and never quite transcends—pre-

theoretical experience.101 All of Western thought from Plato to Husserl—with the

partial exception of Aristotle—Heidegger argued, is deficient precisely insofar as

it has lost its rootedness in the ‘soil’ of pre-theoretical experience. Moreover, a

Platonic approach was anathema to someone who ‘arrived on the path of thought’

thanks to his reading of such thinkers as Luther or Augustine or Kierkegaard, and

100
Compare the similar language of Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” with, for instance,
Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Republic in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, vol.
1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 166.
101
Granted that this may be a mistaken characterization of what is truly Platonic, it is nevertheless
the way the term is typically understood—viz., as the philosophy of transcendence par excellence,
from the bodily, the sensuous, the manifold and hence also from the life of the people.

95
who was deeply influenced by the revival of the rhetorical tradition undertaken by

the Historical School—specially by Dilthey.102

The second reason why beginning from Being and Time is misleading is

simple: like Gadamer and Klein, Strauss and Arendt made it clear that what was

most important about Heidegger was not his philosophy—“whose very existence

may be put into question”103 —but his recovery of classical thought. Hence

Strauss would claim that “Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle was an

achievement with which I cannot compare any other intellectual phenomenon

which has emerged in Germany after the war.”104 The peak of Heidegger’s

interpretation of Aristotle—and, generally, of his recovery of Socratic-Platonic

thought—occurred in 1922-1924/5 and not later.

Anticipating the response of Arendt and Strauss (and also of Gadamer), I

have argued that what is unique in these lectures is Heidegger’s un-self-conscious

Socratism. Heidegger brought philosophy ‘down from the heavens to the people

in the city’. That is, he redirected the philosophical quest from theory aimed at

knowledge that is universal, teachable and binding—e.g., the search for a

transcendental realm of validity or for ‘worldviews’ that guide our willing and

102
It must also be taken into account in this connection that (very much in opposition to
Heidegger), Plato (also contrary to Aristotle) only refers to pathos and pathema when he wants to
underline the pathological (in the sense of sickly) nature of the affects of the soul. See Giulia
Sissa, “Pathos,” art. in Barbara Cassin (ed)., Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 902.
103
Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 151.
104
Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and
the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115-139, here
134-135.

96
acting in neo-Kantianism, or for a science that will make possible a life “regulated

by pure rational norms” in Husserl—to the “self-illumination of life,” or to letting

life speak “for itself on the basis of its very own factical possibilities.” More

specifically, I suggested that Heidegger was a Socratic insofar as he was an anti-

scholastic Aristotelian who took Aristotle’s most important works to be those that

“preserved the basis of Socrates’ and Plato’s inquiry [in] the world of common

sense,”105 notably the Physics and the Rhetoric. Heidegger was a German

Sokrates in that the only ‘Being’ that interested him was the Being that Dasein

always already somehow grasps. In other words, for him, as for Socrates it seems,

“the question of being is in itself, correctly understood, the question of man.”106

I referred to two possible conceptions of Socratic political philosophy. The

first conception provides a phenomenology of authentic existence—or, literally,

of truthful existence (assuming that Heidegger’s model is Aristotle’s

aletheutikos)—in and through political life. For the Greeks “man is truly man

[Mensch] insofar as he lives in the polis.”107 This is not something that simply

happens to us (viz., that we depend on others and are therefore ‘political’), but is

rather an ontological condition insofar as our “being-in-the-world” is “determined

in its grounds by speech” “in the sense of speaking-with-one-another by way of a

105
Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” trans. Robert
Bartlett, Interpretation, Vol. 18, No. 1, Fall 1990, 7.
106
Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, GA 26 (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, [1928] 1990), 20-21.
107
Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 56.

97
sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-with.”108 Such a phenomenology, however,

is not merely descriptive. Rather it leads to a particular understanding of

philosophy. In this understanding the world is there for us as a common world

which opens up according to particular ways of speaking, which in turn express

ways of being attuned to the world. Truth is therefore not primordially disclosed

through true or false assertions (pace Aristotle), and neither is it approximated by

(rationally) considered opinions. Instead it is contained in doxai, that is, in

‘opinions’ or—perhaps better rendered—in ‘beliefs’ that express the way the

world ‘seems to me’, and thus it is also contained in particular (ethical)

dispositions or ways of bearing oneself in the world. (Any scientific proposition,

Heidegger would insist, is in the last instance an expression of a more primordial

attunement to the world.)

This first conception of neo-Socratic thought directs the attention of

philosophy to political life in various ways. Foremost among them is the fact that

political life—where we share speeches (doxai or logoi)—becomes the site in

which the disclosure of beings—including who we are—occurs. Ethics becomes

unthinkable apart from politics thus conceived both insofar as ethics bespeaks a

way of bearing oneself vis-à-vis others—of standing for the way the world

‘appears to me’ while being open to the fact that things could also be otherwise—

and insofar as it bespeaks a way of dwelling in the world. Indeed from a

Heideggerian perspective our humanity seems to depend completely on a proper

108
Ibid., 47.

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dwelling—what he calls Bodenständigkeit—that makes it possible for us to

“speak with the world,” meaning to ‘save the phenomena’ or ‘to make things

appear in their true light’.109 Political life also acquires normative significance

insofar as the way we speak about something—particularly when what is at stake

is who we are and when that ‘who’ is taken seriously (meaning that our opinions

are ‘reputable’)—would seem to be sufficient for establishing principles for

action. All of this makes of the political sphere a revolutionary sphere in the

literal sense—namely, insofar as it is the site where beings are disclosed, where

our humanity (through a proper dwelling) is at stake, and where new principles

are discovered.

The second meaning of Heideggerian neo-Socratism would be this. The

political sphere acquires philosophical significance not because in it we can make

visible the true in what is most apparent—or what shines most—but because

political opinions (in the sense of public, shared opinions) are the starting point of

any investigation into being qua being. The premise must again be made explicit

as it is foreign to our way of thinking. It is that “our speech, even our unguarded

colloquial way of speaking, may reveal to the attentive listener the hidden

articulations of the language of things.”110 The ‘proof’ must likewise be

109
At a minimum, such a dwelling would require a mother tongue. Heidegger would later refer to
poetry, custom, history, and state—among other things pertaining to a Völkish existence.
Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The
Heidegger Controversy, 33.
110
Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” 177. To explain how this comes about—and whether this
remains since Plato the best account of the way being and thinking are connected—would amount
to explaining Plato’s ‘theory’ of the ideas or forms, and proving that it is superior to (for instance)

99
repeated—namely the revelatory capacity of Aristotelian fundamental concepts—

such as energeia, kinesis, ousia, telos, dunamis, pathos, arche—that have made it

possible for us to know what we are doing.111 And yet, it is here that Heidegger’s

approach can no longer be considered neo-Socratic in our sense, for it is not clear

that the type of speech that most primordially refers to ‘the things themselves’ is

public speech, and that such speech expresses (in the last instance) an orientation

to the good. Hence Heidegger’s claim that “[t]he concepts of Being-in-the-polis

also have their foundation in the concepts of nature” and his claim that Socrates’

turn to the politike “was a fundamental oversight.” Perhaps, indeed, it was not

Socrates but the pre-Socratic poet-philosophers of nature that discovered the way

to speak to the essence of things. This would be the greatest challenge to Socratic

political philosophy.

Kant’s understanding of the mediation between being and thinking. It hardly needs to be said that
that is beyond the scope of this work (and of my competence). The strongest case I know of for
the continuing validity and superiority of Platonism (over Kantianism, post-modernism or
contemporary science) has been made by Stanley Rosen, particularly in The Question of Being,
esp. 46-95. Rosen’s defense of Platonism is an attempt to reverse Heidegger’s thesis that the
Platonic idea is the reification of Being. As the appendix of the book begins to show, however,
Rosen would (in my view) have been forced to qualify his critique of Heidegger had he studied the
1924 lecture analyzed in this chapter. For in SS 1924 Heidegger makes precisely Rosen’s case that
the idea (understood as the ‘look’ of a thing, which is “very often identical” with the way a thing
is spoken about) is “the accessibility of Being.” Compare note 86 above and Rosen, The Question,
79; see also the Appendix, 317-322 where Rosen admits that “Heidegger, despite the criticism I
have recorded, is much closer to the Platonic text in 1924 [in the lecture on the Sophist of
1924/25] than he was ever to be again” (321). Had he been more attentive to the continuity
between Plato and Aristotle, I would argue, Heidegger would have seen that the Aristotelian
account of the ‘ideas’ he favors in 1924 is the Socratic-Platonic account he would later denounce
as metaphysics.
111
To the extent that we understand these concepts, or perhaps to the extent that we act humanely?

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 CHAPTER TWO

Descending the Magic Mountain to Begin a Socratic Ascent:

Leo Strauss in Weimar

One year after the end of the Second World War a Jewish-German émigré who

had arrived in America at the beginning of the war prophesied the success of his

teaching with a strange mixture of hopelessness and confidence. In one of his first

writings on the subject of ‘political philosophy’, “On a New Interpretation of

Plato’s Political Philosophy,” a critique of John Wild’s Plato’s Theory of Man,1

Leo Strauss claimed that “It is safe to predict that the movement which [Wild’s]

book may be said to launch in this country will become increasingly influential

and weighty as the years go by.”2 Upon reading Strauss’s text, his friend Karl

Löwith characterized it as “a true masterpiece,” except for one sentence which “I

would have left out.” Referring to Strauss’s prediction, Löwith claimed that,

“That is very un-safe [to predict], for how could Mr. Wild ever begin a movement

and how can you yourself believe that in the USA of all places the return to

antiquity could become a serious striving or a fashion?”3

1
John Wild, Plato’s Theory of Man: An Introduction to the Realistic Philosophy of Culture
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1946).
2
Leo Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13, no.
3, September, 1946, 326.
3
See Löwith’s letter to Strauss of August 14, 1946, in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3:
Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und Zugehörige Schriften – Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart:
Metzler Verlag, 2001), 659. (Hereafter, GS.)

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 At that time, in 1946, Strauss was a lecturer at the New School for Social

Research who found “life here in this land upsettingly difficult for people like

me,” who had to “fight for the simplest working conditions,” and who considered

sending his writings to Switzerland due to the difficulty of finding a publisher in

America. He nevertheless disagreed with Löwith: “Assume however for a minute

that I knew of 2 or 3 people concerned with the restoration of classical philosophy

whose work will appear within the next 10 years and who understand something

about the matter. Then the thesis which Wild accidentally supports for the first

time publicly in America [viz., that a return to classical philosophy is possible]

would acquire a greater influence and greater weight than it has at the moment.”4

Strauss, of course, was one of those 2 or 3 people whose reinterpretation

of classical philosophy would appear in the next 10 years. Four years later, in

1949, he was appointed Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of

Chicago. Little more than a decade after that, he had managed to divide American

political theory into ‘Straussian’ and ‘Wolinian’ camps.5 By 1996—twenty-three

years after his death in 1973—he had become, according to Time magazine, “one

of the most influential men in American politics.”6

4
Strauss to Löwith, August 15, 1946, in GS3, 660-61.
5
See Benjamin R. Barber, “The Politics of Political Science: ‘Value-Free’ Theory and the Wolin-
Strauss Dust-Up of 1963,” The American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (Nov., 2006).
6
“Perhaps one of the most influential men in American politics is the late Leo Strauss, the German
émigré political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s. His
distrust of moral relativism, his deep skepticism about the benefits of the Enlightenment and his
concern that the unchecked authority of reason would sabotage the cultural traditions that
sustained civilization were absorbed by a generation of students and disciples. Some of them,
including Irving Kristol and William Bennett, eventually became leading neoconservatives, the

102
 Strauss rose to prominence by creating a school of ‘political

philosophy’7—a term which he did more than anyone to popularize by writing

more than a dozen books or articles bearing the term in their title.8 That school

has since had a deep public impact especially in the United States, both as a way

of doing philosophy (or human sciences generally) and as a way of doing politics.

As a way of doing philosophy, Strauss’s ideas led to the formation of schools of

thought in several fields of study—from the study of the classics (Seth Benardete,

Stanley Rosen, Christopher Bruell, Allan Bloom); to medieval philosophy

group that brought to American conservatism a measure of the intellectual legitimacy it had lacked
for decades. Kristol’s son William, the Weekly Standard editor and publisher and G.O.P.
strategist, is another self-described Straussian.” Richard Lacayo and Ratu Kamlani, “You’ve Read
about Who’s Influential, but Who has the Power?” Time 147, no. 25 (06/17, 1996): 80.
7
According to Heinrich Meier, the editor of Strauss’s Collected Writings and the leading
European interpreter of Strauss’s work, the founding of a school upon his appointment at the
University of Chicago in 1949 was “the sole political act of consequence that Strauss brought
himself to launch.” Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), xvii-xx. Strauss’s efforts to found a school are documented in his
correspondence. Newly arrived at the University of Chicago, Strauss reports on the situation to his
friend Jacob Klein as follows: “One could say much about the situation here. The U of Ch would
be a great opportunity, if it were not at the same time just as great an encumbrance…The power of
[Robert Maynard] Hutchins shows itself always in statu evanescendi: he appoints, and from that
moment on the appointee does what he wants, not what Hutchins wants. Thus one cannot change
anything through ‘politics’, but only in the class rooms. There more and more I must develop a
‘political theory’, with which I appear to have success among the students (≠ with myself). I must
read more contemporary literature as is good and agreeable to me, and I had to leave completely
behind all the interesting things that I had begun (Rousseau and Lucretius above all).” (See GS3,
597.)
8
Strauss used the term ‘political philosophy’ in the title of both his first and his last books
published in English—Hobbes’ Political Philosophy (1936) and Studies in Platonic Political
Philosophy (posthumously published in 1983)—in nine essays written between 1945 and 1971, as
well as in the collection of essays, What is Political Philosophy? (1959). (Strauss wrote the
following essays on ‘political philosophy’: “On Classical Political Philosophy” (1945), “On a New
Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy” (1946), “Political Philosophy and History”
(1949),“On the Spirit of Hobbes’ Political Philosophy” (1950), “On the Basis of Hobbes’s
Political Philosophy” (1954), “What is Political Philosophy?” (1964), “The Liberalism of
Classical Political Philosophy” (1959), “The Crisis of Political Philosophy” (1964), and
“Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” (1969).) See Meier, The Theological-
Political Problem, xii.

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(Mushin Mahdi, Rémi Brague, Ralph Lerner); to early modern political thought

(Pierre Manent, Victor Gourevitch), German idealism (Richard L. Velkley,

Steven B. Smith), and American politics (Walter Berns, Martin Diamond, Harry

Jaffa).9 As a way of doing politics, Strauss’s attempt “to foster the politically

gifted and the gentlemen”10 among his students has had an equally striking

impact—even though, quite naturally for a thinker who very rarely took a public

stance on the political issues of his time,11 the nature of that impact (as against the

fact that it exists) is hard to specify.12

9
See Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and
American Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 29-30. For a full account
of Straussian studies in America see Ibid., chapter six, “The Emergence of the Straussian Study of
America,” 197-228, and Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and
Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), chapter four,
“Strauss’s Legacy in Political Science,” 89-117. As Pangle points out, to measure the imact of
‘Straussianism’ one would also have to consider that his ‘negative’ influence has been just as
important as is evident in the work of the leading American pragmatist philosopher, Richard
Rorty, whose life’s work, as he himself concedes, has been devoted to spelling out his
disillusionment with the ‘Straussian’ Platonism he encountered in his youth at the University of
Chicago. See Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope
(Lodong: Penguin, 1999), 8, 16. Cf. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and
Intellectual Legacy, 130.
10
Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, xviii.
11
For an exception see Strauss’s “Letter to the Editor: The State of Israel”—a 1957 letter to the
editor of the National Review—in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity:
Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (New York: SUNY
Press, 1997), 413-414. (Hereafter JPCM.)
12
That followers of Strauss use Strauss’s ideas to shape public opinion in powerful ways and
occupy positions in government where these ideas could—and very likely have had—an impact in
policy-making is widely documented. However, whether this is what Strauss intended, and
whether one can legitimately translate Strauss’s philosophical views into a worldview from which
in turn a political program could be derived is far more difficult to determine. For an account of
the political impact of Straussianism see Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, L’Amérique
Messianique: Les guerres des néo-conservateurs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), chapter 8: “La
compagnie des neo-conservateurs.” Consider also the attribution of specific foreign policy
positions to Strauss’s ideas by a highly knowledgeable scholar of Strauss (Steven Lenzner) and a
Straussian public intellectual (Bill Kristol): “[Aristotle’s] concept of regime, properly understood,
is one that avoids the unhealthy extremes of utopian universalism and insular nationalism.

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 The political impact of Straussianism led some scholars beginning in the

1980s to question the relation between Strauss’s philosophy and his politics.

Critics of Strauss questioned both his status as a serious scholar and his bona fides

as a friend of liberal democracy—and the relation between the two.13 A second

wave of critique began during the run up to the war in Iraq as sectarians,

journalists, and scholars, all sought—more or less implausibly—to link neo-

conservative policies to Strauss’s teachings.14 A third wave has now been

generated as scholars have begun to pay closer attention to Strauss’s early

political views, and specifically to his “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” leanings.15

President Bush’s advocacy of ‘regime change’ – which avoids the pitfalls of a wishful global
universalism on the one hand and a fatalistic cultural determinism on the other – is a not altogether
unworthy product of Strauss’s rehabilitation of the notion of regime.” William Kristol and Steven
Lenzner, “What was Leo Strauss up to?,” The Public Interest, Fall 2003.
13
Among the most important statements of this first wave of critique of Strauss’s ‘politics of
philosophy’ are Miles Burnyeat, “The Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books, May
30, 1985, 30-36; Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988); and Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993). For a rather different perspective on the relation between philosophy and
politics in Strauss’s thought, see Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss,
and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
14
See, for example, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “The Essential Fraud of Leo Strauss,” Executive
Intelligence Review, March 21, 2003. James Atlas, “Leo-Cons; A Classicist’s Legacy: New
Empire Builders,” New York Times, May 4, 2003. Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The
New Yorker, May 12, 2003. Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
15
See Strauss’s letter to Karl Löwith of May 19, 1933, in GS3, 625. “Just because the new right-
wing Germany does not tolerate us, it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are
therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist,
authoritarian, imperial—is it possible, in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and sickening
appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme, to protest against the repulsive monster [i.e.,
Hitler].” Scott Horton drew attention to this letter in a 2006 blog which itself generated hundreds
of responses. http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html. The debate has been taken up in
panels held at the 2007 and 2008 APSA meetings.

105
 For those concerned with understanding the possibilities and limits of

political philosophy in our time, these three waves have had at least one positive

result: they have forced us to confront the fundamental question that Strauss never

really answered: Why ‘political philosophy’? And indeed: What is ‘political

philosophy’?

In this chapter I argue that to begin to answer these questions it is

necessary to revisit the Weimar debate within which Strauss’s thinking

developed, and, specifically, to study it afresh in light of the recent publication of

his correspondence (beginning in 1930); of the totality of his writings up to 1938;

and, above all, of the lectures which shaped his understanding of Heidegger (from

1922 and 1924)—for, as Strauss put it towards the end of his life, “nothing

affected us as profoundly in the years in which our minds took their lasting

directions as the thought of Heidegger.”16

16
Strauss and Klein, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College in Honor of
Jacob Klein,” in JCPM, 450.

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 “Ethos anthropoi daimon?”: Strauss’s Becoming Strauss (1899-1933)

To understand the reasons that led Strauss to his lifelong quest for a political

science or philosophy, it is necessary to begin by recalling the basic facts of his

youth. These facts we gather mainly from Strauss’s autobiographical writings.

Strauss was “brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home

somewhere in a rural district of Germany... [where] [t]he ‘ceremonial’ laws were

rather strictly observed, but [where] there was little Jewish knowledge.”17 From a

very early age Strauss became aware of the Jewish predicament as his family

assisted persecuted Jews from Russia.18 Strauss entered the Gymnasium

Philippinum in Marburg in Easter of 1912.19 There “[he] became exposed to the

message of German Humanism” and “[f]urtively … read Schopenhauer and

Nietzsche” (460). “Without being aware of it,” as Strauss recalls, “[he] had

moved rather far away from [his] Jewish home, without any rebellion.” At the age

of 17 Strauss was then “converted to Zionism—to simple, straightforward

political Zionism” (460).20 At about that age Strauss began his university studies

17
In what follows I refer mainly to Strauss’s remarks delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland in 1970, published as “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss” in JPCM,
457-466, here 459-460. (Henceforth cited in the text in parentheses.)
18
Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews?” in JPCM, 312-13.
19
Strauss, “Lebenslauf,” [1922] in GS2, 298.
20
Strauss joined was the “Jüdischer Wanderbund Blau-Weiss” which was conceived in 1907 as a
counterpart to the German nationalist and anti-modernist Wandervogel movement. “Countering
the Protestant Germanism of the Wandervogel with a corresponding ‘German Jewish’ orientation,

107
but was almost immediately conscripted by the German Army where he served as

an interpreter in the Belgian occupation until December of 1918.21

Upon completing his military service, Strauss joined the university of

Marburg. There he began to study the western philosophical tradition under the

neo-Kantians Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp. Strauss attended courses on

Plato’s theory of ideas, Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, and the history of

modern German philosophy, while also concentrating on classical philology under

the guidance of Karl Reinhardt and Eduard Fraenkel.22 Sensing that the Marburg

school of neo-Kantianism was “in a state of disintegration” after the death of its

founder Hermann Cohen (in 1918) (460), Strauss decided to pursue his doctorate

at the university of Hamburg with a notable disciple of Cohen, Ernst Cassirer.

Strauss completed his dissertation on The Problem of Knowledge in the

Philosophical Doctrine of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in 1921 at the age of 22.23

The decisive encounters that shaped Strauss’s life and thought occurred

soon thereafter.

Blau-Weiss provided a haven for the assimilated and alienated Jewish youths who enjoyed the
sense of belonging provided by the uniforms and pins and who thrived on the ritual marching
through the streets, returning the German ‘Heil!’ with a self-assured Jewish ‘Shalom!’.” Michael
Zank, “Introduction” to M. Zank (ed.), Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921-1932) (New York:
SUNY Press, 2002), 4. On Strauss’s early political Zionism see also Heinrich Meier, Preface to
Leo Strauss, GS1: xv-xx. (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl reports that Heinrich Blücher, Hannah
Arendt’s husband—a communist and a Gentile—was also for a time, strangely, a member of Blau-
Weiss. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 127.)
21
Strauss, “Lebenslauf,” in GS2, 298.
22
Eugene Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher
(Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2006), 15-16.
23
L. Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis, in GS2, 237-
293.

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 After receiving his Ph.D. Strauss went to Freiburg (in 1922) “in order to

see and hear Husserl” (460). However, “I did not derive great benefit [from him],”

probably, as he recalled, because he was “not mature enough” and because “[m]y

predominant interest was in theology” (461). Yet, “[o]ne of the unknown young

men in Husserl’s entourage was Heidegger” (461). Of the first occasion in which

he “understood something” of what Heidegger was saying at the time—viz.,

“when he interpreted the beginning of [Aristotle’s] Metaphysics”—Strauss

recalled that it led him to say to Franz Rosenzweig, whom he visited on his way

home, that “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the

incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child” (461).

In 1923 Strauss was recruited by Rosenzweig to teach at the Free Jewish

House of Learning in Frankfurt. It was also around this time that Strauss began to

intervene publicly in the Zionist debate of the time as a freelance writer for the

Zionist press.24 During these years (especially from 1923 to 1925), Strauss

became an intellectual leader of the young Zionist movement. Though he largely

stayed away from questions of practical politics or strategy–Strauss was critical of

most programs and was concerned above all with examining their premises and

implications—he seems nevertheless to have met on more than one occasion with

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionists, to discuss the different

24
See, for instance, L. Strauss, “Antwort auf das Prinzipielle Wort der Frankfurter,” in Jüdische
Rundschau 28, n° 9 (1923): 45 (reprinted in GS2, 299-307); “Anmerkung zur Diskussion über
‘Zionismus und Antisemitismus’,” Jüdische Rundschau 28, nos. 83/84 (1923): 50l (in GS2, 311-
315); “Das Heilige,” Der Jude 7 (1923): 240-242 (GS2, 307-311); “Der Zionismus bei Max
Nordau,” der Jude 7 (1923), 10/10, 657-60 (GS2, 315-323).

109
possibilities open to the movement.25 According to Eugene Shepppard, he also

elaborated a strategy in 1923 to advance legislation that would facilitate the

inculcation of a Jewish national consciousness for Jewish students in Hessen

schools.26

One of the articles Strauss wrote for the Der Jude (a periodical edited by

Martin Buber) on “Cohens Analysis of Spinoza’s Bible Science” (1924) brought

him to the attention of Julius Guttmann who was the head of the Berlin-based

Academy for the Science of Judaism. Strauss thus secured a position as a research

fellow in Jewish philosophy in the Academy where he worked from 1925 to 1932.

There, under Guttmann’s commission, Strauss wrote his first book, Spinoza’s

Critique of Religion (1930),27 while also contributing to the Academy’s Jubilee

edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s works. It was also during these years in Berlin

that Strauss met Alexandre Kojève and Gershom Scholem, as well as their

common acquaintances, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt.28

In 1932 Strauss managed to leave Germany for Paris thanks to a

Rockefeller fellowship won through the support of Carl Schmitt.29 In Paris (where

25
Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in JPCM, 319.
26
Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, 34.
27
Leo Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft.
Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat, in GS1, 1-363.
28
For Benjamin’s (rather positive) opinion of Strauss, see Gershom Scholem (ed.), The
Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940, trans. Gary Smith and
André Lefevere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 347, 349.
29
See the letter from Strauss to Carl Schmitt of 10 July 1933, in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt &
Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127. (As

110
he lived from 1932 to 1934), Strauss was part of an intellectual community that

included Alexandre Koyré and Kojève (students of Husserl and Jaspers

respectively); the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain; the Arabists Louis

Massignon, Paul Kraus, and Shlomo Pines; as well as other members of what

Strauss called the “German-Jewish intellectual proletariat” (presumably meaning

Hannah Arendt and her company).30 It was also while in Paris that he learned of

Heidegger’s decision to align himself with the Nazis.31

we will see Strauss had captured Schmitt’s attention through the research he conducted on Hobbes
in the context of his study of Biblical criticism for his book on Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.)
30
See Strauss’s letter to Löwith of May 19, 1933: “…the entire German-Jewish intellectual
proletariat is assembled here. It’s terrible – I’d rather just run back to Germany” (GS3, 624). (This
was, of course, after the Nazi rise to power.) That Strauss hardly ever mentions Arendt in his
correspondence of the time, or indeed in all of his correspondence, even though they were part of
the same circle of friends, seems to be due to Arendt’s general dislike of Strauss and her harsh
opinion of him as a German nationalist, who, on top of that, moving to France had become a
French nationalist. Cf. Klein’s letter to Strauss of July 6, 1933 in GS3, 466 on the rumors
circulating in Berlin spread in part by Hannah Arendt and “Dr. Stern” (Günther Stern, Arendt’s
first husband) that “Herr Dr. Leo Strauss has become a French nationalist after he had previously
been a German nationalist.” In fact, it is true that Strauss had written to Schmitt that same month
that he had been “somewhat occupied” with the work of Charles Maurras, the cofounder of the
Action Française (a nationalist Catholic group which had rallied against the Dreyfusards and
which was hostile to aliens generally but particularly to Jews). See Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of
July 10, 1933 in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 127. How far
the animosity between these groups went is perhaps shown by Strauss’s worry that France is out
of the question as a possibility for continuing his exile, “as a consequence of the fact that I count
here as a ‘Nazi’.” Letter to Gerhard Krüger of December 3, 1933 (in GS3, 435).
31
A letter from his friend Jacob Klein dated April 22, 1933 informed Strauss of Heidegger’s
treatment of his Jewish colleagues and students—and especially of his mentor Husserl—as well as
of his ascent to the rectorship (GS3, 463-64). Strauss’s correspondence responding to this is
sparse. We do know, however, that he read Heidegger’s Rectoral Address, which had been sent to
him by Karl Löwith together with Karl Barth’s “Theological Existence Today!” and that he
responded struck by the contrast between Barth’s “Christian critique of the events [and] H.’s
[Heidegger’s] un-critical submission to them” (Paris, September 5, 1933, in GS3, 636).

111
Political Science, Political Liberalism and Political Theology in the Dwindling
Days of Weimar (1928-1933)

We break off at this point in order to begin to trace Strauss’s turn to political

science, which by 1933 had been for the most part completed. In 1928/29 Strauss

wrote his last Zionist publications32 and began to intervene in the broader

philosophical-political debate of the time. It was then that his thinking underwent

what he would later call a “change in orientation”33 from political Zionism to

political science, or, as Michael Zank puts it, from the question, ‘How are the

people to live now?’ to the question, ‘What is the right way of life as such?’34

Indeed, as the Weimar Republic began to collapse, Strauss began to raise the

question that arguably became his life’s work: whether political science is

“possible and necessary.”35 By this Strauss meant first of all to raise the problem

32
See “Die Zukunft einer Illusion” (1928) and “Zur Ideologie des politischen Zionismus,” (1929),
in GS1, 431-448.
33
Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 173.
34
See Zank, “Introduction,” 17-19.
35
See, e.g., Strauss’s letter to Krüger, October 15, 1931, in GS3, 394 (on “the necessity and
possibility of natural right”); cf. “Preface to a planned book on Hobbes” (1931), in GS3, 210-211,
as well as Strauss’s letter to Krüger, November 17, 1932 in GS3, 404; Die Religionskritik des
Hobbes (1933/34), in GS3, 274 (on the “possibility and necessity of a political science, of a human
order of human life”); Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft (1935), in GS3, 156 (on Hobbes’ taking
for granted “that political science is at all possible and necessary”); see also 173. “On Classical
Political Philosophy” (1945) in What is Political Philosophy?, 78-79 (on the tradition of political
philosophy taking for granted “the necessity and possibility of political philosophy”; cf. 89 on
classical political philosophy’s problematization of its theoretical basis); “What is Political
Philosophy?” (1954), in WPP, 17 (on the “very possibility” of political philosophy becoming
questionable in our time). Consider especially the note Strauss wrote on “8-11-46”: “I herewith

112
whether the question of the right order of society can be answered by unassisted

human reason, that is, whether “an immanent rational foundation of one’s way of

life is possible,” or whether this is a question that societies (and individuals)

cannot ultimately answer autonomously.36

Today these questions seem rather odd because we tend to take for granted

the triumph of what Strauss would call ‘the global alliance of liberal democracy

and capitalism’. Yet this triumph, of course, was anything but decided at the

time—and may be neither actual nor decided today. It must therefore, and quite

obviously, be recalled that already in 1930 Germany was living under emergency

dictatorial rule and that very soon the question of the right order of society would

no longer be a question at all but would be settled by the Führer’s decrees. Thus,

as we shall see, during these years the major thinkers of the time became

strike out everything I have done so far—I must really begin from the very beginning./I must once
again get clear on what the real question is—and I have to change my working plans accordingly
[…]/Thus far I have assumed that the account of the original concept of philosophy (including the
critique sketched of the modern concept of philosophy) could suffice, since for me the right and
the necessity of philosophy was certain. Impressed by Kierkegaard and recalling my earlier
doubts, I must raise the question once again and as sharply as possible whether the right and the
necessity of philosophy are completely evident. Since this is the case, much more important than
the topic ‘Socrates’ and ‘Introduction to pol[itical] philos[ophy]’ becomes—philosophy and the
Law or (perhaps) Philosophy or The divine guidance.” Leo Strauss Papers, Box 11, Folder 11.
(Cited in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 29.) To continue
chronologically, see the 1951 ‘Preface to the American Edition’ of The Political Philosophy of
Hobbes (“I assumed that political philosophy as the quest for the final truth regarding the political
fundamentals is possible and necessary…”); Natural Right and History (1953), 167 (Hobbes takes
on trust “the view that political philosophy or political science is possible or necessary”); “On
Aristotle’s Politics” (1964) in The City and Man, 18 (“…political philosophy is more questionable
than philosophy as such”); Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), 3 (“Our great tradition includes
political philosophy and thus seems to vouch for its possibility and necessity. According to the
same tradition, political philosophy was founded by Socrates”).
36
For a concise statement of the theological-political problem thus conceived see Wolf-Daniel
Hartwich, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assman, “Afterword,” in Jacob Taubes, The Political
Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 115-142, here 140.

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implicitly or explicitly concerned with Strauss’s question concerning the necessity

and possibility of political science or with the question of the source of a “a

human order of human life.”37

Contrary to what seems to be the tacit assumption of most Strauss

scholarship, it shall become clear in what follows that the origins and the meaning

of this understanding of political science cannot be appreciated properly without

an attempt to at least sketch the alternatives which Strauss explicitly confronted.38

One of the first attempts to address the crisis of the time—and going from

least to most important for Strauss—was Karl Mannheim’s sociology of

knowledge. Mannheim’s manifesto for a sociology of knowledge, Ideology and

Utopia (1929), would become the most widely debated book by a living

sociologist in Weimar.39 Indeed, when its theses were first presented at the

Sociologists’ Congress in September 1928 it was seen as a “spiritual revolution”

37
Strauss, Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933/34), in GS3, 274.
38
This is specially true with respect to Strauss’s engagement with Heidegger. Among recent
studies that seek to explain how Strauss became Strauss, Heidegger is a tangential figure or at the
most one of the ‘existentialist’ thinkers Strauss thought against. See David Janssens, Between
Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (New
York: SUNY Press, 2008); Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007); Heinrich Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Svetozar
Minkov (ed.), Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD.:
Lexington Books, 2006). Cf. however, Meier’s statement that Heidegger’s idea of a “destruction
of the tradition” may have “allow[ed] [Strauss] for the first time to find his way to his own
distinctive undertaking.” Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 62.
39
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [1929] 1985). Ideology and Utopia was reviewed in Germany
by, among others, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Tillich,
Günther Stern (Anders), Karl A. Wittfogel. In the United States it was reviewed, inter alia, by
Hans Speier, Robert Merton, Kenneth Burke und C. Wright Mills. See Verhandlungen des 6.
Deutschen Soziologentages in Zurich, 1928, (Tubingen: Mohr, 1929). See also Hans-Joachim
Lieber (ed.), Ideologienlehre und Wissenssoziologie (Darmstadt, 1974) (where Arendt’s review is
collected), and especially, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds.), Der Streit um die
Wissenssoziologie, 2 vols. (1982).

114
(Norbert Elias) and as pervaded by an “alarming sense of trying to sail a storm-

churned ocean on an unseaworthy ship” (Alfred Meusel).40 Writing in a time of

intense political and class struggle in which the fate of the Weimar Republic was

being decided, Mannheim responded to the collision between the different

political forces of the time—liberal-bourgeois, socialist, fascist, buraucratic,

conservative—by suggesting that we have reached a stage in history in which the

ideological character of all thought becomes apparent, thus enabling a purification

of thinking that could give rise to a science of politics in the form of political

sociology.41 “It has become incontrovertibly clear today that all knowledge which

is either political or which involves a world-view is inevitably partisan… But this

implies the possibility of an integration of many mutually complementary points

of view into a comprehensive whole.”42 Thus, “politics as a science is for the first

time possible” because we see that mutually opposing views are not infinite and

not products of arbitrary will but mutually complementary since they derive from

specific social and historical situations. Political science in the Mannheimian

sense, in short, aimed to rescue liberalism as a therapist rescues a sinking

40
Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1998), 212.
41
Mannheim argued that the sociology of knowledge is born with the formulation of a “total”
conception of ideology. This conception makes it possible to turn “what was once the intellectual
armament of a party into a method of research,” in such a way as to “provide modern men with a
revised view of the whole historical process.” The sociology of knowledge is also a means for the
purification of thinking: “the attempt to escape ideological and utopian distortions is, in the last
analysis, a quest for reality…[it provides us] with a basis for a sound scepticism…[it can] be used
to combat the tendency in our intellectual life to separate thought from the world of reality, to
conceal reality, or to exceed its limits. Thought should contain neither less nor more than the
reality in whose medium it operates.” Ideology and Utopia, 78, 98.
42
Ibid., 148-49.

115
marriage: no-one possesses the absolute truth, there are no absolute oppositions—

these result only from different perspectives—only a ‘freefloating’ intelligence

(Mannheim’s ‘freefloating’ intellectuals playing the role of therapists) can

neutralize these apparent differences.43

An alternative defense of Weimar liberal democracy was the attempt to

overcome the ‘anarchy of worldviews’ that dominated the time by an appeal not

to a synthesizing view but simply (so to speak) to the validity of the rules of the

game. From the perspective of Hans Kelsen’s positivism, the situation called for a

legal science that is “politically indifferent”—in the sense that it “accepts the

given legal order without valuing it as such”—and that sees behind any claim to

natural right but the ideology of an interest group.44 Kelsen was a defender of the

republic, and yet from the standpoint of his pure theory of law his defense of

democracy was, paradoxically and yet consistently with his own premises,

relativistic and ideological. As he put it in 1929: “A metaphysically absolute

ideology entails an autocratic attitude, a critically relativist one entails a

democratic attitude. Anyone who considers absolute truth and absolute values of

human cognition to be barred to us, must at least regard an opposite opinion as

43
Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 213.
44
Hans Kelsen, Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Naturrechtslehre und des
Rechtspositivismus (Charlottenburg, 1928), 67. Cited in Strauss, “Vorwort zu Einem Geplanten
Buch Über Hobbes,” (1931), in GS3, 202.

116
being possible. That is why relativism is the ideology presupposed by the

democratic idea.”45

A third type of defense grew out of the deepest tradition of German

humanism going back to Kant and the spirit of Goethe, and was articulated by

perhaps the greatest representative of German academic philosophy of the time:

Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer, Strauss’s mentor, was the last successor of the Marburg

neo-Kantian school which had dominated the German philosophical establishment

since the 1870s. In 1928 Cassirer became the first Jew to be named rector of a

German university (the university of Hamburg)—an opportunity he used to go on

record for defending the Weimar constitution. Generally speaking, neo-

Kantianism in the context of Weimar can be seen as an attempt not to synthesize

or to relativize the questions raised by a plurality of worldviews but to

compartmentalize these questions into different ‘provinces of culture’, that is, into

questions of science, law, art, and religion.46 Cassirer’s own philosophy of culture

found its systematic expression in a philosophy of symbolic forms which grew out

of an Olympian effort using the unique sources of the Warburg library in

Hamburg to provide “an analysis of all the fundamental forms of world-

45
Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929), 101. Cited
in Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, 3rd ed. (München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1992), 181 (my emphasis).
46
For a classic statement of the Marburg school of philosophy see Paul Natorp, “Kant und die
Marburger Schule,” Kant-Studien, 17 (1912):193-221. See specially, 196-197.

117
understanding.”47 In an attempt to draw all the consequences of Kant’s

Copernican Revolution in a systematic form, Cassirer argued that, just as much as

science, so too myth, religion, art, and language are forms of objectivating the

world—they are “symbolical forms” in which is accomplished a “synthesis of

world and spirit”—and that it is the task of philosophy “to grasp each of these

forms in its individuality and in their systematic relations.”48

Cassirer, we could say, was the most dedicated and serious believer in the

possibilities afforded by culture understood as “the process of man’s progressive

self-liberation.”49 And thus indeed, according to Cassirer—referring back to the

crisis of Weimar—there would be no reason why two human beings could not in

principle come to an agreement on even the most divisive issues, even religious

ones, provided these human beings are highly cultivated, that is, provided that

they know that it is “in the last instance the ‘same’ human being that always

confronts us in thousands of manifestations.”50 Cassirer defended the Weimar

constitution along these lines as “an outgrowth of German soil … fed from the

47
Ernst Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt. Goethe/Schiller/Hölderlin/Kleist. Fünf Aufsätze (Berlin: B.
Cassirer, 1921). Cited in Heinz Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer. Von Marburg nach New York: eine
philosophische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 70.
48
E. Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt, 69, 73; cited in Ibid., 50.
49
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 228.
50
E. Cassirer, Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, 1971, 76. Cited in W. Perpeet, “Kultur,
Kulturphilosophie,” in HWPh, Vol. 4, 1312.

118
force of idealistic philosophy.”51 Specifically, he drew a parallel to Kant’s

position on the French Revolution and its republican constitution. Kant had

posited that, whether the Revolution and constitutional reform succeed or not, it is

a phenomenon that will not be forgotten in human history “because it discovers a

disposition in human nature towards the better.” In 1928 Cassirer appealed to that

spirit claiming that “In these sentences is most clearly expressed that type of

symbolic consideration that characterizes the ethicist, the philosophical idealist

Kant.”52

Finally, there was in the Weimar republic a theological or theological-

political reaction against all of this—and specifically against the philosophy of

culture—on the part of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic thinkers including (among

many others) Franz Rosenzweig, Friedrich Gogarten, and Karl Barth, whose

importance (especially politically) stands in a strange relation of

disproportionality to the amount of attention it receives in studies of the political-

philosophical debate of the time.53 For these thinkers the various attempts at

51
Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanischen Verfassung: Rede zur verfassungsfeier am 11. August
1928 (Hamburg: De Gruyter, 1929), cited in H. Paetzold, Ernst Cassirer, 71.
52
Cassirer, Die Idee Der Republikanischen Verfassung. Cited in Ibid., 72-73.
53
This is especially true with respect to analyses of the genesis of the thought of Heidegger,
Arendt, and Strauss, particularly in the Anglo-American context. Some exceptions are the
following. With respect to Heidegger: Christopher Rickey, Revolutionary Saints: Heidegger,
National Socialism, and Antinomian Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2002). Concerning Strauss: Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on
the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998). On Arendt in the Weimar theological-political context, see Peter Eli
Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political
Theology,” Social Research, Vol. 74, 3, Fall 2007, 855-876. Though not dealing directly with
these thinkers, the following studies also shed light on the theological-political predicament in

119
synthesizing, relativizing, or compartmentalizing the fundamental questions that

divide human beings are but humanistic evasions of God’s transcendence: indeed

self-divinizing evasions of fundamental decisions with tragic consequences.

Hence against the attempt to find God in human cultural activity—a nineteenth

century hope that had first led to bourgeois self-complacency and then in reaction

to nihilistic militarism—Gogarten called for “a religion which is a constant crisis

of this and every culture,” a religion that “attacks culture as culture … that attacks

the whole world.”54 Somehow more moderately, Barth called for a decision either

for man or for God, for history or for eternity, a decision that amounts to “a war

of life and death, a war in which there can be no armistice, no agreement—and no

peace.”55 As for Rosenzweig, he appealed to “the calm and silent image of our

Weimar. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York:
Knopf, 2007). Jean-Lois Gasse, “République de Weimar et Théologie Protestante,” in Manfred
Gangl and Hélène Roussel (eds.), Les intellectuels et l'etat sous la République de Weimar (Paris:
CID, 1993). Kurt Nowak, “Religiöse Sozialisten – Deutsche Christen. Zur theologischen
Wechselbeziehung zwischen politischen Antipoden,” as well as Hartmut Ruddies, “Flottierende
Versatzstücke und ideologische Austauscheffekte: Theologische Antworten auf die Ambivalenz
der Moderne,” in M. Gangl, and Gérard Raulet, Intellektuellendiskurse in der Weimarer Republik:
Zur politischen Kultur einer Gemengelage (Paris: Editions de la Fondation Maison des Sciences
de l'Homme, 1994). Karl Löwith, “Postscript: On Martin Heidegger’s Political Decisionism and
Friedrich Gogarten’s Theological Decisionism,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 159-173. Alexander Schwan, “Zeitgenössische
Philosophie und Theologie in ihrem Verhältnis zur Weimarer Republik,” in K. D. Erdnamm and
Hagen Schulze (eds.), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag,
1980), 259-305.
54
Friedrich Gogarten, “The Crisis of Our Culture,” in James M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings
of Dialectic Theology, Vol. I (Richmond: John Knox Press, [1920] 1968), 299.
55
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Eswyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, [1921] 1968), 225.

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existence … worldless evidence which gives the lie to the worldly and all-too-

worldly sham eternity of the historical moments of the nations.”56

56
Franz Rosenzwig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1985), 334-35.

121
 Götterdämmerung: The Davos Disputation Between Martin Heidegger and
Ernst Cassirer (1929)

In a sense, at least for Strauss, the confrontation between all of these possibilities

of the thinkable and the doable culminated in the debate between Cassirer and

Heidegger that took place in the Swiss ski resort of Davos during the last weeks

of March of 1929.57

The debate between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos was about the

correct interpretation of Kant, and specifically whether Kant is to be read as an

ontologist concerned with “a theory of beings in general,” as Heidegger

suggested, or whether, as Cassirer would have it, Kant was a philosophical

idealist primarily concerned with the possibility of objectivity, that is, of

transcending human finitude both in an ethical realm which leads beyond the

world of appearances and in a scientific sphere where necessary and universal

truths can be found in the form of synthetic, a priori judgments.58

At stake, however, was a much broader and urgent question (politically

and otherwise), namely, whether understanding is possible on the basis of reason

and a common language which finds expression in philosophy. Cassirer insisted

that this must be possible. Heidegger showed both through his interpretation of

57
For an account relating Strauss and Heidegger, see Geoffrey Waite, “On Esotericism: Heidegger
and/or Cassirer at Davos,” Political Theory 26, no. 5 (Oct., 1998): 603-651.
58
The Davos disputation is collected in Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans.
Richard Taft, Fifth Edition, Enlarged (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), here, 196,
194, 195. (In what follows I refer to this text in parentheses.)

122
Kant and through his way of responding to Cassirer—in “a completely different

language,” as one of the participants remarked, and perhaps even through his

refusal to shake hands with Cassirer at the end of the debate—that that is not

possible—indeed that the question cannot even be properly raised until the true

grounds of human language and rationality are recognized.

Heidegger’s central argument to this effect was that Kant himself had

already seen that, strictly speaking, that ground is an ‘non-ground’ (Abgrund);

that, consequently, when we search for the roots of both practical and theoretical

reason, which themselves are the conditions for the possibility of moral and

scientific progress, we encounter an abyss: “In attempting to lay the ground for

Metaphysics, Kant was pressed in a way that makes the proper foundation into an

abyss [Abgrund]” (196).

Heidegger’s point here can be read as resting on an interpretation of Kant

which as such may be debatable, but it can also be read as a more general

statement concerning the human situation from which philosophical questioning

and with it the discourse of reason (or logos) first arises. The interpretive point is

that Kant saw that beneath the “two stems of human knowledge”—sensibility and

understanding—there is “a common, but to us unknown root” and that he thus

realized that his initial point of departure—pure reason as the basis of the

Critique—is itself derivative (25). “The point of departure in reason has thus been

broken asunder. With that Kant himself, through his radicalism, was brought to

the brink of a position from which he had to shrink back” (192). This, however

123
implies according to Heidegger, the “destruction of the former foundation of

Western metaphysics (spirit, logos, reason),” that is to say, the destruction of the

grounds upon which the question of Being is raised, and hence the destruction of

the (traditional logos-based) grounds of philosophizing.

Heidegger’s general point at this stage of his career, again, is that that

‘ground’ is more of a non-ground: it is human finitude open in anxiety to the

totality of beings. The unbridgeable gap between his and Cassirer’s conception of

philosophizing (and indeed of man) becomes manifest in the following statements

which are worth recording in full as they summarize the state of Heidegger’s

philosophizing at the time when both Strauss and Arendt began to respond to him.

Contrary to Cassirer who, as we saw, sees culture as the “progressive self-

emancipation of man” and hence conceives of freedom (in Heidegger’s words) as

“becoming free … for the forming images of consciousness and for the realm of

[cultural] form,” Heidegger understands freedom as “becoming free for the

finitude of Dasein.” This Dasein, Heidegger says, “does not allow translation into

a concept of Cassirer’s.” What, then, does Heidegger mean by Dasein? Simply

put: “Should one say consciousness, that is precisely what I rejected” (203). Or as

he puts it more explicitly: The central question, the question of Dasein in Kant’s

terms is “the question of what man is”—nothing less is at stake. This is a question

that is “only essential for the philosophers in the way in which the philosopher

simply disregards himself, so that the question may not be posed

anthropocentrically.” “On the contrary, it must be shown that: because man is the

124
creature who is transcendent, i.e., who is open to beings in totality and to himself,

that through this eccentric character man at the same time also stands within the

totality of beings in general—and that only in this way do the question and the

idea of a Philosophical Anthropology make sense.” Heidegger’s final statement in

the debate culminating in his sharpest attack on Cassirer continues as follows

(204):

The question concerning the essence of human beings is not to be

understood in the sense that we study human beings empirically as given
objects, nor is it to be understood in such a way that I project an
anthropology of man. Rather, the question concerning the essence of
human beings only makes sense and is only justifiable insofar as it derives
its motivation from philosophy’s central problematic itself, which leads
man beyond himself and into the totality of beings in order to make
manifest to him there, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein.
This nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy.
Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity takes
place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of
throwing man back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the
shallow aspect of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit.

Cassirer, the highest representative of classical German Bildung and of the work

of spirit, was symptomatically—or so, at least, Strauss would see it—forced from

one extreme of the Enlightenment to the other, from Kant to Nietzsche (as he

understood them). His own final statement thus reads as an either/or: given what

125
Heidegger had just said, either “we have been condemned here to a relativity,”

meaning in Nietzschean terms that “‘What one chooses for a philosophy depends

upon what sort of human being one is’” (205), or, says Cassirer, since “we may

not persevere in this relativity which would be central for empirical men,” we

must insist on the possibility of a common language reminding ourselves that

through “the Objectivity of the symbolic form … the inconceivable [is] done …

From Dasein is spun the thread which, through the medium of such an objective

spirit, again ties us together with another Dasein. And I believe that there is no

other way from Dasein to Dasein than through this world of forms” (205).

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 Descending From Davos—What Did Leo Strauss Do?

Strauss’s account of what had happened in the debate, I shall argue in what

follows, explains the direction that his search for a political science would take.59

The debate made it clear that the question of the necessity and possibility

of political science—of an immanent, rational foundation of one’s way of life—

had to be rethought from its grounds. Strauss seems to have regarded Heidegger’s

predecessor in Marburg, Hermann Cohen, as the last great thinker to stand for the

necessity and possibility of political science thus conceived.60 And yet Cohen’s

system had been overcome by Heidegger’s more timely and originary thinking:

There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in

Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable
representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had
eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-
Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose

59
It is an open question whether Strauss attended the Davos disputation. Though Strauss seems to
speak from the perspective of an eyewitness, he never explicitly confirms that he was there.
Walter Benjamin’s correspondence with Scholem suggests that he left Berlin exactly during the
time of the debate. On March 15, 1929 Benjamin writes: “Strauss, whom I mentioned previously,
has disappeared from sight [Benjamin had previously met Strauss in the state library in Berlin].
But I will send out a warrant for his arrest since he took with him an extensive bibliography on the
nature of the fairy tale.” See Scholem (ed.), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and
Gershom Scholem, 347, 349.
60
As he noted in 1954: “As regards the philosophers, it is sufficient to contrast the work of the
four greatest philosophers of the last forty years — Bergson, Whitehead, Husserl, and Heidegger
— with the work of Hermann Cohen in order to see how rapidly and thoroughly political
philosophy has become discredited.” Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?,” in What is
Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 17.

127
 center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen’s system into a new
system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had
been silently dropped: he had not faced the problem of ethics. Heidegger
did face the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole
being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.61

What Strauss means by this last sentence can be glimpsed from another occasion

in which he spoke of the Davos encounter in slightly different but equally telling

terms: “having been a disciple of Hermann Cohen, [Cassirer] had transformed

Cohen’s philosophic system, the very center of which was ethics, into a

philosophy of symbolic forms in which ethics had silently disappeared. Heidegger

on the other hand explicitly denies the possibility of ethics because he feels that

there is a revolting disproportion between the idea of ethics and those phenomena

which ethics pretends to articulate.”62

The last phrase is crucial for understanding Strauss’s turn to political

science. For Heidegger, as we saw in the last chapter, ethics understood as the

possibility of distinguishing between “man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-

could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature”63 presupposes that man (or Dasein)

is just like any object in the world which is producible in some ideal form. Ethics

61
Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in Thomas L. Pangle (ed.), The
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss: Essays
and Lectures (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28.
62
Strauss, “Kurt Riezler,” in Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 246 (my
emphasis).
63
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984), 52.

128
thus misses the specific character of human being in the world: our natality and

mortality; “the destiny of man and the enduring world; death, coming to the

world, leaving the world…”64 More generally, then, ethics as a science or as

knowledge of man’s essential nature would seem to be impossible for Heidegger

because “science proper” is said to be “concerned with beings which always are,”

while “the Being of man,” which is the subject of ethics, “can also be

otherwise.”65

Now, that there is a ‘revolting disproportion’ between ethics and the

phenomena it refers to was a common theme of the thinkers that shaped the spirit

of the time. Thus, for instance, according to Kierkegaard “…all speculative talk of

sin from an ethical viewpoint (that is objective, correct talk) is frivolous,”66 just as

it would be frivolous to emit an ethical judgment for or against Abraham’s

sacrifice of Isaac.67 In a similar way, Nietzsche expressed his revulsion against

every morality that pretended to know what Socrates did not know, and against

every claim to live a Christian life, when “at bottom there was only one Christian,

and he died on the cross.”68 Likewise, for theologians such as Karl Barth,

Friedrich Gogarten, and Rudolph Bultmann—Heidegger’s close collaborator at

64
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des
Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, 270.
65
Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schwur (Bloomington, Ind:
Indiana University Press, 1997), 90.
66
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Lowrie (Doubleday, 1955), 251.
67
Cf. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds. and trans.),
Fear and Trembling. Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 54-67.
68
See Beyond Good and Evil, § 202; and The Anti-Christ, § 39.

129
Marburg—any system of ethics would either be arbitrary—with no connection to

God and the eternal—or blasphemous if it pretended to grasp the true content of a

Christian life.69 Heidegger, for his part, would adopt a similar language, specially

in the late 1920s. Thus, as famously expressed in Being and Time, any ethics

traditionally conceived is an ethics of the mass or of the ‘they’: “The common

sense of the they knows only what is sufficient or insufficient with respect to

handy rules and public standards.”70 It does not know that “Dasein as such is

guilty,” and that this original guilt is “the existential condition of the possibility of

the ‘morally’ good and evil.”71 It does not see that every action is necessarily

“without conscience.”72 It does not realize that death is not an event ‘in’ time, but

the end of time. It therefore makes a mockery of the phenomena that give rise to

an authentically ethical life. It is thinking along such lines, it seems, that

Heidegger would later claim that one can better experience what ethics is from

Sophocles or from three words of Heraclitus than from the lectures of Aristotle.73

69
According to Bultmann, a man ultimately does service to God only when he “never dreams that
any sort of approximation to God’s world can be realized in this world.” Indeed, as Barth and
Gogarten put it and as Bultmann approvingly cites, “‘A system of ethics for this world, based on
the Gospel, would have this singular character: its action would be without any immediate relation
to God and the Eternal’.” Rudolph Bultmann, “Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological
Movement,” in Faith and Understanding, trans. L.P. Smith, ed. Robert W. Funk (NY: Harper &
Row, 1969), 45.
70
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1996), 265.
71
Ibid., 263 (my emphasis), 264.
72
Ibid., 265.
73
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977), 256.

130
 Where did Strauss stand in this debate in the late 1920s when his turn to

political science began? The standard answer in the literature is that Strauss then

saw that modern rationalism was self-destructing, which led him to explore the

possibility of pre-modern alternatives. Strauss developed his thesis of the self-

destruction of modern rationalism in the 1935 introduction to Philosophy and

Law, which he then reproduced and complemented in his most famous

autobiographical statement published in 1965, the Preface to Spinoza’s Critique

of Religion.

Strauss understands the argument that modern rationalism is self-

destructing in Nietzschean terms. According to Nietzsche, modernity is a form of

secularized Biblical faith. Central to Biblical faith, however, is a commitment to

truthfulness that in the end makes any faith, including the faith in modernity,

incredible. Strauss expressed this thesis in 1932 as follows: “Of modern

philosophy this holds true: without Biblical belief one did not and does not arrive

in it … ‘modern philosophy’ is therefore only possible as long as Biblical belief

has not been shaken in its grounds. This, however, is since Nietzsche … no longer

the case.”74 What remains of modern philosophy after Christian truthfulness

sublimated into the scientific conscience has made its faith in God and its faith in

progress incredible is a form of “absolutely honest atheism.”75 This atheism—“the

only air we breathe,” as Nietzsche puts it—is central to the work of some of the

74
Letter to Krüger (December 12, 1932), in GS3, 414.
75
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, § 27 (“Der unbedingte redliche Atheismus…”); The
Gay Science, § 357.

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most important thinkers of what Strauss refers to as the ‘ultramodern’, such as

Kierkegaard,76 Nietzsche,77 Weber,78 and Heidegger.79

Strauss saw early on, perhaps also with the help of Nietzsche, that the

modern will to truth resulting in the atheism of probity must itself be subjected to

critique, for, as he put it in 1935, “the new intellectual probity is something

76
See, e.g., Soren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon ‘Christendom’, “What Do I Want?,” in Robert
Bretall (ed.), A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 439-441.
77
See, for instance, Nietzsche, Daybreak, book I, § 84; V, § 456: “Such assertions and promises as
those of the antique philosophers concerning the unity of virtue and happiness … have never been
made with total honesty and yet always with a bad conscience: one has advanced such
propositions, which one very much desires to be true, boldly in the face of all appearance and has
felt in doing so no religious or moral pang of conscience. … Many worthy people still stand at this
level of truthfulness. … Notice, however, that honesty is among neither the Socratic nor the
Christian virtues: it is the youngest virtue … something in process of becoming which we can
advance or obstruct as we think fit.” trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 457. Compare, however, Nietzsche’s later stance in On the Genealogy of Morals, III,
§ 27: “absolutely honest atheism … is the awesome catastrophe of two thousand years of training
for truth which finally prohibits the lie of belief in God.” See also, The Gay Science, § 159, § 357.
Beyond Good and Evil, § 9, § 227. “Probity as a consequence of long moral training: the self-
critique of morality is at the same time a moral phenomenon, an event of morality.” “We are no
longer Christians: we have grown out of Christianity, not because we dwelled too far from it, but
because we dwelled too near it, even more, because we have grown from it—it is our more
rigorous and fastidious piety itself that forbids us today to be Christians.” For the last two citations
see F. Nietzsche, Grossoktavausgabe Nietzsches Werke (GOA) (Leipzig: Kröner, 1901-1913), vol.
XIII, 121 and 318. Cited in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, vol. 1 (San Francisco:
Harper Collins, 1991), 160 (see also 206-207 on the relation between probity and positivism).
Compare Jacob Taubes’s critique of probity in J. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 44-45.
78
See Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 551ff., 553, 554. Cf. Jaspers’ remarks on the “cause of honesty”
as furthered by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and, above all, Weber—“They were all three sick men, but
Weber was different.” Letter to Arendt of April 29, 1966, in Arend and Jaspers, Correspondence,
636-37.
79
See, e.g., M. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle:
Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation.” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992,
367; Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. GA 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
[1924] 2002), 6. Consider, in particular, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, trans.
William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39-62, esp. 53. For Strauss’s
critique of the atheism of probity in general and—albeit implicitly—of Heidegger’s resolute
unbelief in particular, see L. Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 25; cf. also “Preface to
Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 148-149.

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different from the old love of truth.”80 The problem with the new probity is most

immediately moral. While it would compel a denial of morality—as secularized

Christianity—it in fact rests on a new morality, namely a “new form of courage

[or fortitude]” “to look one’s forsakenness in its face,” “to welcome the terrible

truth.”81 This new morality is blinding—and hence the problem becomes also

theoretical. Seen historically, what occurs is that when the modern enlightenment

has finally overcome its ‘mortal enemy’—viz., orthodoxy—it has ceased to be a

form of enlightenment and has become in all probity, quite literally, a form of

obscurantist terror. Thus, the ‘true reality’ of man is described in such terms as a

“feeling of smallness and impotence before the whole of the world”82 (Freud), or

as Heidegger put it in 1929, in a time in which he began to invoke those thinkers

“able to instill our Dasein with a terror,” “the clear night of the nothing of

anxiety.”83 The danger with ‘the dark enlightenment’ of ‘ultramodern times’, as

Strauss would put it in 1965, is that it can turn into “a race in which he wins who

offers the smallest security and the greatest terror … But just as an assertion does

80
Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 25. “‘[P]robity’,” Strauss claims in 1932, “is as such
only necessary and even possible as long as there is still a Christianity that must be combated.”
GS3, 414. See also SCR, 172 and “An Epilogue” (in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern),
218 (intellectual honesty is “a kind of self-denial” “because truth has come to be believed to be
repulsive”); “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” (in SPPP), 189 (“cruelty
directed toward oneself”).
81
Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 25.
82
Cited in Strauss, “Die Zukunft einer Illusion,” (1929), in GS1, 437.
83
See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The
Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 198-245, here
210. Compare Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin: W. de Gruyter and co., 1931):
“Alles ist fraglich geworden; alles sieht sich bedroht” (66). Der Mensch erkennt, dass er “vor das
Nichts geraten ist” (180).

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not become true because it is shown to be comforting, it does not become true

because it is shown to be terrifying.”84

At that time, Strauss famously decided that modern thought had

culminated in nihilism, whose “inescapable practical consequence” is “fanatical

obscurantism.”85 As “it would be unwise to say farewell to reason … I began …

to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome

of modern rationalism as distinguished from premodern rationalism, especially

Jewish-medieval rationalism and its classical (Aristotelian and Platonic)

foundation.” Such a realization led Strauss, as he tells us in a 1965 Preface, to a

“change in orientation” which “found its first expression” in his 1932 “Notes” on

Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.86

The direction of Strauss’s change in orientation has become a subject of

intense controversy, for on it depends the answer to the central question, Why

‘political philosophy’?

In the early 1930s, Strauss set out in three directions examining three

different understandings of political science: Socratic-Platonic, Hobbesian, and

Jewish-Arab Medieval.87 Quite naturally, however—and specially so given the

historical emergency in which Strauss began to search for a political science—his

84
Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 149 (my emphasis).
85
Strauss, Natural Right and History, 6.
86
Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in JPCM, 173.
87
See Strauss’s letter to Scholem of December 7, 1933 where he characterizes his current project
as a “comparative analysis of the Hobbesian…and the Platonic politics” (GS3, 706-709). For the
confrontation between classic, Socratic-Platonic, and the Jewish-Arab medieval conceptions see
Strauss’s letter to Krüger of June 26, 1930, in Ibid., 382-83.

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investigations began as engagements with contemporary thinkers; notably, with

Hermann Cohen, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. Three different kinds of

explanations have been given for Strauss’s ‘change in orientation’, each of them

emphasizing either its Socratic-Platonic, Hobbesian, or Jewish-Arab aspects.

According to the view that “[t]he question of Socrates was from the very

beginning the decisive, fundamental question for Strauss,”88 his reorientation

occurred as follows. Strauss realized that the spiritual situation of the time was

characterized by the forgetfulness of the Socratic question concerning the right or

the best life for man and for a collectivity. This forgetfulness originated in the

theological-political treatises that founded political modernity—notably those of

Spinoza and Hobbes—whose aim was to confront, in a fateful alliance with

worldly sovereigns, the theological and political answers to the question of the

best life for man. Acting politically for the sake of philosophy, “the founding

fathers of modern philosophy” supplied “the reliable and manageable knowledge

required for the methodical conquest of nature and the rational reorganization of

society,” in exchange for the peace and security which would guarantee the

freedom to philosophize.89 However, the success of this strategy, much as the

earlier success of Plato’s action to safeguard philosophy from the fate of Socrates

“had grave repercussions for philosophy itself” as it would cease to understand

88
Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 86. David Janssens argues
along similar lines. See David Janssens, “A Change of Orientation: Leo Strauss’s ‘Comments’ on
Carl Schmitt Revisited,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 33, no. 1 (2005), 93-
104.
89
Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 60, 10. Cf. also GS3, 142, 225.

135
the seriousness of its political and theological contenders.90 At the end of this

process the forgetfulness of the theological and political alternatives to the

question of the best life becomes particularly manifest in the work of Nietzsche

and Heidegger as they uncritically reassert pre-philosophical political ideals such

as courage and manliness (specially in the case of Nietzsche)91 and Christian

ideals such as probity or conscience or ‘depth’. To restore philosophy’s capacity

to address the fundamental questions—especially the Socratic question of the

right life—Strauss therefore develops his thought in the form of theological-

political treatises with an opposite ‘tendency’ as those of the seventeenth

century.92 Strauss thus affirms, notably with Schmitt for instance, the seriousness

of the political, or in his studies of Maimonides and his predecessors, of a life

guided by divine revelation—all ultimately for the sake of strengthening

philosophy’s capacity to respond to the question of the best life for man.93

90
Ibid.
91
See, e.g., Strauss’s letter to Krüger of December 12, 1932, in GS3, 415; Hobbes’ politische
Wissenschaft, in GS3, 186.
92
Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, GS2, 31. Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political
Problem, 23.
93
Political philosophy must confront the answers of theology and politics “if [it] is fully to
develop its own power and strength in the attempt to answer the question of the order of human
things…” Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 86. “Politics and religion
deserve the special attention of political philosophy not although but, rather, because politics is
not everything and because not everything is faith.” Ibid., 87. ‘Political philosophy’ in other words
stands as an “[a]bbreviation to the urgency of the confrontation with the theological and political
alternatives to philosophy.” Meier, Preface to GS3, xxvi. Janssens interprets Strauss’s change of
orientation as a turn away from politics towards a more fulfilling philosophical life: “At the
moment of his philosophical breakthrough, Strauss was taking leave, not only of the political
Zionism to which he had been strongly committed since his youth, but also of political activism
and modern politics as such.” Strauss, that is, discovered in Socratic questioning a way of life
more fulfilling than the political life. Janssens, “A Change of Orientation,” 100 f. Cf. Strauss,

136
 A different set of considerations leads to rather different conclusions.

Strengthening philosophy’s capacity to answer the question of the right life in

1932 would seem to be for a thinker like Leo Strauss to fiddle while Rome burns.

According to the argument that Strauss was at core a Hobbesian, Strauss’s early

work is a philosophy of politics meant first of all to stop the collapse of the

Weimar republic.94 Strauss, like Carl Schmitt, understood Hobbes’ problem to be

not that he was too successful in combating the theological and political

alternatives to the philosophical life, but that the means he used for this purpose—

natural science and technological thinking—led to an age of depoliticizations and

neutralizations which undermined the foundations of the state. Together with

Schmitt Strauss thus sought to retrieve the fear of death as the “primal source of

political order” by radicalizing Hobbes, that is, by more decisively affirming the

dangerousness of man—indeed his moral baseness—and the fear of violent death

at the basis of the bargain of protection for obedience that guarantees the stability

“Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” 129: “Politics and theology, as distinguished from
science of all kind[s], appeared to be much more closely connected with the basic interests of man
as man than science and all culture: the political community and the word of the living God are
basic; compared with them everything else is derived and relative. ‘Culture’ is superseded by
politics and theology, by ‘political theology’” (129).
94
John P. McCormick provides in my view the strongest case along these lines. See his “Fear,
Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and
National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (November, 1994): 619-652. Carl
Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); “Political Theory and Political Theology: The Second Wave of Carl
Schmitt in English,” Political Theory 26, no. 6 (December, 1998): 830-854; “Irrational Choice and
Mortal Combat as Political Destiny: The Essential Carl Schmitt,” Annual Review of Political
Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 315-339. Cf. Strauss, “Living Issues…,” 131, which suggests that
Strauss turned to Hobbes for a positive appropriation: “Return to the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, or more precisely to the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, seemed to be
recommended by … [t]he urgency of a convincing, generally valid moral teaching, of a moral
teaching of evident political relevance … Such a moral teaching seemed to be discernible in the
natural law doctrines of the 17th and 18th centuries…”

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of the state.95 From this perspective, Heidegger would serve the purpose of a

“Germanization of Hobbes” in which “the significance of anxiety over death” is

politicized and recast in Hobbesian terms as the fear of violent death. It is this fear

“that brings an other into proximity with a being and thus raises the question of

the social and political in Schmitt’s sense of the terms.”96

A third explanation emphasizes the importance of Strauss’s discovery of

the Platonism of Maimonides and his Muslim predecessors.97 According to this

view, Strauss’s aim was to preserve the ethical and cognitive value of those

traditions that understand the Law—the binding order of life—to be a

“fundamental concept of humanity,”98 and that see philosophizing as always

already related—in opposition to or in the quest of—a (lawful) order of life.99

Such were the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece in the quest for a natural

order occasioned by the collapse of a pre-philosophical nomos, and so was the

meaning of classical philosophy understood by the Jewish and Arab

commentators of the Middle Ages, that is, wherever the idea of a binding order

was not covered over by the Christian tradition that began with Paul’s radical

95
McCormick, “Irrational Choice and Mortal Combat,” 335-336.
96
“It is the privileged place of the fear of violent death in Strauss’s early political philosophy that
might lead one to view these works as the first explicit politicization of the significance of anxiety
over death in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.” Strauss would thus represent that “very special mixture
of Schmitt and Heidegger” Habermas sees as the core of post-war conservatism. McCormick,
“Political Theory and Political Theology,” 853.
97
The fullest accounts from this perspective are K. H. Green, Jew and Philosopher; and Daniel
Tanguay, Leo Strauss.
98
Strauss, Cohen und Maimuni, in GS2, 428.
99
See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of December 16, 1932 in GS3, 417.

138
critique of the Law.100 Strauss’s attention to Hobbes and Heidegger in the early

1930s could be seen from this point of view as primarily deconstructive, that is, as

a way of tracing the modern forgetfulness of a given Law prior to the human will

in the most authoritative thinkers of modern (Hobbes) and ‘ultra-modern’ times

(Heidegger), both of whom were philosophical atheists but Christian thinkers.

These explanations shed light on different aspects of the genesis of

Strauss’s thought. However, they all fail to explain—and no study to date has

done this—what Strauss suggested on various occasions: that, given his

realization already in 1922 that Heidegger was the greatest thinker of our time, his

critical engagements with different possibilities of political science in the late

1920s and early 1930s either presupposed the truth of what he had learned from

Heidegger or were true themselves only to the extent that they could go beyond

the Heideggerian horizon. Concretely, Strauss made three claims which remain

unexplained in the literature, thus making accounts of his turn to political

science—and his answer to the question, Why political science?—radically

incomplete. The first claim is that Heidegger made possible a way of thinking that

had been lost for centuries, or, as Richard Velkley puts it, that “after a certain

historical development a kind of thinking was not possible until the appearance of

Heidegger.”101 The second claim is that this way of thinking is not a return to the

100
Strauss, Cohen und Maimuni, in GS2, 428.
101
Richard L. Velkley, “Leo Strauss and History: Is Modernity an Unnatural Construct?,” New
Perspectives on Leo Strauss from America and Europe, New School for Social Research,
November 17-18, 2005. Strauss’s central statement to this effect is that “[Heidegger] made it
possible for the first time after many centuries—one hesitates to say how many—to see the roots

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past but the highest self-consciousness of modern thought. As such, it makes

certain philosophic positions untenable while revolutionizing others in a

movement of incorporation and transcendence that points to an altogether new

way of thinking.102 Heidegger would thus represent, to use a Sartrean expression,

the unsurpassable horizon of our time with which or against which any form of

thought aware of its presuppositions must assert itself. The third claim is that the

most revolutionizing aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy is his interpretation of

Aristotle.103

In subsequent chapters we shall see that Heidegger is indeed the unnamed

presence to whom Strauss directs himself in virtually every one of his writings

following the Davos disputation. Thus we shall be able to see more clearly why

Heidegger was for Strauss the authoritative thinker of our time; what this has to

do with his interpretation of Aristotle; and, most importantly, what the way of

thinking made possible by Heidegger has to do with ‘political philosophy’. In the

remainder of this chapter I will begin to address these questions by returning to

the Davos encounter. So far I have suggested that the best clue to understanding

of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know, what so many merely believe, that those are
the only natural and healthy roots.” Strauss, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St.
John’s College in Honor of Jacob Klein,” in JCPM, 450.
102
“Heidegger, who surpasses in speculative intelligence all his contemporaries…attempts to go a
way not yet trodden by anyone or rather to think in a way in which philosophers at any rate have
never thought before.” Ibid. See also “What is Political Philosophy?,” in WPP, 55. “Philosophy as
Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” SPPP, 32-34. GS3, 380, 398, 406, 420.
103
“Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle was an achievement with which I cannot compare any
other intellectual phenomenon which has emerged in Germany after the war.” Strauss, “Living
Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political
Problem, 134. See also “An Unspoken Prologue…” in JCPM, 450.

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Strauss’s turn to political philosophy is what occurred there, and specifically that

Davos revealed the limits and the possibilities of the thinkable and the doable as

Strauss understood them in the context of Weimar. If this is true, then one should

be able to show that already then Strauss saw certain positions as untenable given

Heidegger’s revolutionizing influence while regarding others as compatible but

somehow transcended by Heidegger’s thought.

Strauss’s recollection of the debate and the analysis of the competing

intellectual discourses that attracted his attention at the time developed earlier

suggest that the fault line of Weimar thought for him lay between forms of

thought that confronted the problem of ethics or of the right or the best life and

forms of thought that did not. To the former would belong Cohen; the neo-

Orthodox thought of Rosenzweig and Barth; and Heidegger. Among the latter

would be Cassirer, who ‘silently drops’ the problem of ethics; Kelsen, for whose

legal science the question of the right life is not a problem; and Mannheim, who

considers it possible to synthesize competing ideas of the best life into a higher

unity. This raises two questions. Do Strauss’s recollections of Davos from the

1950s correspond with what he understood to be happening at that time? And

what is the relation, if any, between the thought of Heidegger on the one hand and

the thought of Cohen and the neo-orthodox thought of Rosenzweig or Barth on

the other?

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 Strauss was not the first to tell the story of Davos in the terms he did.

Franz Rosenzweig, to whom Strauss dedicated his book on Spinoza in 1930,

recounted the events at Davos that same year as follows:

In Davos recently there took place before a European forum that

conversation between Cohen’s most distinguished pupil, Cassirer, and the
current custodian of Cohen’s Marburg chair, Heidegger, [which … has
been interpreted] as a representative encounter between the old and the
new thinking. And here Heidegger, the student of Husserl, the Aristotelian
scholastic, whose tenure in Cohen’s chair can only be felt as an irony in
the history of spirit by every ‘old Marburgian’, represented against
Cassirer a philosophical position, just that position of ours, the new
thinking, that lies in the line descending from that ‘last Cohen’.104

Whether Strauss was the source of Rosenzweig’s version of the story or his

version is an adaptation of Rosenzweig’s (or both drew on someone else),105 the

fact is that already in 1931 Strauss would express Rosenzweig’s view that his

104
Rosenzweig, “Vertauschte Fronten,” Der Morgen 6, 6 (April 1930), 86. Cited in Peter Eli
Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 293.
105
Rosenzweig refers explicitly to Hermann Herrigel’s reports in the Frankfurter Zeitung
published as “Denker dieser Zeit, Fakultäten und Nationen treffen sich in Davos, I” (and the
follow-up, II), Frankfurter Zeitung, Abendblatt (Friday, May 10, 1929), 73, 345: 4. Peter Eli
Gordon notes that there is no evidence of any other source of Rosenzweig’s knowledge of
Heidegger. (Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 289.) We know, however, that Strauss had been in
communication with him about Heidegger since 1922 (if not earlier).

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thinking (Rosenzweig’s) stands together with Heidegger’s in the line descending

from the ‘last Cohen’.106

Now, while it is true that Heidegger occupied Cohen’s Chair at Marburg,

his filiation with Cohen would not seem to be anything but institutional.

Heidegger did not consider Cohen to be an important thinker, and so any talk of

discipleship would be out of the question for him.107 If anything, Cohen would

represent the antithesis of what Heidegger stood for. For Cohen all true science

and all true philosophy begin from constructions of reason, and not from the self-

illumination of human praxis in ever-changing historical situations.108 True

philosophy, from Plato to Kant to Cohen’s own Critical Idealism, is a science of

grounding that is meant to secure and promote the cultivation of practical and

theoretical reason. Philosophy begins from the ‘facts’ of culture—science, art,

religion, jurisprudence—and not from an Angst-full mood disclosing an abyss. It

begins and culminates in an ethical project: knowledge has no meaning and no

value if it does not see the good it presupposes and pursues.109 Finally, the good

pursued by true science and philosophy and the good pursued by true religion are

the same: indeed, there is a symbiosis between philosophy and religion such that

106
See Strauss, Cohen und Maimuni in GS2, 410.
107
See Heidegger’s remarks on Cohen in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 270.
108
See, for instance, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” in Christop Schulte (ed.), Deutschtum und
Judentum. Ein Disput unter Juden aus Deutschland (Stuttgart: Reclam, [1915] 1993), 44.
109
Hermann Cohen, “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis,” in Bruno Strauss (ed.), Hermann
Cohens Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn, [1908], 1924), 226.

143
religion is the development of humanity’s ethical ideal and ethics is its

guarantee.110

When Rosenzweig speaks of the ‘last Cohen’ as the origin of a ‘line’

descending to Heidegger and himself he must therefore have another Cohen in

mind. Following Nietzsche’s view that of philosophical systems that have been

superseded what remains is the personal—“the eternally unrefutable”111—and

following Strauss’s practice in this case, let the ‘later Cohen’s’ position be

illustrated by an anecdote. According to a story that Strauss reported to

Rosenzweig, it is said of Cohen that “When [he] was still in Marburg, he once

confronted an old Marburg Jew with the idea of God as propounded in his Ethics

[Cohen’s Ethics of Pure Will]. The latter listened respectfully, and when Cohen

was done, asked him, ‘And where is the B’aure Aulom [the Creator of the

World]?’ But Cohen said nothing and broke in tears.”112 According to Peter

Gordon, “[w]hen Cohen falls silent and begins to weep, it is as if all of idealism

has confessed defeat.”113 Whether one accepts this view or not, for Strauss at any

110
H. Cohen, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” 46-47. “Das Gesetz Gottes ist das tiefste Fundament
aller Sittlichkeit, daher vor allem des Rechts und des Staates” (50).
111
F. Nietzsche, “Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen,” in Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol.
1 (Munich: DTV, 1999), 803.
112
Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 38. For a concise account of Cohen’s idea of God see
Julius Guttman, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1964), 352-367.
113
Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 76.

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rate the story shows that “the gulf between [Cohen’s] belief and the belief of the

tradition is unbridgeable.”114

The ‘late Cohen’, we could say, represents for Rosenzweig and Strauss not

the Professor of Philosophy furthering the work of Kultur and Zivilisation but the

philosophizing human being who knows, as Cohen himself put it privately, that

“to regard the intellectual transport into eternal culture as the highest … value of

the poor, human individual” is to miss what is “truly of value in [him],”115and

who thus realizes that there is indeed a ‘revolting disproportion’ between a system

of ethics and the phenomena it pretends to articulate, or, in our example, between

the Kantian God—an idea of reason—and the God of the old Marbug Jew—the

Creator of the World.

Seeing himself as a descendent of the ‘late Cohen’, Rosenzweig developed

a ‘new thinking’ that uses robustly religious language to do justice to the

phenomena as they appear not only to the believer but, he would claim, to

common sense. As perhaps most clearly expressed in his 1925 “The New

Thinking,” Rosenzweig argued that God, the world, and man open up to us “only

in creation, revelation, redemption.”116 This, he would claim, is not theology but

ordinary thinking: “God himself, if we want to comprehend him, conceals

114
Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 38.
115
Cohen in a letter to August Stadler written in 1890. Cited in Gordon, Rosenzweig and
Heidegger, 76.
116
Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’: A Few Supplementary Remarks on The Star,” in Alan
Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’ (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1999): 67-105, 85. (Hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.)

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himself; man, our very self, shuts himself in; the world becomes an apparent

puzzle” (85). We somehow know that God is something other and not ‘in me’ or

‘only my higher self’, for else “this God would hardly have anything to tell me

since I know already what my higher self has to tell me” (85). We also know that

man too is ‘other’, for “if ‘in the deepest depth’ the other were the same as

myself, ‘deep down’ … I could not love him, but only myself” (85). Finally, we

know that the world opens up to us not when the cogito—the ‘I’ that presumably

must accompany all knowledge—asserts itself, but when it forgets itself: when “I

only know of the tree and nothing else” (80). According to Rosenzweig, we miss

all of this—or at any rate Western philosophy from Parmenides to Hegel does—

because of a deep-seated tendency going back to the origins of the philosophical

tradition to apply the same ‘What is?’ question to everything. Thus we reduce

everything either to God—such that “the world and man are of divine ‘essence’”

(75)—or to Nature—“man is only a product, and God nothing but a reflection of

‘Nature’” (75)—or to the I—such that “in all knowledge the ‘I’ must necessarily

accompany it” (80). In other words, the problem is that, like the early Cohen, we

try to build bridges—in Cohen’s case between the reality of the thinking I and the

reality of God. Everything then depends on understanding the “separateness of

‘Being’” (85).

This cursory look at Rosenzweig’s ‘new thinking’ should suffice to

illustrate its superiority to the ‘old thinking’ represented by Cohen, at least when

it comes to articulating the phenomena of an ethical existence—particularly the

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relation to the ‘other’ or to the neighbor and the reality of the divine—and at least

as these phenomena appear to a believing person. There can be no disproportion

between ethical language and what it refers to because the ‘new thinking’ does

not seek to understand the Being of God or the Being of the world in terms of the

Being of man.117 It should also be sufficient to illustrate the striking resemblance

of Rosenzweig’s thinking to Heidegger’s.118 Both propose to move beyond

philosophy towards forms of ‘new thinking’. Both propose different versions of

the destruction of the history of ontology. For both, a central omission of western

philosophy has been that in its quest for knowledge of timeless essences it “wants

to know nothing of time” (82). Rather, as Rosenzweig puts it, we “cannot know

independently of time” (83). For both, truth is not (or not primarily) ‘what is the

case’ or what works or what is a necessary postulate of reason, but what reveals

itself to us in and through time, and not in passive contemplation but in and

through care or commitment (99). Consequently, a theory of knowledge that

precedes knowing does not make sense, “[f]or all knowing, if something is really

known, is a singular act and has its own method” (97). The ‘new thinking’, like

Heidegger, thus proposes to move beyond theoria: “What does not happen any

117
Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’…,” 74. As Karl Löwith puts it, “Experience discovers in
man, however deeply it may dive, only human qualities, in the world worldly things, and in God
divine: but this in God alone, as worldly things only in the world and human qualities only in
man.” Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Sep., 1942): 53-77, 64. Cf. Rosenzweig’s remarks
on ethics in The Star of Redemption, 10 (“Philosophy had intended to grasp man, even as a
‘personality’, in ethics. But that was an impossible endeavor. For it and as it grasped him, he was
bound to dissolve in its grasp”).
118
The first comparative reading of Heidegger and Rosenzweig was attempted by Karl Löwith in
1942. See his “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity.”

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longer is only the ‘looking’.”119 Above all, perhaps, both Rosenzweig and

Heidegger attempt ‘theologies without God’ or accounts of religious

consciousness that nevertheless claim to be beyond theology or religion or even

philosophy of religion.120

The main work of Rosenzweig’s New Thinking, The Star of Redemption,

appeared in 1921.121 By the following year Strauss was already well-acquainted

with him, and thus it was to Rosenzweig that Strauss reported his impression of

Heidegger, specifically, of his interpretation of the beginning of Aristotle’s

Metaphysics.122 One year later, in 1923, Strauss would be recruited by

Rosenzweig to teach at the Free Jewish House of Learning. Thus it is safe to

assume that beginning in 1922 Strauss’s thought already moved within the orbit

of the New Thinking—somewhere between Rosenzweig and Heidegger, or

attempting to go beyond them.

119
Rosenzweig in a letter to Hans Ehrenberg of 1921, quoted in Barbara E. Galli, “Introduction,”
in Galli and Udoff (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’, 41.
120
“Theology may not debase philosophy to the [role of] handmaiden; but just as degrading is the
role of the cleaning woman which philosophy in modern times and the recent past had accustomed
itself to attribute to theology. The true relationship of the two renewed sciences … is that of
siblings, indeed it has to lead to the point where both are united in one person. The theological
problems are to be translated into the human, and the human driven forward until they reach the
theological.” Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’…,” 89. See Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F.
Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” 56. Cf. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of
Religion,” in Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1968), 237 (the new thinking sought “to escape from the evidence of the biblical understanding of
man,” but failed; “Heidegger wishes to expel fom philosophy the last relics of Christian
theology”). (See also chapter 3 for a fuller discussion.)
121
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame press, 1985).
122
“A Giving of Accounts,” in JPCM, 461.

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 This begins to explain, I believe, the tangential role attributed to

Heidegger in accounts of Strauss’s Weimar turn to political science. Ironically, it

is not because Strauss was too far from Heidegger’s fundamental positions that he

hardly ever mentions him but because he was too close to him. In part, of course,

this has to do with the fact that Heidegger did not publish any major work

between 1922 (when Strauss encountered him) and 1927 (when Being and Time

was published). But even after 1927 Strauss engaged Heidegger’s thought only

with great circumspection: rarely mentioning him by name; commonly letting

others (notably Kojève) stand for Heidegger’s position; never reading him closely

(and then writing about him) as Strauss read other major thinkers; and, most

interestingly it seems to me, never explicitly discussing Heidegger’s interpretation

of Aristotle—which, as we have seen, he regarded as the most important

intellectual phenomenon to have emerged in Germany after the First World

War.123 And yet, arguably every writing of Strauss is directed to the unnamed

presence of Heidegger.124

In what sense, then, can it be said that Strauss was ‘too close’ to

Heidegger in his early years?

Given Strauss’s personal acquaintance with Rosenzweig, and assuming

that he had read his Star of Redemption published in 1921, Strauss must have

123
Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and
the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115-139, here
134-135.

124
See Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 256.

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understood Heidegger’s early lectures in light of or in dialogue with

Rosenzweig’s ‘new thinking’. Now, among all the coincidences between

Heidegger and Rosenzweig there is one that points directly to what most

impressed Strauss about Heidegger, namely, his interpretation of the beginning of

Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Both Rosenzweig and Heidegger sought to move beyond

the view that philosophy culminates in the godly ‘look’ of theoria. This meant

taking a stance against Hegel. Indeed, while, as mentioned earlier, Hegel saw

Aristotle’s Metaphysics as the authoritative account of ancient thought

culminating in his own view that philosophy is speculative science,125 Heidegger,

as we saw in the last chapter, went back to it to show that Aristotle had not been

understood. Philosophy in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle “goes along with the

factical tendencies of interpretation of factical life,”126 and becomes a form of

detached ‘looking’, a theoria disjoined from life—from ‘natality and mortality’—

only because of a prejudice that regards certain beings—viz., complete and self-

sufficient beings—as higher than others and as more worthy of being known. It is

the mistaken assumption that one can understand human being-in-the-world as

one understands other beings of the world that leads to the belief that ethics as a

science and politics as an art of production are possible and necessary.

Soon after the Davos disputation this became the question that runs as a

red thread through Strauss’s work over the decades—whether political science is
125
Joachim Ritter, “Aristoteles und die Vorsokratiker,” Metaphysik Und Politik. Studien Zu
Aristoteles Und Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 34.
126
Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles,
78.

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possible and necessary.127 But, again we must ask, why only after Davos and not

earlier? Earlier, it seems, Strauss simply accepted Heidegger’s attack against what

he called the ‘tyranny of the theoretical’ together with its corollary that a science

of politics is impossible. Though an analysis of Strauss’s writings prior to Davos

is beyond the scope of this dissertation, it must at least be mentioned that in his

study of Spinoza Strauss takes a clear stance against the primacy traditionally

accorded to theory and, particularly, against the possibility of a theoretical

understanding of politics.128

This begins to change in 1929 as Strauss becomes aware of the possibility

of a return to classical political philosophy. Earlier we suggested that Strauss’s

Weimar was made up of two groups of thinkers: those that confronted the

problem of ethics and those who dropped the problem (Cassirer) or relativized it

(Kelsen) or attempted a synthesis of various answers (Mannheim). Beyond this,

127
See note 35 above.
128
On Spinoza’s privileging of theoria specially, see Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas, in GS1:
76-78, 138, 142, 155 (“the freedom of philosophizing…is the primary and ultimate purpose for
which Spinoza wrote the Treatise”), 249, 288: “The cool statesmanship for which Spinoza makes
a claim against the philosophers is not the spontaneous outcome of political life, political interest,
political responsibility. In the last instance, it is nothing other than the pure understanding, by
which man consciously shares in the imperishable whole. His interest in the state is mediated by
his interest in theory. His political theory presupposes that theory is the one thing needful—even
though only as the sole means of attaining perfect happiness. For on this assumption the gulf
between the few wise and the multitude is given, and political theory is unconcerned with the wise
and concerned only with the multitude. The abyss, created by interest in theory, between the wise
and the multitude, makes the wise essentially spectators of the life of the multitude. For the wise,
the multitude becomes an object of theory” (=229 of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion). Cf. Spinoza,
A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover
Publications, 1951), 11 (the Treatise is dedicated to the philosophical few, specially to those
“whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to theology” (cited
in GS1, 154). See also Spinoza’s letter to Oldenburg of 1665 (letter 30) in Spinoza, The Letters,
trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1996), 185f. (Cited in Michael Zank, Leo Strauss:
The Early Writings, 163.)

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what the latter group has in common is the attempt to resolve fundamental

questions concerning right and wrong, just and unjust, belief and unbelief through

different forms of theorizing. As he had done with Spinoza, Strauss would also

take a stance against this presumption. Thus, most notably, in 1929 Strauss would

criticize Mannheim for raising “the question of the meaning of science, in

particular of the possibility of politics as science” while forgetting “the

foundations of our scientific tradition that lie in Greek antiquity.”129 Referring to

Heidegger, Mannheim had warned against “the danger inherent in the ‘false

contemplation of the investigative attitude’ vis-à-vis political praxis,”130 and

generally against the “contemplative craving for knowledge.”131 To this Strauss

responds that: “the same problem exists with respect to scientific praxis,” that is to

say, “Mannheim is dominated by liberalism … insofar as it is the essence of

liberalism to elevate insights won in a contemplative attitude to principles of

praxis.”132

This begins to show why Strauss characterized the form of thinking

against which he began to raise the question of the necessity and possibility of

political science, as sophistry.133 As we shall see more clearly in later chapters, he

129
Strauss, “Der Konspektivismus,” in GS2, 372.
130
Ibid., 373.
131
As quoted in Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland.
132
Strauss, “Der Konspektivismus,” in GS2, 373.
133
See his letters of 17 November 1932 to Krüger in GS3, 404 (“how can a philosopher, a man of
science, teach like a sophist?”); of 23 June 1934 to Klein (revelation and philosophy are one vis-à-
vis sophistic, i.e., “modern philosophy as a whole”); February 7, 1933 to Krüger; Philosophie und

152
meant this literally as the failure to raise the question of the good and to

understand the problems involved in a techne politike. Crucially, however,

Strauss’s response was not Platonic in the common understanding of the term,

namely, a recourse to politics as a form of fabrication.134 Rather, in accord with

what Heidegger taught in the early 1920s concerning the difficulties of a science

of politics, Strauss began to search for a response in what he called “the critical

philosophy of Plato.”135 Of this philosophy it can be said provisionally that its

quest for an order of human life “is not tied to a previous knowledge of phusis”136

or even to a knowledge of human nature.137

Around 1929 Strauss thus began to retract against his earlier critique of

theory in favor of his own version of a ‘new thinking’ which he would later call as

an émigré in America ‘political philosophy’. It would take a long time, however,

before he would assume the ‘Straussian’ positions for which he is best known: for

instance, that the life of contemplative theoria is the best life for man; that there is

such a thing as classical ‘political philosophy’ (when the very term was never

Gesetz, in GS2, 9-10; 27 March 1935 to Klein (‘Sophistik’ “is meant completely literally
(following the Protagoras-Mythos): to come under submission to what the Athenians say on the
grounds of an epimethean physics…” (GS3, 442). See also the reference to Plato’s Protagoras in
Hobbes’ Politische Wissenschaft, in GS3, 147. Compare Strauss’s apparent retraction years later
(in 1946): “The temptation to identify modern philosophy with sophistry is considerable, and Wild
is not the first to succumb to it.” “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” 335.
134
See e.g., Plato, Gorgias, 503 d 5ff. Timaeus, 27d5ff. 30a 1-6.
135
Letter to Krüger (18 August 1934), in GS3, 440.
136
Letter to Krüger (7 February 1933), in GS3, 426. See also Strauss’s letter to Klein of October
13, 1934, in GS3, 529.
137
Letter to Krüger (17 November 1932), in GS3, 407.

153
used by Plato and only once by Aristotle); or that “political philosophy as quest

for the final truth regarding the political fundamentals is possible and

necessary”138 (when the ‘greatest thinker of our time’ had apparently persuaded

him of the absurdity of such a quest for ‘final truth,’ specially regarding political

things).

Having considered the context of Strauss’s turn to political science, the

task now becomes to read the works in which and through which Strauss became

the Strauss we know by responding to Heidegger’s view that ethics and politics as

science are impossible. To this we shall turn in chapter four.

138
The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, xv.

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 Concluding remarks

In this chapter I have tried to trace the genesis of Strauss’s project in the

intellectual debate he witnessed during the final years of the Weimar Republic. In

the work of a thinker as complex as Leo Strauss, it is difficult to find a single

defining theme. Indeed, Strauss was deeply attracted to philosophical and political

positions which—at first sight at least—have very little (if anything) to do with

each other: the young Strauss ‘believed everything Nietzsche said from age 22 to

30’ (i.e., until around 1929); he agreed with Schmitt that Hobbes was ‘by far the

greatest and perhaps the only truly systematic political thinker’; he saw Hermann

Cohen as ‘surpass[ing] all other German professors of philosophy of the period

between 1871 and 1925 by the fire and power of his soul’; he came to consider

Maimonides as ‘the true natural model’ of rationalism; he took Heidegger to be

‘the greatest thinker of our time’; and he regarded the neo-orthodox thought of

Barth and Rosenzweig as at least potentially superior to any modern philosophy

of religion, and as a guide to the quest for truth. Reflecting the complexity of his

intellectual affinities, Strauss has been read as at core a Nietzschean (Laurence

Lampert), Maimonidean (Kenneth Hart Green), Farabian (Daniel Tanguay),

Socratic (Heinrich Meier), and Schmittean-Hobbesian (John McCormick) thinker.

What Strauss was ‘up to’ is similarly unclear. ‘Political philosophy’ is the

common answer. But the meaning of ‘political philosophy’ according to scholars

of Strauss ranges from ‘philosophical propaganda’ meant to reinstitute the

155
‘conservative enlightenment’ (Stanley Rosen) to a means of retrieving the

ordinary experience of what is ‘first for us’ with the aim of purging political

practice from utopian designs and of renewing philosophizing as a dialectical

ascent from ordinary experience (Victor Gourevitch). The theme of Strauss’s

reflections has similarly been interpreted variously as ‘the city and man’ (or the

conflict between philosophy and society) (Gourevitch), the ‘quarrel between the

ancients and the moderns’ (Gadamer), and ‘the theological-political predicament’

(Meier).

I have proposed, rather, to begin to read the work of Strauss as guided by

the question of ‘the necessity and possibility of political science’. I thus concur

with the reading of Strauss as a Socratic, insofar as it was Socrates who seems to

have been the first to raise the problem of the necessity and possibility of a techne

politike. I further agree with the view that the ‘theological-political predicament’

(or, generally speaking, the question reason or revelation?) became for Strauss the

central problem. This insofar as precisely the question of the necessity of political

science points to the alternative of a life guided by divine revelation. Nonetheless,

the ‘necessity and possibility of political science’ still seems to me to be a better

guide to understanding the goal and the movement of Strauss’s thought. First, this

question appears far earlier as a central theme in his writings than the conflict

between philosophy and society or the quarrel between the ancients and the

moderns. Second, whether or not it predates or is more fundamental than ‘the

theological-political predicament’, it can be traced more consistently over several

156
decades of Strauss’s work. Finally and most importantly, it makes it possible to

see the deep doubts that Strauss harbored with respect to a project—viz., the

restoration of classical political philosophy—that is too often read and taught as

self-evidently plausible.139

Paying attention to the context of Strauss’s early work makes it clear that

the path to ‘political philosophy’ is far more arduous than it seems—but precisely

because of that, it seems to me, it is also far more interesting and thought-

provoking. To name but a few results of this chapter in order to conclude: first,

Strauss’s ‘political philosophy’ is hardly ‘classical’; rather it seems to originate in

Strauss’s early adherence to Heidegger’s ‘ultramodern’ attempt at developing a

comprehensive philosophy of the human situation that overcomes—by

transcending and incorporating—the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. That

is, the young Strauss seems to have believed in the possibility of a purely atheistic

answer to the question of the right life for man. The question reason or revelation?

or the ‘theological-political predicament’ are therefore to be read as a reversal of

Strauss’s own early atheism (as distinguished from his later ‘unbelief’).

Something similar holds for the claim that the best life is the life of philosophical

contemplation. Following Heidegger (and others, e.g., Rosenzweig and

Nietzsche), the young Strauss was a critic of ‘the general domination of the

139
No doubt, Strauss’s own claims are partly responsible for this—for instance the claim, already
mentioned, that ‘[t]he meaning of political philosophy and its meaningful character is as evident
today as it always has been since the time when political philosophy came to light in Athens’; or
that ‘[t]he whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel and certainly all adherents of
natural right, assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final solution’—
namely on the grounds of ‘the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live’, that is,
on the assumption that the best life is the philosophic life.

157
theoretical’ knowing that the paths to truth are manifold and lead through praxis,

political and otherwise. The ‘Straussian’ thesis that contemplation is the highest

form of life, as we shall see more clearly in a later chapter, seems also to be a

reversal of a different—indeed opposite—position that prevails in the thought of

the young Strauss. The key to understanding the movement of Strauss’s thought

therefore seems to me to be his young encounter with Heidegger. As to the

meaning of ‘political philosophy’, we could say so far that it aims at awareness of

‘fundamental problems’—reason or revelation, theory or praxis—as Strauss

himself lived them.

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 CHAPTER THREE

Hannah Arendt in Weimar: Beyond the Theological-Political

Predicament?

Reading Arendt from the start has been the exception rather than the norm. While

some studies emphasize the centrality of the German-Jewish experience for the

development of her thought paying particular attention to her biography of Rahel

Varnhagen begun in the early 1930s,1 few go back to Arendt’s earliest writings,

and in particular to her dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine.2 In part

this is due to the fact that Arendt’s dissertation remained untranslated until 1996,

which meant that even for German readers the only statement of her youthful

writing was a version “printed in Gothic script, filled with … Latin and Greek

1
Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess, trans. Richard and Clara Winston
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). See, for instance, Seyla Benhabib, The
Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996);
Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
1996); and Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
2
Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, edited by Joanna V. Scott and Judith C. Stark
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). See specially the interpretive essay by the
editors in Ibid., 115-213; and, more recently, Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the
New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of her
Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). For a recent reading of Love and
Saint Augustine as a response to Heidegger see Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel
Lévinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

159
quotations, and written in Heideggerian prose.”3 More importantly, however, the

failure to incorporate the dissertation into the Arendt canon seems today to be due

to a neglect of the theological sources of her thought. This applies even for—

indeed especially for—Heidegger who, as is now well known, “would never have

arrived on the path of thinking” without his theological background.4 Thus, while

it has been noted for decades now that Arendt’s thinking developed out of a

critical engagement with Heidegger,5 there are no studies of their relation to date

that take into account his theological concerns, and in particular his close

collaboration with the New Testament theologian Rudolph Bultmann who

mentored Arendt in theological questions.

This way of reading Arendt has led to the view that, as Peter Gordon has

recently put it, “what Leo Strauss termed ‘the theological-political

predicament’… left virtually no imprint upon [her] thinking.”6 In what follows I

shall argue that this is a mistaken presumption that conceals far more than it

reveals of Arendt’s deepest political and philosophical insights.

3
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982), 490. See Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer
philosophischen Interpretation, edited by Ludger Lütkehaus (Berlin: Philo, [1929] 2003).
4
Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. GA 12 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, [1959] 1985),
96. See the important study of John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For more recent studies of the origins of
Heidegger’s thought see Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander and Holger Zaborowski (eds.),
Heidegger Und Die Anfänge Seines Denkens. Heidegger-Jahrbuch. Vol. 1 (Freiburg: Karl Alber,
2004).
5
See specially Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and
Heidegger (New York: SUNY Press, 1997) and Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of
the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
6
Peter Eli Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical: German Jewish Thought and Weimar Political
Theology,” Social Research, Vol. 74: No. 3, Fall 2007: 855-878, 857.

160
 These insights grew out of an unfamiliar source, namely, from Arendt’s

encounter of 1920s neo-orthodox ‘dialectical theology’. The importance of neo-

orthodox theology for twentieth century thought has largely been missed. This

significance resides in the fact that, long before post-modernism, neo-orthodoxy

set out to destroy ‘metaphysics’ or ‘onto-theology’—with both liberating and

nihilistic consequences. Neo-orthodox Destruktion liberated human judgment

from reliance on the ‘gods’ of this world—History, Science, Nature. And yet,

specially in its Christian variants, it also involved a certain anti-nomianism—

dating back to Paul’s critique of the law and early Christian thought more

generally—that made it radically anti-political. The young Arendt was torn

between her attraction to such a form of thinking and her Judaism in a complex

way which involved, on the one hand, a ‘factical’ condition of ‘homelessness’ or

insecurity in the world similar to the early Christian experience, and on the other

hand, a radically different understanding of ‘being-in-the-world’ shaped by a

sense of gratitude for what is ‘given’ to the human condition and by the relevance

of the ‘other’ or the neighbor. It is from this tension, I shall argue, that her

political thought arises.

To see the full significance of the theological-political background of

Arendt’s thought, it is necessary to reconstruct the path that led from nineteenth

century theological-political liberalism to neo-orthodox theology, and thence to

her response. This will involve discussing thinkers such as Hermann Cohen that

exercised a far more important influence on the ‘spiritual situation’ of the time

161
than is recognized in the literature. Though Arendt mentions Cohen only very

rarely, it seems to me that some of her central theses—including the rejection of

the will in politics, the critique of the ‘social question’, and generally her critique

of liberalism—must be understood with Cohen in mind. I have tried to reduce my

preliminary approach to Arendt to the minimum but it still seems necessary to

apologize for unavoidable prolixity.

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 The ‘theological-political predicament’

Leo Strauss referred to the “theologico-political predicament” (or “problem”) in

two famous statements. The first appears in the opening sentences of his 1962

autobiographical preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion: “This study on

Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise was written during the years 1925-28 in

Germany. The author was a young Jew born and raised in Germany who found

himself in the grip of the theologico-political predicament.”7 Two years later

Strauss used the term to explain the motivation behind his study of The Political

Philosophy of Hobbes: “My study of Hobbes began in the context of an

investigation of the origins of biblical criticism in the seventeenth century,

namely, of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. The reawakening of

theology, which for me is marked by the names of Karl Barth and Franz

Rosenzweig, appeared to make it necessary to investigate how far the critique of

orthodox theology—Jewish and Christian—deserved to be victorious. Since then

the theological-political problem has remained the theme of my investigations.”8

7
Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Kenneth H. Green (ed.), Jewish
Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought by Leo
Strauss (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 137.
8
Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Ibid., 453.

163
 What exactly Strauss meant by the theological-political predicament is a

subject of debate.9 These statements, however, suffice to convey the basic sense

that the problem has to do with the conflicting claims of political and religious

norms, or of norms derived from reason and norms whose source is attributed to

divine revelation. Strauss described the problem in terms such as the following:

“No alternative is more fundamental than the alternative: human guidance or

divine guidance. Tertium non datur.” “[T]his indeed is the question: whether men

can acquire knowledge of the good, without which they cannot guide their lives

individually and collectively, by the unaided efforts of their reason, or whether

they are dependent for that knowledge on divine revelation…”10 Or: “The

fundamental alternative is that of the rule of philosophy over religion or the rule

of religion over philosophy.”11

As Gordon points out, a similar understanding of the fundamental

alternative confronting humanity pervades the work of Franz Rosenzweig with

whom Strauss was closely associated and who was arguably the greatest Jewish

thinker of the Weimar era. Deeply marked by his experiences in the war front and

by his discovery of the concept of revelation, Rosenzweig was led to the view that

the vocation of the Jewish people consisted in providing the world with a

9
Particularly when it comes to understanding the theological-political problem as “the theme” of
Strauss’s investigations as a whole. See the discussion in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the
Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3-28.
10
Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” in Ibid., 141-180, here 149.
11
Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in Studies in Platonic
Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 176.

164
collective model of what may be called non-political redemption.12 Thus, while

the peoples of the Christian age “know that God’s will somehow realizes itself in

the martial fortunes of their state,” the Jews—who conducted a holy war only

once and for all time (in Joshua’s conquest of the holy land)—are “practically the

only human being[s] who cannot take war seriously, and this makes [them] the

only genuine pacifist[s].”13 Similarly, while the nations of the world are bound to

a particular land, law, and language, the Jewish people are bound to land only as a

yearning—since for a “people in exile … home is never a home in the sense of

land;” to a particular ‘present’ law only insofar as it flows “into the common basin

of what is valid now and forever” (viz. the holy law); and to particular ‘temporal’

languages only for the business of daily life—the eternal language being the holy

language of prayer.14

Whereas Strauss raised the question, politics or revelation? to remind us of

what is at stake in politics—the right or the good life and ultimately happiness—

while leaving the question undecided,15 Rosenzweig, we can say, decided it in

favor of revelation and against politics. Thus, since the Jewish people has already

reached “that inner unity of faith and life” “toward which the nations are still

moving,” it is “numb to the concerns, the doing, and the struggling of the world,”
12
See Stéfan Mosès, “Politik und Religion. Zur Aktualität Franz Rosenzweigs,” in Wolfdietrich
Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1866-1929), Vol. II (Freiburg: Karl
Alber, 1988), 855-875, esp. 865.
13
Franz Rosenzwig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1985), 331.
14
Ibid., 300, 303, 302.
15
See Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 3-28, esp. 16 and 28.

165
and indeed “must deny itself active and full participation in the life of the world

with its daily, conclusive solving of all contradictions…”16

Nothing, it seems, could be more foreign to the thought of Hannah Arendt.

Thus Gordon’s claim that “to this apolitical inheritance Arendt’s political theory

offers a dramatic alternative” appears entirely justified.17 Is it true, however, that

to Strauss’s “conception of theological-political conflict” Arendt develops an

“alternative conception of non-theological politics”?18 To answer this question it

is necessary to begin by taking a closer look at Strauss’s understanding of the

“theological-political predicament.”

According to Strauss, the core of this predicament lay in the political and

spiritual dependence of German Jewry on the German nation.19 Not only did the

German Jews owe their full political emancipation to the Weimar Republic; long

before that, their thinking had become “open to the influx of German thought.”20

The spiritual dependence of Judaism on German philosophy can be briefly

illustrated by referring to the title of the culminating work of pre-war Jewish

thought: Herman Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism.21

16
Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 331-332 (my emphasis).
17
Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical,” 869-70.
18
Ibid., 859.
19
Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the
Crisis of Modernity, 140.
20
Ibid., 139-140.
21
Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New
York: Ungar Publishing, 1972).

166
Cohen, who was “the center of attraction for philosophically minded Jews” like

Strauss and Rosenzweig,22 had sought to reconcile the moral truths of Judaism

with the Protestant spirit of German rationalism, as well as with the basic tenets of

an ‘ethically socialist’ political liberalism. But this assimilationist attempt to solve

the Jewish Question revealed itself as a dismal failure. For soon after the war both

German rationalism and liberal democracy were in a terminal crisis—and so, not

coincidentally given its dependence on the German spirit, was Judaism qua

‘religion of reason.’ This crisis of liberal Judaism became manifest in the turn

from liberal to neo-orthodox theology undertaken, most notably, by Rosenzweig.

The predicament for “a young Jew born and raised in Germany” was, then, how to

liberate the Jewish heritage from its dependence on modern reason (which had

fallen into disrepute) without embracing orthodoxy, that is, without saying

farewell to reason tout court.

22
See Strauss, “Introductory Essay for Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of
Judaism,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 233-248, here 233.

167
 Philosophy and theology: “for me they belonged together”

Arendt spoke on one occasion of a predicament that echoes the problem just

described. In a 1968 interview with Günter Gaus she noted that during the time of

her studies she regarded philosophy and theology as “belong[ing] together.”23

Almost in passing she then went on to say that “I had some misgivings only as to

how one deals with this if one is Jewish … how one proceeds. I had no idea, you

know. I had difficult problems that were then resolved by themselves.”24

The superficial explanation of Arendt’s difficult problems is this: as a

Jewish student attending the New Testament seminars of the Protestant

Theologian Rudolph Bultmann she had to make it a condition of her attendance

that “there must be no anti-Semitic remarks.”25

But Arendt’s difficulties, I shall argue, ran much deeper. Regarding

philosophy and theology as “belonging together” was in itself nothing unique.

Heidegger, as we shall see, saw his work at that time as a contribution to both

philosophy and theology—a contribution that became essential to the work of

Bultmann as well. The work of their students—among them Hans Jonas, Karl

23
H. Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding
1930-1954, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 9.
24
“A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” 9.
25
See Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 61-62. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Ich Will Verstehen, edited by
Ursula Ludz, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 2006), 56, n. 7.

168
Löwith, and Gerhard Krüger—reflected this collaboration.26 Indeed, the

university of Marburg itself, committed as it was to the Reformation, stood for the

same principle.27 And the idea that German thought as a whole arose from a field

of questions that was as theological as it was philosophical was fairly widespread.

Thus the Protestant theologian Emmanuel Hirsch could argue in the 1930s that the

aim of “all the more serious German thinkers” from Leibniz on was “out of

philosophical reflection freely to produce the essential content of Christian piety

and morality,” thus making human and divine truth coincide.28

And yet, of course, Arendt was not a Christian. In that regard she was in

the situation of other Jewish students of Heidegger such as Jonas and Strauss.

These thinkers had two important commonalities. They were deeply influenced by

the collaboration of theology and philosophy in the 1920s, and specifically by the

view that existentialist philosophy could provide a universal key for

understanding human consciousness, including religious consciousness.29 And

26
See, for instance, Hans Jonas, Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem. Ein
philosophischer Beitrag zur Genesis der christlich-abendländischen Freiheitsidee (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1930); Gerhard Krüger, “Die Herkunft des philosophischen
Selbstbewusstseins,” Logos, Bd. XXII, 1933: 225-272; Karl Löwith, “Phänomenologische
Ontologie und protestantische Theologie,” in Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1930-1970 (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, [1930] 1971), 9-41.
27
See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Restricted Conception of Rhetoric,” in Daniel M. Gross and
Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 166: “By going
to Marburg in 1923 [Heidegger] had come to a university that had committed itself to the
Reformation; theology and philosophy should work in concert.”
28
See John Stroup, “Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany, 1928-1939:
Emmanuel Hirsch as a Phenomenon of His Time,” Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 80, No. 3.
July 1987, 340.
29
In the late 1920s Strauss referred to Heidegger’s interpretation of the call of conscience in Being
and Time and to his critique of the primacy of “seeing” (theorein) as decisive for an atheistic

169
they broke away from their early Heideggerian existentialism not only because of

its political consequences but because of its religious presuppositions.30 Perhaps

due to the sui generis nature of her investigations, which reflect her love of the

world far more than her love of books—thus concealing the intellectual sources of

her work—Arendt has typically been read as an anomaly whose thought reflected

a variety of tensions—between modernism and nostalgic Grecophilia, between

Socrates and Heidegger, between radical agonism and elitism31—but nothing

comparable to a “theological-political predicament.” To question this view I shall

attempt to situate Arendt’s early thought within the broad movement of

philosophy and theology that led to the theological-political predicament

confronted not only by Strauss and Rosenzweig but, in different ways, by the neo-

orthodox theology in which Arendt was schooled.

interpretation of the Bible that would make it possible to overcome religion. See Strauss’s letter to
Gerhard Krüger of January 7, 1930 in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3: Hobbes’
politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften – Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler,
2001), 398. For Jonas’ early understanding of Heideggerian existentialism as “the explication of
the fundamentals of human existence as such” see his “Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and
Nihilism,” in The Gnostic Religion, 2nd revised ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 320-340, here
321.
30
In 1931 Strauss began to take a critical distance from the Christian tradition “in whose track
moves at least our philosophical thinking.” See Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” in Leo Strauss,
Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2: Philosophie und Gesetz; frühe Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 393-436, 428. As in several other statements of the time, the primary
(though unnamed) target of Strauss’s critique is here Heidegger. For a more detailed analysis of
Strauss’s early response to Heidegger see Rodrigo Chacón, “Reading Strauss From the Start: On
the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy’,” European Journal of Political Theory
(forthcoming). (See also note chapter two above, n. 120.) For Jonas’ critique of the Gnostic
presuppositions of Heideggerian existentialism see his “Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and
Nihilism,” and, more generally, Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” The Review of Metaphysics 18
(1964): 207-33.
31
See respectively Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt; Margaret Canovan,
Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992); and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993).

170
 Liberal theology: the religion of culture

The neo-orthodox revival of the 1920s was a reaction against the liberal theology

that dominated the nineteenth century, also known as ‘free,’ ‘rationalist,’ or

‘modern’ theology; or as characterized by its opponents, Kulturprotestantismus.32

Liberal theology can be understood as a consequence of the philosophical—or,

more specifically, historical-critical—treatment of religion that gained particular

strength in Germany in the nineteenth century.33 Religious faith would either be

undermined, as its basic tenets—such as the resurrection or the existence of a

creator God—were revealed as more myth than reality, or it would have to

become reconciled with modern culture, that is, with modern morality and

science.

The most important representative of Christian Kulturprotestantismus was

Adolph von Harnack (1851-1930).34 Along with other liberal theologians,

Harnack attempted to recover the “Jesus of History” from the “Christ of

dogma.”35 Dogmatic Christianity, which understands Christ as “Logos incarnate”

32
R. Beer, art. “Theologie, liberale,” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel (eds.), Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2007), Vol. 10, 1101.
33
See Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Anchor, 1967),
323-86.
34
For a recent critical appraisal of Harnack within the context of liberal theology see Mark Lilla,
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
35
Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming. How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (New
York: Random House, 1986), 13.

171
and as the God-man,36 Harnack argued, is the “work of the Greek spirit on the

grounds of the Gospels.”37 Against this dogmatic conception, Harnack turned to

the earliest records of Jesus’ life to find in them an entirely human prophet who

did not speak as “a heroic penitent, or like an ascetic who has turned his back

upon the world.” Jesus’ message, he argued, lies beyond any “dramatic

eschatological apparatus,”38 and its essence consists in the fatherhood of God, the

brotherhood of man, and the “infinite value of the human soul.”39 Emphasizing

this last aspect, Harnack claimed that the message of the Gospel—the coming

kingdom of God—is directed primarily to the interior man: “[t]he kingdom of

God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of

individuals…”40 To make this message available to “our modern way of thinking

and feeling,” Harnack further described it as “superior to all antithesis and tension

between this world and a world to come, between reason and ecstasy, between

work and isolation from the world, between Judaism and Hellenism.”41

36
Adolph von Harnack, What is Christianity, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper
Brothers, 1957), 203.
37
Harnack, Dogmengeschichte (Tübingen, 1991), 4. Cited in Gunther Wenz, “Adolph von
Harnack. Herzensfrömmigkeit und Wissenschaftsmanagement,” in P. Neuner and G. Wenz (eds.),
Theologen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 33-51,
40.
38
Harnack, What is Christianity?, 38, 41. Cf. Sheehan, The First Coming, 16.
39
Harnack, What is Christianity?, 63; see also 51.
40
Ibid., 56.
41
Ibid., 63.

172
 Thus, far from warning us that “you must change your life,” the Gospel

according to Harnack would seem to require us to adapt it as much as possible to

modern humanist ideals. Indeed, the Gospel “is in nowise a positive religion like

the rest … it contains no statutory or particularistic elements;” it contains no

“ordinances or injunctions bidding us forcibly to alter the conditions of the age in

which we may happen to be living.”42 Quite to the contrary, the ideal it contains is

the “goal and lodestar” of “our historical development.” Writing in 1900, Harnack

believed that modern civilization was moving closer to precisely that “lofty and

noble ideal” which

we have received from the very foundation of our religion. Who can tell
whether man will ever achieve it? But we can and ought to draw nearer to
it, and today—as opposed to two or three hundred years ago—we are
already aware of a moral obligation to proceed in this direction, and those
among us whose experience is more subtle and therefore prophetic no
longer look upon the kingdom of love and peace as a mere Utopia.”43

As Mark Lilla has recently argued, Protestant liberal theology left its mark on

German Jewish thought as well.44 Christianity and Judaism faced the same

challenge of adapting their message to the modern world. In stark contrast to

Christianity, however, Judaism confronted in Germany a culture that was deeply

42
Ibid., 101.
43
Ibid., 113-14 (translation altered as cited by Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the
Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 189.)
44
Lilla, The Stillborn God, 256; see also 238-244.

173
hostile. This was true not only on the level of popular opinion, as became evident

in the anti-Jewish riots that followed upon the Prussian Emancipation Edict of

1812 and the founding of the Reich,45 but on a philosophical level as well. Suffice

it to recall a statement such as Kant’s to the effect that “[t]he euthanasia of

Judaism is the pure moral religion,”46 or Hegel’s view that “[t]he great tragedy of

the Jewish people … can arouse neither terror nor pity … but horror alone,”47 or

Heinrich von Treitschke’s warning to the new Germany that “the Jews are our

disgrace.”48

The most ambitious attempt to make Judaism compatible with German

thought and culture was undertaken by Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). In the

1880s Cohen responded to the rise of anti-Semitism in the academy with an

attempt to demonstrate the universal meaning of Judaism for the culture of

humanity.49 According to Cohen, anti-Semitism is not a racist worldview but a

matter of prejudices that belongs really to the past since Jewish and Protestant

45
See Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg:
Könighausen & Neumann), 147-48.
46
Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Arabis, 1979),
95.
47
G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, trans. T.M. Knox (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 204-205.
48
Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Ansichten,” in “Preussische Jahrbücher,” November 1879;
repr. in Walter Boehlich (ed.), Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag,
1965), 5-12. On German philosophy and Judaism, more generally, see Steven B. Smith, Spinoza,
Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
49
See Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 146-157. See also Andrea Poma, “Hermann Cohen’s
Response to Anti-Judaism,” in Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen’s
Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 1-21.

174
elements in German spiritual history have long been reconciled.50

Cohen attempted to prove that Judaism is not only compatible with “the pure

moral religion” or with the “purer form of Christianity” defended in different

ways by Kant, Harnack or Treitschke, but that it is the original source of

Christianity and of the cultural, religious and philosophical ideals with which it is

associated.

With Kant, Cohen argued that religion and morality are concerned with the

same fundamental problem—with the question, how should I live?51 Historically,

religions have been a rich source—if not indeed the source—of ethical idealism.52

However, in the historical religions ethical ideals are still entangled with

mythological, mystical, and metaphysical elements that are incompatible with

autonomous morality and the findings of modern science. Thus faithfulness to our

religious heritage—not least as the source of our ethical ideals—commands us to

work towards the rational purification or ‘idealization’ of the historical

religions.53 Religion must be transformed or must grow into ethics: religion is the

50
Cohen, “Ein Bekenntnis in der Judenfrage,” in H. Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, Vol. 2, edited by
Bruno Strauss (Berlin: Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924), 73-95, 79f.
51
See, for instance, Cohen, Ethik des Reinen Willens, 3rd ed. (Berlin, [1904] 1921), 55-56.
52
See Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 358. Cohen, “Religion und Sittlichkeit,” in Jüdische Schriften, vol.
3 (Berlin: Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924), 100ff., 155. Reason and Hope. Selections from the Jewish
Writings of Hermann Cohen, trans. Eva Jospe (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1993),
69, 72, 87.
53
Ethik des Reinen Willens, 592; see also 52ff.

175
“state of nature” of which ethics is the “state of maturity.”54

In his attempt at a rational purification of Judaism, Cohen, we could say, was

more Kantian than Kant. Thus, rejecting the postulates of the immortality of the

soul and the existence of God,55 Cohen argued that God does not exist as a

metaphysical reality but only as an idea,56 while the immortality of the soul

remains but “a moral hope.”57 Similarly, Cohen rejected the dogma of God’s

incarnation and the idea of the trinity to which Kant had made concessions.58

Echoing the Protestant distillation of Christianity to its humanistic essence, Cohen

claimed that “…we do make a clear and vital, though possibly still somewhat

embarrassed distinction between the ritualism of our religion and its eternal

essence.”59 Against the historical procedure of Harnack, however, he also noted

that only the philosophy—and not the history—of religion “knows how to

construe the essence of a religion through the conceptual idealization of its basic

thought.”60

Cohen argued that the idealization or spiritualization of Judaism was a

process that began with the Hebrew Bible itself. It is through this process that

54
Ibid., 591.
55
Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, 354.
56
Ibid., 354, 356, 366; Cohen, Ethik, 449 ff.
57
Cohen, Reason and Hope, 85.
58
Ibid., 83.
59
Ibid., 89.
60
Ibid., 88.

176
Judaism became the “original source” of the “religion of reason.”61 What Cohen

meant by this can be illustrated by referring to some of the key stages of

Judaism’s idealization. The most important one is the development of

monotheism from polytheism and mythology.62 Monotheism, Cohen argued, was

the product of a uniquely spiritual culture (Geisteskultur) which learned that there

is only one being; that all other being is, “as Plato would say, only appearance.”63

This development implied a movement away from plastic culture to poetic

imagination, as the being of God cannot be represented but only contemplated—

much like the Platonic idea of the Good.64 Thus Judaism also transcended

materialism and eudaemonism; namely by deprecating “all earthly things”—as

well as their images—“in view of their irrelevance with regard to the knowledge

of the good.”65 In this way, Judaism became a religion motivated by the ethical

interest from beginning to end. As monotheism unites all nations and states into

one humanity guided by an ethical ideal, it “reaches its summit in Messianism”—

in the unshakeable confidence that “[m]orality will be established in the human

world.”66

61
Cohen, Religion of Reason, 8; see also 7, 34.
62
Ibid., 37.
63
Hermann Cohen, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” in C. Schulte (ed.), Deutschtum und Judentum.
Ein Disput unter Juden aus Deutschland (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 47. See also Religion of
Reason, 41, 44.
64
Cohen, Deutschtum und Judentum, 47.
65
Cohen, Religion of Reason, 46.
66
Cohen, Religion of Reason, 21.

177
 Thus Cohen tried to show that Judaism is a fundamental source of the highest

aspirations of Western culture—aspirations such as science, autonomous morality,

and an ‘ethically socialist’ politics.

Cohen’s philosophical and theological thought translated into an unshakable

trust in the realization of the religion of reason in world history. In a way similar

to Harnack Cohen claimed that “historical developments prove ever more

distinctly and definitively that the idealization undertaken by our philosophy of

religion is correct.”67 The value of Judaism “as represented by its prophetism

(hence, its ethics), its universalism, and its humanism is already widely

acknowledged today.” And “there is comfort and hope” that this will continue to

be the case—that “classical thinking will once again awaken in philosophy as well

as in art, and from it there will emerge a new direction in politics. Akin to the

moral purity of prophetic monotheism, this new political orientation will come to

acknowledge and appreciate Judaism as its most natural ally.”68

Cohen’s vision was soon proven tragically wrong as the moral culture of the

nation proved to be anything but faithful to its Judeo-Christian sources. In light of

what was to come, Cohen’s motto for the new world—“All the people a nation of

priests”—appears uncannily naïve.69 Yet, in another sense, Cohen may also be

said to have been tragically right. For he insisted throughout that the existence of

an ethical culture cannot be taken for granted; that it cannot be simply invoked in
67
Cohen, Reason and Hope, 88-89.
68
Cohen, Reason and Hope, 88-89.
69
Ibid., 76.

178
man at any given moment; that one cannot rely, as Kant did, on the ‘fact’ of pure

practical reason.70 True Sittlichkeit, he came to insist more and more, cannot exist

without religion.71

Cohen’s thought underwent a profound transformation, which pointed away

from his unshakable trust in the synthesis of (Judeo-Christian) monotheism with

modern—and, especially, German—culture.72 This incipient ‘turn’, however,

would count for very little at that time especially in light of Cohen’s enthusiastic

support of the Reich’s imperialistic ambitions during the First World War. Indeed,

the most immediate impact, not only of Cohen’s work but of the defense of

German culture undertaken by some of the most prominent German theologians—

such as Harnack, Troeltsch, and Wilhelm von Hermann—was, ironically, the

powerful rejection it generated. For these theologians and representatives of

German Bildung became ardent supporters of Germany’s imperialistic ambitions,

not in spite of but—in their own self-understanding—because of their

commitment to the highest ideals of Judeo-Christian religiosity and culture.73

70
Cohen, Kant’s Begründung der Ethik, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1910), 254 ff. Cited in Helmut Holzhey,
“Der systematische Ort der ‘Religion der Vernunft’ im Gesamtwerk Hermann Cohens,” in H.
Holzhey, et als., (eds.), “Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums.” Tradition und
Ursprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens Spätwerk (Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000), 47.
71
Cohen, “Religion und Sittlichkeit,” in Jüdische Schriften, Vol. 3., 111; and Holzhey, “Der
systematische Ort,” 47.
72
This, at least, according to Rosenzweig’s understanding of Cohen. See his “Introduction” in
Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, Vol. 1, xiii-lxiv. (See chapter two.)
73
See Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God, 245, as well as the “Appeal to the Civilized World,” signed
by ninety-three scholars including Harnack and Hermann, in New York Times Current History of
the European War, 1: 1 (1914: Dec. 12), 185-187. For Troeltsch’s declarations of support see “An
die Kulturwelt,” in Karl Hammer (ed.), Deutsche Kriegstheologie (1870-1918) (Munich, 1971),
263-65. For Cohen see his “Deutschtum und Judentum” (op. cit.).

179
 Dialectical theology: destroying the gods of this world

Dialectical theology emerged as a response to the crisis of liberal humanism that

culminated in liberal theology’s embrace of militaristic nationalism. The

movement found its strongest expression in Karl Barth’s commentaries on Paul’s

Epistles to the Romans published between 1916 and 1921.74 Among its most

important representatives were Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen, and

Rudolph Bultmann—all of whom were frequent contributors to the journal

“Between the Times” (1922-1933). It was the reaction against the liberal

theologians’ Kulturkrieg that gave the movement pioneered by Barth its essential

characteristics.

First, dialectical theology called for a crisis of culture. As a student of

Harnack, Hermann, and Cohen,75 Barth initially stood for the belief that human

culture could bring us closer—and in fact was bringing us closer—to the ‘lofty

and noble ideals’ of Judeo-Christian religion.76 Socialism, he claimed in 1915, is

“despite its inconsistencies … one of the most encouraging signs for the fact that

74
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Eswyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, [1918] 1968).
75
See Georg Pfleiderer, “Karl Barth. Theologie des Wortes Gottes als Kritik der Religion,” in
Neuner and Wenz (eds.), Theologen, 125.
76
See Rudy Koshar, “Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?,” Modern Intellectual
History, 5, 2 (2008): 333-362, 340.

180
the kingdom of God does not stand still, that God is at work.”77 This was bound to

change, however, as the distinction between the culture of socialism and the

culture of nationalism could no longer be maintained. Indeed, already in 1914

Barth had referred to the war as a calling no longer to expect to see God’s work in

the world: “We thought we were on the right path, we Europeans … Now comes

God and says … No! You are not on the right path! ... your ways are not my

ways, and your thoughts are not my thoughts.”78 These ways and thoughts, Barth

began to argue, are inaccessible to us. Indeed, “…it is sentimental liberal self-

deception to think that from nature and history, from art, morality, science, or

even religion, direct roads lead to the impossible possibility of God.”79

The experience of the war gave dialectical theology a second essential

characteristic—a new receptivity to the word of the Bible. As Thurneysen put it:

“We knew [the Bible] indeed and truly so. But we had read it through the lenses

of certain interpretations […which] broke apart as the theology and the worldview

that … supported such interpretations became shaky. And so we read the Bible

anew, with far less reservations than before… We read it (I dare say) more

penitently, much more than before as an eternal Word directed to us and to our

77
Cited in Dieter Schellong, “Jenseits von politischer und unpolitischer Theologie.
Grundentscheidungen der ‘Dialektischen Theologie,” in Jacob Taubes (ed.), Religionstheorie und
Politische Theologie, Vol. 1: Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen (Munich: Fink
Verlag, 1983), 297.
78
Cited in Ibid.
79
Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 337 (translation altered). Or as Gogarten put it in 1920, “…a
thousand eternities would not suffice to walk the path which leads from man to God.” F. Gogarten,
“Between the Times,” in James M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology, Vol. 1
(Richmond: John Knox Press, 1968), 285.

181
time. We niggled less about it … We read it with the eyes of the shipwrecked.”80

Thus, instead of reading and discarding what appears to be outdated or a remnant

of Judaism or Greek metaphysics, every effort was made—especially by Barth—

to “see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the

Eternal Spirit;” to take seriously the fact that “[w]hat was once of grave

importance, is so still,” and that “[w]hat is today of grave importance … stands in

direct connection with that ancient gravity.”81 In the case of Barth, this led him to

embrace the old dogmas of the trinity and of God’s two natures.82 Bultmann, as a

pioneering ‘demythologizer’ of the apocalyptic myths that permeate the New

Testament, was far less of a literalist.83 And yet he also insisted that Christianity

cannot dispense with Christology, if only (as we shall see) for the “existential

challenge to authenticity” it conveys.84 It is this acceptance of Christian dogma

that gave the movement its neo-orthodox character.

And yet, none of this is to say that the dialecticians were obscurantists or

dogmatists. Indeed, the third characteristic of the movement—its ‘dialectics’—is

key. What this means is perhaps best explained by Barth’s own rejection of this

label. According to Barth (even though he used it himself) “dialectical” was a

80
Cited in Schellong, “Jenseits,” 305.
81
Barth, The Epistle, 1.
82
Schellong, “Jenseits,” 300; Pfleiderer, “Karl Barth,” 127 f.
83
See his critique of Barth in Bultmann, “Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans in its Second
Edition,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectical Thelogy, 100-121, esp. 119.
84
Sheehan, The First Coming, 22.

182
term “hung upon them” by some “spectator.”85 Likewise the idea that they

constituted a movement or a school was rejected. There was nothing ‘neo-

orthodox’ about ‘dialectical’ theology, he claimed;86 and we could add, what they

did was not even theo-logy anyway. This penchant for deconstructing their own

views is a consequence of the serious fact that there is, indeed, no logos about, no

rational grasp, and hence no theology, of God’s revelation.87 Rather, in dialectical

theology the very idea of knowing through seeing or theorizing collapses: the

relation between God and man is that between a Deus loquens and a homo

audiens, a relation of ‘hearing’ rather than ‘seeing.’88 ‘Dialectical’ thus means

that every statement about the reality of God in Jesus Christ is incomplete and

must constantly be reframed and expressed anew in different ways of speaking

85
K. Barth, E. Thurneysen, G. Merz, “Abschied von ‘Zwischen den Zeiten’,” in: J. Moltmann
(ed.), Anfänge der Dialektischen Theologie, Vol. 2 (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, [1933] 1963), 313–
331, 313. Barth began to use the term in 1922 to characterize his approach and that of his friends
in Barth, “Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie,” in Gesamtausgabe 19 (Zürich 1990), 172.
Cited in H.-G. Geyer, art. “Theologie, dialektische,” in J. Ritter, et. als., (eds.), Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 10, 1099-1101, 1099.
86
See Barth’s “Preface to the Second Edition,” in The Epistle, 3, cf. 8; and, more generally,
Pfleiderer, “Karl Barth,” 127, n. 4. Cf. Bultmann’s remark that the seriousness of dialectic
theology “lies precisely in the fact that it takes very seriously the dissimilarity of its talk to divine
talk—that it takes seriously the ultimate lack of seriousness of its own theology and all others as
well.” “The Question of ‘Dialectic’ Theology,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings, 262.
87
Thus, for instance, according to Bultmann (writing in 1928), “men do not know God; for
knowing God does not mean to have ideas (perhaps correct ideas) about him. To know him is to
see him as really made manifest, and that means to recognize him as Creator, to submit one’s self
to be determined by him.” “Jesus himself is … present in his Word…But the Word does not
become ‘idea’ and as such enter into the ‘history of thought.’” R. Bultmann, “The Eschatology of
the Gospel of John,” in Bultmann, Faith and Understanding I, edited by Robert W. Funk (New
York: Harper & Row, 1969), 168, 178.
88
H.-G. Geyer, art. “Theologie, Dialektische,” 1101.

183
and thinking.89

Paradoxically, one could argue that the most important accomplishment of

dialectical theology was its contribution to secularization.90 The paradox is this—

that only acceptance of what is beyond the human as the truth liberates purely

human judgment. That seems to be the true and lasting significance of the crisis of

culture called for by the movement.

Friedrich Gogarten’s extreme position is particularly illustrative in this

regard. Against liberal theology, Gogarten noted that “a religion which has to

reconcile itself to this world as it is … is itself drawn along into the contingencies

from which it should be freeing us, and it will dance the insane dance of world

history.” And when, as happened towards the end of the ‘summer of 1815-1914’,

“the immanent strength dies out of that greater context of contingencies we call

culture, then this religion—which is perhaps the closest, most direct, and most

subtle expression of the immanent strength of a culture—will die too.”91 The fatal

blunder leading to this outcome lies (from this perspective) precisely in the

attempt to create a religion of reason; or, to borrow a phrase from Rosenzweig, it

lies in the attempt to bring about “the monstrous birth of the divine out of the

89
Schellong, “Jenseits,” 301; cf. also Bultmann, “The Significance,” 146 f., and for a somewhat
different view, “The Question of ‘Dialectic’,” 257. See also Gogarten, “The Crisis of Our
Culture,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings, 289.
90
Cf. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 4-5.
91
Gogarten, The Crisis of Our Culture,” 291. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

184
human.”92 The result is that culture becomes God, or that religion becomes

“culture-religion.” Thus, instead of a religion “which seeks to be the soul of

culture,” Gogarten called for “a religion which is a constant crisis of this and

every other culture” (293). By this Gogarten meant first of all a renunciation of

“[e]very objective ascertainment … which has not already died to all things,” that

is, every ascertainment which has not died “to the good and the bad, to life and

death, to heaven and hell” (288). Here it must be stressed that Gogarten was not

calling for an attack against a particular (bourgeois-liberal) “culture-religion,” but

against culture as such. Thus the theological ‘Destruktion’ of culture undertaken

by dialectical theology left very little to hold on to, for ultimately “none of our

thoughts reach beyond the human sphere.”93 All that remained, then, was, on one

side, the Word of God—wholly impenetrable to human reason—and on the other

this “world of apostasy, of the Fall, and of original sin” (295).

What was to be done?

Gogarten argued as follows. If we cannot grasp God’s Word, we would have

to say that ‘in the beginning was the deed’: “Here there is only the independent

act which takes place at this very moment, simply because I exist and live face to

face with this world, which I recognize as my world and for which I bear all the

responsibility” (296). Hence rather than a “mystical retreat from the world,” what

religion would seem to require is “complete worldliness” (294). Rather than

92
Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” in Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (eds.),
Franz Rosenzweig. Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 23.
93
Gogarten, “Between the Times,” in Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings, 279.

185
saying no to the world, we have to respond to everything that happens in the

world. Indeed, the “sole possibility of escape from the world and from time

demands that we do not free ourselves from either world or time, not even to the

extent of a single fiber of our being; that we, on the contrary, take world and time

upon ourselves, shirk not one difficulty and assume the burden of all

responsibility for everything which exists or happens” (296).

Barth was equally incisive in his Destruktion of so-called ‘culture-religion’.

“The Word of God is the transformation of everything that we know as Humanity,

Nature, and History, and must therefore be apprehended as the negation of the

starting-point of every system which we are capable of conceiving.”94 Yet far

from serving as a guide, the Word of God is also the negation of any religious

‘system.’ The Word of God is a “scandal” that “criss-crosses every form of

rationalism.”95 Thus Barth did not shy away from saying that “[t]he absolute

character of Christian ethics lies in the fact that they are altogether

problematical,” or that “all that we are and do moves within the sphere of

relativity,” or that “[a] political career … becomes possible only when it is seen to

be essentially a game; that is, when we are unable to speak of absolute political

right.”96

94
K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 278. (Hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.)
95
Ibid., 276.
96
Ibid., 465, 489.

186
 Arendt in Marburg: between Bultmann and Heidegger

Arendt came into contact with dialectical theology through Bultmann, under

whom she studied at Marburg in 1924/25.97 Bultmann stood for a position within

dialectical theology that must be discussed separately. His opposition to liberal

theology became equally strong. On the other hand, however, he was far more

interested than Barth and Gogarten in providing the New Testament’s

understanding of life with a philosophical basis.98 This attempt to provide a

radical critique of ‘culture-religion’ with a theological and philosophical basis left

a deep mark on Arendt—and perhaps not surprisingly so, since it was made

possible by Bultmann’s closeness to Heidegger.

Bultmann and Heidegger worked closely together during the time of

Arendt’s doctoral studies (1924/25-1928).99 Since the early 1920s Heidegger had

97
Arendt’s relation to Bultmann seems to have been close. According to Hans Jonas, both of them
(apparently the only Jews in the New Testament theological seminar) formed together with
Bultmann in their “extraordinary situation an almost natural alliance.” See Jonas, “Im Kampf um
die Möglichkeit des Glaubens. Erinnerungnen an Rudolph Bultmann und Betrachtungen zum
philosophishen Aspekt seines Werkes,” in Otto Kaiser (ed.), Gedenken an Rudolph Bultmann
(Tübingen, 1977), 41-70, 41. See also Arendt’s letter to Jaspers of July 13, 1953 in Hannah Arendt
and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, edited by L. Kohler and H. Saner, trans. Robert
and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 221-222.
98
See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger und Bultmann. Philosophie und Theologie,” in Markus Happel
(ed.), Heidegger—neu gelesen (Würzburg: 1997), 44, 45. See, for example, R. Bultmann, “Karl
Barth’s Epistle to the Romans,” in Robison (ed.), The Beginnings, 100-130; and “The Problem of a
Theological Exegesis of the New Testament,” Ibid., 236-256.
99
Heidegger and Bultmann became close friends during Heidegger’s five years at Marburg (1923-
28). They met regularly—for a time, weekly—to read the Gospel of John and also convened with
a group of students including Gerhard Krüger, Heinrich Schlier, Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Hans Jonas. See Otto Pöggeler: “Heidegger und Bultmann,” 42. See also Gadamer,

187
been trying to develop an interpretation of Christian consciousness that was

adequate to the time.100 As a formerly Catholic philosopher, his approach was

different but analogous to that of dialectical theology. In order “to find the word

that is capable of calling one to faith”101 in our time, he argued, it is not only

necessary to overcome liberal theology and the German idealist philosophy that

sustained it; rather, one has to uproot the whole tradition of philosophy beginning

with Aristotle. Concretely, this required dismantling the static metaphysics of

eternal “substances” and “natures” that had been adopted from a particular

interpretation of Aristotle and that pervaded most of Western philosophy and

theology. If one is serious about appropriating radical possibilities of (Christian)

existence, Heidegger argued, it is necessary to go back in a “dismantling return”

to the “basic philosophical experiences and motives” that underlie Christian

consciousness.102 One such experience was the experience of time in early

Christianity, which Heidegger characterized as the “deepest historical paradigm of

“The Marburg Theology” in H.-G. Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (New
York: SUNY Press, 1994), 29-43.
100
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’ Jugendschrift,” in Gunther Neumann
(ed.), Martin Heidegger. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Stuttgart: Reclam,
2000), 77; as well as Gadamer, “The Religious Dimension,” in Heidegger’s Ways, 175. Cf.
specially Heidegger’s description of his task in 1920 as finding “the way to an original Christian—
Greek-free—theology.” M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks:
Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung. GA 59 (Frankfurt, a. M.: Klostermann, [1920]
1993), 91.
101
Gadamer reports that he heard Heidegger describe the true task of theology in these terms in
1923. See Gadamer, “The Religious Dimension,” in Heidegger’s Ways, 175.
102
Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the
Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992, 371-72.

188
the world of inner experience,” or of “live[d] temporality as such.”103 Heidegger’s

project thus became to refound philosophy as it grows from precisely the lived

temporality of ‘factical’ life-experience.104

In his Marburg years Heidegger would then attempt more systematically

to provide “the [ontological] concepts for things which are usually treated in a

nebulous way … in theology” such as faith, sin, anxiety, and revelation.105

Heidegger’s premise was that “a purely rational grasp of all basic theological

concepts” is possible insofar as “all theological concepts necessarily contain that

understanding of being that is constitutive of Dasein as such.”106 Thus, for

example, faith was to be understood existentially as rebirth, or as “a way in which

a factical believing Dasein historically exists in that history which begins with the

occurrence of the revelation;”107 revelation was to be understood in terms of

Dasein’s openness for meaning or sense (Sinnoffenheit); and the experience of sin

in terms of the indebtedness of life.108

Drawing on Heidegger’s approach, Bultmann conceived of theology as

103
Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. GA 58 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann,
[1919/20] 1993), 61. Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens. GA, 60 (Frankfurt a. M.:
Klostermann, [1920/21] 1995), 80.
104
See Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung, 8, 4, 9, 28.
105
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1992), 292.
106
Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51.
107
Ibid., 44.
108
Pöggeler, “Heidegger und Bultmann,” 43.

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“nothing other than the conceptual presentation of man’s existence as determined

by God.”109 “[I]n speaking of God,” Bultmann argued, “theology must at the same

time speak of man.”110 Theology must speak of man because every theological

exegesis presupposes a specific self-interpretation. That is, “I can understand … a

text only if I bring to it a pre-understanding of the subjects there discussed.”111 To

understand the Bible I must bring to it my own understanding of the meaning of

such terms as ‘revelation,’ ‘world,’ ‘death,’ ‘love,’ ‘joy,’ ‘flesh,’ and ‘body.’112

The following difficulty results: the text is meant to determine our lives but we

see in it what our lives determine. To escape this hermeneutic cycle—to the extent

that this is possible—one must either possess an understanding of all the

possibilities of existence113—of love, joy, death, and so on—or else give up this

notion altogether. That is, one must abandon the view that human existence is the

realization of certain potentialities which we can theoretically grasp and

approximate in practice. Instead, one must recognize that understanding requires

taking up existential challenges, that is, trying things out, projecting possibilities,

or in Bultmann’s words, “realizing [our] own potentiality-to be.”114 Like

Heidegger, Bultmann chose the latter option, without however giving up on the

109
Bultmann, “The Question of ‘Dialectic’ Theology,” 274; “The Problem of a Theological
Exegesis,” 252.
110
Bultmann, “The Significance,” 148.
111
Bultmann, “The Significance,” 156.
112
Ibid., 156, 160, 150, 159, 160 f.
113
Ibid., 150.
114
Ibid.

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first altogether. Somehow, that is—presumably because we do have a sufficient

grasp of the possibilities of human existence—we know that the being of man is

historical. “And we understand by the historical nature of man’s being that his

being is a potentiality to be. That is to say, the being of man is removed from his

own control … and goes through decisions in which man does not choose

something for himself, but chooses himself as his possibility.”115 “Understanding,

therefore, is always simultaneously resolve, decision.”116

In considering the practical-ethical consequences of this way of thinking, it is

important to emphasize that despite its renunciation of a theoretical grasp of

different possibilities of life, Bultmann’s theology is not a kind of humanism for

which existence—the ‘projection’ of possibilities—somehow precedes essence.

Rather, understanding is resolve—but this is a resolve to obey. Indeed, only when

one “admits that the possibilities of human existence are not marked off

beforehand and not determined in the concrete situation through the use of

reason” does one “allow the text to speak with authority.”117 Only then can the

mistake of liberal theology be overcome: the text “is there not to be inspected, but

to determine the existence of the reader.”118

Practically speaking, the question then becomes: How can existence be thus

determined, if the ways of God are so utterly foreign to the ways of man?

115
Ibid.,149.
116
Ibid., 158; see also “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis,” 245.
117
Bultmann, “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis,” 245.
118
Ibid., 238.

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Bultmann’s answer to this question in the 1920s went roughly as follows. The

most important decision to be able to realize the possibilities of existence

disclosed in the Gospel119 is “either to fall into the world or to grasp life.”120 That

is, one must decide whether or not to be “of the world.”121 Being “of the world”

means “surrender[ing] [one’s] authentic possibilit[ies]. The world’s view is that

man has possibilities at all times. The world forgets that man is at all times

himself possibility, that his being is potentiality-to-be.”122 Not being ‘of the

world’ means regaining “authenticity in its potentiality to be;” it means “being-in-

the-future.” “[M]an can now live in the future. That is, he can love.”123

But, again, love who or what? For a Christian the answer would seem to be

simple: we are to love our neighbor as we love God. Yet if man lives in

expectation of the future and is not ‘of the world,’ how can he have any genuine

neighbors?

In a context in which all liberal (theological or philosophical) positions had

become discredited, and in which intellectual honesty compelled one to admit that

the Word of God is inaccessible in theory or practice, it became extremely

difficult to answer such basic ethical/theological questions. In 1924 Bultmann let

Barth speak for him on the question of neighborly love. Against his teacher

119
Bultmann, “The Significance of Dialectical Theology,” 158.
120
Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” 180.
121
Ibid., 170.
122
Ibid., 102.
123
Ibid., 176, 179, 182.

192
Harnack, who claimed that the equation of love of God and love of neighbor

proved that there is no “absolute contradiction” between “life in God and life in

the world,” Barth objected: but “what fact in the world is more alien, more

incomprehensible than just a ‘neighbor’? Is there any fact on which we are more

in need of God’s revelation?”124 Two years later, markedly under the influence of

Heidegger and in polemic with Martin Dibelius—Arendt’s Heidelberg New

Testament professor—Bultmann sought to give ontological grounding to

neighborly love. A man who exists only in the future, in expectation of eternity

(as Dibelius conceives him), has no genuine neighbors, “only very agreeable

subjects over whom he can let the powers of his new being flow. But my neighbor

is the man with whom I am constantly associated in my concrete historical

existence. This means that the concept of the neighbor depends on the conception

of human existence as a mutual inter-relation which conditions my existence from

its very beginning, and apart from which ‘man’ is a pure abstraction.”125 Man is a

conditioned being, thoroughly pervaded by ‘world.’126 Yet again, a true Christian

cannot be pervaded by ‘world;’ he cannot be ‘of the world.’ Bultmann’s final

word on this difficulty seems to have been that “the eschatological existence” of a

Christian is not a “flight from the world” but is rather the embodiment of the

Pauline disposition of being in the world while not being of the world, or of living

in the world “as if not” which thus wants to be “loving responsibility for the
124
Bultmann, “Liberal Theology and the Latest Theological Movement,” 43.
125
Bultmann, “Historical and Supra-historical Religion,” 111.
126
Ibid., 112.

193
world.”127

127
R. Bultmann, “Der Mensch und seine Welt nach dem Urteil der Bibel,” in Glauben und
Verstehen 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, [1957] 1993), 151–165: 165. Cf. 1 Corinthians 7, 29-31.

194
 Love in Augustine

After having studied under Heidegger and Bultmann in Marburg for about a year,

Arendt decided to conclude her doctoral studies at Heidelberg under the

supervision of Karl Jaspers.

The guiding question of Arendt’s dissertation became “the meaning and

importance of neighborly love.”128 Arendt posed this question to Augustine since

his “every perception and every remark about love refer at least in part to this love

of neighbor” (3). The dissertation examines three contexts in Augustine’s work

where love of neighbor is central: first, when love is understood as future-oriented

craving or desire for eternity; second, when it is conceived as the nondesirous

charity of a creature of God; third, when it is understood as an element of social

life. In the first two contexts Arendt finds that “love of neighbor remains

incomprehensible in its true relevance” (98). Arendt argues that Augustine comes

closest to accounting for the true relevance of neighborly love in his reflections on

social life.

Arendt’s dissertation is a difficult text. Not only is it a Jugendschrift

128
Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 3. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.) Arendt’s dissertation was
first published in 1929 as Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen
Interpretation in the series Philosophische Forschungen edited by Jaspers (Berlin: Springer, vol.
9). In the 1960s a translation was prepared by E.B. Ashton. This translation was revised by Arendt
in 1964/65, but only partially so (thus, for instance, the Introduction and Part III were not revised).
The English version of the dissertation edited as Love and Saint Augustine is thus composed of
three layers: Arendt’s 1929 original, the Ashton translation, and Arendt’s revisions of 1964/65. In
what follows I will use the English version noting when it departs from the original.

195
conceived when Arendt was barely twenty-two years old, but its argument is

deliberately fragmentary and multi-layered. Indeed, Arendt’s aim was to pursue

different thought trains in Augustine until they led to contradictions, which

themselves resulted from the conflicting—neo-Stoic, neo-Platonic and

Christian—sources of his thought (3-4). The basic argument, however, can be

stated in relatively simple terms by explaining, as it were, the ‘logic’ and the

limits of neighborly love in each of the three contexts Arendt analyzes.

In a first context love is understood as craving or as “a human being’s

possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy” (9). This

craving “gives rise in the moment of possession to a fear of losing” (10). Thus

happiness consists “in having and holding” our good, but “even more in being

sure of not losing it” (10). Now, “[s]ince life in its approach to death is constantly

‘diminished’ and thus keeps losing itself,” (12) human desire is either everlasting

(since it can never have and hold the good) and thus a contradiction in terms or it

is “a description of hell” (32). Hence a desire that “craves its fulfillment, that is,

its own end” (32) must of necessity transcend human mortality and temporality:

“Just as the lover forgets himself over the beloved, mortal, temporal man can

forget his existence over eternity” (29). Such self-denial, however, makes “the

central Christian demand to love one’s neighbor as oneself well nigh impossible”

(30). For not only does it deny “the present, mortal self that is, after all, God’s

creation,” but it does this not “for the sake of others or of God, but for the sake of

the eternity that lies ahead” (30).

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 In a second context of Augustine’s work the idea that love is an object-driven

desire is transcended on the premise that “all desires reckon with a love that is

nondesirous” (45). The longest part of Arendt’s dissertation is devoted to

explaining the existential sources; the theological and philosophical

presuppositions; and the consequences of this understanding of love. For only by

breaking away from the traditional (and, we could say, commonsensical) view

that love implies (at the very least) desire, an object, a will, and future-oriented

expectation can neighborly love become intelligible. That “all desires reckon with

a love that is nondesirous” means, first of all, that “[o]ur craving and the

relationships we establish through it only seem to be in our own power. In truth,

craving and its relationships depend upon a pre-existing reference whose object

was forgotten in desire’s exclusive direction toward the future” (48). This “pre-

existing reference” of our desires is revealed to us by memory, which “opens the

road to a transmundane past as the original source of the very notion of the happy

life” (48). More concretely, memory opens the road to the “the original

beginning,” to the Creator in whom we find the inspiration to desire happiness

(49). Thus, object-driven and future-oriented desire is transcended insofar as man

no longer depends upon a desired object which he anticipates in hope and fear,

but rather “relies exclusively on remembrance and refers back to the past” (51). It

is in this context that neighborly love becomes conceivable as a nondesirous love

that is God-given (93). In neighborly love, man loves as God loves (94) and the

other is loved in his createdness (95). Yet, once again, Arendt argues, this second

197
context also fails to account for the true relevance of neighborly love (98). For in

accepting God’s love we now “love and hate as God does” (94). And in thus

renouncing ourselves we renounce all worldly relations. Loving the other in his

createdness we “love all people so completely without distinctions that the world

becomes a desert” (95).

Arendt finds that Augustine comes closest to accounting for the significance

of neighborly love in a third context—in his reflections on social life. She refers

to such reflections as “another empirical context” in Augustine’s work where the

“experiential ground” of community “can no longer be traced by the inner

dialectics of faith” (99). This experiential ground is historicity or the fact that “All

share the same fate” (100). It is our common mortality that grounds the equality

of all people, which in turn “permits us to understand interdependence, which

essentially defines social life in the worldly community” (101). This is a ground

of community beyond the “dialectics of faith” because “[i]n the society founded

on Adam man has made himself independent of the Creator. He depends on other

persons and not on God” (103). Whereas the individual as creature “feels that ‘all

the way back’ he was ‘out of this world’, as a member of human society he feels

that even all the way back he has been worldly” (104). Man’s origin is “the

beginning of the man-made world” through which the world ceases to be “an

utterly strange place into which the individual has been created” (104).

Neighborly love acquires a new meaning in this context: human coexistence

ceases to be “inevitable and [a] matter of course” and becomes “freely chosen and

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replete with obligations” in virtue of the fact that we are equally sinful and hence

mortal (102).

Still, the question remains: does this not simply repeat the problem that loving

all without distinctions turns the world into a desert (cf. 30)? Arendt concludes

her dissertation by linking the second and third contexts of Augustine’s

reflections on love—viz., man as a creature of God and man as a social being qua

descendent of Adam. Augustine, she argues, had a twofold theory of man’s

origins as both creature of God and descendent of Adam. Thinking these together

Arendt moves towards a new understanding of man’s dwelling in the world—

towards a “new social life” (108). In this understanding alienation from the world

by means of faith does not cancel out togetherness (106). “Faith dissolves the

bonds that tied men to the world in the original sense of the earthly city, and so

faith dissolves men’s dependence on one another. Therefore, one individual’s

relationship to another also ceases to be a matter of course, as it was in

interdependence…” (108). Beyond this, Arendt does not make it clear how

exactly the two possibilities of being both estranged from the world and being of

the world—or worldly “as a matter of course”—are compatible or even

complementary. She does conclude, however, by suggesting that the very fact that

Augustine poses the question of the being of humanity in reference to both the

individual and the human race means that he already saw that “Man is the other,

whether he understands himself as an isolated individual or as conditioned … by

the fact of belonging to the human race” (my emphasis, 112).

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 Arendt’s theological-political predicament

To judge from its treatment in the literature, Arendt’s dissertation has often left

readers cold—but also, as she herself put it when she rediscovered it in the 1960s,

“strangely fascinated.”129

What is going on in Love in Saint Augustine?

One answer is that its “central problematic” is “[f]ounding new moral

communities in the Germany of 1929” on the basis of “renewed love of

neighbor.”130 Arendt, in other words, is “suggesting the possibility of

‘constituting’ new worlds based on mutual caritas.”131 Thus the dissertation is

read as containing the germ of Arendt’s philosophy of natality—a philosophy that

would become “expressly political” in her understanding of “new ‘committees’,

‘public spaces’ and ‘soviets.’”132 As an incipient philosophy of natality the

dissertation is seen as Arendt’s early response to Heidegger’s “death-driven

phenomenology.”133 Concretely, Arendt is said to side with “Augustine’s

‘Creator’ God over the Neoplatonic, and Heideggerian, God of death and

129
See Arendt’s letter to Mary McCarthy of October 20, 1965, in Hannah Arendt and Mary
McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-
1975 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 190.
130
Scott and Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” 123-24, 184.
131
Ibid., 178.
132
Ibid., 184.
133
Ibid., 124; see also 173-74.

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desire”:134 “Juxtaposing the saint and Heidegger, Arendt asserts that ‘it is memory

and not the expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s

approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.’”135

Arendt’s dissertation has also been read as a critical engagement with “the

greatest philosophical spokesman of … Christian antiworldliness” (viz.,

Augustine), and thus, as it were, as the opening salvo of her “head-on

confrontation with Christianity.”136 The dissertation “may indicate that Arendt

was a political philosopher before she knew she was one.” Indeed, “the entirety of

Arendt’s philosophical work merely elaborates the question she had posed

directly to Augustine: ‘Why should we make a desert out of this world?’”137 Yet

others have argued that Love in Saint Augustine in fact turns to Christianity as a

positive model for a “…universal bond among men, an ontological foundation, a

transcendent principle guiding men who are in the world but not of it.”138 Reading

the dissertation along such lines, it has been considered almost an embarrassment

134
Ibid., 121.
135
Ibid., 125, citing Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 56. (This statement is not in the original
version of the dissertation.)
136
Ronald Beiner, “Love and Worldliness: Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Saint Augustine,” in
Larry May (ed.), Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 269.
137
Ibid., 270, 281, citing Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 19. (This is also a revision missing in
the original version.)
138
Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 499.

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(for any true ‘Arendtian,’ that is), insofar as it is the work of “an unpolitical

intellectual studying antipolitical theology.”139

As this overview suggests, Love in Saint Augustine has been read for the

most part from the perspective of Arendt’s later works, and typically in light of a

few key revisions that Arendt introduced in the 1960s. Ironically, Arendt’s

Existenz has thereby been missed, that is, both her ‘factical’ condition as a young

Jewess born and raised in a nation that meant as much to the Jews as it would

inflict misfortune on them,140 and as a thinker trying to hold philosophy and

theology together in a context dominated by the Protestant collaboration of

Heidegger and Bultmann.

In his evaluation of Arendt’s work Jaspers pointed to precisely these

predicaments. “Neither historical nor philological interests are primary. The

impulse comes rather from what is left unsaid: through philosophical work with

ideas the author wants to justify her freedom from Christian possibilities which

also attract her.”141 What are these possibilities? First, as we have seen, Arendt

seems to be attracted to a conception of love that points to “a deeper and more

fundamental mode of human dependence than desire can ever detect when it acts

in accord with its own phenomenological meaning” (49). This is a dependence on

139
Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, 8-9.
140
See Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn
and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 60. For an exception see Patrick Boyle,
“Elusive Neighborliness: Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Saint Augustine,” in James W.
Bernauer (ed.), Amor Mundi. Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (Boston:
Martinus Nijhof, 1987), 81-115, esp. 84 f., 100.
141
See Ludger Lütkehaus (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, 130.

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“a notion of happiness that [man] could never experience in his earthly life” and

that signifies “that human existence as such depends on something outside the

human condition as we know and experience it” (49). Second, this points to an

understanding of the human condition as non-worldly, or as a form of being in the

world but not of the world. As Arendt puts it, God’s creation is “not worldly as

such; neither is man” (66). Finally, the result is a Paulinian (and Bultmannian)

ethos of living in the world “as if not.”142 Indeed, as Arendt claims in a statement

removed from the English version, neighborly love is “the peculiarly Christian

possibility for a relationship to the world even in attachment to God.”143 More

generally, this ethos—in the literal sense of a way of dwelling in the world—

begins to take shape in the final part of Arendt’s dissertation. There, as we saw,

Arendt reflects on the possibility of a “new social life” from the standpoint of

Augustine’s twofold theory of man’s origins. As descendents of Adam, “[b]eing a

stranger in the world, for the Christian, is only a possibility, for the matter of

course is to be at home in the world” (105). This very possibility, however,

changes the nature of social life in decisive ways: it becomes “freely chosen and

replete with obligations” (102); it “gives a new meaning to human togetherness—

defense against the world” (108); it results in “mutual love … replac[ing] mutual

dependence” (108).144

142
Cf. Patrick Boyle, “Elusive Neighborliness,” 94.
143
Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff, 50.
144
For Arendt’s conception of Christian possibilities of existence in her later work, see, e.g.,
“Religion and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 373: “The freedom which Christianity brought into

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 Arendt is attracted to these Christian possibilities but she also wants to

justify her freedom from them. This reminds us of Arendt’s statement that she had

“difficult problems” doing philosophy and theology as a German-Jewish woman.

How are these difficulties manifested in her dissertation?

To justify her freedom from what is specifically Christian in the

possibilities of existence contained in Augustine’s writings Arendt attempts to

base her interpretation on the “pre-theological sphere” (5) or on the existential

origins of his reflections. A few examples shall suffice for illustration.

“‘Christian’ will never mean more than ‘Pauline’” (3). “Augustine’s dogmatic

subservience to scriptural and ecclesiastical authority will be largely alien to our

analyses” (4); this is “relatively easy” to justify in Augustine’s case because “[f]or

Augustine, authority commands from without what we would also be told by

conscience, the inner law, if habit had not ensnared us in sin” (4-5). When

Augustine speaks of love as desire “he hardly speaks as a Christian. His starting

point is not God who revealed himself to mankind, but the experience of the

deplorable state of the human condition” (21). “Augustine’s deepest pre-Christian

experience” must have been “man’s utter strangeness in the world he is born into”

(22). Above all, Arendt’s attempt to understand Augustinian neighborly love as

pre-theologically grounded is evident in her quest for “another empirical context”

the world was a freedom from politics, a freedom to be and remain outside the realm of secular
society altogether…” The Human Condition, 60, n. 55: “The Christian precept to mind one’s own
business is derived from I Thess. 4: 11: ‘that ye study to be quiet and to do your own business’…”

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in his work where “the experiential ground” of community “can no longer be

traced by the inner dialectics of faith” (100).

Arendt turned to Augustine to recover possibilities of existence in an

“attempt at an inquiry of purely philosophical interest” (6) for which Augustine

seemed an ideal subject. Indeed, like Arendt, Augustine confronted “no radical

breach between authority and reason” (5) or, we could say, between reason and

revelation. He was a thinker, in other words, who lived through the “theological-

political predicament,” but whose thought, as Arendt understood it, could

somehow provide answers to fundamental questions of living together without

“becom[ing] involved in the eternally paradoxical problems of faith” (5).

Augustine seemed most appropriate for Arendt’s purposes for other crucial

reasons as well. The Protestant spirit that dominated German philosophy and

theology, Arendt suggests, originated in Augustine: “indeed, neither the Protestant

conscience, Protestant individuality, nor Protestant biblical exegesis”—on which

Luther’s (and arguably Heidegger’s) Destruktion of the Aristotelian tradition is

grounded—“would be conceivable without Augustine…”145 Arendt’s turn to the

existential origins of Augustine’s ideas could thus be seen as her own

“dismantling return” to a standpoint from which she could justify her

145
See Arendt’s 1930 article “Augustine and Protestantism,” in Essays in Understanding, 24-25.
On the connection between Protestantism and Destruktion, see Van Buren, The Young Heidegger,
162-63. (Van Buren argues that “Long before Nietzsche, Luther had already killed the
ontotheological God of western metaphysics” providing Heidegger with a model—and a term—
for ‘Destruktion’. “[F]atefully for the young Heidegger, Luther’s Theses 19 and 20 translate the
term ‘destroy’ in I Corinthians into the Latin word destruere, to pull down, to dismantle, to de-
stroy, to deconstruct” (163, 162). Cf. Corinthians I: 19: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and
I will make void the intelligence of the intelligent.”) Arendt would later refer to Augustine also as
“the father of all Western philosophy of history.” Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn
(ed.), Essays, 321.

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‘Germanness’—which she characterized as “my mother tongue, philosophy, and

literature;” the origins of which can be traced back to Augustine’s discovery of

the inner life—while preserving a critical distance.146 In lieu of an explicit attempt

to come to terms philosophically with her Jewishness, I would suggest, Arendt

sought to provide a philosophical interpretation of Augustine’s understanding of a

human condition that closely resembled her own—in its deep religiosity; in its

love of community and the ‘world’; and in its experience of insecurity in the

world.147

It seems to me, then, that at least part of what Arendt meant by her

“difficult problems” is this. First, Arendt attempted to recover possibilities of

existence that are hardly conceivable beyond faith while at the same time

avoiding the “eternally paradoxical problems” that result from it. That is, Arendt

attempted to understand faith as “the most radical possibility of being human”

(99; also 98)—and indeed as a condition for a “new social life”—while at the

same time remaining a philosopher, and thus, in effect or in practice, defending an

essentially atheistic form of existence.148 Arendt left it unsaid but the

146
See Arendt’s letter to Jaspers of Janary 1, 1933, in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 16.
147
On the problem of Arendt’s understanding of Judaism—and in particular of her own condition
as a Jew—see R. J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, esp. 184-189. On the
parallels between Augustine’s situation and the modern condition, see, e.g., “Understanding and
Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 321.
148
Arendt did not explicitly link philosophy as a way of life to atheism, but the link is implicit in
her attempt to interpret Augustine exclusively on the grounds of the pre-theological sphere in his
thought. The difficulty lurking here—at least if one is serious about the alternative between belief
and unbelief—is that one of the central premises of Heidegger’s thought, which he repeatedly
stressed, was that the ‘most radical possibility of being human’ is precisely not faith but a
philosophical existence that lets “factical life speak for itself on the basis of its very own factical

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“theological-political” predicament involved here is obvious: Why philosophy, if

faith is “the most radical of all possibilities available to human existence” (98)?

Or, in other words, what is to determine the choice between a resolve to obey the

authority of Scripture (Bultmann’s authentic existence) or a resolve to embrace

the possibility for existence “to stand exclusively on its own, to make do without

belief, without religion and the like” (Heidegger’s authentic existence)?149

Granted that “most serious German thinkers” had held philosophy and theology

together, this had become more and more difficult as the work of Cohen,

Rosenzweig and Heidegger made clear. Arendt was affected by the same

difficulties.

Indeed, Arendt’s difficulties were arguably greater because in her context

the only language available to hold philosophy and theology together was the

philosophical ‘sublation’ of Christianity attempted by Heidegger.150 Thus she also

confronted the “theological-political predicament” in the second sense we

specified at the outset, that is, the problem that arises from the dependence of

possibilities.” Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle,” 367 (see

also 393); Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, GA 18 (Frankfurt a.
M.: Klostermann, [1924] 2002), 6; “Phenomenology and Theology,” 53.
149
Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 6.
150
According to Bultmann, Heidegger’s existential analytic was a “profane philosophical
articulation of the New Testament’s understanding of life.” R. Bultmann, “Neues Testament und
Mythologie. Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung,” in
Beihefte zur Evangelischen Theologie (Munich, 1988), 81. Cited in Friederike Nüssel, “Rudolph
Bultmann. Entmythologisierung und existentiale Interpretation des neutestamentlichen Kerygma,”
in Neuner and Wenz (eds.), Theologen, 83. While Heidegger may have disputed this, Bultmann’s
view was fairly common at the time. See, for instance, Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie
und protestantische Theologie,” esp. 10.

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one’s spiritual existence on two antagonistic (German-Christian and Jewish)

sources.

In her dissertation this becomes manifest in her appropriation of a

Heideggerian language from which she also seems to want to break free.151 Thus,

on the one hand, Arendt referred to human “Dasein” in terms of “Eigentlichkeit”

(authenticity) and “Uneigentlichkeit” (inauthenticity) (26); “Sorge” (“care”) (31);

“Verfallensein” (“fallenness”) (42); “Geschichtlichkeit” (historicity) (114); of its

being “in die Welt gesetzt” (placed in the world) (35) and “in die Existenz

gerufen” (called into existence) (62),152 while on the other hand she pointed to the

possibility of a “new social life” “freely chosen and replete with obligations”

(102); to a “new meaning [given] to human togetherness” (108), and to “mutual

love … replac[ing] mutual dependence” (108).

151
While Arendt only began to address the question of the Jewish condition explicitly in her work
on Rahel Varnhagen, it was a central concern of hers well before that, as can be gathered from her
correspondence with Jaspers. See Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, 11 (March 24,
1930); 17 (January 3, 1933: Jaspers: “I find it odd that you as a Jew want to set yourself apart from
what is German.”); 18 f. (January 6, 1933).
152
These page numbers refer to the original (German) version, as cited by Ludger Lütkehaus in his
introduction to Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff, 12, 17.

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 Beyond the theological-political predicament?

One question remains to be answered: how successful was Arendt in addressing

her difficulties? Was she able to replace a “conception of theological-political

conflict” with an “alternative conception of non-theological politics”?

In Arendt’s dissertation the answer remains inconclusive. There, as we

have seen, Arendt attempted an inquiry into Christian possibilities of existence

that was meant to be of purely philosophical interest, and yet one of its results was

a conception of a “new social life” which is unthinkable beyond faith.

Later in her life Arendt ceased to regard theology and philosophy as

belonging together, and her “difficult problems” “solved themselves.” Henceforth

she would insist that philosophical questioning of matters of faith only introduces

doubt into a realm in which it has “no business whatsoever.”153 As for the place of

faith and piety in political life, it was decided by the turn world history took in the

1930s, which proved that the “death of God” had become a fact of our world.154

Despite her use of religious language and her persistent concern with theological

and metaphysical questions—most notably with the question of radical evil—

Arendt would no longer refer to experiences that are explicitly (and exclusively)

153
Letter to Jaspers of July 13, 1953, in Ibid., 222. See also “Religion and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.),
Essays in Understanding, 368-390, esp. 369.
154
See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind , v. 1. Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978),
11 f., 212.

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religious as politically relevant.155 Instead she would attempt to provide

existential concepts for the religious notions that she had used in her dissertation.

Thus, for instance, human ‘createdness’ would become human ‘conditionedness’

(Bedingtheit), and the memory of our beginnings, by virtue of which “[t]he

creator is in man,” would become the “decisive fact” of “natality” “determining

man as a conscious, remembering being” (51-52).156 The result is the iconic

Arendt we know best: the fiercely independent thinker who immediately began to

distance herself from her teacher; the Pallas Athena—as she was known in her

student years—who turned against Zeus; the conscious pariah whose Jewishness

was a purely political fact; the modernist anomaly who was beyond the whole

thrust of German philosophy and theology, both in its ‘synthetic’ attempts to

make human and divine truth coincide and in its ‘destruktiv’ drive to reverse the

“monstrous birth of the divine out of the human.”

And yet, as I have shown in this chapter, situating Arendt’s early thought

within its intellectual context reveals a rather different picture. Concretely, I have

suggested that Arendt was deeply marked by the attempts of Heidegger and

Bultmann to provide a philosophical account of certain Christian possibilities of

155
The last (and perhaps only) time Arendt did this seems to have been in 1930. See her critique of
Karl Mannheim in “Philosophy and Sociology,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 39-40. There, Arendt
defends “Christian brotherly love” as a way of “saying no to the world” without falling into either
ideology—claiming that one could achieve absolute transcendence from the world—or utopia—
wanting to realize God’s kingdom on earth (39). Christian brotherly love is a way of being
removed from the world that “does not give rise to any will to change the world, but at the same
time does not represent an escape from the world” (40).
156
As pointed out earlier, this is a statement used by Arendt in the 1960s to explain in more
secular terms (or perhaps to revise) what she meant to say in 1928.

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existence. To understand what this implies—specially in ethical-political terms—

however, one has to consider the relevant background we also discussed. Arendt’s

attempt to hold philosophy and theology together was not meant to “absorb in

human terms the ‘utopian contents of … religious tradition.’”157 Nor—as some of

her detractors would have it—was it a form of nostalgia for a ‘lost world’ where

human life is subject to “the measurements of religion or the law of nature.”158

The former explanation situates Arendt within a current of thought running from

German idealism to critical theory that was foreign to her, while the latter is little

more than a form of enlightenment blackmail which reduces Arendt’s thought—

together with that of Heidegger and Strauss—to anti-modernist conservatism.

Instead, the context of Arendt’s thought suggests that she was a far more complex

and interesting thinker—and this, not in spite of, but because of the experiential

background she shared with philosophers like Cohen, Rosenzweig and Strauss.

This background sheds new light on Arendt’s project. First, it points to the

ethical and religious questions that motivate it. Arendt was not drawn to Cohen as

“the center of attraction for philosophically minded Jews” like Strauss and

Rosenzweig, for one thing, because the Marburg she knew had long ceased to be

the Mecca of neo-Kantianism. But it seems to me that what Derrida suggests with

respect to Heidegger holds true for Arendt as well: “It is too often forgotten” that

157
J. V. Scott, “‘A Detour through Pietism’: Hannah Arendt on St. Augustine’s Philosophy of
Freedom,” Polity 20, no. 3 (Spring, 1988): 394-425, 397.
158
Robert B. Pippin, “Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origins of Totalitarian Evil,” in The
Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 165-167.

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(Marburg) neo-Kantianism “largely determined the context in which, that is to say

also against which” Heidegger’s thinking arose.159 Everything Cohen stood for

would seem to be foreign, nay, anathema to Arendt: his ethics of the ‘pure will;’

his ‘religion of reason;’ his hyper-normativism—the law and jurisprudence as ‘the

mathematics of the human sciences;’ his belief in the continuity of the tradition—

of ‘Plato and the prophets;’ his faith in the realization of an ethical culture in

history—his belief that anti-Semitism is a matter of mere prejudice; his political

attention, above all, to the social question; his assimilationist persuasions; his

patriotism. And yet, it could be shown that each of these aspects of Cohen’s work

concerned Arendt deeply, to the point indeed that she dedicated her work to

conceiving of alternatives.

While it is true that Arendt almost never referred to Cohen in her work,160

her affinity to the dialectical theology that did respond immediately to the way of

thinking he represented is evident. Like Bultmann, Barth and others, Arendt was

not a moral—let alone a ‘normative’—thinker, not because of her alleged

affinities to pre-Platonic or post-modern agonism, but because (human)

morality—especially in the form of an ethics of the ‘pure will’—is essentially a

rebellion against what conditions us or what is given to us.161 Thus, again like

159
Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” Pysche. Inventions of the
Other, Volume II (Standford: Standford Univeristy Press, 2008), 244.
160
For an important exception, see Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish
Writings, 48-49, and 112 n. 3.
161
See specially, Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, 2 vols. edited by Ursula Ludz and
Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 163, 165. See also 138. Cf. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt

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Bultmann, Arendt problematized a fundamental ethical and religious precept—

neighborly love—from the standpoint of a more authentic understanding of its

existential sources in Christian religious experience. More generally, she

suggested that being true to the world requires destroying the gods of this world—

the ideologies of History, or spirit, or nature or pseudo-Christian morality. Only

then is human judgment free; and only then do we truly assume responsibility for

the world.

and the Jewish Question, 188: “The sentence which epitomizes Arendt’s blindness/insight, which
has deep resonances within the tradition of Judaism, is: ‘There is such a thing as a basic gratitude
for everything that is as it is.’” Bernstein refers specifically to a strand of Judaism “that is central
and dominant in Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Lévinas when they remind us that ‘The Good
Lord did not create religion; he created the world.” (This aspect of Arendt’s work will be
addressed in detail in chapter five.)

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 Concluding remarks

Searching for the origins of Arendt’s understanding of political philosophy, this

chapter has encountered territory that is largely foreign to Arendtian studies. The

most common way of reading Arendt today is as a political theorist who did not

want to be read as a philosopher, let alone as a religious thinker. However, as

someone who (as she put it) ‘came from German philosophy and literature’ and

who ‘never doubted the existence of God’ she naturally confronted—more or less

self-consciously—the ‘theological-political predicament’. Furthermore, as a

thinker educated in the philosophy of existence of Jaspers and Heidegger, and

given her situation as a Jew born and raised in Germany, Arendt’s philosophizing

reflected—again, more or less self-consciously—deep tensions resulting from her

attraction to Christian and Jewish ways of being in the world.

Concretely speaking, the ‘theological-political predicament’ becomes

manifest in the work of the young Arendt in her awareness—and apparent

conviction—that faith may be sufficient for realizing our most ‘radical

possibilities’. Or, indeed, faith may even be necessary for such a purpose. This

does not mean subservience to dogmas or passive obedience. Rather, one of the

peculiarities of early twentieth century German thought is that both theology and

philosophy—notably through the collaboration of Bultmann and Heidegger—

arrived at an understanding of human realization for which the disposition of the

faithful seems to be essential, that is, ‘wakeful and anxious expectation’,

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‘openness to meaning’, the projection of possibilities. Whatever one’s take on the

question whether Heidegger’s thought, as Bultmann understood it, was a ‘profane

philosophical articulation of the New Testament’s understanding of life’, the fact

is that it represents a very deep challenge to the classical view that it is possible to

grasp something like ‘the right order of human life’ theoretically. For, as becomes

particularly clear in the study of scripture, a text only speaks to us when we bring

to it our own historically conditioned pre-understanding of, for instance, ‘love,’

‘joy,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘body’, ‘faith’ and ‘revelation’, or in the case of philosophical texts

of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘evil’, and ‘just’. Either, then, one would have to provide

existential or ontological concepts for these terms—e.g., explain faith as rebirth,

revelation as openness to meaning, good as ‘fit for’ and so on—or, more likely,

before such a universal ontology is completed, one would have to act ‘resolutely’

to try out possibilities of existence—or in Bultmann’s words, one would have to

accept that ‘the being of man is removed from his own control’ and that one must

go ‘through decisions in which man does not choose something for himself, but

chooses himself as his possibility’.

How does this matter for political philosophy? In the case of Strauss, it

seems to me, the blurring of the divide between two apparently very clear

alternatives—reason or revelation, human or divine guidance—led him on a

search for alternative pre-Christian (ancient Greek) and extra-Christian (Jewish

and Islamic) understandings of the relation between reason and revelation. (This

we shall see more clearly in the following chapter.) It also reinforced his

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awareness—perhaps unparalleled in twentieth century thought—of the difficulties

of providing an immanent, rational answer to the question of the right way of life

for a community. More generally and bearing now also on Arendt’s case, this

chapter makes clear just how much the Destruktion or ‘deconstruction’ of the

western philosophical and theological traditions was the work of theological (and

anti-theological) discourses. The shared conviction held by probably the most

influential theological and philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century—

Bultmann (or Barth) and Heidegger—that a Christian ethics and a philosophical

ethics are impossible is not the result of mere chance but of a long history of

attempts at reconciling divine guidance with human guidance. The reaction to

what appeared to some as ‘monstrous’ attempts to bring about the birth of the

divine out of the human or to realize the kingdom of God on earth or to talk in a

‘revoltingly’ disproportionate (i.e., ‘merely’ ethical) way of divine matters led to a

condition resembling nihilism in which the highest values (qua merely human

values) have lost all value. This liberation or loss—depending on how one reads

it—resembles the postmodern condition, and in that sense (to the extent that they

were aware of this) I have proposed to read Arendt and Strauss as post-

postmodern thinkers.

What this means concretely I shall try to make clear in the following

chapters. So far we can say the following regarding the case of Arendt. In her

dissertation Arendt addressed a most elementary ethical precept and condition for

social life—love thy neighbor as thyself—that had been rendered problematic by

216
‘dialectical’ thought, both Jewish and Christian (e.g., Cohen, Buber, Barth,

Bultmann). Arendt went back to the problem as it becomes manifest in the

philosophy of Augustine. Among the various strands of Augustine’s thought—

some leading to the Protestant conscience, Protestant individuality, Protestant

biblical exegesis, and the idea of sovereignty—Arendt explored the possibility of

a philosophy of existence as political existence. Drawing on the tradition of

Judaism and responding to Heidegger’s quasi-Gnostic understanding of the

forsakenness of man in the midst of the whole, Arendt began to develop a

philosophy of the human situation centered on the world as the condition of life

given to us, on our mutual interdependence and sense of a shared fate, and on a

tension-ridden relation between individual and collective existence.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

Strauss’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1931-1936)

Leo Strauss made the importance of Heidegger for any possible ‘political

philosophy’ clear enough. After the revolution effected by the thought of

Heidegger, he claimed in the 1950s, “[t]here is no longer in existence a

philosophic position, apart from neo-Thomism and Marxism crude or refined. All

rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.”1

This importance has not escaped the attention of some of the most perceptive

students of his thought. Stanley Rosen has pointed out that “the central fact about

the thought of Leo Strauss is his confrontation with Heidegger on the nature of

philosophy,”2 while Steven Smith takes Heidegger to be “the unnamed presence

to whom all of Strauss’s writings are directed.”3 Similarly, Heinrich Meier has

suggested that Heidegger’s idea of a “destruction of the tradition” may have

“allow[ed] [Strauss] for the first time to find his way to his own distinctive

1
Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in Thomas L. Pangle (ed.), The
Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29.
2
Stanley Rosen, “Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Philosophy, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol.
53, 2000), 542.
3
Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2006), 256.

218
undertaking.”4 Yet, despite this recognition, the most direct way to understand

Heidegger’s influence on Strauss has not yet been explored. This is to carefully

consider Strauss’s earliest writings on ‘political science’, which, as I shall try to

show, elaborate some of the possibilities of thought opened up for him by

Heidegger.5

4
Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 62.
5
It has long been known by students of Strauss that he closely followed the development of
Heidegger’s thought, and in particular the early lectures on Aristotle analyzed in chapter one. See
Stanley Rosen, “Phronesis Or Ontology: Aristotle and Heidegger,” in Riccardo Pozzo, The Impact
of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America
Press, 2004), 11: “…my own teacher Leo Strauss…spoke of a seminar on Aristotle’s Rhetoric
that contained an ontology of the human passions.” See also Harvey C. Mansfield’s remarks
concerning Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotle’s Physics in Peter Kielmansegg et als. (eds.),
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought After World
War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 170.

219
Maimonides in Weimar and his Critique of Heidegger: Strauss’s “Cohen and
Maimonides” (1931)

Strauss’s first substantive proposal to respond to the crisis of his time, which he

understood to be the crisis of ‘political science’ as the quest for a rational answer

to the question of the right order of human life, dates back to a talk he gave in

May of 1931 on “Cohen and Maimonides.”6 The talk revolves around Hermann

Cohen’s 1908 “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis.”7

Cohen had died in 1918 and, to judge from Strauss’s appraisal of the

Davos disputation, his thinking had been superseded by Heidegger’s more timely

and originary thinking. Moses Maimonides had died in the thirteenth century, in

1204. Cohen was credited by one of the foremost authorities on the thought of

Kant (Ernst Cassirer) for having essentially rescued Kantian philosophy and thus

modern (critical, post-metaphysical) rationalism from the growing dominance of

the positive sciences. Maimonides was the greatest authority of Jewish rabbinic

thought. Kant, to say the least, did not lend great weight to any law that was not

the result of unassisted human reasoning. Maimonides, by contrast, had

6
In GS2, 393-437. See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of May 7, 1931 where he gives a report of the
speech to his friend (in GS3, 385). At the same time or soon thereafter Strauss wrote part IV of
Philosophie und Gesetz which should therefore be read together with “Cohen und Maimuni.”
(Strauss finished writing part IV of Philosophie und Gesetz in July 1931.) See Heinrich Meier,
“How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Svetozar Minkov (ed.), Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in
Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 363, as well as Philosophie und
Gesetz, GS2, 87, n. 1.
7
Hermann Cohen, “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis,” in Bruno Strauss (ed.), Hermann Cohens
Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn, [1908], 1924), 221-289. For an
English translation see Almut Sh. Bruckstein (ed. and trans.), Ethics of Maimonides. Hermann
Cohen (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

220
apparently so little to object to the 613 commandments of the Torah that he

sought to provide a rationale for each one of them.8

What could Cohen and Maimonides have to say to Heidegger as the

thinker who for Strauss dominated the epoch? How could Strauss situate himself

between the extremes represented by these thinkers to develop one of the

strongest currents of contemporary political philosophy?

The key lies in the return to the ancients that Strauss begins to delineate in

this talk. What unites Maimonides, Cohen, Heidegger, and Strauss is the critique

of the Aristotelian tradition that regards metaphysics, understood as knowledge of

the suprasensous or of the highest intelligibles, as the core of philosophy. Instead,

for all in different ways it is ethics, broadly understood as the “philosophy of

human affairs”9 that is its core. We shall first consider what this means for

Maimonides, Cohen and Heidegger, in order then to address the points of

contention between them through whose analysis Strauss establishes his own

position.

Ethics as first philosophy in Maimonides…

Cohen’s thesis in his “Characteristics of the Ethics of Maimonides” is that,

contrary to what most authorities suggest, Maimonides “was in deeper harmony

8
Ibid., 238/46. (Henceforth the second number refers to the English translation.)
9
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1181 b 15 (“ἡ περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπεια φιλοσοφία”).

221
with Plato than with Aristotle.”10 This means that for him ethics and politics

are—in a way we shall specify—pre-eminent over metaphysics or theology. Now,

according to the dominant view, this could hardly be the case since Maimonides

not only saw little use in even reading Plato,11 but he followed Aristotle in

affirming that theory understood as the contemplation of the divine is the highest

human activity.12 Yet, according to Cohen, there remains an essential difference

between Maimonides and his master Aristotle: “With due respect to the God of

Aristotle, he is not the God of Israel” (329/50).

The fact that Maimonides has typically been read as an Aristotelian but is

nevertheless more of a Platonist in Cohen’s view can be explained as follows.

Even though for Aristotle practical wisdom or phronesis would seem to be the

highest form of knowledge since on it depends the possibility of ‘seeing’ the good

in a particular moment and thus of accomplishing those actions that lead to the

10
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 396. Bruckstein refers to the following interpreters
holding the Aristotelian reading: Harry A. Wolffson, Isaac Husik, Julius Guttmann, Shlomo Pines,
Marvin Fox, and Collette Sirat. Bruckstein, Ethics of Maimonides. Hermann Cohen, 24. Note that
Strauss himself in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion had “presented Maimonides as a classic
Aristotelian, the Jewish equivalent of Thomas Aquinas.” David Janssens, Between Athens and
Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strauss’s Early Thought (NY: SUNY
Press), 109.
11
Maimonides saw Aristotle as representing “the extreme of human intellect” whose writings
“suffice” such that “we need not occupy [our attention] with the writings of earlier philosophers.”
Rémi Brague, The Law of God. The Philosophical History of an Idea (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 114 f.
12
Cohen, “Characteristik der Ethik Maimunis,” 241 (metaphysics for Maimonides too is the
“Godly science” (göttliche Wissenschaft) and God is the object of science). Furthermore,
“Maminonides remains beholden to his teacher for one essential lesson: despite all that profoundly
separates them, Aristotle serves him as master and model in his enthusiasm for pure theory,
scientific cognition for its own sake, which is the ultimate and absolute purpose of human
existence” (243) (and, again, the highest cognition is of God). Hereafter I cite Cohen in
parentheses in the main text.

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good life and to eudaimonia, he nevertheless regards theory as the highest human

possibility leading to the highest form of wisdom because, essentially, the wisdom

of right action is merely human, while “[t]here are other things whose nature is

much more divine than man’s.”13 Maimonides does not teach otherwise:

“Aristotle serves him as master and model in his enthusiasm for pure theory,

scientific cognition for its own sake, which is the ultimate and absolute purpose of

human existence” (243/61). And again the highest cognition for Maimonides is

knowledge of God.

But, the question is: how if ‘the God of Israel’, as Maimonides insists, is

the God that cannot be known? (245/67-68) “How could Maimonides deny the

cognition of divine attributes on the one hand, and on the other hand proclaim

knowledge of God as the main principle of his theology and his ethics?” (Ibid.)

The answer is: exactly in the same way that Plato denied the cognition of the

Good and still made its knowledge the ultimate goal and foundation of all science,

theoretical or practical.

According to Cohen, then, for Maimonides “ethics constitutes the core and

effective center of his metaphysics” (231/23); “the meaning and purpose of

wisdom [is] ethics” (231/24). Yet to understand what this means exactly, we must

ask: What kind of ethics or what kind of rational answer to the question of the

good life can this be if the end of wisdom is still knowledge of the divine and if

13
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1141a20ff.: “For it would be strange to regard politics or
practical wisdom as the highest kind of knowledge, when in fact man is not the best thing in the
universe.”

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the divine in Judaism is the divine of the revealed Law par excellence?14 The

answer hinges on the nature of ‘the God of Israel’, whose attributes, Maimonides

insists, cannot be known: “there are no other divine attributes than those posited

by revelation,” and thus “[i]t is philosophy’s impotence that is exposed here” (my

emphasis; 246/68). And yet, says Cohen, “Let us recall … how even Plato

formulates his idea of the Good in seemingly negative terms as non-foundation”

(250/86-87). Just as Plato’s aim was not to show that the Good could not be

known, but rather quite the opposite, that we should strain every nerve in us to

know the Good and live according to it, so Maimonides “is not … ultimately

concerned … with the unknowability of God’s essence. Rather, by multiplying

negations, Maimonides promotes the true, seminal, (ethical) cognition of God”

(254/98).

…Cohen

For Cohen, as Strauss notes, ethics as the “doctrine on man [Lehre vom

Menschen]” is “the center of philosophy.”15 Now, according to Cohen it is

Socrates who first of all mortals gave a foundation to ethics “in that he declared

14
“This problem is aggravated by the nature of Jewish tradition, which, much more than
Christianity or Islam, is dominated and controlled by laws of Scripture, and even more laws of
oral transmission, regulating in detail the ethical conduct of all individual and social activity”
(232/22).
15
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 394. Ethics “requires logic for its preparation as well as
aesthetics as its complement [zu ihrer Ergänzung], thus it is not the whole of philosophy; but it is
the central philosophical discipline” (Ibid.).

224
virtue to be knowledge” (221/1). “[W]ith the religious zeal of a prophet, Socrates

made all Hellenic pursuits of nature and natural sciences yield to the benefit of the

human soul. Thus Socrates considered ethics not only to be a science, but to be

the science par excellence. He proclaimed ethics to be the core and focus of

human cognition” (221/1-2). Still, Socrates’ founding deed was but a preparation,

a “program” whose “sense and value” had first to be illuminated by the scientific

work of Plato: “Socrates was the [herald] Elijah; Plato is the Messiah” (221/2).

Only within Plato’s epistemological context, Cohen argues, could ethics

“flourish and advance as a science” (222/3). Specifically, Socrates had conceived

of the Good as a concept, but Plato elevated it to the rank of an idea, the

difference being that while “[t]he concept can do no more than indicate—it is an

indication of what is relevant,” (222/4) an idea demands accountability (223/5). In

the idea, says Cohen, Plato discovered the scientific hypothesis: “the idea

constitutes the necessary premise, or grounding, for every scientific investigation.

It contains the rationale, the basis and foundation—the account that cognition

renders of itself” (224/8).

The central problem becomes: how does the Good account for itself?

Plato’s solution was to convert the hypothesis, in the case of the Good, “into a

matter of non-hypothesis (anupotheton), or non-foundation” (225/10).16 Thus “the

idea of the Good may be defined as that hypothesis which constitutes the telos or

16
Cf. Plato, Republic, 507b, 510b.

225
end of reason, and thus plainly terminates the report of its accountability”:17

“Whereas all other scientific hypotheses are predicated upon prior hypothetical

propositions, the hypothesis of the Good constitutes its own ultimate ground,

closing the cycle of reason. The non-foundation must be considered the ultimate,

rock-bottom ground of all grounding. … The Good constitutes the foundation of

the world” (226/11-12).18

…and Heidegger

Heidegger is perhaps best known as the philosopher who recovered the question

of Being to refound ontology on the basis of an ‘existential analytic.’ Thus in

Being and Time we read that philosophy is “universal phenomenological

ontology, taking its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein…”19 Yet, specially

in his early writings, he also made it clear that “ontology is philosophically

productive and scientifically relevant only insofar as it opens up new possibilities

17
“The idea of the Good must remain a hypothesis. Ethics does not evolve from political
consitutions, nor from the impulse of human nature, as manifested in the growth of trees, or the
beasts’ pursuit of enjoyment. The Good is a prophecy of wisdom; not as proclaimed by Plato in
the dithyrambic style at the conclusion of his Philebus, but as the grounding of ethical cognition.”
That the Good is hypothesis means that it is “a problem that demands ever-innovative
rejuventation, new questions posed unceasingly, and new challenges yielded with every new
solution.” It is an infinite task (225-26/10).
18
“Ethics is to be removed from any relativism, even from that which is part and parcel of the
methodology of all scientific investigation. Having arrived at the idea of the Good, I am no longer
justified in inquiring why and wherefore there ought to be ethics in the world, or whether such an
ethical world might exist…” (226/11-12).
19
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 38.

226
for life [Lebensausbildung].”20 The problem, then, of western philosophy is that it

began to understand itself as ‘meta-physics’ conceived as “knowledge of the

suprasensous” or of “those beings that lie behind and above other beings,”21 thus

becoming disconnected from life, from natality and mortality.22 Philosophy

ceased to be human theoria and became ‘divine’ in trying to emulate the noesis

noesos of the God of Aristotle.23 Against these tendencies, Heidegger argued that,

correctly understood, philosophy always begins from the self-illumination of life

in its natality and mortality, and thus not only from the order of the sensible but

from altogether practical deliberations concerning different (ethical) possibilities

of human comportment. But beyond this, ontology or the disclosure of beings in

their being not only begins from but depends on a particular (practical-‘ethical’)

disposition,24 namely, on ‘living-in-truth’, meaning both “giving oneself as one is

and as one thinks” and removing “the world from concealedness and

20
Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles
zur Ontologie und Logik. GA 62 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1922] 2005), 179 (my
emphasis).
21
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39, 40, 43.
22
Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles
zur Ontologie und Logik, 270.
23
See Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the
Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. Michael Baur. Man and World 25, [1922] 1992, 386.
24
See, e.g., Heidegger, Plato's Sophist (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, [1924/25]
1997),17; Sein und Zeit, 222; “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. Wiliam McNeill, in Pathmarks,
ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 103.

227
coveredness.”25 In this regard, it can be said that, insofar as ethics for Heidegger

is “a knowing concerning the Being of man in his authenticity,”26 the center of

philosophy is ethics. Indeed, as Heidegger insisted, “[t]he basic question of

philosophy, the question of Being, is in itself, correctly understood, the question

of man … Yet the important thing is to raise the question of man in view of the

problem of Being.”27

25
Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
2002), 264. Plato’s Sophist, 12.
26
Ibid., 68-69.
27
Martin Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, GA 26
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, [1928] 1990), 20-21. This is not to deny that Heidegger failed
to address virtually every traditional ethical question concerning the right and the good, the just
and unjust, or the noble and the base. When referring to the ‘proper’ human ethos or comportment,
he also neglected those dispositions (or ‘virtues’) that are essentially political (e.g., generosity or
justice) and instead focused on ones that are trans-political (e.g., wisdom and prudence (or
phronesis)). (See, especially, Plato’s Sophist as well as Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen
Philosophie.) As Seyla Benhabib puts it, in the existential analytic “there are no categories … for
thinking of actions demonstrating generosity or cupidity, friendship or treachery, love or
hostility.” The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications,
1996), 105. In my view, however, this clearly does not mean that Heidegger was not a thinker
primarily concerned with the being of man or with the humanity of the human. It seems to me that
the reason why Heidegger was reluctant to write about ‘ethics’ was similar to the classical
philosophers’ (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) reluctance to speak of ‘practical philosophy’, ‘political
philosophy’ and indeed ‘ethics’ as technical terms—namely, knowledge of the being of man and
of his proper ‘work’ (ergon) is unavailable to us, especially in light of the fact that, as Aristotle put
it, there is something divine—and hence supra-natural—in man (Nic. Ethics, 1177b30 sqq.). In
that sense it is ethics that is the highest and the only properly metaphysical (i.e., supra-natural)
form of knowledge. Cf. Claudia Baracchi, Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Heidegger’s classical statement on the problem of
ethics in his “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, revised and
expanded ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), esp. 233-34: “Humanism is opposed [in
Being and Time] because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough;” 245: “…the essence
of man consist in his being more than merely human.” It hardly needs to be added that
Heidegger’s own comportment was anything but ‘divine’, which only deepens the problem of
ethics.

228
 Strauss: Socratic political philosophy as first philosophy?

Strauss develops his own position through a critical engagement with Cohen’s

thesis. Heidegger is nowhere mentioned in the talk but his presence is

unmistakable.

The point of contention is Aristotle. Aristotelianism, says Strauss, is on the

rise again and just like it diverted—at least in its historical impact—Socratic-

Platonic philosophizing from the ethical and political things towards metaphysics,

so contemporary Aristotelianism is threatening Cohen’s ethical-political

philosophizing.28 To explain what this means three questions need to be

addressed: first, what exactly is Socratic-Platonic philosophizing for Strauss?

Second, how does contemporary Aristotelianism threaten such philosophizing?

Third, what is to be done to respond to this?

1. Socratic-Platonic philosophizing as true philosophizing

In “Cohen und Maimuni” Strauss provides his first explanation of the meaning of

Socratic philosophizing. “Socratic philosophizing means: questioning” (411).

This is “not a questioning concerning the things in Hades, below the earth and in

the skies; but that questioning alone that is directed to what is most worthy of

being questioned, that which is a need for life [lebensnotwendig], to the question:

28
“Die von Cohen angeblich überwundene Vergangenheit, der Aristotelismus, hat sich aufs neue
erhoben und droht Cohen’s Lebenswerk in der Form, die er ihm gegeben hat, ernstlich in Frage zu
stellen.” Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 410.

229
How should one live, to the question of the right life” (411-412). “Raising the

question of the right life—that alone is the right life.” “Raising the question of the

Good—that alone is Socratic philosophizing” (412).

This is always a questioning in relation to others. “He [Socrates] always

asks together with others, not because he wants to convince others—only

someone who teaches can want that—but because he is after mutual

understanding and harmony. He is after mutual understanding and harmony,

because only from mutual understanding and harmony … can the state be truthful.

The truthful state—that is truthful living together; and human life is essentially

living together; hence the right life: right living together, true State; hence all

virtues of the individual are only possible and understandable from the State. So is

Socrates’ sought knowledge a common understanding concerning the good, that

as human good is a common good. … Socrates’ questioning is essentially

political” (412).

Yet it is one thing to say that all human thought arises from our political

condition and is oriented to some good. Quite another thing is to suggest that

‘politics’ and ‘the Good’ are essential to true human thought; that they are not

only its conditio sine qua non but its conditio per quam. Strauss makes the latter,

much stronger, claim. In this he follows Cohen in affirming that there are

oppositions in philosophy that pervade its entire history, or, more exactly, that

human thought incurs in forms of forgetfulness or of repression of fundamental

realities or fundamental experiences. Specifically, human thought is either

230
oriented towards the question of the Good or it assumes that the Good is not a

question or that we already know what it is. There is in that sense an opposition

between Socratic-Platonic philosophizing, which Strauss would characterize as

true philosophizing as it is guided by the ethical-political question of the Good,

and those forms of philosophizing that take this question for answered which

Strauss would characterize as forms of sophistry or of falsely ‘political’

philosophizing. Strauss’s justification for this division itself, however, is not

based on ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ or ‘political’ preference (for indeed, that would

make it sophistical in his understanding). Rather, the criterion is sound

philosophizing which must be ‘political’ in order to have a secure foundation.

What does this mean?

It means, first of all, that “human life as such is living together and

therefore political life. Hence all human doing and going about and thinking are in

themselves political” (413). Now, human life may be political “without

responsibility or in responsibility … without responsibility—that means without

raising the question of the Good, that is, assuming that one knows what the Good

is. Knowing what the Good is, I can teach it, teach it openly; I can also therefore

write. If, however, there is no knowledge of the Good which I can posses, then I

cannot teach, I cannot teach openly, I cannot write. Because Socrates knows that

he knows nothing, that all understanding can only be agreement, he does not

address the multitude, but only individuals; his conversation with others is

dialogue” (413).

231
 That philosophy is political in this sense also means, secondly, that the

idea of enlightenment as such, as it originates in Socrates and Plato (and not with

the Sophist movement as is often supposed) is ethical-political: “The question that

enlightenment poses to what is given: Why is this actually this way? Means: is it

so as it is good? The enlightened critique is essentially practical, ethical” (402).

Thirdly, human enlightenment is practical-ethical not because philosophy

is necessarily a humanism but because to understand any philosophical

opposition—even on questions of metaphysics—one must inquire into human

(political) opinions in order, first of all, to clear the way (from erroneous

opinions) to ‘the things themselves’.29 One begins from politics or the political

because “politics is that field where philosophical, moral, internal [innerliche]

oppositions become explicit, where what is at stake with respect to these

oppositions is the whole, where what is at stake in them becomes revealed” (my

emphasis; 406).

Fourth, the turn to opinions or to pre-philosophic experience already

means that enlightenment is not necessarily secular. Thus, together with Cohen,

Strauss will argue that philosophy may be able to learn from the teachings of

Judaism. And yet, that this possibility is not self-evident becomes clear “when one

considers that there used to be and still are philosophers—the best known is

Spinoza—that were of the opinion that it is only to the detriment of philosophy

when it is put in any relation with revelation, and that there used to be and may

29
Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991), 21.

232
still be Jews … that were of the opinion that Judaism would be destroyed by

philosophizing” (my emphases; 398).30

Finally, there is a fifth sense in which true philosophy is for Strauss

political philosophy: only thinking that is ethically-politically committed reveals

to us the moments of (ethical-political) truth in the history of thought. “Cohen,

himself guided by an ethical-contemporary [aktuell-ethisch] interest, or more

pointedly: by a political interest, unlocks for us the access to the ethical-

contemporary, political meaning of the philosophy of RMbM [Maimonides]”

(394). In other words, for Strauss it is a certain passion [Leidenschaft] of Cohen’s

that makes of him a political philosopher (see 429; also 404, 407) and that

accounts for the acuity of his vision. Theoretical vision, that is, would seem to

require a certain comportment or a certain (truthful) disposition.31

30
Cf. also the “Introduction” to Philosophy and Law, 26 (=GS2, 14) (“…the radical
Enlightenment still lives today, and it is in a certain way, viz. as regards its last and furthest
consequences, far more radical today than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and
orthodoxy too still lives today.”)
31
Yet it is here, on the question of the relation between theory and praxis, that Strauss begins to
sharply disagree with Cohen. For in the extreme the passion of the political philosopher borders on
messianism, and ‘truthful disposition’ becomes simply a certain will. Thus just as Cohen’s vision
comes from his passion, so his deeply erroneous views—most notably of Aristotle—are also
passionately wrong (see 407). Aristotle, says Cohen, misunderstood Plato because “his heart was
not filled” with devotion for the Good. Aristotle was led by “enmity” towards the Good. But, says
Strauss, what is someone who hates the Good as such but a devil? (407) Cohen demonizes
Aristotle. He has no tolerance for him. Such is also his political judgment which guided by passion
becomes more of a political theology. Strauss draws our attention to Cohen’s views on tolerance
in his Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism: “There cannot be another God [but the
God of Monotheism]…Monotheism cannot permit any tolerance of polytheism. Idolatry has to be
destroyed absolutely…One has not acquired a true understanding of monotheism, which unites
theory and practice, if one has not understood the destruction of idolatry as a relentless necessity,
if one believes one is able to detect even a trace of intolerance, of fanaticism and misanthropy in
this holy zeal against the false gods. These suspicions merely disclose that one’s heart is not
completely filled with the unique God.” “What are we to say to this,” responds Strauss, “who
really cannot say of ourselves that our heart is filled from the one God or from the idea of the
Good?” (408) Thus Strauss takes issue with Cohen’s erroneous reading of Aristotle and also of

233
 2. Contemporary Aristotelianism as a threat to political philosophy

As mentioned earlier, Strauss argues that the form of political philosophizing

represented by Cohen is under threat due to a rebirth of Aristotelianism. The new

Aristotelianism, says Strauss, is a consequence of the hegemony of

phenomenology: “As phenomenology has become an all-determining power—

whoever is not acquainted with the school-concept of phenomenology may be

reminded that Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of a ‘new thinking’ is the world-

concept of this philosophy—so this means a decisive step towards the

rehabilitation of Aristotelianism.”32

Maimonides’ himself as it is guided by passion bordering on intolerance. See H. Cohen, Religion

of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Ungar Publishing,
1972), 52.
32
“Wenn die Phänomenologie inzwischen eine alle bestimmende Macht geworden ist—wer mit
dem Shulbegriff der Phänomenologie nicht vertraut ist, sei daran erinnert, dass Franz Rosenzweigs
Begriff des neuen Denkens der Weltbegriff dieser Philosophie ist—, so bedeutet das einen
entscheidenen Schritt zur Wiederherstellung des Aristotelismus” (410). Two years earlier (in
1929) Rosenzweig had referred to Heidegger as “the Husserl disciple and Aristotelian scholastic”
whose thought was an expression of his own (Rosenzweig’s) “new thinking.” See Franz
Rosenzweig, “Transposed Fronts,” in Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (eds.), Franz
Rosenzweig. Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 146-152.
Strauss refers explicitly to Heidegger’s thought as “another form of the new thinking” in his
“Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of
Modernity, 147. On the distinction between ‘Weltbegriff’ and ‘Schulbegriff’, see Kant, Critique of
Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), A838f.: “Until now, however, the concept of philosophy has been only a scholastic concept
[Schulbegriff], namely that of a system of cognition that is sought only as a science without having
as its end anything more than the systematic unity of this knowledge…But there is also a
cosmopolitan concept [Weltbegriff]…that has always grounded this term, especially when it
is…personified and represented as an archetype in the ideal of the philosopher. From this point of
view philosophy is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human
reason…” See also CPR, BXXXI f.: critique is essentially a limitation of the “the monopoly of
schools” in “the interest of human beings.” For studies of the relation between Rosenzweig and
Heidegger see Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Sep., 1942): 53-77, and more
recently: Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

234
 Strauss, at least to begin with, understands Aristotelianism together with

Cohen as the abandonment of Socratic philosophizing for the pre-Socratic ideal of

life in divine theoria. Aristotle “restores the fundamental possibility of the Greeks

that had been questioned by Socrates: life in pure contemplation and

understanding, in theory (theoria).” Specifically, “if Socratic philosophizing is

questioning after the Good of human life, after the true state, so is Aristotelian

philosophizing: pure contemplation of beings and understanding of Being. And if

Socratic philosophizing is in itself political, so politics for Aristotle becomes

secondary” (414).

3. How to respond to neo-Aristotelianism?

That Strauss is almost certainly referring to Heidegger as the chief

phenomenologist behind the Aristotelian revival will become clear as we consider

his response to the whole problem.33 Strauss begins by noting that, granted that

Aristotelianism is a threat against which Socratic-Platonic political philosophizing

must reassert itself, it is the same Aristotelianism that can make possible such a

response: “Aristotelianism and generally non-idealized and non-modernized

Greek philosophy is not only a threat and therefore of present interest. Above all –

the modern presuppositions that were binding for Cohen … may appear to us one

day as decayed and brittle; we would then perhaps be glad, if non-idealized, non-

33
Consider also in this regard Strauss’s claim that Cohen sensed or had a correct intuition
concerning “the deep connection of phenomenology with Aristotle” (“…dass Cohen den tiefen
Zusammenhang der Phänomenologie mit Aristoteles, dem Lehrer der Scholastik, ahnte.” “Cohen
und Maimuni,” GS2, 410.)

235
modernized Greek philosophy could show us a way out of the modern anarchy”

(410).

Aristotelianism is then, after all, not necessarily a threat. Against what

Cohen believes and what is commonly believed, Aristotle does not abandon the

Socratic-Platonic ‘program’. In fact the opposite is the case. Cohen’s thesis that

Aristotle did not understand Plato is paradoxical in light of the fact that Aristotle

spent twenty years in the Academy with Plato as his master. Above all, “the latest

research has shown the deep connection between Plato and Aristotle; at the border

of this research we confront the thesis: that Aristotle’s work completed the work

of Plato” (410).

By the latest research, Strauss probably meant that of Gadamer who in

turn incorporated in his studies completed in the late 1920s the findings of

classical philologists and philosophers such as Paul Friedländer and Julius

Stenzel.34 Gadamer himself was responding to Heidegger, and specifically to that

34
See Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, xxxi f. Other members of what François Renaud refers
to as the ‘Marburg school’ of Platonic studies (Krüger , Klein, Gadamer) held the same view
concerning the relation between Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, Strauss could also have meant
Krüger’s research. See Strauss’s letter of May 7, 1931, in GS3, 385 where Strauss refers to “how
much I have profited from your lecture on Plato” (referring to a talk Krüger had delivered two
days before). On October 13, 1934 Strauss writes to Klein that “Gadamer is surely the soundest
[ordentlichste] of the German Plato scholars…” He points to the fact, however, that he only knows
his “very thorough and very good reviews” (GS23, 528). (Gadamer’s reviews are collected in
volume 5 of his complete works.) That Aristotle completed the ‘Socratic program’ was also one of
the central theses of the work of Jacob Klein. See, e.g., J. Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” in R.
Williamson and E. Zuckermann (eds.), The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein (Annapolis, Md:
St. John’s College Press, 1985). Klein reads Socrates as an ontologist, and he takes his
fundamental premise to be that “the reasons for things being as they are, and the truth about those
things, are to be found in the spoken—or, for that matter, silent—words and the nonta they
embody.” He argues that “[i]t is safe to say, I think, that in one respect at least, Aristotelian
philosophy consists in the execution of that Socratic program. It is in speech, in searching for and
finding adequate words, that the logos of things, the logos of nature (phusis) becomes audible and
capable of being understood” (179). For an account of the relations between Klein and Gadamer

236
Heidegger that in Being and Time had claimed that the Socratic-Platonic dialectic

was a “philosophical embarrassment” thankfully overcome by Aristotle.35 Against

this view, Gadamer argued that Aristotle’s project is best understood as the

execution of precisely the ‘program’ that begins from the Socratic-Platonic

dialectic, and in particular from Socrates’ ‘flight into the logoi’ described in the

Phaedo.36

It seems, then, that by the new Aristotelianism Strauss (following

Gadamer) meant that pretension to scientificity that regards the movement from

Socratic dialogue to Platonic dialectic to Aristotelian episteme as progress

and the “Marburg school” of Platonic thought in general see François Renaud, Die
resokratisierung Platons: Die platonische Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers (Sankt Augustin:
Academia Verlag, 1999). For a recent study of the relation between the philosophies of Socrates
and Aristotle see Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).
35
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 25. Heidegger’s critique of dialectic dates back at least to the 1924/25
course on Plato’s Sophist. See Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 59, 113, esp. 137 (“…the only meaning
and the only intention of dialectic is to prepare and to develop a genuine original intuition, passing
through what is merely said”), 138 (dialectic as “a preliminary stage of theorein”); 148; 434:
“Aristotle was the first to be able to understand dialectic positively and to appropriate it.
Superseding it in a properly disclosive original ontology”). See Michael Allen Gillespie, “Martin
Heidegger’s Aristotelian National Socialism,” Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 2000): 140-
166, 149 (“In Heidegger’s view…there is no … dialectical path because there is an unbridgeable
ontological difference between Being and beings”). Francisco Gonzales, “The Socratic
Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A
Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006), 426-442. (Gonzales emphasizes precisely
Gadamer’s critique of Heidegger’s reliance on “phenomenological intuition” for the discovery of
truth (see esp., 436 f.). The “opposition between dialectic and ‘phenomenology’ persists in
Heidegger’s thought to the very end” (431).) See also Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos:
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press),
esp. 72 f.
36
See Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 70-83; The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian
Philosophy, trans P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 26: “It is not in
the least excessive to see in Aristotle’s textbooks the execution of just this project, [namely “the
program projected in the Phaedo’s flight into the logoi”] particularly in his Physics and his
Politics, which contains his ethics.”

237
towards a ‘higher’ and ‘purer’ understanding of Being,37 thus missing or

neglecting the centrality of dialogue or of the examination of human opinions

(logoi) not only for truthful living together but for the very possibility of securing

access to ‘the things themselves’.38 More particularly, what is thereby neglected is

the ‘idea’ of the Good or of excellence (arete) that always already guides our

actions and thoughts and which is always a shared, public or political

conception.39

Still, at least so far (i.e., in 1931), Strauss does not suggest how Socratic-

Platonic political philosophizing could begin to address the crisis of his time.

Moreover, the problem remains for Strauss that Aristotelianism has become a

threat to the type of political philosophizing represented by Cohen, and again, at

least on this occasion, it is with Cohen and Maimonides (and not with Gadamer,

37
See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 26.
38
See Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 21. Compare, by contrast, Walter Brogan,
“Heidegger’s Aristotelian Reading of Plato: The Discovery of the Philosopher,” Research in
Phenomenology 25 (1995), 274-75: Aristotle’s greatness, according to Heidegger, “is that he is
able to take up in a positive manner the implicit direction of Plato’s thought, towards a logos that
is not dialogos” (my emphasis). See, e.g., Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 59, 113.
39
Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 53: “All Dasein lives continually in an understanding of
arete. What the good citizen must be and how he must act are prescribed for everyone in an
explication that dominates the entire public understanding of Dasein: in what is called ‘morals’.
So the concept of arete is a ‘public’ concept.” “Thus Protagoras describes it as sheer madness for
someone to assert that he is not just.” (See Plato, Protagoras, 323b.) Of this foundational concept
of Socratic-Platonic philosophy (the Good) Heidegger, especially in the late 1920s, argued that it
had nothing to do with ethical comportment or with an ethical pre-understanding of things, but
was rather proof that the Greeks understood being within the paradigm of fabrication (“the good”
being essentially the demiourgos, the “producer pure and simple”). Heidegger, The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
[1927] 1982), 286: “ancient philosophy interprets being in the horizon of production”; “the idea
agathou is nothing but the demiourgos, the producer pure an simple.”

238
say) that Strauss ultimately sides. This points to the fact that the quarrel with

Heidegger and Aristotelianism here runs deeper.

As noted earlier, Strauss argued with Cohen that philosophy may be able

to learn from the teachings of Judaism against those philosophers who are “of the

opinion that it is only to the detriment of philosophy when it is put in any relation

with revelation.”40 As we have seen, virtually every writing of Strauss post-dating

the Davos encounter so far involves an implicit dialogue with Heidegger. This

reference seems to be no exception.

In a lecture delivered twice in 1927 and 1928 with the title

“Phenomenology and Theology” Heidegger had argued that faith (in divine

revelation) is “so absolutely the mortal enemy [of philosophy] that philosophy

does not even begin to want in any way to do battle with it.”41 Whether Strauss

knew about the lecture or not, it expresses in a drastic form what Heidegger had

been arguing at least since the time Strauss knew him, viz., that philosophy must

in principle be atheistic.42 The lecture starts from the premise of Being and Time

40
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” in GS2, 398 (my emphases).
41
Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, 53. Cf. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson
of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 85. Meier situates Heidegger’s
statement within the context of the larger debate at the time between the proponents of a life
guided by faith (e.g., Bultmann or Friedrich Gogarten) and the defenders of the philosophical life
(especially Heidegger and, in a different way, Strauss).
42
For Heidegger’s affirmations of philosophical atheism see, e.g., Martin Heidegger,
Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die
Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät, ed. Günther Neumann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 28;
Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 6; Ontologie (Hermeneutik der
Faktizität) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 26. Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987), 5. Cf. Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in
Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 237

239
that philosophy is “universal phenomenological ontology” and as such the master

science that clarifies the regional ontologies of every other positive science,

including theology. Thus, both philosophy and theology are sciences, only of a

different type and rank. As a positive science, “theology is closer to chemistry and

mathematics than to philosophy.”43 This is because its positum does not arise

from Dasein “or spontaneously through Dasein [as is the case for philosophy], but

rather from that which is revealed in and with this way of existence [namely,

faith], from that which is believed.”44 Between the way of existence of philosophy

and the way of existence of faith there is therefore no possible mediation, but only

a leap. “The existentiell opposition between faithfulness and the free

(“Heidegger wishes to expel fom philosophy the last relics of Christian theology”). Alexandre
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. by James
H. Nichols, Jr., ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1947] 1969), 259, n. 41 (“In
our times Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy”). For Emmanuel
Lévinas too, “Heidegger broke with theology ‘with a radicalism without precedent in the history
of philosophy’.” E. Lévinas, Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 37, no. 5 (October-
December 1937): 194-95. Cited in Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other. Emmanuel Lévinas
between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 10-11. Cf. especially, Sein
und Zeit, section 44C: “The assertion of ‘eternal truths’ and the confusion of the phenomenally
grounded ‘ideality’ of Dasein with an idealized absolute subject belong to those residues of
Christian theology in philosophical problems which have not yet been radically extruded.”
Apparently the same point is made in M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, vol. 1 (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 206. Cf., however, his “Letter on Humanism,” 253: “it is not
only rash but also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of man
from the relation of his essence to the truth of Being is atheism.”
43
Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” 41. (Having understood philosophy and theology
as “belonging together” in her youth, Arendt ended up holding Heidegger’s view. See Hannah
Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, edited by L. Kohler and H. Saner, trans.
Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 221-222.) For Heidegger’s stance on
the relation between philosophy and theology in his later work, see, e.g., M. Heidegger, Nietzsche,
vol. 1, 5: “…there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be
determined anywhere else than from within itself. For the same reason there is no pagan
philosophy…”; see also 166.
44
Ibid., 43-44.

240
appropriation of one’s whole Dasein [in philosophy] is not first brought about by

the sciences of theology and philosophy but is prior to them.”45

Most noteworthy in this lecture is the fact that philosophy is no longer the

self-illumination of life in its everyday going about the world—as Heidegger had

stressed in the early 1920s—but a science, even the master science. Consequently,

the question that links philosophy as Socratically conceived with theology—the

question of the right life for man—is completely missed. (Hence the strange claim

that theology is closer to mathematics and chemistry than to philosophy.) Here it

must be stressed that this is not only a consequence of the pretension to turn

philosophy into fundamental ontology but of that understanding of theology—

common to Heidegger and Dialectical Theology—which, much like any other

positive science, is seen as dealing with given ‘facts’ (“The crucifixion … and all

that belongs to it” (44)) which however, unlike any positive science, can only be

believed and never rationally discussed, no matter how powerfully they shape our

understanding of the right life for man.46

If, then, against Heidegger, Strauss argues that it is not to the detriment of

philosophy when it is put in relation with revelation, what kind of relation does he

envisage?

45
Ibid., 53.
46
See Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 26 (=GS2, 14) (on “the newer dogma that ‘religion’ and
‘science’ each has in view the ‘truth’ belonging to it” which accounts for the fact that “the radical
Enlightenment still lives today,…and orthodoxy too still lives today.”) This statement comes close
to reproducing Heidegger’s position in “Phenomenology and Theology” and may be an indication
that Strauss did know of the lecture.

241
 Beyond Heidegger and Cohen: From ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ to ‘Mecca’

In 1929 or 1930 Strauss had come across a passage of Avicenna (A.D. 980-1037)

which treats the study of prophetic revelation and the divine Law as an integral

part of Platonic political philosophy, and specifically of Plato’s Laws.47 This

discovery marked a revolution in Strauss’s thought as it pointed to a radically

47
See Avicenna, “On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences,” in Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi
(eds.), Medieval Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 95-98. Following
Aristotle, Avicenna divides the sciences into “theoretical” and “practical.” Through the third part
of practical science “one knows the kinds of political regimes, rulerships, and associations, both
virtuous and bad … Of this science, the tratement of kingship is contained in the book by Plato
and that by Aristotle on the regime, and the treatement of propechy and the Law is contained in
their two books on the laws.” (Avicenna is referring to the Republic and the Laws; the reference to
Aristotle is uncertain. It probably comes from the bibliographies of Aristotle’s writings, as the
Politics seems never to have been translated into Arabic. (See Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” in
GS2, 425, and for a more recent statement Brague, The Law of God, 115.)) Avicenna continues as
follows: “By the nomoi, the philosophers do not mean what the vulgar believe, which is that the
nomos is nothing but a device and deceit. Rather, according to them, the nomos is the law and the
norm that is established and made permanent through the coming-down of revelation. … Through
this part of practical wisdom one knows the necessity of prophecy and the human species’ need of
the Law for its existence, preservation, and future life” (97). On Strauss’s discovery of the Jewish-
Arab Medieval enlightenment see, Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Green (ed.), Jewish
Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 463; Philosophie und Gesetz, in GS2, 112. See also
Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007), 57; and, more generally, Brague, The Law of God, 118, as well as his “Athens, Jerusalem,
Mecca: Leo Strauss’s ‘Muslim’ understanding of Greek philosophy,” Poetics Today 19, no. 2
(July 1, 1998): 235-259. Brague argues that Strauss’s read the ancients “with medieval eyes …
and never ceased to do that.” “This outlook seems to stem from … Nietzsche” (239). The basic
commonality between Islamic political philosophy and the philosophy of Nietzsche is the idea that
philosophy is essentially a form of legislation for which Plato’s art constitutes the original model.
According to Nietzsche, “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 a critic of
all customs he is the antithesis of the moral man, and if he does not succeed in becoming a
lawgiver for new customs he remains in the memory of men as ‘the evil principle’.” Nietzsche
argues that it is therefore no wonder that Plato “intended to do for all the Greeks what Mohammed
later did for his Arabs: to determine customs in things great and small and especially to regulate
everyone’s day-to-day mode of life … A couple of accidents more and a couple of other accidents
fewer—and the world would have seen the Platonisation of the European south.” F. Nietzsche,
Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), book V, 496.
On Plato and Mohammed see also F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, aphorism 972. For a reading
of Strauss as a Platonic-Farabian-Nietzschean political philosopher along these lines see Laurence
Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially
146-147.

242
different tradition of philosophic thought for which the rational discussion of the

revealed Law is essential. Indeed, according to Maimonides and his Muslim

predecessors, prophetic legislators are not inspired beings who work miracles

whose commandments are to be taken as credo to be accepted on faith. Rather,

they are men who enjoy extraordinary powers of theoretical and practical

reasoning, and whose commandments are indispensable means for achieving

human perfection, among other things, through philosophizing. The model they

followed was Platonic, which means that they saw the prophet as assuming the

role of the philosopher-king. Crucially, however, what Plato demanded of

philosophers, namely, that they stand under the law and care and watch for others,

“this is fulfilled in the age of revelation religions.”48 Or in the words of

Maimonides, because “divine laws govern human conduct,” “we do not need all

these laws and nomoi.”49 And yet, this does not mean that there is no need for

political science. The philosophers know that their philosophizing depends on the

legal order and hence need to justify it vis-à-vis that order; nay, they see their

48
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 426.
49
“The sages of the peoples of antiquity made rules and regulations, according to their various
degrees of perfection, for the government of their subjects. These are called nomoi; and by them,
the peoples were governed. On all these matters, the philosophers have many books which have
been translated into Arabic. … But in these times we do not need all these laws and nomoi; for
divine laws govern human conduct.” Maimonides, Treatise on Logic, trans. Israel Efros (New
York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1938), 64. Cited in Brague, The Law of God, 109.
See also Strauss, “Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science,” in What is Political Philosophy?,
155-169.

243
philosophizing as a duty and in particular they see it as their duty to provide a

rational interpretation of the revealed Law.50

Thus, philosophy, we can say, begins for this tradition from ethical-

political considerations. Not only this: it culminates in them.51 That is to say, the

philosophers of the Jewish-Arab Middle Ages were free, as it were, to

‘Aristotelianize’, that is, to engage in metaphysical discussions concerning what

the soul is and what its parts are, what Being is and what the One is, and so on,

and yet they saw this ultimately as a preparation for addressing the question of the

Good.52 Thus, they reversed the order of the Christian West where the beginning

and end of science was precisely not political but metaphysical.53

50
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 426-27.
51
See, especially, Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, trans, Muhsin S. Mahdi, revised ed.
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), esp. 49-50 (concerning the political conditions of
philosophy: “Both [Plato and Aristotle] have given us an account of philosophy, but not without
giving us also an account of the ways to it and of the ways to re-establish it when it becomes
confused or extinct.”); 22-23 (concerning the culmination of philosophy in political science: the
highest reach of philosophy is ‘metaphysics’ but what is literally beyond ‘physics’ or nature is the
province of political science: “He will know that the natural principles in man and in the world are
not sufficient for man’s coming to that perfection for the sake of whose achievement he is made. It
will become evident that man needs some rational, intellectual principles with which to work
toward that perfection. …There emerges now another science and another inquiry that investigates
these intellectual principles and the acts of character with which man labors towards this
perfection. From this, in turn, emerge the science of man and political science.”) See, more
generally, Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 26, 57 (“Metaphysics does not simply
crown the sciences. It does this, to be sure, but it also becomes a preface to political science…”).
52
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 426.
53
As Mushin Mahdi explains, the great achievement of Islamic philosophy as founded by Alfarabi
was to revive the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and thus to liberate Socratic
philosophy from Christian theology. “During the ten centuries that separated Cicero [106-43 BC]
from Alfarabi [ca. 870-950], one cannot point to a single great philosopher for whom the problem
of philosophy was inseparable from the problem of political philosophy or in whose writings
political philosophy occupies a massive, central, or decisive position. Political philosophy may not
be totally absent from pagan and Christian Platonism in the Hellenistic-Roman period, but it
remained marginal and subterranean, or else overwhelmed by metaphysics, theology, and

244
 Strauss does not further explore here the curious affinity between the

Judeo-Arabic medieval tradition and the thought of Cohen (and Heidegger)

insofar as all share a concern with ethics or the proper being of man. He does

note, however, that in sharp contrast to the ‘ethical’ thought of Cohen (and again,

we may add, Heidegger), the essential characteristic of Jewish-Arab medieval

thought is the centrality of the concept of Law. “Cohen’s outset—‘all honor to the

God of Aristotle, but truly he is not the God of Israel’—leads no further if one

interprets the God of Israel as the God of morality [Sittlichkeit]. Instead of

morality, one should say: Law. It is the concept of Law, of nomos, which unites

Jews and Greeks: the concept of the concrete binding order of life.”54 As Strauss

goes on to explain, this idea has been “covered over by the Christian and the

natural-right tradition, in whose track moves at least our philosophical thinking.

By the Christian tradition: which begins with the radical law-critique of the

Apostle Paul. By the natural right tradition, that postulates an abstract system of

norms, that must first be filled with positive Right to become useful.”55

mysticism” (65). “It was not until the twelfth century that political philosophy penetrated Judaism
through Maimonides, and not until the thirteenth that it penetrated Latin Christianity through the
Averroists, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas” (30). References in parenthes refer to Mahdi,
Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy. See also Strauss, “How to Begin to
Study Medieval Philosophy,” in Pangle (ed.), The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 207-
226.
54
On order and law in Platonic thought, see Plato, Laws, 874 e 7ff. (cf. 688 a 1ff.); Gorgias, 503 d
5ff. (cf. Strauss, GS3, 369.); Timaeus, 27d 5ff; 30 a, 1-6.
55
Strauss, “Cohen und Maimuni,” GS2, 428. See Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science
of Maimonides and Farabi,” 4-5: “it is not the Bible and the Koran, but perhaps the New
Testament, and certainly the Reformation and modern philosophy, which brought about the break
with ancient thought. The guiding idea upon which the Greeks and the Jews agree is precisely the
idea of the divine law as a single and total law which is at the same time religious law, civil law
and moral law.”

245
 To see the full significance of Strauss’s point here, it is necessary to

consider a different branch of his studies during the final years of Weimar. Going

back a few years we shall now trace his critique of the Christian reception of

classical thought, that is, we shall move from Maimonides and Cohen to Hobbes

and Heidegger.

246
 Hobbesheidegger is Heideggerhobbes: Strauss’s Studies in Hobbesian
Political Philosophy (1930-1936)

At the same time that Strauss discovered the Platonism of the Jewish-Arab

medieval enlightenment, he embarked on an extensive investigation of Hobbes.

Hobbes was the most profound critic of classic natural right and of the nomos idea

underlying Jewish and Greek thought. In that sense, he was the heir of Paul: a

‘destroyer’ of ‘the wisdom of the wise’ and, qua ‘deconstructionist’, a precursor

of Heidegger. Like Heidegger, he defined his political philosophy in opposition to

Aristotelian metaphysics. Like Heidegger also, he was a philosophical atheist but

a deeply Christian thinker. Like the German Meister, Hobbes sought to ‘destroy’

Aristotelian metaphysics but recovered his Rhetoric. We shall see in what follows

how Strauss attempted to uncover the roots of “our philosophical thinking”

culminating in Heidegger—and in the abandonment of the idea of a binding order

of life—by revisiting Hobbes.

On January 8, 1930 Strauss wrote to his friend Gerhard Krüger that he

intended to continue the investigation begun in his first book, Spinoza’s Critique

of Religion (1930), “in the form of an analysis of the Hobbesian anthropology.”56

Strauss’s study of Hobbes would culminate six years later with the publication of

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936). Between 1930, when he wrote to

Krüger from his study in Berlin, and 1936, when he completed his book on

56
GS3, 382.

247
Hobbes in London, Strauss engaged in a ‘hidden dialogue’ with the soon-to-be

‘crown jurist of the Reich’ (Carl Schmitt); discovered the Platonism of the

Jewish-Arab Middle Ages; became an exile in Paris where he began a decade-

long dialogue with Alexandre Kojève; and learned of Heidegger’s Nazism. These

involvements and encounters are reflected in the flurry of writings he produced

during those turbulent years, six of which are dedicated to Hobbes.57

Hobbes’ repetition and reduction of Socrates

Strauss described the direction that his thinking would take after 1929 in rather

precise, though indirect, terms in a preface he wrote in 1964 for the German

edition of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.58 There he states that “[t]he final

sentence of [Gerhard Krüger’s] Kant book, which corresponded completely to my

view at that time and with which I would still today, with certain reservations,

agree, explains why I directed myself wholly to the ‘true politics’, and why I did

not write about Hobbes as a Hobbesian.”59

57
Strauss wrote the following pieces on Hobbes: an unpublished MS written between 1931 and
1932 entitled Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes. Eine Einführung in das Naturrecht; a
“Disposition” for the planned book written in October/November of 1931; a “Preface to a planned
book on Hobbes” (namely, to the MS, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes…) written towards
the end of 1931; “Some remarks concerning the political science of Hobbes” (end of
1932/beginning of 1933); “Die Religionskritik des Hobbes” (1933/34); and The Political
Philosophy of Hobbes (1934-36). (To this may be added his indirect confrontation with Hobbes in
his “Notes” on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (April-May, 1932)). For the chronology,
see Meier, “How Strauss Became Strauss,” in Svetozar Minkov (ed.), Enlightening Revolutions,
376.
58
Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Green (ed.), Jewish Philosophy, 453-
457.
59
Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” 454. The idea of a ‘true politics’ (die
wahre Politik) points to Kant who contrasted it with “empirical politics” (die empirische Politik).

248
 Gerhard Krüger was one of Strauss’s main philosophical dialogue

partners, and likewise a student of Heidegger. The last sentence of his Kant book

reads as follows: “For the conditionedness [Bedingtheit] of man and above all

history … must be the motivation for a philosophical, that is, for an unconditional

questioning. The question can be truly unconditional, however, when … it

questions the Good. Let the answer to this question … be left undecided. That for

him that takes it up, the decisive question remains true, even when it finds no

answer, is shown by the example of Socrates.”60

Strauss would follow Krüger’s way of responding to Heidegger: away

from him—from modern historicist thought—and yet back to him—to the

Socratic-Platonic political philosophy he had unintentionally recovered. Whereas

Krüger saw Kant as the thinker standing at the threshold between Socratic-

Platonic and the modern philosophizing that would culminate in Heidegger,

Strauss went further back to Hobbes. As thinkers at the threshold, both Kant and

True politics assumes “that pure principles of right have objective reality,” “regardless of what
objections empirical politics may bring against them.” “True politics can therefore not take a step
without having already paid homage to morals, and although politics by itself is a difficult art, its
union with morals is no art at all; for as soon as the two conflict with each other, morals cuts the
knot that politics cannot untie.” Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpectual Peace,” in Mary J. Gregor
(ed.), Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 346-347. Cf. Susan M. Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously:
Schmitt’s ‘Concept of the Political’ and Strauss’s ‘True Politics,’ in Leo Strauss: Political
Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Walter Nicgorski (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
1994).
60
See Gerhard Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931),
236.

249
Hobbes were read by Krüger and Strauss as at once originary thinkers and as

objects of Destruktion.61

Strauss’s central contention with respect to Hobbes in those years was that

his philosophy is a repetition of the Socratic-Platonic program of founding a

techne politike that nevertheless overly simplifies or reduces the problems

involved in such a founding. It is this Hobbesian repetition and reduction of

‘political science’, Strauss argued, that gave rise to modern rationalism.62 By such

a reduction Strauss means to say, above all, that Hobbes does not raise the

question concerning the nature of virtue, or in other words, that he does not

sufficiently problematize ethics; that he therefore takes for granted the possibility

of political science understood as the quest for a ‘human order of human life’: for

Hobbes the standard of that order is “‘self-evidently’ social life or peace.”63

The general problem here seems to be the following: it is the same ethical-

political science that Hobbes took for granted at the beginning of modernity that

Heidegger would come to regard as impossible at its end. This fate of modern

reason was dramatized in Davos where Heidegger, much like a magician

61
The Kant Krüger is interested in—ultimately to respond to Heidegger—is the Kant of the
Anthropology in Pragmatic Intent. It is this Kant, he claimed, that discovered “a wholly new
fundamental position [Grundstellung] of science and likewise a new horizon of philosophy” by
understanding man “in his bodily-factical concreteness in the midst of his world”—a world that
Krüger likens to Heidegger’s Umwelt. This is a new horizon for philosophy in which its ‘world-
concept’ (Weltbegriff) replaces its ‘school-concept’ (Schulbegriff). Krüger, Philosophie und Moral
in der kantischen Kritik, 41, 43.
62
See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of October 15, 1931 in GS3, 394.
63
Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS) cited in GS3, xviii. “This standard is not
clarified; it is taken over without deliberation [or misgivings: Bedenken] from life, or from the
scientific [wissenschaftlichen] tradition” (ibid.; see also GS3, 173).

250
astounding his audience, revealed the abyss at the grounds of modern reason. The

question for Strauss thus became: How is it that practical or political philosophy

went from self-evidence to impossibility at the end of a movement from Hobbes

to Heidegger?64 This occurred through a series of reductions or simplifications,

and thus through the missing of certain fundamental questions. As Strauss put it

1931/32: “Hobbes misses the question that has to be answered for political science

to be science. He does not begin with the question: which, then, is the right order

of human living together? or with the equivalent question: ti estin arete [what is

(human) excellence or virtue]?”65

Strauss rejected Heidegger’s answer to the problem of ethics—namely:

there is no ‘rational answer to the right order of living together’; we live such

answers, but at the most we can ‘resolutely choose’ to accept them as destiny—

and yet he could only begin to reject Heidegger’s historicism because of the new

horizon it opens. To his critique of Hobbes’ ‘missing’ of the Socratic problem,

Strauss adds the following note: “We have Heidegger to thank for this expression

[viz., Versäumnis or ‘missing’]; see Being and Time, I, 24 and 89ff. Heidegger’s

64
Cf. Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 185-86.
65
Ibid., cited in GS3, xviii. The note referring to Heidegger stems from Strauss’s first manuscript
on Hobbes, which was written between 1931 and 1932. Though the manuscript remains
unpublished, it is striking to note that its plan (which has been published) foresees several sections
dedicated to a critical engagement with Heidegger. See Meier’s Preface to Meier GS3, xix. The
plan in question is published as “Disposition: Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes. Eine
Einführung in das Naturrecht,” in Ibid., 193-201. The language of the MS (as can be gathered
from the excerpts cited by Meier) seems to be equally Heideggerian. See e.g., GS3, x: “faktischen
Zusammenleben”; “faktischen Staat.” For Hobbes’ neglect of the question of the essence of virtue,
see also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 150.

251
idea of the ‘destruction of the tradition’ is what first made possible the

investigation carried out in this and in the previous sections.”66

In a letter to Krüger of the same year (1932) Strauss made the connection

leading from Heidegger to Socratic ‘political science’ more explicit: “…modern

philosophy, brought to its end, appears to me to lead to the point where Socrates

begins. Modern philosophy thus reveals itself as a massive [gewaltige]

‘Destruktion of the tradition’, but not as a ‘progress.’”67 When Strauss thanks

Heidegger for the idea of a Destruktion of the tradition he therefore implicitly

thanks him (and Nietzsche) for opening a way back to Socrates: “…modern

philosophy … believes it may take the fundamental questions as already answered

and therefore ‘progress’, hence its missing of the Socratic question that was then

denounced by Nietzsche, and its missing of ontology, which Heidegger

discovered.”68

This, then, is the Hobbes to be ‘deconstructed’ for failing to take up the

question of the right life. And yet, Hobbes, as we suggested, is also a model

thinker for Strauss. Indeed, Strauss’s second central thesis with respect to Hobbes

at the time was that, precisely his repetition of the Socratic-Platonic program—

however ‘reduced’ it may be—attests to his unsurpassed originality in modernity.

He is “incomparably more original than Spinoza,” not to speak of Hegel who

66
Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS) cited in GS3, xix.
67
December 12, 1932, in Ibid., 415.
68
November 17, 1932, in Ibid., 406. (On Nietzsche’s recovery of the Socratic question see also
GS2, 461.)

252
presupposes Spinozism, or Kant who sublates what is most significant in Hobbes.

His thought is “the deepest stratum of the modern mind.”69 “Hobbes

philosophizes in that fertile moment [Augenblick] in which the ancient tradition

became unsteady and the modern tradition of natural science had not yet become

solidified.”70

What does Strauss have in mind? First of all this: that the ancient tradition

had become questionable when Hobbes philosophized means that the ideal of

theoria had also become questionable. “Hobbes is incomparably more original

[ursprünglich] than Spinoza.” Specifically, “If one considers the significance for

Spinoza of the traditional ideal of theory … and if one considers on the other hand

that Hobbes explicitly renounces this basic presupposition of pre-modern thought,

one arrives at a different picture as the typical one concerning the

‘progressiveness’ [Fortgeschrittenheit] of Spinoza vis-à-vis Hobbes.”71

Strauss developed these theses between 1930 and 1932 in exchanges with

Krüger as well as in a manuscript on Hobbes, which he wrote between 1931 and

1932 and sent to Carl Schmitt at the beginning of that year.72 They are the starting

69
Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1936] 1963), 5.
70
Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS), cited in GS3, xvii f.
71
Ibid., cited in GS3, xviii. On Spinoza’s privileging of theoria see note 127 of chapter two.
72
The MS of Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes was sent to Schmitt at the beginning of 1932
in the urgency of finding a scholarship to leave Germany. (See the Preface to GS3, ix; GS2, xxxi,
n. 44.) Due to the financial crisis of the time, Strauss had lost his job in the Academy for the
Science of Judaism. (This happened towards the end of 1931. See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt &
Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17, 31, 134
f.) Schmitt first knew of Strauss through the latter’s analyses of Hobbes as presented in Spinoza’s

253
point of Strauss’s Hobbesian studies of the 1930s. However, as the manuscript has

not been published it is not possible to trace their precise aim any further. Suffice

it to note that Strauss reads Hobbes as a founding thinker for modern times,

whose thinking is radical enough not to presuppose that theory is “the one thing

needful” and yet whose radicality pales in comparison to that of Socrates or

Heidegger. As Strauss puts it in Heideggerian language, Hobbes “misses” the

Socratic question concerning the right life because he begins “with that

completely different question concerning the ‘nature’ of man,”73 or because due to

his “ontological materialism” he seeks for a human order beginning from “the

material from which the virtuous human being must be fabricated.”74 By thus

taking for granted an inherited answer to the question of the nature of man (as

“animal rationale”75) Hobbes misses the ethical problem—viz. how to live—as it

arises for man in his confrontation with death: “Hobbes’ philosophy remains

before death: it is a philosophy of averageness.”76

Critique of Religion. See Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of March 13, 1932: “the interest you have
shown in my studies of Hobbes represents the most honorable and obliging corroboration of my
scholarly work that has ever been bestowed upon me and that I could ever dream of.” The letter is
reprinted in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, 123.
73
GS3, 409; see also 172, 407, 416.
74
Ibid., 419.
75
Ibid., 407.
76
Ibid., 199.

254
 A. Political science for the crisis of the time (1931-1933)

Preface to a planned book on Hobbes (1931)

The first published expression of Strauss’s Hobbes studies now included in his

collected writings is a “Preface” he prepared for the planned book on Hobbes. It

was composed in October/November of 1931.77

Strauss defines his quest there as guided by “[t]he question of the right

order of living together – of its ‘natural’ order, of natural right…”78 “The

question of natural right means the right order of human living together; the right

order is that order that is determined by reason” (211; see also 212). This question

“urges itself upon us in the face of the dominant anarchy” (201). Strauss means

both ‘factical’ anarchy—in a time marked by political assassinations, attempted

coups, paramilitary violence, extreme political polarization, and economic

emergency—but also the anarchy of ‘systems’ of natural right. This is an anarchy,

he argues, that has prevailed since Hobbes’ attack on traditional natural right

(201). Since that attack “the most opposed doctrines of natural right quickly

followed upon each other” leading to the view that natural right is as arbitrary as

any individual belief (201).

77
For situating the “Preface” within the development of Strauss’s thought, compare the letter of
October 15, 1931 where Strauss explains to Krüger that my “warrantor” (Gewährsmann) for “the
possibility that natural right is possible in a world without providence” is no longer Hobbes but
Plato (GS3, 393).
78
Strauss, “Vorwort zu einem geplanten Buch über Hobbes” (1931), in GS3, 201-215, 201.
(Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

255
 This was Hans Kelsen’s view at that time—that natural rights are but

ideologies used by interest groups to turn their particular struggles into

universalistic demands. Strauss takes issue with Kelsen and other critics of natural

right while also pointing to the sources of these critiques in neo-Kantianism (210)

and the ‘historical school’ of Savigny (211).79 The preface was not meant to be

published80 and the planned book was also abandoned because of the events of the

following years. Nevertheless, it remains important for understanding the genesis

of Strauss’s political science in light of its contemporary sources.

As we saw earlier, the idea of “the right order of human living together,”

or of “nomos” as a “concrete binding order of life” is what, according to Strauss,

unites Jews and Greeks. It is also what distinguishes ancient from modern

thought, as the latter was decisively shaped by Paul’s critique of the law. But far

from being an antiquarian quest, or one only meant to dismantle modern thought

to return to pre-modern conceptions, the idea of nomos and of order-thinking

seems to have been introduced by Strauss at the time to address Carl Schmitt, who

was gaining more and more influence in Berlin as an advisor of government

79
Readers of Natural Right and History will recognize here the germ of that project, namely, a
grounding of the question of natural right prepared by a “critical history” of natural right
theories—e.g., Hobbes, Grotius, and Rousseau—and of the different ‘waves’ of opposition to
natural right: the early historicism of Savigny (whose better-known representative in NRH would
seem to be Burke); the positivist critique of all ‘metaphysics’ in the name of ‘value-free’ science
(Weber and others); and the radical historicism represented by Heidegger. See the letter to Krüger
of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396, and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1953).
80
Letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396.

256
officials on legal and political matters.81 And, indeed, in Strauss’s view at least,

Schmitt’s turn from decisionism to “concrete-order thinking” (or

Ordnungsdenken) in 1933/34, which coincided with Schmitt’s becoming a

member of the Nazi party and Prussian Attorney General, was due to Strauss’s

influence.82 This being said, however, the radical differences between Strauss’s

and Schmitt’s conceptions must also be stressed. First, while one can imagine that

a young Jew, who even in May of 1933 expressed his sympathy for “fascist,

authoritarian, imperial” politics,83 and a conservative Catholic like Schmitt could

find common ground as outsiders within a philosophical and theological world

dominated by Protestantism,84 Strauss remained a Jew and Schmitt a Catholic.

This is to say that whatever Strauss may have meant by “the right order” it had

nothing to do, even genealogically, with “[t]he Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law

of the Middle Ages” or with the “Germanic thinking of the Middle Ages” that

81
For a brief and lucid account of Schmitt’s activities during the final days of Weimar see John P.
McCormick’s introduction to Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
82
“Have you seen Carl Schmitt’s latest brochures. He is now against Hobbes’ decisionism, for
‘Ordnungsdenken’ on the grounds of the argument in my review, which he naturally does not
cite.” Letter to Jacob Klein of October 10, 1934, in GS3, 524. For Schmitt’s ‘concrete-order
thinking’ see his On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, trans. Joseph W. Bendersky (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger Publishers, [1934] 2004).
83
See Strauss’s letter to Karl Löwith of May 19, 1933, in GS3, 625. See note 15, chapter two.
84
For Schmitt’s Catholic views and his distance from Protestantism see C. Schmitt, Roman
Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), esp. 12
(“…Catholic argumentation is based on a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a
specific juridical logic and whose focus of interest is the normative guidance of human social
life.”), 25 (“Should economic thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about
an absolutely unpolitical condition of human society, the Church would remain the only agency of
political thinking and political form.”)

257
Schmitt alluded to in his genealogy of Ordnungsdenken.85 Indeed, perhaps the

deepest problem of a ‘political science’ for Strauss would become precisely the

fact that the ‘order thinking’ he inspired in his youth excluded his own people—

that is, those who, as Schmitt put it, “without territory, without a state, and

without a church, exist only in ‘law.’”86

The “Preface,” then, is important for understanding how Strauss’s early

conception of ‘political science’ as the quest for “the right order of human life”

related to contemporary juridico-political conceptions. However, according to

Strauss, what mattered most to him—at least as he explained to his philosophical

friends with whom he almost never mentioned Schmitt—was something else:

“What matters for me above all [in the “Preface”] is to highlight the fact that the

sole presupposition of today’s skepticism against natural right is the historical

consciousness.”87

The discovery of the ‘historical consciousness’ is attributed to the early

critics of modern natural right, and specifically to the ‘historical school’ of

85
C. Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, 43, 45.
86
Ibid., 45. In other words, the problem is this: What can political science, when it is conceived as
the quest for “the right order of living together,” possibly mean for someone who has become
apolis? (For the premise of such a definition of political science would seem to be that man
belongs and ought to belong entirely to the ‘city’ or polis.) It is not surprising, then, that this
definition of the problem of political science would begin to disappear from Strauss’s writings.
Instead, in his American exile Strauss would insist that “all political life is necessarily imperfect”
and that the human problem cannot be solved at the political level. See, specially, Strauss’s 1939,
“Exoteric Teaching,” in Interpretation 14, n. 1 (January 1986): 51-59, 52, and Leo Strauss, On
Tyranny, edited by V. Gourevitch and M. S. Roth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2000), 182, 208. If this is true one would have to understand Strauss’s American political
philosophy as (at least in part) a reversal of his own youthful views, and perhaps also as a response
to Schmitt.
87
See the letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396.

258
thinkers such as Carl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke.88 “Today’s

skepticism,” however, is due to Heidegger, whom Strauss characterized at that

88
The Historical School was a broad movement with an all-important, though largely
subterranean, influence. “According to Dilthey, it was the Historical School that ‘had recognized
the historicity of human and of all the social order’ by defining the individual as an ‘essentially
historical being’, a discovery that he termed ‘the emancipation of historical consciousness’.”
Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995), 140. The new insight into historicity led “to a radical break with the 18th century
notions of natural law, natural religion, abstract political theory, and abstract political economy”
(140). Central to the reaction against modern natural law was the view that the enlightenment does
not represent a radical break with the pre-modern but a ‘secularization’ of Christian and Protestant
thought. Arthur M. Melzer, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism,” The American Political
Science Review 100, no. 2 (May, 2006), 286. (See Strauss’s argument against this thesis in his
letter to Löwith of August 20, 46 (in GS3, 667-668). Cf. also Natural Right and History, 1-2 and
the reference there to Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (Cambridge UP, 1934),
201-22.) For our understanding of Heidegger as a political philosopher, it is important to note that
the Historical School originated as a legal-political movement. Its leading representative was Carl
von Savigny (1779-1861), who stood for a historical and systematic treatment of Right conceived
as an outgrowth “of the most inner essence of the nation itself and its history.” The “historical
method” in legal science consists, according to Savigny, in going to the roots of Right—i.e.,
German and Roman Right—in order to “discover an organic principle through which that which
still has life can be separated and rescued from what is already dead and only belongs to history.”
This historicism would then be adopted not only by historians such as Ranke and Niebuhr, but also
by philologists such as Boeckh and Bopp, as well as by theologian-philosophers such as
Schleiermacher. H.-P. Harstick, art. “Historische Schule,” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel
(eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971-2007), Vol. 3, 1138-1141.
Carl Schmitt’s Ordnungsdenken also traces its genealogy to (among others) Savigny. See Schmitt,
On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, 77.
For the influence of the Historical School on Heidegger see his “Wilhem Dilthey’s Research
and the Current Struggle for a Historical Worldview,” in Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan
(eds.), Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 (Evanston,
Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 238-274. “The derivation of life-goals from history has
been developed since the eighteenth century by Kant, Herder, Humboldt, and Hegel. Their basic
conviction is in the end that humanity develops historically from a state of dependency towards a
state of freedom… The way was thus cleared for genuine historical research, whereby the sciences
disclose history theoretically and scientifically on the basis of sources secured in critical work (as
in Wolff, Niebuhr, Savigny, Bopp, Bauer, Schleimermacher, and Jacob Grimm)” (244). See also
Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale
Wertphilosophie. GA 56/57 [1919], 134 (where Heidegger praises the German discovery of the
historical consciousness and of communal life drawing on the experience of early Christianity,
referring to Savigny, Niebuhr and Schleiermacher); 164 (“The awakening and emancipation of
historical consciousness … is nothing other than the first true seeing of the growth that inheres in
all spiritual realities [das erste echte Sehen des grundeigentümlichen Wachstums aller geistigen
Tatsachen].” Cf. also Heidegger’s lectures on Schelling as well as his 1934 speeches on “the
German university,” respectively in GA II, vol. 42, 83; and GA 1, vol. 16, 285-307 and esp. 289-
97, as referenced by Richard L. Velkley, “On the Roots of Rationalism: Strauss’s Natural Right
and History as Response to Heidegger,” The Review of Politics 70, 2008: 245-259, 248.

259
time as the dominating historicist thinker.89 Indeed, no doubt influenced by the

followers of the historical school, especially Dilthey, but going beyond them,

Heidegger had proposed a radical historicism for which the very possibility of

discovering truth depends on a form of attunement to the world that ‘lives

temporality as such’ in the wakeful and anxious expectation of a transforming

event. Heidegger was only the highest expression of the ‘historical consciousness’

that for Strauss dominated the “spiritual situation of the present”90—from

philosophy and theology to the juridical thought of Schmitt, Kelsen, Bergbohm,

and others. While for juridical thinkers the generally accepted historicist premise

meant something rather more simple—viz., that “the standards with reference to

which we pass judgment on the historical, positive law … are themselves

absolutely the progeny of their time and are always historical and relative”91—

Strauss considered it necessary to confront the more radical historicism of

Heidegger—by turning Heidegger against himself. Whereas historicism considers

the question of the right life to be naïve—given how much we know about the

plurality of historical worldviews and cultures—it is historicism itself, Strauss

argued, that makes the recovery of that question possible. “If the historical

consciousness is no cabby that one can simply stop at will, so one arrives at a

89
See, especially, Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” GS2, 383.
90
Cf. Strauss, “Die Geistige Lage der Gegenwart” (1932), in GS2, 441-465.
91
Karl Bergbohm, Jurisprudenz und Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig, 1892), 450 n. Cited in Strauss,
Natural Right and History, 10, n., 3.

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historical Destruktion of the historical consciousness.”92 Henceforth, Strauss

would seek to show that historicism is itself “historically conditioned and limited

to a particular situation.”93 Historicism, as we shall see, is conditioned by the

modern fight against prejudice, which is, more specifically, a fight against the

‘onto-theological’ tradition that dominates western thought. By noting that it was

Hobbes who pioneered the modern philosophical ‘Destruktion’ of ‘onto-theology’

we shall return to the connection between Hobbes, Heidegger, and the crisis of

political philosophy.

Notes on Carl Schmitt’s ‘The Concept of the Political’ (1932)

The Hobbes manuscript that Strauss sent to Schmitt fulfilled at least one of its

aims. Thanks to Schmitt’s endorsement, by March of 1932 Strauss had been

awarded the Rockefeller grant that enabled him to emigrate to Paris half a year

later in September or October of 1932.94 During those final months in Berlin

Strauss must have been busy working on his first—and only—direct engagement

92
Letter to Krüger of November 16, 1931 in GS3, 396.
93
Ibid.
94
On September 4, 1932 Strauss writes to Schmitt from Berlin. His first (preserved) letter from
Paris was sent on October 8. The letters are collected in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss.

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with the thought of Schmitt,95 his ‘Notes’ on The Concept of the Political96 which

were published in September of 1932, right before he left Germany.97

Strauss’s “Notes” respond together with Schmitt to the political situation

of the time; specifically, to the crisis of the state, which “has become more

questionable than it has been for centuries or more” and whose understanding

requires a “radical foundation” of its basis, that is, a radical foundation of the

political.98 Schmitt understands the political as the ever-present tendency of

human collectivities to identify each other as ‘enemies’ in affirming particular

forms of life if necessary by eliminating others. This orientation of the political

“to the real possibility of physical killing” makes it “authoritative” (Massgebende)

(222) over any other ‘province of culture’ such as the moral or the aesthetic or the

economic. Schmitt’s affirmation of the political is aimed against liberalism

95
Strauss did refer to Schmitt on later occasions, but rarely if ever in his writings meant for
publication. See, for instance, Strauss’s summary of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political in
“Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-
Political Problem, 127-28.
96
No letters of Strauss’s correspondence with Krüger or Klein are preserved from December 1931
to August 1932. From that period the only extant letter is the letter to Schmitt of March 13, 1932
in which Strauss expresses in the strongest terms his admiration of Schmitt (in Meier, Carl Schmitt
& Leo Strauss, 123.) (The correspondence with Löwith and Gershom Scholem begins later.)
97
Strauss, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” in Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67, no. 6 (August-September): 732-49. In GS3, 217-238.
(Hereafter cited in parentheses in the main text.) Strauss sent his “Schmitt-Rezension” to Krüger
on August 19, 1932 with copies to “Klein, Frank and Gadamer” (GS3, 398). “Schmitt himself in
1932 had apparently seen to it that Strauss’s ‘Notes’ were published in the Archiv…” Meier, Carl
Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 8, n. 7. See also Strauss’s letter to Schmitt of September 4, 1932 where he
supplements his review, referring interestingly to “an oral exchange” between them (in Ibid., 124).
98
Compare Kelsen’s pure theory of law which claims to be a “theory of the state—without state.”
Such a theory is necessary because the concept of the state “lies epistemologically—just as the
concept of God—on the same plane as the concept of the soul in the old psychology or the concept
of power in the old physics.” Hans Kelsen, “Gott und Staat,” Logos 11 (1922/23): 261–284, 283-
284.

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insofar as it neutralizes and depoliticizes the questions for which one lives and

dies: for liberalism, whatever those questions may be (to this it is indifferent), the

end, to be achieved at any cost, is peace, understanding, and reconciliation.99

Strauss agrees with Schmitt’s critique of liberalism at least as to this: “in

opposition to understanding at any cost, fighting is truer [ist der Streit wahrer];”

nevertheless, as he immediately adds in a letter to Krüger of August 1932, “the

last word … can only be peace, i.e., understanding in truth. That such an

understanding on the basis of reason [Verständigung der Vernunft] is possible—

firmiter credo.”100 The question is: reason-based understanding—but on what

grounds, or what ‘reason’?

Perhaps Hobbesian reason or Hobbesian natural right would first come to

mind. Against this attests one of Strauss’s fundamental points in the ‘Notes’.

Contrary to Hobbes who understood the political condition “in the sense of the

specifically modern concept of culture … as the opposite of the natural condition”

(223), Strauss seeks to recover the question of nature that Hobbes ‘misses’.

Strauss therefore argues that the deeper problem with the liberal philosophy of

culture is that it regards culture as an ‘autonomous’ whole, as the “sovereign

creation, the ‘pure product’ of the human spirit,” (222) whereas in truth culture is

99
See Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” trans. Matthias Konzett
and John P. McCormick. Telos, 96 (1993): 130-142.
100
August 19, 1932, in GS3, 399. This is in line with Strauss’s earlier claims that “the true state—
that is truthful living together,” or with his recollection that he had turned to the “true politics” and
did not write about Hobbes as a Hobbesian. Cf. Strauss’s letter to Schmitt criticizing Schmitt’s
identification of the Right with “bellicose nationalism.” September 4, 1932, in Heinrich Meier,
Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und ‘Der Begriff des Politischen’. Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden,
erweiterte Neuausgabe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 132-33.

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always culture of something: “culture is always the culture of nature” (222). This,

either because it means “careful nurture of nature”—that is, the development of

natural dispositions, if one understands nature as “exemplary order”—or because

it means “conquering nature”—that is, “a harsh and cunning fight against

nature”—if one understands nature as “disorder to be eliminated” (222). In either

case, “‘[c]ulture’ is to such an extent the culture of nature that culture can be

understood as a sovereign creation of the spirit only if the nature being cultivated

has been presupposed to be the opposite of spirit, and been forgotten” (222).

By reason-based understanding, then, Strauss presumably means an

understanding that somehow takes into account the question of nature. But then,

what ‘nature’? As suggested earlier, Strauss’s understanding of nature is not

naturalistic, either in the Spinozistic sense for which in the end might makes right

or in the Hobbesian sense—for, again, Hobbes misses the Socratic question

because he begins “with … the question concerning the ‘nature’ of man.”101

Neither is Strauss’s ‘return’ to nature a naturalism in the Nietzschean sense that

simply takes over the pre-philosophical, hence allegedly ‘natural’, Greek ideal of

manliness or andreia and the accompanying virtues of courage and fortitude.102

Rather, Strauss’s aim is to Socratically raise the question of the idea (the ‘look’ or

the ‘shape’ of man) beyond the ‘natural attitude’ that sees the world—and

specially the human world—as always already given to me and—especially—as

101
GS3, 409; see also 407, 416.
102
See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of December 12 1932, in GS3, 415. See also Hobbes’ politische
Wissenschaft, GS3, 167, 186.

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always already in order. 103 And yet, crucially—and again Socratically, Strauss

would say—the insight into the fact that the human world is not naturally in order

“is not tied to a previous knowledge of phusis” or, in other words, does not

presuppose a naturalistic cosmology.104

We thus begin to approach a clearer understanding of the way Strauss

responded to contemporary political-philosophical and theological conceptions

through a Socratic turn. The specific meaning Strauss gives to this turn will be

discussed in a later section. Suffice it here to note the movement of Strauss’s

thought: it is towards what he considers to be a “truly critical philosophy” beyond

moral, theological, or naturalistic understandings of the political.105 It seeks—at

103
GS3, 426; See also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, in GS3, 175; Natural Right and History,
145-6: “Human nature is one thing, virtue or the perfection of human nature is another. The
definite character of the virtues and, in particular, of justice cannot be deduced from human
nature….Whatever may be the proper starting point for studying human nature, the proper starting
point for studying the perfection of human nature, and hence, in particular, natural right, is what is
said about these subjects or the opinions about them.” See also Leo Strauss, The City and Man
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964) where Strauss distinguishes between the
“nature of man” and “the human things”: “‘the human things’ are not ‘the nature of man’” (13).
Political philosophy is concerned with ‘the human things’, not with ‘the nature of man’.
104
As, for instance, that presupposed by a Sophist like Callicles. See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of
February 7, 1933 (GS3, 426: “während die bekämpfte sophistische Ansicht naiv eine
naturalistische Kosmologie voraussetzt.”). Cf. also the letter of August 18, 1934 (GS3, 440):
Strauss’s model is what he calls Plato’s “critical philosophy” (“Die durch das Gesetz aufgerufene
Philosophie fragt nicht nach dem Gesetz, sondern nach der richtigen Ordnung des menschlichen
Lebens und darum sofort nach dem Prinzip der Ordnung. Aber diese Frage kann nicht zu der
natürlich-theologischen werden, wenn man sich nicht in die Schwierigkeiten einer Begründung
des Wissens auf den Glauben verwickeln will; sondern sie muss in der Weise der Kritischen
Philosophie Platos gestellt und beantwortet werden.”) Or as he suggests on November 17 1932
(GS3, 407): “man muss (im Hegelschen Sinn) phänomenologisch vorgehen, die Geschichte des
Menschen darstellen und die eigentlichen Voraussetzungen erst nach und nach hervortreten
lassen.”
105
Cf. Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi,” 6: “In a
century which was not considerably less ‘enlightened’ than that of the sophists and Socrates,
where the very bases of human life, i.e., political life, had been shaken by Chiliastic convulsions
on the one hand and, on the other, by a critique of religion the radicalism of which recalls the free-
thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Farabi had rediscovered in the politics of

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least at this point in time—to rethink the idea of the state beyond theological-

political (Schmitt) or anti-theological and anti-metaphysical conceptions

(Kelsen)106 by going back to a horizon in which the question of nature had not

Plato the golden mean equally removed from a naturalism which aims only at sanctioning the
savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master and the conqueror; and
from a supernaturalism which tends to become the basis of slave morality—a golden mean which
is neither a compromise nor a synthesis, which is hence not based on the two opposed positions,
but which suppresses them both, uproots them by a prior, more profound question, by raising a
more fundamental problem, the work of a truly critical philosophy.” (See also GS3, 440 on
“Plato’s critical philosophy.”)
106
In the early 1920s, Kelsen and Schmitt had revived the nineteenth century debate on ‘political
theology’ between counter-revolutionaries and anarchists by taking a position against Bakunin’s
anarchism. (See Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 7th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 69-70;
Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 36-39; Kelsen, “Gott und Staat,” 261–284.) Both agreed
that the concept of the state is theological in origin. (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 43: “Alle
prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe.” Kelsen,
“Gott und Staat,” esp. 272: there is a “complete coincidence” between the doctrine of the one God
and the juridical concept of a sovereign state.”) So far, they also agreed with Bakunin, who
claimed that no state could survive without religion. (M. Bakunin, Gott und der Staat (Glashütten
im Taunus: Auvermann, 1974), 82, 22 f.) Yet, while Bakunin therefore called for the abolition of
both state and religion, Kelsen and Schmitt sought new ways to reassert order and authority.
Against the prospect of anarchy, Kelsen called for a pure (or normativistic) theory of law
according to which a legal order is valid because it has been created in a specific way or because it
has been established by a specific person that thus counts as the ‘authority’. (Kelsen, “Die Idee des
Naturrechts,” in Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, 76 (1927/28), 224.) Schmitt proposed a
decisionistic theory of law in which the order of the state rests on the sovereign decision of a
collectivity (or, in an emergency, of a dictator) regarding its form of life. (E.g., Schmitt,
Verfassungslehre, achte Auflage (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989), p. 81, and 75-76.) Neither
of these conceptions solved the problem of ‘political-theology’ insofar as the authority of the state
continued to rest on foundations or decisions that can hardly be distinguished from (groundless)
divine intervention. In other words, normativism could not avoid decisionism (in emergency
situations) while decisionism would not avoid political theology—indeed, it would positively
embrace it (at least according to one interpretation) as a “a political doctrine that claims to be
founded on faith in divine revelation.”
For Kelsen’s justification of an ‘autocrat’s decision’ to suspend or change norms to
establish a condition that is still according to Right (Rechtszustand), see his Allgemeine
Staatslehre (Berlin, 1925), 335-36. (This is a passage omitted from the English translation
published in 1949, as Strauss points out in Natural Right and History, 4.) The thesis that
“‘[p]olitical theology’ is the apt and solely appropriate characterization of Schmitt’s doctrine” has
been developed by Heinrich Meier in various writings. (It hardly needs to be said that that thesis
has often been disputed.) See, inter alia, his “What is Political Theology?,” in Leo Strauss and the
Theologico-Political Problem, 81 (Schmitt’s political theology is “a political doctrine that claims
to be founded on faith in divine revelation”), and, more generally, his The Lesson of Carl Schmitt:
Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, as well as
Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss. For indirect evidence of Schmitt’s fundamentally theological position
at the time, see his correspondence with Werner Becker; specially Becker’s letter of December 15

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been co-opted by theological (e.g. Thomistic natural right) or anti-theological

discourses (e.g. Hobbesian ‘nature’). At the same time, such a return does not

uncritically presuppose the possibility of a recovery of ‘the ordinary’ pre-

scientific standpoint from which ‘natural’ philosophizing arises. In other words,

the aim is not to repeat antiquity at the height of modernity. Rather, Strauss finds

that Socrates’ critique of naturalism remains valid today, or that modern

philosophy leads to the point where Socrates begins.

‘Some remarks concerning the political philosophy of Hobbes’ (1933)

Strauss arrived in Paris in late September or early October of 1932. By the

following month he was already well acquainted with Alexandre Koyré—“a jolly

good fellow” and “the only human being with whom I can relate”—who himself

introduced him to a “very smart and sympathetic Russian, a student of Jaspers

(Koschevnikoff).” He had also met “two extraordinary men, both—naturally—not

philosophers”: the geographer André Siegfried and the Arabist Massignon, “a

1933, in Piet Tommissen (ed.), Werner Becker. Briefe an Carl Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1998), 54-60. In that letter Schmitt’s anti-philosophical position becomes clear
(presuming that his student’s appreciation is correct): “whether one understands human nature as
Hobbes does or as Rousseau did is actually more a matter of taste. Common to both is what you
call the ‘antireligious this-worldly activism’. And this is in fact the enemy we are fighting against”
(55). Cf. also Becker’s support of National Socialism against liberalism on the grounds that “Der
Liberalismus, gegen den hier gekämpft wird, ist nicht marxistischer, sondern christlicher
‘Liberalismus’. D.h. aber, er ist Liberalismus auf Widerruf. Der Christ kann im Ernstfall nicht
liberal bleiben. Daher finde ich auch unter meinen Frunden (und bei mir selbst) soviel ehrlichen
Anschluss an den Nationalsozialismus.” (My emphases.)

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glowing soul, incredibly learned,”107 as well as other noted French scholars like

Jacques Maritain.108

During this time Strauss worked on a review of Zbigniew Lubieński Die

Grundlagen des ethisch-politischen Systems von Hobbes109 to which he gave the

title “Some Remarks Concerning the Political Science of Hobbes.”110 This

Hobbes publication which Strauss seems also to have sent to Schmitt, appeared in

French, translated by Kojève, in Koyré’s Recherches Philosophiques.111

Strauss again underscores the actuality of Hobbes’ teachings in the face of

the political crisis of the time, and specifically of liberal democracy which, says

Strauss, “faces today for the first time a critique that is neither simply

‘reactionary’ nor ultimately immanent as is the socialist critique…” (243-244).

Liberalism is “forced to ground itself as radically as ever in its history” (244).

This situation arises from the fact that it can no longer appeal to “certain

presuppositions that supported the religious tradition that it opposed, that united it

with its opponent and therefore made that opponent a target of attack.” These

presuppositions “are precisely as a result of the triumph of liberalism today no

107
Letter to Löwith of November 15, 1932, in GS3, 607-609. See also Strauss’s letter to Schmitt
of July 10, 1933, in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 127.
108
GS3, 457.
109
Zbigniew Lubieński ’s Die Grundlagen des ethisch-politischen Systems von Hobbes (Munich:
Reinhardt, 1932).
110
“Einige Anmerkungen über die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes,” in GS3, 242-261.
Hereafter cited in the body of the text in parentheses.
111
See GS3, xi: the idea was to publish it in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung but because of the
political situation it was published in French and sent to Schmitt very likely annexed to a letter of
July 10, 1933 (in Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 127).

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longer self-evident, so that liberalism could appeal to them to confront its new

opponent” (244). If, then, the aim is to provide a radical foundation for

liberalism—and that means one that does not borrow “openly or in a hidden

manner” from the religious tradition—one must return to Hobbes, for it was

Hobbes that first provided this foundation “with a never again achieved

radicality” (244). Hobbes founded liberalism without being himself a liberal “in

the true meaning of the word” (245). He was “‘absolutiste sans être théologien’”

(243). He saw clearly the strength of the forces opposing liberalism “specially in

human nature itself.” Thus his “absolutism is in the end nothing else than militant

liberalism in statu nascendi and that means in its most radical form” (244-245).

The central problem of Hobbes’ interpretation Strauss discusses in the

review concerns the grounds of “Hobbes’ ethical-political system”—specifically,

whether they are natural-scientific or whether they express a prior and more

fundamental pre-scientific understanding of ‘the human things’. According to

Lubieński, Hobbes’ ethical-political system is ultimately natural-scientific, and it

rests on the two central postulates of “natural appetite” and “natural reason.”

Human beings naturally strive for the “intensification of life’s … movement”

(251), while natural reason restricts that movement to guarantee the preservation

of one’s life (255). Strauss, to the contrary, suggests that “the deepest

anthropological and political thoughts of Hobbes are concealed rather than

clarified” by his later attempt to provide them with a natural scientific foundation

(250). For a Hobbes correctly understood, Strauss argues, the natural striving of

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man is towards greater fame and is driven by human vanity, while the grounds of

duty is the fear of violent death.112

Bracketing Strauss’s elaboration of this point that pertains to Hobbes

interpretation,113 his deeper aim in the review seems to be to rediscover the roots

of modern thought in order to reopen the ‘quarrel between the ancients and the

moderns’.114 This he begins to do by arguing that vanity and fear, “the two

112
Within days or weeks of his first encounter with Kojève, Strauss writes to Krüger that one
cannot understand Hobbes “if one goes about it systematically, that is, by first establishing that
according to Hobbes man is a rational animal etc. etc.” Rather, “one has to proceed
phenomenologically (in the Hegelian sense), laying out the history of man and only then letting
the true presuppositions gradually come into the open.” November 17, 1932 in GS3, 407. By thus
proceeding, it becomes clear that behind Hobbes’ mechanistic psychology of limitless desires
leading to competition and distrust lies an understanding of human nature as vain, such that man’s
natural desire is “to like himself in that others recognize him as superior” (“Einige Anmerkungen,”
GS3, 258). As to the source of morality or the grounds of duty, it is not simply the result of a
‘logic’ of ‘natural reason’ commanding us to preserve our lives out of fear of death as the greatest
evil. For Hobbes “knows that under certain conditions death may be counted as one of the goods”
(Ibid., 255). He therefore sees in the fear of violent death the greatest evil, which in turn means
that morality is not simply in the service of the preservation of life but of its preservation against
possible attacks by others (Ibid., 255).
113
Briefly, Strauss uncovers certain presuppositions of Hobbes’ teaching without which it would
be unintelligible or at least more inconsistent than it is. Thus, without the presupposition of man’s
vanity, one cannot really explain why for Hobbes man is for man a wolf (253). Or, in other words,
man is the enemy of every other man because “each desires to surpasss every other and thereby
offends every other.” (Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 12.) That is also why the
Leviathan is “King of the Proud”—because man’s natural appetite is not simply innocent animal
competition beyond good and evil (Ibid., 13). In short, dismantling Hobbes’ system reveals that
behind the postulate of ‘natural desire’ lies a particular morality. The same holds for his postulate
of ‘natural reason’. Morality for Hobbes is in the service not of the preservation of life simply but
of its preservation against attacks by others. That is why the norm of his ethics is not the fear of
death but the fear of violent death; and that, in turn, is the reason why he denies the character of
virtues to those dispositions such as courage and magnanimity that are not conditions of peaceful
coexistence (“Einige Anmerkungen,” GS3, 255); or in other words, that is why the content of duty
for Hobbes is nothing less but also nothing more than what is conducive to peace (Ibid., 256). See
also The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 116: “…justice and charity…take the place occupied
before by honor. These virtues, which in Hobbes’s view, are the only moral virtues, have … their
ultimate foundation in fear of violent death.”
114
This is most evidently the case with regards to Kojève’s Hegel. On one level, Strauss shows
that the foundational modern insight into what is taken to be man’s natural desire, namely “to like
himself in that others recognize him as superior,” does not arise from pure contemplation of what
man is or from a definition of the essence of man, but from the question concerning the principle

270
opposed ways of human life”—which Hobbes presents as the two opposed

movements of “natural appetite” and “natural reason”—“appear at first sight as

the secularized form of the opposition between superbia and humilitas” (259-

260). They “appear at first sight” to be so. In the last instance, however, “the

opposition vanity-fear is the modern transformation [Abwandlung] conditioned by

Christianity of the classical Socratic-Platonic opposition,” between the political

life and “the truly Good that is only accessible to reasonable insight” (260).

Modernity, then, is not simply secularized Christianity. Rather it must be

understood by starting from its confrontation and modification of the oppositions

between forms of life that were first made in ancient thought—in this case, from

the classical suspicion leveled against the political life from the standpoint of the

of evil in man which must be combatted (i.e., vanity). (See Strauss’s letter to Krüger of November
17, 1932, in GS3, 407.) This is to say that the origins of the modern philosophy of self-
consciousness must be traced back not only to Hegel and, before him, to Descartes, but to
Hobbes—and ultimately to Hobbes’ moral-political project. Throughout, Strauss also points to
certain key notions—upheld, for instance, by Lubieński —that are expressed in Heideggerian
language. The aim seems to be to underscore the pervasiveness of Heidegger’s philosophy in the
‘spiritual situation of the time’. Some examples of Heideggerian (and also Hobbesian) notions are
the views that human actions as such are not oriented towards the good; that life is first of all a
movement that is not towards the good but towards death; that, in Lubieński ’s terms, the voice of
conscience arises from ‘Sorge’ concerning one’s life as a whole (256); that reasonable
consciousness of duty is constituded by ‘fore-sight’ (Vorblick) of something frightening (256);
that human Dasein is guilty but in a way that is pre-moral; or that ‘intellectual honesty’ (242)
requires that moral language be purged. See Strauss’s letter to Löwith of February 2, 1933, in
GS3, 620-21 (“…mein Anfang ist genau wie der ihrige: die Situation der Gegenwart und d.h.
zugleich unsere Zukunft….Ich sehe vor mir den Kampf zwischen Links und Rechts, und die
Auslegungen dieses Kampfes auf beiden Seiten: die progressivistische und die marxistische links,
und die Nietzsches, Kierkegaards, Dostojewskis rechts. Die Auslegungen der gegnerischen
Ansicht ist je eine Karikatur. Ich versuchte mir also eine richtige Vorstellung von einer der
Kampffronten zu verschaffen, und zwar, aus irgendwelchen Grunden, von der Linken. Also
studierte ich die Aufklärung, insbesondere Spinoza und Hobbes. Ich sah dabei mancherlei, was ich
sonstwo schwerlich gesehen hätte, und es wurde mir z.B. auch bei Heidegger und bei Nietzsche
manches klarer, als es mir aus deren eigenen Schriften klar geworden war.” My emphasis.) For
Strauss’s debate with Kojève see, inter alia, Michael S. Roth, “Natural Right and the End of
History : Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, N. 3, 1991:
407-22.

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life of the philosopher. It is this suspicion, Strauss argues, that is “transformed”

into the liberal and socialist fight against the political in the name of the

economic; specifically by making of the political “the domain of vanity, prestige,

and the will to dominate” against which the economic must assert itself as the

world of “reasonable, pragmatic and modest labor” (259). (In simpler terms, in

modern times liberalism and socialism debase political life just as the life of

theoria did in ancient times.) Strauss concludes that “a radical understanding and

a well-founded judgment of Hobbesian politics is in fact only possible if one

confronts it directly with Platonic politics. Only in this way can it be ascertained

whether the modification, intended by Hobbes and in fact determined by

Christianity, of ancient ideas is actually based on a more profound understanding

of human nature, and what this concern for ‘profundity’ actually entails” (260).

B. Political science after 1933

Die Religionskritik des Hobbes (1933)

Strauss conceived his next project on Hobbes—“Hobbes’ Critique of Religion: A

Contribution to the Understanding of the Enlightenment”—as a thesis for

attaining a French degree in the Summer of 1933.115 By the end of that fateful

115
Strauss, “Die Religionskritik des Hobbes. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis der Aufklärung”
(1933), in GS3, 263-373. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)

272
year the plan had been abandoned and the Diplomarbeit was left unfinished.116

This was to be Strauss’s first work post-dating Hitler’s rise to power and the

Gleichschaltung of Christian philosophers and theologians such as Heidegger and

Gogarten.117 At that time, Strauss was specially shocked by Heidegger’s inaugural

address as rector of the university of Freiburg, and specifically, as a letter to

Kojève written a year later suggests, by Heidegger’s blurring of the distinction

between theory and praxis in Heidegger’s claim that theory for the Greeks

constituted the “highest manifestation of genuine praxis.”118

Strauss begins by underscoring the centrality of the critique of religion for

Hobbes’ project. Hobbes returned repeatedly to the critique of religion, and every

time in one of his four attempts at developing a science of politics.119 Thus,

notably, “more than a third of De Cive and about half of the Leviathan are

dedicated to theological questions” (268). Why must political science deal with

theology and be developed in the form of a theological-political treatise? Strauss

explains this in relation to Hobbes’ historical situation:

116
See the letter to Krüger of July 17, 1933, in GS3, 431. The plan to attain a French degreee was
given up in December of 1933 (GS3, 435). By October of 1934 two thirds of the project were
finished (GS3, 523).
117
For Strauss’s reaction, see note 31 of chapter two.
118
Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin (ed), The
Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), 32. See Strauss’s letter to
Kojève of January 16, 1934 (in Strauss, On Tyranny, 223), and generally David K. O’Connor,
“Leo Strauss’s Aristotle and Martin Heidegger’s Politics,” in A. Tessitore (ed.), Aristotle and
Modern Politics: The Persistence of Political Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2002).
119
GS3, 275: in Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642 and 1647), Leviathan in English (1651)
and Latin (1668).

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Due to the consequences of the Reformation, theological politics became as

questionable as ever: instead of leading to order and peace, theological politics

appeared to lead with necessity to the horrors of the wars of religion. Should it

finally come to order and peace, one would therefore need, so it appeared, a

politics based on independent human reasoning alone. Such a politics had been

worked out by ancient philosophy. But the philosophical politics that rested on the

foundations laid out by Socrates, had not only not renounced its connection to

theology, but could not renounce that connection; in any case, it had given

theological politics some of its most dangerous weapons. One therefore needed a

new politics that was not merely independent of theology but that would make

theological politics impossible for all future times … That is the reason why the

critique of revelation is not merely a post factum if necessary supplement of

Hobbesian politics, but much more its presupposition, indeed the presupposition

of Hobbes’ philosophy simply (272).

Strauss suggests that this relation of presupposition is analogous to the

relation between the critique of Sophistry and Platonic politics, such that the

critique of revelation is constitutive of Hobbes’ philosophy and indeed contains

“its true foundation” (274-75).

Hobbes’ critique of the tradition proceeds as a dismantling (Abbau) of “the

whole religious tradition erected on the foundations of the Scriptures” (312). His

aim is, first of all, “only destruktiv” insofar as “it is not guided by a positive,

274
original understanding of Scripture” (312-13). Hobbes’ critique of religion is thus

at first only a critique of theology.120 Theology, which is not to be confused with

religion, “rests precisely on the mixing of philosophy and religion; it is the at once

comical and atrocious [grauenhafte] result of the perverse attempt to bring

together Biblical simplemindedness [Einfalt] and Greek speculation” (279).121

Theology, thus conceived as onto-theology, must be combated not only because it

turns philosophy (understood as a way of life) into its handmaid but specially

because it leads to religious wars (279).

Hobbes’ critique is directed primarily against the beliefs in incorporeal

substances and in a supra-temporal or otherworldly power beyond the sovereign

power of the state. These beliefs have their origins in the ‘Kingdome of

Darknesse’, by which Hobbes means the Roman and Presbyterian Clerus (303).

120
Indeed, theology must be combatted also in the interest of religion itself, of piety (312-13).
121
In a letter to Krüger of November 17, 1932 Strauss refers to this “perverse interweaving”
(widersinnige Verflechtung) as a central cause behind the difficulties confronting philosophizing
in our time. The problem arises from the fight against this linkage (of philosophy and theology, or
‘onto-theology’) which begins with Hobbes (and other modern thinkers) and reaches all the way to
Heidegger. The aim of combatting revelation gives modern philosophy its two defining traits: the
attempt to find a firm, unshakable foundation, and its becoming practical or ‘worldly’. The attempt
to find final foundations and achieve absolute certainty—driven by philosophy’s competition with
Christianity—leads to the suppression of fundamental questions insofar as it leads to the belief
that, given the ‘triumph’ of modern philosophy over orthodoxy, the Socratic questions ‘how
should I live?’ and ‘why philosophy?’, as well as the question of Being, have been answered
(GS3, 406; “Political Philosopy and History,” in Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other
Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 76.) In other words, modern thought
considers the elementary questions as ‘historically settled’: hence its unradicality. On the other
hand, philosophy’s ‘becoming worldly and the world philosophical’ also leads to a form of
forgetfulness insofar as through its influence on politics, morality, and religion, philosophy
becomes part of the process which it aims to steer. Thus the quest for knowledge of the whole is
supplanted by the quest for knowledge of the whole historical process: metaphysics becomes
philosophy of history. (See Natural Right and History, 320.) See also Strauss’s letter to Klein of
December 1, 1932, where Strauss declares to be “completely in agreement with the formulation
that we today lack an Existenz philosophy in the strict sense and that the failure of ontology in
modern philosophy and science has to do with their ‘practical’ character” (GS3, 457).

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More specifically, the dualism of powers has its origins in a false understanding

of Scripture while the dualism of substances originates in Greek philosophy—

particularly in Aristotle.

Two errors were taken over from Aristotle. The first error is the belief that

‘ideas’ or ‘essences’ are more than products of the imagination or, in his words,

that “there be in the world certain Essences separated from Bodies, which they

call Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes.”122 The second error is the

“complete misrecognition [Verkennen] of the importance and the essence of the

law,” (306) or the practice of judging good and bad on the basis of our own

appetites and passions instead of recognizing the law of the state as the only

measure (307). These errors have a common origin. They stem from the failure to

put into question the imagination and passions of “common men and therefore of

natural man” (308), which itself is a consequence of the fact that ancient

philosophy was academic philosophy, or leisurely discourse that was not

concerned with the matter of “rigorous truth”—the matter of the geometricians—

for which no school is needed. Now, the reason why men got together to

philosophize was to “have a good opinion of oneself” or, in other words, vanity.

This vanity, in turn, or the “Vain Philosophy” of the ancients which “disput[es]

Philosophically, in stead of admiring, and adoring … the Divine and

122
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
463.

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Incomprehensible nature” is an expression of the will to be like God and hence an

expression of pride (310-11).123

So far Hobbes’ critique is a critique of theology (or onto-theology), and

not a critique of Scripture or religion themselves. Indeed, Hobbes relies

throughout on Scripture to prove theology wrong. Hobbes’ final aim, however, is

to undermine the authority of Scripture itself.124

In order to do this Hobbes proceeds by using an extreme argument for the

belief in revelation—indeed for divine omnipotence—and then turning it against

itself. The center of Hobbes’ critique of religion is the critique of miracles as

these are the proof of the existence of God (367). To prove that God cannot

perform miracles presupposes the possibility of making scientific statements

about God (341). Natural reason can no doubt know that there is a first and eternal

cause of all things, “in other words, that God is eternal, unlimited and all-

powerful” (341). If, however, God is all-powerful, all natural occurrences can be

his will. It follows that all natural occurrences, insofar as they are the work of an

all-powerful God, are just as incomprehensible as wonders (342). Thus, “in order

to refute his opponents, [Hobbes] goes from the presupposition of his opponents

further towards the complete abandonment of the idea of nature as an intelligible

123
Ibid., 467.
124
“Exactly as Spinoza did later, Hobbes with double intention becomes an interpreter of the
Bible, in the first place in order to make use of the authority of the Scriptures for his own theory,
and next and particularly in order to shake the authority of the Scriptures.” Strauss, The Political
Philosophy of Hobbes, 71. On this strategy of the modern Enlightenment, see, more generally, Y.
Yovel, “Bible Interpretation as Philosophical Praxis: A Study of Spinoza and Kant,” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 189-212; and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the
Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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order” (345). The following predicament arises: “Hobbes’ makes at the same

time revelation religion and natural reason questionable.”125 Hobbes liberates

himself from this predicament by “retreat[ing] to a dimension that is beyond the

reach of God,” namely the world of consciousness (345). The idea is that God can

do whatever he wants with nature; as long as I remain, my representations of

nature remain and with them the matter and foundation of science (345).126

Natural science will then gradually lead to the disappearance of belief in miracles

(347).

At first sight, then, Hobbes’ strategy appears to be Cartesian.127 Yet,

despite all the parallels, Strauss argues, its true basis is not so much the world of

consciousness but “the fact of the arts” (366), that is to say, the differentiation of

beings into what is by nature and what is artificial (366). For Hobbes, the arts are

an “essentially pre-scientific” capacity, a “matter of ‘smartness’, of

‘experience’… of sound commonsense [that] shows itself … above all in dealings

with human beings as knowledge of the nature and interests of men” (366-67). In

other words, Hobbes’ critique of religion seems ultimately to rest on the fact that,

even if we cannot understand the works of nature, we can understand our own

works.
125
This is the case because, insofar as nature is not intelligible and one cannot distinguish between
miracles and natural occurrences, it is also impossible to discern what is a miracle—containing a
divine message—and what is not. Hence the fact that both natural reason and revelation become
questionable.
126
Cf. the restatment of this argument in NRH, 201.
127
For the commonalities and differences between Hobbes and Descartes and Strauss’s argument
that the thought of “Hobbes, not Descartes, [is] the elementary presupposition of any philosophy
of consciousness,” see the letter to Klein of October 10, 1934 (GS3, 523).

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 This, however, does not mean that the critique of religion follows once this

island of security, as it were, is discovered. The critique of religion is rather

constitutive of Hobbes’ (and after him, of the modern) understanding of nature.

Specifically, Strauss argues that “[his] idea of natural science can only be

understood radically from his critique of wonders” (344). This critique of

wonders, in turn, presupposes a particular understanding of God, not as logos or

as ordained power (potentia ordinata) but as will or absolute power (potentia

absoluta) (cf. 371); and not as wisdom, goodness and justice but as complete

unboundedness that may even be the source of evil itself. It is as a response to the

human condition that results from such an understanding of the ‘order’ of natural

and human things that Hobbes undertakes an idealistic turn that becomes

foundational for modern philosophy.128

Strauss concludes by situating this problem within the theme that

constitutes the leitmotif of his Hobbes studies of the 1930s. It was not Hobbes, he

claims, that first made ‘the fact of art’ the basis (Grundlage) of philosophical

128
Strauss, “Philosophie und Gesetz,” in GS2, 14: (“the polemic against the extreme possibility of
miracles becomes the foundation of the ‘idealistic’ turn of philosophy”). One of the consequences
of this turn is a debasement of theoria. This is due to “[t]he prejudice that being is being-
corporal…or that being is resistance [Widerständigkeit] and palpability” (GS3, 358, cf. 362). This
means that “seeing…is actually no longer intelligible [verständlich]. ‘The fundamental sense is
touch’, as Dilthey says with respect to Descartes. And optics has no other task than explaining
seeing as analogous to touching…” (GS3, 496 f.) (See also Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 29
(the fear of violent death is the beginning of wisdom because it can be felt (as against merely
‘seen’), as well as 188). Janssens refers to the following political consequence: “[Hobbes’]
polemic against the traditional dualism of power precludes him from addressing a more
fundamental question that Strauss calls the ‘primitive and principal theme of politics’: ‘for every
discussion about dualism or monism of powers presupposes the clarification of the meaning of
‘power’ [Gewalt], the answer to the question of the meaning and the purpose of the state.”
Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 170 citing Strauss, Die Religionskritik des Hobbes, in
GS2, 270.

279
orientation. “It was of the same authoritative meaning for Sophistic reflection on

the one hand and for Socrates and Plato, on the other, and it therefore became

authoritative for the whole philosophical tradition” (368). Still, there is a crucial

difference between the understanding of art of Hobbes and the tradition. “The

tradition discarded by Hobbes understands art as the imitation, or as the perfection

of nature … it thus presupposes that nature is an (intelligible) order” (368). If,

however, following Hobbes, one maintains that nature is unintelligible, art can no

longer be the imitation of nature and becomes “sovereign invention” (369). More

specifically, the altogether different sense in which art is authoritative for Hobbes

in comparison to the tradition can be seen in the fact that “for the originators of

the tradition, for Socrates-Plato, the knowing that is authoritative for the artisan is

a looking-away-at-something, namely at a form, an order that he wants to

fabricate.”

C. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1935)

Strauss’s Religionskritik ends with a problem.129 Strauss seems to suggest that

sound political philosophizing follows the model of fabrication. This is exactly

129
Strauss would probably have addressed this problem if he had completed the Religionskritik.
See the letter to Klein of October 10, 1934 where he reports that after finishing his first book on
Hobbes (Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis) he wants to complete the last third of
the Religionskritik (GS3, 523). Note in this letter also the reference to the first MS on Hobbes
Strauss began to write “3-4 years ago,” viz., his “exposition and critique of [Hobbes’] political
science” which Strauss had sent to Schmitt. This MS Strauss also plans to complete but apparently

280
the idea that Heidegger had identified, already in 1922, as the fundamental

mistake of Greek ontology, namely, that human being in the world is like any

other being of the world producible in some ideal form.130 As noted earlier,

however, Strauss did not believe that the Socratic-Platonic approach presupposes

the possibility of grasping a natural order which could serve as a model for

‘fabricating’ a political order. Strauss indicates this in the parenthetical note with

which the Religionsrkritik concludes: “Cf. Gorgias, 503-504a with Phaidon,

Rep.” (369). Gorgias, 503-504a refers to what the true art of politics presumably

would be: making citizens as good as possible by speaking “with regard to what’s

best,” that is, “with a view to something, just like the other craftsmen, each of

whom keeps his own product in view and so does not select and apply randomly

what he applies, but so that he may give his product some shape” (503e). As

Strauss indicates elsewhere,131 Plato’s Phaidon on the other hand stands for the

Socratic limitation of philosophy to the examination of reasonable speech.132

in a radically revised way (presumably because of the events of 1933): “…eine Darstellung und
Kritik der politischen Wissenschaft … die natürlich ganz umgeworfen werden wird” (my
emphasis).
130
See, e.g., Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), 286 (“ancient philosophy interprets being
in the horizon of production”; “the idea agathou is nothing but the demiourgos, the producer pure
and simple.”)
131
See, e.g., Strauss’s letter to Krüger of February 7, 1933 (GS3, 426).
132
See Plato, Phaedo, 96a7-8, 99e3. Strauss also points to the mythic character of the Timaeus.
See letter to Löwith of August 20, 46: “Plato and Aristotle never believed that the ‘stars, heaven,
sea, earth, conception [Zeugung], birth, and death provided natural answers to their unnatural
questions’ (I am citing your letter). Plato ‘escapes’ as is well known from these ‘things’
(pragmata) into the logoi, because the pragmata cannot give a direct answer, but are mute riddles”
(GS3, 668). The reference to the Republic is left unspecified. Cf., however, Hobbes’ politische
Wissenschaft where Strauss points to Republic 473 A as the passage from which Phaidon 99E-100
A is to be “radically” understood. “[Socrates:] Can anything be done as it is said? Or is it in the

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From this perspective, as Strauss puts it in a letter to Jacob Klein, “the question of

the right life and the right state and the answer to these questions does not depend

on answering the question of the Being of the ideas, or more exactly: on the

Platonic answer to this question.”133

Strauss continued his search for a post-Heideggerian and pre-Platonic

political science in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.134 Apart from the last

chapter, which we shall consider separately, the book is largely a continuation and

deepening, but also, apparently, a partial reversal of the theses that Strauss had

developed in his earlier Hobbes studies.

The first thesis concerns the foundational place of Hobbes’ political

science (Wissenschaft) for modern thought in general. Hobbes’ political science

has a “foundational meaning not only for political science as one philosophical

discipline among others … but for modern philosophy as such” (13). According

to Strauss, Hobbes was the only thinker who posed “the fundamental question of

man’s right life and of the right ordering of society” in the decisive moment “in

which the tradition stemming from antiquity [the classical and theological

tradition] was shaken and a tradition of modern natural science had not yet been

nature of acting to attain to less truth than speaking, even if someone doesn’t think so? Do you
agree that it’s so or not? [Glaucon:)] ‘I do agree’, he said. [Soc.:] Then don’t compel me
necessarily to present it as coming into being in every way in deed as we described it in speech.”
On the use of contradictions between speeches and deeds as a primary tool of the Platonic
dialogues, see Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 2, 227.
133
To Klein, October 13, 1934 in GS3, 529. Cf. the letter to Löwith of June 23, 1935, in GS3, 650
(“So-called Platonism is only an escape from Plato’s problem”).
134
Leo Strauss, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis, in GS3, 3-192. Hereafter cited
in parentheses.

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formed and established.” “This moment was decisive for the whole age to come;

in it the foundation was laid on which the modern development of political

science is wholly based, and it is the point from which alone modern thought can

be radically understood” (17). The very ideal of modern civilization, “the ideal

both of the bourgeois-capitalist development and of the socialist movement, was

founded and expounded by Hobbes with a depth, clarity, and sincerity never

rivaled before or since.” Likewise, “not only the morality of the Enlightenment—

including Rousseau’s—but also that of Kant and Hegel would not have been

possible without the work of Hobbes” (13).

To illustrate Strauss’s point here it helps to recall Heidegger’s claim that

to understand Nietzsche properly one should first study Aristotle for “ten to

fifteen years.”135 What Strauss is saying, in effect, is that to radically understand

Heidegger—and modern philosophy as a whole—it is necessary to study

Hobbes;136 only then will one understand Heidegger’s critique of the tradition as

developed in his confrontation with Aristotle.

135
“It is advisable…that you postpone reading Nietzsche for the time being, and first study
Aristotle for ten to fifteen years.” What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York:
Harper & Row, [1951/52] 1968), 73.
136
See Strauss, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 155, where Strauss refers to the consequences of
Hobbes’ philosophy reaching all the way to Nietzsche’s Will to Power, aphorisms 693 ff. (Strauss
also refers to Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 20, § 6.) See also Strauss,
“On the Basis of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in What is Political Philosophy?, 170-196,
specially 172: “…Bacon and Hobbes were the first philosophers of power, and Nietzsche’s own
philosophy is a philosophy of power. Was not ‘the will to power’ so appealing because its true
ancestry was ignored? Only Nietzsche’s successors [i.e., Heidegger—R.C.] restored the
connection, which he had blurred, between the will to power and technology. But this connection
is clearly visible in the origins of that philosophic tradition which Nietzsche continued or
completed: the British tradition.”

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 Strauss’s premise is that Hobbes is the foundational thinker of modernity,

for only Hobbes raised the Socratic question of the right life in the decisive

moment when the traditions were shaken, and only the question of the right life is

truly foundational and authoritative (13). One key implication of this claim is that

one cannot understand modern thought as simply derivative from traditions

initiated by the classics. Strauss refers to Dilthey, who argued that “the

fundamental part of Hobbes’ political science, the theory of the passions, is

decisively conditioned by the Stoa” (16).137

To see the broader significance of Strauss’s argument here we recall

parenthetically that in SS 1924 Heidegger made the theory of the passions the

central part of his interpretation of Aristotle, and that he pointed to Dilthey’s

study as an essential reference.138 We also recall that it was Heidegger who in the

1920s made the strongest case to the effect that modern thought is derivative from

the classical tradition, and specifically from an understanding of Being as

presence. Strauss seems to be suggesting that Heidegger’s interpretation of

Aristotle is un-self-consciously Hobbesian; or, more exactly, that it is determined

by the reaction of the Historical School (represented by Dilthey) to modern

(Hobbesian) natural right. This is true in at least three respects: Heidegger’s

interpretation of Aristotle gives to a historically neglected work, the Rhetoric, a

137
Wilhelm Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und
Reformation, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, ed. G. Misch (Leipzig, Berlin, 1914), 293.
138
Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 178.

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central place in the development of western thought;139 as we shall see, Hobbes

too rescued the Rhetoric from his own condemnation of the ‘metaphysical’

Aristotle, and made it foundational for his thought.140 Within the Rhetoric

Heidegger’s interpretation is especially concerned with Aristotle’s treatment of

the passions—which were the fundamental part of Hobbes’ political science.

Heidegger does not deal with every passion, but focuses on the passion of fear—

the Hobbesian passion par excellence.141

We can now proceed with Strauss’s argument. Against the view that

Hobbes’ thought can be understood as conditioned by Stoic teachings, Strauss

argues that while this may be true for De Homine (1685) it does not hold for

Elements of Law (1640). More fundamentally, however, Dilthey fails to

139
For a concise history of the reception of the Rhetoric see George A. Kennedy, “The
Composition and Influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on
Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 416-425. “Although the
Rhetoric was much read in the later Renaissance and although important scholarship on the text
and the fine commentary of E.M. Cope appeared in the nineteenth century, real appreciation of the
significance of the treatise is a phenomenon of twentieth-century interest in speech communication
and critical theory” (423). Cf. Eugene Garver’s claim to have written “the first book-length
philosophic treatment of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in English in this century.” E. Garver, Aristotle’s
Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3. Garver relies
on Arendt to support some of his main claims, yet he also notes the omission of ‘rhetoric’ in her
work (5: in The Human Condition “‘rhetoric’ and Aristotle’s Rhetoric are not mentioned”). As I
shall try to show in the next chapter, however, the most important insights of The Human
Condition concerning the role of ‘speech’ in political life are based on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, viz.,
through Heidegger’s reading. Something similar could be said of the work of Gadamer and
Strauss. Daniel Gross makes this point with regards to Arendt and Gadamer in his “Introduction,”
to Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press,
2005), esp. 4-5. I shall point to the relation between Heidegger’s reading of the Rhetoric and
Strauss’s understanding of political philosophy in the remainder of this chapter.
140
Hobbes prepared the first English version of the Rhetoric published in 1637. George A.
Kennedy, “The Composition and Influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” 423.
141
See Nancy S. Struever, “Alltäglichkeit, Timefulness, in the Heideggerian Program,” in Gross
and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, 113-114: “Like Hobbes before him, Heidegger
defines the passions as intrinsically social, interpersonal, rather than simply physiological.” For
Heidegger’s analysis of fear, see his Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 256-263.

285
investigate whether the traditional doctrines that recur in Hobbes’ writings are not

merely residues of a tradition that had been expressly rejected by Hobbes.

Dilthey, Strauss argues, does not take Hobbes’ opposition against the whole

tradition seriously enough. Had he actually confronted the ‘material’ of Hobbes’

politics—his peculiarly modern disposition—with traditional politics—i.e., both

the ancient and Biblical-Christian dispositions—he would have seen that the

traditional theses and concepts in Hobbes acquire a completely non-traditional

meaning (16).

The second central thesis of The Political Philosophy of Hobbes is that

Hobbes’ political science does not rest on a naturalistic basis but on a moral

teaching, that is, on precisely the modern disposition (or attitude [Gesinnung])

that marks his break with the ancient and Biblical traditions. This thesis had been

developed by Strauss a year earlier in his ‘Remarks’ on Lubieński’s study of

Hobbes. However, there is a telling difference. Strauss underscores Hobbes’ break

with the tradition, implicitly arguing against the secularization thesis he had

partly endorsed in 1933 (41). The opposition between vanity and fear, he argued

then, presents itself “at first sight as the secularized form of the opposition

between superbia and humilitas. In any case, it has as its condition the Christian

conception of life” (259-260). More concretely, Strauss had argued that the

opposition between vanity and fear is the transformation of the Socratic-Platonic

opposition between “the shining mirage of the ‘political life’ and the truly Good

that is only accessible to reasonable insight” (260). Seen from this perspective, the

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modern disposition unknowingly takes the side of philosophy or theoria—to

which alone the ‘good life’ of reasonable labor: the capitalist and socialist ideal

reveals itself—against the political life, which appears as the life of vanity and

prestige. Strauss had thus taken a stance against the primacy traditionally

accorded to theoria as unproblematically disclosing ‘the Good’ and (together with

Schmitt) for the seriousness of the political. This implicit critique of ancient

theoria—which had been an explicit one in earlier writings—is absent in The

Political Philosophy of Hobbes.142 Instead we begin to see the opposite: the

problem of modern philosophy as a whole beginning with Hobbes is its ‘practical’

character.

This becomes clear in the third thesis that Strauss develops in the book:

the idea that Hobbes’ political science is a repetition of the Socratic-Platonic quest

for a techne politike. Strauss points to the repetition thesis already in the

introduction—in the claim that Hobbes was the only one to raise the Socratic

question of the right life and of the right order of society at the moment when the

Biblical and classical traditions were shaken. But more substantively, Strauss

devotes a central chapter to Hobbes’ humanistic—or, we could say, ‘political, not

metaphysical’—‘Aristotelianism’. Specifically, Strauss sees himself as the first

scholar to begin to draw the consequences of the fact that Hobbes’ condemnation

142
Strauss provides rather a critique of Hobbes’ debasement of theoria by pointing to the
importance (for Hobbes) of the fear of death as that which alone gives man’s life a direction (29);
as the “beginning of all knowledge of the real world” (36); as the grounds of conscience (38); and
as the “necessary condition not only of human living together but of science” (39; and also 170).
See also the letter to Klein of October 13, 1934 (now “I see the relation between the theme and
structure of Hobbes’ theory of seeing and ‘vanity’”) (GS3, 527).

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of Aristotle did not include his “‘Politics’, i.e., ethics, politics and, above all the

Rhetoric”; indeed, so much so that “the central chapters of the Hobbesian

anthropology are nothing but free reworkings of [it].”143

Dilthey, himself drawing on Tönnies, had already noted that “Hobbes …

began from the moral-political problems”; that “he was for long Politiker and

humanist” before he turned in the direction of the natural sciences influenced by

Euclid. And indeed, Hobbes only became acquainted with Euclid (and later with

Galileo) when he was forty (in 1629), and up to that moment he was

predominantly influenced by the humanism of the classical historians and poets

(most notably Thucydides). However, to leave things at that, namely, at a

biographical or historical peculiarity, Strauss argues, is not enough for a thinker of

the rank of Hobbes (47). There must be a reason, a “philosophical motivation”

behind Hobbes’ humanism (47).

Strauss notes that at around age twenty-two Hobbes’ interest shifted from

Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics to his morals and politics, “to his philosophy

peri ta anthropeia” (philosophy concerning human affairs) (49). Hobbes’ turn

from metaphysics to politics implied an appropriation but also a transformation of

Aristotle’s teachings. Hobbes’ shift of interest to the philosophy of human affairs

implies a “replacement of the primacy of theory by the primacy of praxis” (49).

For Hobbes the justification of philosophy does not lie in the joys of knowledge

but in the benefit of man, that is, “in the safeguarding of human life and the

143
Letter to Krüger and Gadamer of May 12, 1935 in GS3, 444.

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increase of human power” (49). Thus, contrary to Aristotle, Hobbes asserts that

both prudence and wisdom have a practical aim (50).144 The implication is that

“the difference between prudence and wisdom loses any relation to the difference

between praxis and theory” (50). For indeed, according to Hobbes, “not he that

hath skill in geometry, or any other science speculative, but only he that

understandeth what conduceth to the good and government of the people, is called

a wise man’” (50).145 Strauss argues that this contrast to Aristotle has its ultimate

reason in “Hobbes’ conception of man’s place in the universe, which is

[diametrically] opposed to Aristotle’s” (50). While for Aristotle “it would be

strange to regard politics or practical wisdom as the highest kind of knowledge,

when in fact man is not the best thing in the universe” (Nic. Ethics, 1141a22) for

Hobbes man is “the most excellent work of Nature” (50).146

By comparing certain passages of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with their

corresponding variations in Hobbes’ Elements (1640), Leviathan (1651), and De

Homine (1658), Strauss shows that Hobbes studied Aristotle’s Rhetoric afresh

each time he composed his systematic expositions of anthropology (57). This

comparison points to the historical sources of Hobbes’ Aristotelianism, and

indirectly of his privileging of praxis over theory. Strauss notes that Hobbes’
144
To elucidate Aristotle’s understanding of theory—and to underscore the contrast to Hobbes’
interpretation—Strauss refers to Nic. Ethics, 1141a19ff: “…theoretical wisdom must comprise
both intelligence and scientific knowledge. It is science in its consummation, as it were, the
science of the things that are valued most highly.” He also suggests a comparison with
Metaphysics Alpha 1, presumably because there the emphasis is more on the practical origins and
ends of the quest for wisdom as Heidegger had stressed in SS 1922 (see chapter one).
145
In other words, we may say that for Hobbes “the politikos is the true philosophos.” See
Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 93.
146
See Hobbes, Leviathan, 9.

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praise of heroic virtue, specially in his early work, was influenced by his reading

of the Italian humanists. The characteristic tendency of the humanist reading of

Aristotle is to replace the theoretical virtues by heroic virtue (63), and thus more

generally to affirm the primacy of praxis over that of theory (63).

This tendency is part of a larger movement towards the historical study of

man that, in the end, would lead Hobbes away from the Aristotelian tradition

altogether (97). Hobbes repeats ‘political science’ not only out of humanistic

interest in man and in the right norms of human life, but out of an unprecedented

concern with the application of these norms. Indeed, while Aristotle claimed that

the precepts of reason have no influence on most human beings,147 he still thought

that precepts do affect the conduct of at least certain (good) natures. Hobbes, by

contrast, doubts the effectiveness of philosophical precepts as such. Accordingly,

the lessons of history replace the precepts of philosophy as the primary tool for

the education of the nobility (100). In doing this, Hobbes was following a general

tendency that began in the sixteenth century towards the methodical study of

history. Strauss refers to different motivations leading to this turn in thinkers from

Machiavelli to Bodin to Bacon. Some of these motivations were: to extract from

history certain teachings or concrete maxims for right action (102, 104); to study

the ‘material’ on which virtue and right action may be realized—viz., what men

do instead of what they ought to do (107)—thus, to study human tempers and

147
Cf. Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 1179 b 3 ff.

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dispositions, specially the passions;148 to find a popular ideal that can be realized

that is not superhuman, as Aristotle’s ideal of the contemplative life;149 to

suppress the morality of obedience, or to sidestep the problem of obedience

altogether, for instance, by setting passions against each other “and to master one

with another” (111); and to make History itself lead to the knowledge of norms

(such that what is morally good is what has been successful and virtue is identical

to smartness (113)). Specially this last motive points to a general development in

the sixteenth century through which philosophy was substituted by history as

magistra vitae (114).

All of these motivations, Strauss argues, were ‘sublated’—that is, transcended

and incorporated—in Hobbes’ ‘new political science’.150 The new political

148
Strauss refers to Bacon: “And here again I find it strange, as before, that Aristotle should have
written divers volumes of Ethics, and never handled the affections, which is the principal subject
thereof; and yet in his Rhetorics … he findeth place for them…” (The Advancement of Learning,
in Basil Montagu (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852), vol. I, 225);
Descartes: “The defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than
in their writings on the passions” (The Passions of the Soul, in John Cottingam, et. als. (eds), The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 328.)
Spinoza: “…no one, so far as I know, has defined the nature and strength of the emotions…”
(Ethics, III, Preface, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol. II, R.H.M. Elwes, trans.
(New York: Dover, 1951), 128.) Hegel: “The question of the means by which Freedom develops
itself to a World, conducts us to the phenomenon of History itself…The first glance at History
convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and
talents. …Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are … the most effective
springs of action” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, 12 (Frankfurt,
a.M., Suhrkamp, 1986), 33-34.)
149
Strauss refers to Bacon: “…men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only
for God and Angels to be lookers on” (The Advancement of Learning, 220); Bodin: “But civil life
demands perpetual action; the whole state cannot be engaged in contemplation…” (Method for the
Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 34.)
150
“With the same argument which Hobbes himself, in the introduction to the translation of
Thucydides, used to prove the need for studying history along with philosophy, he later argues the
necessity for his political science: political science is necessary because ‘most men’ do not obey
precepts” (117).

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science teaches a morality that can be applied (117). Rather than setting the

passions against each other to realize certain given norms (as Bacon, for instance,

attempted), Hobbes seeks to devise a politics that is already in harmony with the

passions (120).151 And yet, crucially as we shall see, Hobbes’ political science

qua science claims also to be beyond the passions, and indeed to contradict

them.152 The result is a political science that both reflects and grounds the ideals

of the bourgeoisie.153

151
Hobbes thereby opens the way to Hegel: “the passions work themselves and their aims out
according to their constitution and produce the edifice of human society, in which they have
provided law and order with power against themselves” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte, 42).
152
Hobbes’ doctrine is at once ‘realistic’ (in conformity with human passions, particularly the fear
of violent death) and ‘idealistic’ insofar as it seeks to ground a new order of society in which
permanent order and peace will become possible for the first time. See Natural Right and History,
169 and 200. See also GS3, 171.
153
“Not only does Hobbes not attack the bourgeoisie which is sensibly aware of its own interests,
he even provides it with a philosophical justification, as the ideals set up in his political
philosophy are precisely the ideals of the bourgeoisie. It is true that he condemns the desire ‘to
grow excessively rich’, but ‘justly and moderately to enrich themselves’ is ‘prudence … in private
men’. It is true that he condemns the exploiting of the poor, but he takes it for granted that ‘a
man’s Labour also is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing’. For ‘the
value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the
just value, is that which they be contented to give’.” “Along with peace at home and abroad,
freedom for individual enrichment is the most important goal of human living together.” Strauss,
Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, GS3, 138. See, more generally, 31 (“continually to out-go the
next before, is felicity”; “but this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland,
but being foremost”), 138-141. The references are respectively to Behemoth, ed. Ferdinand
Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), 44 (“grow excessively rich…private men”);
Leviathan, ed. A. D. Lindsay (London: Dent, 1928), ch. 24, 130 (“a mans Labour…”), ch. 15, 78
(“the value of all things…”); Elements of Law, ed. Tönnies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1928), Part I, Ch. IX, 21 (“continually to out-go…”)

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 Strauss’s Second Sailing (1935/36)

On October 10, 1934, Strauss announced to Jacob Klein that “at the latest in 14

days I will have finished my first work on Hobbes (‘Hobbes’s political science in

its genesis’).”154 Seven months later, Strauss wrote to Gadamer and Krüger with

the same announcement.155 During those seven months Strauss added a final

chapter to The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. This final chapter is Strauss’s first

sustained exposition of Socratic political philosophy.156

The core of the chapter is a confrontation between Hobbes’ political

science as developed after his discovery of Euclid and Plato’s philosophy.

Hobbes’ turn to an exact science of politics set him for the first time explicitly

against Aristotle’s political science. For what Aristotle disputed was precisely that

the objects of political science could be treated as exactly as the objects of

mathematics.157 In doing so, Aristotle was opposing Plato who required that the

most important subjects—the true and the beautiful but above all the Good—be

154
GS3, 523.
155
May 12, 1935, GS3, 443-447. Note that Strauss seems to have written the introduction to
Philosophy and Law that spring as well. See the letter to Kojève of May 9, 1935, in Strauss, On
Tyranny, Gourevitch and Roth (eds.), 230: “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.” For the reactions of
Löwith, Klein, Scholem, and Benjamin to the Introduction, see Meier’s preface to GS2, xxvi ff.
156
During those seven months Strauss began a study of Plato that he had had to delay (October 13,
1934, GS3, 528-29). He also read Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra (more on this below).
157
Strauss refers to Nic. Ethics, 1094 b 12 ff. and 1098 b 5 ff. Cf. Rhetoric I 10 in fine (GS3, 159).

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treated with the greatest precision.158 Hobbes’ turn to Euclid thus brought with it a

turn away from Aristotle to his master Plato.159 Whereas Aristotle philosophizes

from what people say or from speech—from “the names of things”—Plato,

according to Hobbes, philosophizes from “the ideas of things” (160). Insofar as it

is oriented to speech, Aristotelian ethics is nothing but a “description of passions,

and by no means what an ethics must above all be according to Hobbes, a

fundamental critique of the passions” (160).160 By contrast, Plato, through his

esteem of mathematics, manages to liberate philosophy from “the spell of words”

and thus from their indefiniteness and ambiguity, which is the source of all strife

and contradiction (161).

Strauss argues that this is a caricature of Plato that results from Hobbes’

failure to engage in a thorough study of the sources. Such a study reveals that “in

truth it is precisely Plato who originally ‘takes refuge’ in speech,” and that in that

158
Strauss refers to Rep. 504 d-e. (Discussing the four cardinal virtues—justice, moderation,
courage, and wisdom (504 a5)—Socrates suggests that “for these virtues it won’t do to look at a
sketch … but their most perfect elaboration must not be stinted.”) Compare also Rep. 484 c. (Here
Socrates compares those legislators who do not act upon a precise contemplation of the “truest” to
“blind men”; the exact reference is to those “unable—after looking off, as painters do, toward
what is truest … referring to it and contemplating it as precisely as possible—to give laws about
what is fine, just, and good”); Laws 964 d-965 c. (Athenian stranger: “Is there any way in which
there would be a more precise vision and seeing of anything than that which is the capacity to look
to one idea from the many and dissimilar things?” It is necessary to “compel … even the
guardians of our divine regime to see with precision … what it is that we assert is one in courage,
moderation, justice, and prudence, and is justly called by one name, virtue.”) (GS3, 159).
159
Indeed, whereas in his humanistic period Hobbes had nothing to object to the view that
Aristotle is the classic philosopher, he later came to see Plato as “the best of the ancient
philosophers” (GS3, 159). (The reference is to Six Lessons [1656], in English Works, ed. W.
Mollesworth (London: Longman, 1845), Vol. VII, 346.)
160
“Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others of like authority … have given the names of right and
wrong, as their passions have dictated; or have followed the authority of other men…” (Elements,
II, ch. 8, 13) “Their Morall philosophy is but a description of their own Passions … they make the
Rules of Good, and Bad, by their own Liking, and Disliking…” Leviathan, ch. 46, 366.

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respect “Aristotle was only his disciple and successor” (161). Indeed, if anything

it is Plato, much more than Aristotle, that orientates himself by speech (162).161

Strauss’s explanation is as follows. “Plato ‘takes refuge’ from things in

human speech about things as the only entrance into the true reasons of things

which is open to man” (162). Anaxagoras and others had tried to understand the

things in the world by tracing them back to other things in the world. The problem

with such a naturalistic explanation is not only that it is not an explanation at all,

but that the kind of physics it presupposes leads necessarily to the destruction of

all secure and independent standards. It leads to the belief that in the human world

everything is in order.

How, then, can the order of the human world be discovered? Plato turns to

the examination of human speech to find in it the proof of the existence of

transcendent ideas. The proof is that “whenever we speak of virtue—whether we

attribute virtue to a man, a woman, a child, or a slave—because in all of these

cases we use the same word ‘virtue’, we also always mean the same thing” (162).

But do we really mean the same thing when we speak, for instance, of courage as

a virtue? Clearly not. In fact, neither do we mean the same thing, nor do we use

the same word, nor do we agree that courage is to be regarded as a virtue. For

example, for Aristotle courage is “a mean with respect to fear and confidence”

whereas for Hobbes it is to be fearless and even “contempt[uous] of wounds and

161
This is exactly the opposite of what Heidegger suggested. See, e.g., Heidegger, Grundbegriffe,
140, 137, as well as Plato’s Sophist, 234.

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death.”162 “[C]ourage is noble” for Aristotle, whereas for Hobbes—especially in

his later works—it is not a virtue at all.163 Aristotle’s ‘courage’ (andreia) Hobbes

occasionally calls ‘magnanimity’164 and we call manliness.165

And yet, precisely “[t]he fact that what men say is contradictory,” for

instance with respect to courage, “proves that there is truth hidden in what they

say” (163). Plato’s turn to speech is not a turn “to speech in itself, but to speech in

its contradictoriness” (165).166 Perhaps a discussion of the essence of virtue or

human excellence would end up dropping the question of courage, but it would be

“sheer madness for someone to assert that he is not just” (Protagoras, 323b); and,

granted that even justice could be seen as a matter of convention, we would not

say of the good things that they are so only by convention.167 “All say of the good

that they really wish it,” and they mean “the truly good and not merely the

appearance of good,” and because “they desire it, they know, therefore, that they

162
Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 1115 a 8. Hobbes, Elements, I, ch. 9, paragraph 4.
163
Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 115 b 23. See GS3, 30-31, 67, 134, 186 for Strauss’s argument that
courage disappears as a virtue in Hobbes.
164
GS3, 70. In Hobbes, Elements I, ch. 19, par. 2.
165
Precisely this is the critique of Aristotle against the “seduction of speech,” that “the same word
is used in multiple senses—that, for instance, ‘virtue’ said of a man means something other than
‘virtue’ said of a woman—and that that which in speech is ‘prior’—as, for instance, ‘good’ in
speech, is ‘prior’ to ‘man’—is therefore by no means ‘prior’ in being.” Aristotle, Met. 1077b1ff.
Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 101.
166
It is not a turn to “ontology” but to dialectics. Cf. David Lachterman, “What Is ‘The Good’ of
Plato’s Republic?,” St. John’s Review, Vol. XXXIX, nos. 1 and 2 (1989-90): 139-167, 151: “Plato
thinks there are forms because he thinks that the disputes and disparities set in motion when we
engage in talk about our most serious concerns and desires both have a point and point us to
something stable; in contrast, the modern Nominalist, Hobbes or Locke, for example, regards it as
the philosophers’ most important task to bring such pointless disputes to a halt.”
167
Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 18. See Plato, Republic, 505 d.

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lack it” (164). This, in essence, is the proof of the existence of a transcendent

good that orders our actions.

What is Strauss’s aim in this apparent attempt to rescue a theory—Plato’s

‘theory’ of the ‘ideas’—from the refutations or ‘deconstructions’ it has been

subjected to from Aristotle to Heidegger? In preparing the final chapter of The

Political Philosophy of Hobbes Strauss studied a work by Jacob Klein that he

would characterize as “the best work of our generation.”168 While we cannot

discuss this work here, what seems to be Klein’s key accomplishment must at

least be mentioned—namely, to show that ancient mathematical science, however

‘abstract’, was and remained a deepening or a perfecting of the common sense or

‘natural’ understanding of the world. This stands in sharp contrast to a modern

science that is no longer a perfection but a modification of the natural

understanding. Now, Hobbes’ turn to an exact political science and to Plato, as we

saw, was inspired by his discovery of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid.

Even though Strauss does not discuss Hobbes’ understanding of Euclid, his

critique of Hobbes implies that, just as we no longer understand that ancient

science did not conceive of numbers as “symbol generating abstractions,” so

Plato’s ‘theory’ of ideas is not an abstraction from the commonsense

understanding of things but a sharpening of that understanding.169 Strauss seems

to be suggesting, then, that the modern understanding of Socratic-Platonic

168
Letter to Klein of December 7, 1934 (GS3, 533). See also “Preface to Hobbes’ Politische
Wissenschaft,” in JPCM, 454.
169
GS3, 185; see also 536.

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political science is affected by a failure to grasp the pre-scientific, and, more

specifically, dialectical, starting point of the Greek investigation into being. We

recall that Heidegger’s basic objection against ancient (especially Platonic)

ontology was that it remained precisely at the level of a ‘dialectics’ which

Heidegger characterized as a ‘philosophical embarrassment’. It is necessary to

keep this in mind in order to understand Strauss’s critical engagement with

Hobbes.

Strauss argues that Hobbes’ appropriation of a misunderstood Plato had

“disastrous” or “fatal” (verhängnisvoll) consequences (165). In other words,

Strauss suggests that ‘Platonism’—as the origins of the ‘metaphysics of

presence’—is in fact a modern problem that originates in Hobbes’ repetition and

reduction of the Socratic-Platonic techne politike. What does this repetition and

reduction consist in?

Hobbes repeats Plato insofar as both considered it necessary to develop an

exact and paradoxical political science premised on a radical critique of opinion

and appearance (as against truth), of the great (as against the right), and of passion

(as against reason). Briefly, Plato’s political science opposes true virtue to

pseudo-virtue. True virtue demands a turning of the soul towards the (precise)

contemplation of the good; it is “essentially wisdom.” Pseudo-virtue, by contrast,

lives from the reputation and honor that result from the appearance of virtue.170

Plato’s quest for the essence of virtue is paradoxical in the literal sense that it

170
True virtue and pseudo-virtue differ only in their grounds: true virtue is the consequence of
“divine madness,” of a “purification” of the soul, or a turning of “the whole soul.”

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opposes prevalent opinion. This becomes clear in Plato’s critique of the most

brilliant or shining virtue, namely, courage. Courage—“the standard ideal of the

Lacaedaemonian and Cretan laws”–was “usually understood [as] the virtue of the

man, his capacity, without fear or effeminacy, to help himself, to protect himself

from injustice or injury, to assert and save himself. According to this ideal, the

perfect man is the tyrant…” In the tyrant, who “in limitless self-love, in frenzied

arrogance, seeks to rule not merely over men but even over gods,” the nature of

courage becomes revealed: courage is in truth “nothing more noble” than a

“disguised” expression “of man’s natural self-love, of man’s natural hedonism.”

Courage, for Plato, is consequently the lowest virtue (167). And, insofar as “the

unequivocal coordination of virtue with manliness is thus called into question, the

equality of the sexes in the ideal State becomes inevitable in principle” (167). Not

courage but prudence, and above prudence, wisdom and justice, are the highest

virtues (168). Wisdom in itself is supreme, but “for man [from an exoteric point

of view] it is nevertheless justice” that reins. Indeed, contrary to Aristotle, who

asserts the superiority of the theoretical life to ethical virtue, for Plato the

philosophers, while divinely gifted, remain human beings who “form only one

species of humans among others, and are thus under allegiance to the laws of the

State which has as its aim the maintenance of the whole and not the happiness of

the parts” (168). For Plato, therefore, “there are only political virtues” (169).171

171
Strauss refers to Plato’s Letter VII, 335 d (“…no city nor individual can be happy except by
living in company with wisdom under the guidance of justice”) (168).

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 Hobbes’ repetition of the ideal of an exact and paradoxical moral

philosophy leads him to follow the same chain of reasoning. The rejection of

pseudo-virtues (which aim merely at reputation and honor) also becomes

constitutive of his theory. For instance, as part of his quest for a new (bourgeois)

morality, Hobbes ceases to affirm, as he did in Elements of Law, that “the only

law of actions in war is honour” to suggest instead in Leviathan that “Force and

Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall virtues” (133).172 This example also

illustrates the fact that, like Plato, Hobbes only recognizes political virtues, for

indeed, great and ‘honorable’ actions are not necessarily just actions (133).173 As

we have seen, Hobbes too “finds himself forced into a radical critique of the

natural ideal of courage” (169), and “for him also the antithesis between the

fitting and the great is of supreme importance…” (169).

And yet, Hobbes also reduces Plato to the point that his turn to an exact

political science “hides the deepest antithesis to Plato which can be imagined”

(171). “In the same breath” that “Hobbes demands a completely passionless,

purely rational politics – he also demands that the norm established by reason be

in harmony with the passions” (171). This follows from the requirement that the

norm be applicable in the extreme case. Thus in Hobbes, passion—and

particularly the fear of death as a motivation that can be everywhere and at any

time invoked in man—replaces reason. Indeed, it is the fear of violent death, that
172
Hobbes, Elements, Part I, ch. 19, section 2; Leviathan, ch. 13, 66.
173
“Honour consists only in the opinion of Power. Therefore the ancient Heathen did not thinke
they Dishonoured, but greatly Honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their Poems,
committing Rapes, Thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts…” Leviathan, ch. 13, 66.

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following the above example, moderates the “unchecked race of the state of

nature in which force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues.” Fear moderates this

race into “reasonable competition, into the regulated ‘play’ of bourgeois

society”—a ‘play’ that is driven not by reason but by a reasonable selfishness

kept within bounds, we could say, by our ‘being-towards death’. The further ways

in which Hobbes repeats and reduces Plato—or, in other words, in which he

remains caught in the Platonic tradition or in the polemics against it—can be

mentioned more succinctly. First, following Plato and the Stoa, Hobbes came to

conceive of the (Christian) opposition between vanity and fear—superbia and

humilitas—as an opposition between passion and reason (thus replacing reason by

fear in a most un-Platonic way) (170). Second, like Plato, Hobbes begins his

political science from an examination of the ‘nature’ of man. Yet, unlike Plato

who begins from the question concerning the ‘idea’ of man,174 or with the closely

related question concerning the essence of virtue or the perfection of man (175),

Hobbes begins from the ‘nature’ of man understood as “what falls to man’s share

before all education” (151). Third, whereas for Plato (and, we could add,

Aristotle) what is closest to us (such as our ‘nature’ in its possible perfection) is

also what is most obscure and hence most in need of dialectical investigation, for

Hobbes what is closest to us is simply the evident, ‘empirical’ grounds upon

which the machinery of the state can be erected (174). Fourth, this shows that

whereas for Plato the idea of a political science (conceived as the quest for the

174
Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, 403 a 29ff. 403 a 15.

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right order of human life as living together) was absolutely problematical, for

Hobbes political science thus conceived was unquestionably possible and

necessary (cf. 173).175 Finally, fifth, whereas Plato aimed at an exact political

science in order to find “the undistorted reliability of the standard,” Hobbes aimed

at exactness for the sake of its universal applicability (172).

The consequences for modern politics with which Strauss concludes his

analysis can best be understood by returning to the most important contrast

between Hobbes and Plato, which according to Strauss is also what distinguishes

ancient from modern politics as a whole. Whereas ancient politics was oriented by

speech, modern politics fundamentally renounces this orientation (185). The

reason for this renunciation is originally the same that also guided Plato, namely,

“the problematic nature of ordinary speech, i.e., of ‘popular’ valuations, which

one may with a certain justification call natural valuations” (185). “But whereas

Plato goes back from the natural valuations to the truth hidden in them, and

therefore seeks to teach nothing new and unheard of, but to recall what is known

to all but not understood, Hobbes, rejecting the natural valuations in principle,

transcends them and goes beyond towards a new, future, freely projected, ‘a

priori’ politics” (185). In other words, Hobbes’ paradoxical moral philosophy “is

destined sooner or later to change from paradox to an accepted part of public

175
Hobbes does not raise the “radical question of the meaning of science” (156). Cf. Strauss’s later
more explicit description of what it means to take for granted that political science is “possible or
necessary” (NRH, 167). Essentially it means not to take into account the “sophist” tradition of
Protagoras, Epicurus, or Carneades which “was not dedicated to the concern with the right order
of society as with something that is choiceworthy for its own sake” (NRH, 168).

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opinion” (185). Hobbes raises “an incomparably greater claim for his political

science than Plato had done” (185). Thus “Hobbes travels the path that leads to

formal ethics and finally to relativistic skepticism: the massive increase of the

claims made on political science leads at last to the denial of the very idea of

political science [namely, on the part Burke and other critics of modern natural

right] and to the replacement of political science by sociology” (186). The “final

stage” of modern politics, Strauss argues, must also be understood from this

standpoint. Whereas Plato follows ordinary speech and therefore does not deny

the virtue-character of courage, but simply opposes its overestimation, Hobbes, by

contrast, denies that courage is a virtue. And “just as disdain of speech finally

leads to relativistic skepticism,” the negation of courage leads to the polemical

(re)affirmation of that “‘natural’ ideal of humanity” (see 415), “which becomes

more and more acute on the way from Rousseau by Hegel to Nietzsche and is

completed by the reabsorption of wisdom by courage, in the view [for instance, of

Sorel] that the ideal is not the object of wisdom, but the hazardous venture of the

will” (186).

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 Concluding remarks

To begin to draw conclusions from this long chapter it is necessary to connect it

with the considerations laid out in chapter two. There we suggested that Strauss’s

quest for a political science or philosophy grew out of a confrontation with

various philosophical and political discourses: neo-Kantianism and Hermann

Cohen in particular, the critique of the western tradition undertaken by Nietzsche

and Heidegger, the political thought of Hobbes, the pre-modern rationalism of

Maimonides, and the neo-orthodox thought of Rosenzweig and Barth. I argued

that to understand Strauss’s project one has to depart from Heidegger, who—in a

way that this chapter has tried to specify—addressed fundamental questions with

a self-consciousness of the problems involved that surpassed that of his

contemporaries, as well as (though perhaps to a lesser extent) that of thinkers of

the past. Heidegger confronted the problem of ethics which had been ‘silently

dropped’ by neo-Kantianism. He recovered the problem of ontology largely

‘missed’ by the western tradition, or submerged in its ‘onto-theology’. He stressed

that human being-in-the-world cannot be understood as one of the beings of the

world; that, studying human nature theoretically, philosophy has failed to examine

human existence or Dasein—i.e., that being for which its own being is always at

issue and which comports itself to its being in a practical-moral attitude; that

being for which, consequently, practical wisdom and self-knowledge is the one

thing that matters; finally, that being which is transcendent or open to the whole

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of beings and pervaded by the relation thus established to beings. Heidegger

attacks the ‘general domination of the theoretical’—the overriding concern to

secure already known knowledge as universally valid and binding—without,

however, embracing the ‘primacy of the practical’—viz. the foundation of theory

upon mere practical faith and a will to truth. He thus avoids the abandonment of

rationalism that led some of the greatest minds of the time, such as Franz

Rosenzweig, to embrace orthodoxy. Finally, Heidegger may have pointed the way

towards a completely atheistic philosophy that would have completed the project

prepared by Hobbes.

Around 1929 Strauss began to develop a critique of Heidegger as a thinker

whose superior self-consciousness notwithstanding remained limited by the

‘spiritual situation’ of the time. That situation was dominated, first, by the

‘historical consciousness’—the belief that one can understand past thinkers better

than they understood themselves, or that we know more because we have

discovered that history is not simply a succession of events but a dimension of

reality—and, second, by a new morality or intellectual conscience that constitutes

‘a kind of self-denial’ that forbids itself belief—or peaceful dwelling in

contemplation of the highest beings—‘because truth has come to be believed to be

repulsive’.

In this chapter we see how Strauss attempted to begin to respond to the

predicament described. We began in 1931 with Strauss’s engagement with the late

Hermann Cohen, whom Rosenzweig had described as the master of twin

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disciples: himself and Heidegger. The late Cohen had abandoned the neo-Kantian

view that religion must grow into ethics and turned to the pre-modern religious

ethics of Maimonides. Confronting the possibility of a life guided by divine

revelation, Cohen came to admit that philosophy is ultimately impotent when it

tries to know the Good or the divine. Cohen’s late philosophy became explicitly

anti-foundationalist (much like Heidegger’s position in the Davos disputation).

That is, we lay it down as a hypothesis or we somehow know that every human

pursuit aims at some good, and thus knowing the good becomes the one thing

needful. But there is no foundation for this, or the foundation is a ‘non-

foundation’. This is the challenge of ethics as confronted by Heidegger, Lévinas,

Strauss, and others who witnessed the disintegration of Kantianism in the 1920s.

The link noted by Derrida (referred to in chapter three) between neo-

Kantianism and Heidegger (and Strauss, we may add) now becomes clear. These

are strands of thought for which ‘ethics’—variously understood as the question of

the good as the ultimate foundation of knowledge, or of different ‘possibilities for

life’, or of man’s place in the world and of his proper comportment—is the center

of philosophy. Specifically, Strauss explores the idea of Socratic ‘political

philosophy’ as ‘the first philosophy’ (though without yet using these terms). In

Strauss’s early thought Socratic philosophizing aims at ‘mutual understanding and

harmony’, the ‘truthful state’, and the ‘common good’; all virtues ‘are only

possible and understandable from the State’. Socratic philosophizing finds an

essentially political aim in the quest for the common good. It also begins from

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ethical-political considerations: to ask ‘why?’ radically means to ask ‘why is it

good?’ Socratic philosophizing begins from the political as the site in which

fundamental oppositions—concerning, for instance, good and right, just and

unjust—become explicit.

In 1931 Strauss takes a different stance on the crisis of political

philosophy. The problem is not that ethics may not be able to articulate the

phenomena that give rise to an ethical existence or that the spiritual situation of

the time is dominated by an ‘absolutely honest atheism’ based more on fortitude

or probity than the love of truth. Rather, the gravest threat is the rebirth of

Aristotelianism. We find here an emerging opposition between ‘political

philosophy’ and phenomenology as the force behind the Aristotelian revival.

Strauss sides with other members of the Marburg school of Plato interpretation in

opposing a form of philosophizing aimed at ‘pure contemplation of beings and

understanding of Being’. The ‘conditionedness of man’ and history must not lead

to the abandonment of an unconditional questioning after the good even if this

questioning finds no answer. ‘Phenomenological intuition’ must not obscure the

fact that our primary access to reality is through the ‘shared, public, or political’

conception of the good we hold. A further symptom of the crisis of political

philosophy is the failure to confront the ‘theological-political predicament’ or, we

could say, to consider that philosophy may not have originated in wonder at the

fact that ‘there is something rather than nothing’ but in an ethical-political quest

for an ‘invisible measure’ or a natural law after the collapse of a pre-philosophical

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nomos. Strauss thus points to the necessity of recovering the theological and

philosophical traditions undermined by Nietzsche (and Heidegger)—the traditions

of ‘good and evil and theorein’, ‘Plato and the prophets’—in a non-traditional

way.

To reach back to the traditions non-traditionally Strauss attempts a detour

from ‘Jerusalem’—or the Judeo-Christian reception of classical thought—to

‘Mecca’—or its Jewish and Islamic reception. ‘Onto-theology’ is sidestepped by a

tradition that does not engage in the rational exploration of the divine as practiced

in Christian theology. This tradition preserves (or gives rise to) a form of thinking

that begins and culminates in political considerations: first because it must justify

itself before a revelation that takes the form of a divine law (and not of a mystery

demanding faith—viz., the God-man) and, second, because, contrary to the

experience of Latin Christendom where philosophy had to find a place alongside

an already existing authority (the Church), in the Islamic world philosophy aimed

itself to become the authority. There arises here a further meaning of political

philosophy as the inquiry into the conditions for preserving philosophy ‘when it

becomes confused or extinct’ and for achieving human perfection. Insofar as the

‘natural principles’ inherent in man are insufficient for that purpose, the

knowledge of physics must be complemented by a science of ‘intellectual

principles’: thus, physical science culminates in a ‘meta-physical’ ‘political

science’.

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 Strauss seems to have embraced Islamic political philosophy as a way to

think the problem of the being of man beyond onto-theology and cosmology, or in

other words, beyond the idea of a ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ human essence. In a way

that seems to go back to the young Heidegger’s claim that an adequate account of

a thing must not begin from physiology but from the way it is spoken about—the

logos which ‘is very often identical with [its] eidos’—Strauss will argue that

‘Whatever may be the proper starting point for studying human nature, the proper

starting point for studying the perfection of human nature … is what is said about

these subjects or the opinions about them’. Drawing on Farabi’s reading of Plato,

the perfection of human nature seems to lie for Strauss in ‘the golden mean

equally removed from a naturalism which aims only at sanctioning the savage and

destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master and the

conqueror; and … a supernaturalism which tends to become the basis of slave

morality’.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

Arendt’s Turn to Political Philosophy (1950-1958)

Chapter three described the context in which Arendt’s thinking developed. Its

most important characteristic, I argued, is the fact that in it philosophy and

theology, as Arendt put it, “belonged together.”1 The full significance of this fact

shall become clear in what follows, as we trace her turn to political philosophy in

the early 1950s.

Despite having worked in Paris on her study of Rahel Varnhagen (where

she completed the last two chapters in 1938) as well as on the project that would

result in Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951), Arendt had stayed away

from philosophy and dedicated herself, particularly during her first few years in

America (from 1941 to 1945), to what she described as political journalism and

history.2 Arendt returned to Europe for the first time in a three-month-long trip

from November 1949 to March 1950. In that trip she met with Jaspers and

Heidegger. As her correspondence shows, these encounters were decisive for

Arendt’s return to philosophy,3 and in particular for her quest for a “new political

philosophy.”4

1
Hannah Arendt, “A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954,
edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 9. (Hereafter EU)
2
See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, edited by L. Kohler and H.
Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 23.
3
For the movement from politics and history to philosophy see ibid., 31 (Jan. 29, 1946: “I have
learned to think politically and see historically”; “I have refused to abandon the Jewish question as
the focal point of my historical and political thinking”), 61 (Sept. 4, 1947: “…[I have] a genuine

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 Arendt did not become the founder of a school, and even though there

exists a worldwide community of Arendt scholars, few, if any, would claim, as

Heinrich Meier does of Strauss, that we owe to her “the resuscitation and

refounding of political philosophy after its apparent end.”5 And yet, Arendt’s

ambitions in the early 1950s went in a sense even beyond reviving and refounding

political philosophy: “the West,” she claimed “never really had a proper political

philosophy.”6 For at least two decades, from the first entries in her notebooks in

1950 to the courses she taught in the late 1960s, Arendt was concerned with this

problem.

fear … about getting into philosophy now”), 97, 129 (Jan. 28, 1949: continues to be
“overwhelmed by a fear that philosophy would gobble me”), 142 (Sept. 29, 1949: still very critical
of Heidegger), 158 (Oct. 4, 1950: taking up philosophy again).
4
See Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” EU, 433, 445;
“Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, 1990: 73-103, 103. See also Hannah
Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1950 bis 1973, 2 vols. edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann
(Munich: Piper, 2002), 15 ff. (=The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 2005), 93); 295, 465; HC, 299; Ich Will Verstehen, edited by Ursula Ludz, 2nd ed.
(Munich: Piper, 2006), 106; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed., rev. (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), ix (on the need for a “new political principle” and “a new law on
earth”).
5
Heinrich Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss: Die Geschichte der Philosophie und die
Intention des Philosophen (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1996), 9.
6
Letter to Kurt Blumenfeld of October 14, 1952. Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, “…in
keinem Besitz Verwurzelt.” Die Korrespondenz, edited by Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling
(Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1995), 68. See also Denktagebuch, 15 (“theology and philosophy …
have no valid answer to the philosophical question: What is politics?” (=Promise of Politics, 93));
253-54 (“The great tradition itself led there [to totalitarianism], hence there must have been
something fundamentally false in all of western political philosophy”); letter to Jaspers of March
4, 1951, in Arendt-Jaspers, Correspondence, 166 (“…Western philosophy has never had a clear
concept of what constitutes the political”).

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 Political philosophy in Arendt’s Denktagebuch

During the summer of Arendt’s return from her trip to Europe she began to keep a

diary, which has recently been published in two volumes containing close to a

thousand pages of annotations dating from 1950 to 1973. In them we find the

central ideas that Arendt would develop at length in her published work. The

diaries also record her study of what she considered to be the major thinkers of

the western tradition. Most importantly, as I shall argue, they contain much that is

left unsaid in her work that is key to understanding her ethical-political thought.

The index of the two volumes provides an overview of the questions and

themes that occupied Arendt over the decades.7 In order of importance as

measured by the number of entries, these are: philosophy / political philosophy /

philosophy-politics / action / acting / politics / the political / world / worldly /

work / thinking / freedom / man / human / human world / will / willing /

domination / ruling / God / plurality / the Greeks / Christianity / fabrication / truth

/ the true / love / evil / radical evil / otherness / the other / beginning /

commonsense / violence / law / history / reason / necessity / the necessary / reality

/ religion / means / means-ends / appearing / Being / modernity / morality / moral

/ the moral / society / judgment / judging / capacity to judge / nature / power /

7
Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1201-1230.

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solitude / death / immortality / speech / dialogue / logic / idea / opinion / right /

justice / measure / standard / meaning / common / event / public / public-private.

Arendt’s interlocutors were almost exclusively the great thinkers of the

western tradition: Plato, above all, followed by Kant; then Aristotle and Hegel;

then Heidegger and Socrates. Marx and Nietzsche follow upon them—albeit with

a considerably smaller number of entries. Arendt also returned repeatedly—yet

again far less so than to Marx and Nietzsche—to Homer, Cicero, Augustine,

Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau; and less often to Heraclitus,

Pindar, Jesus, Descartes, Spinoza, Goethe, Lessing, Locke, and Kierkegaard. Very

rarely did Arendt refer to contemporary thinkers except for Heidegger. Jaspers

appears twenty times, Benjamin six; Faulkner and Kafka recur some five times;

on not more than three occasions each does Arendt refer to other contemporaries

such as Cassirer, Stalin, Sorel, Valéry, Jünger, Gilson, Bergson, Husserl, Jaeger,

Schmitt, Rosenzweig, Krüger, Kojève, Koyré, Jonas, Berlin, Cochrane, Cornford,

and Freud.

One way to describe the movement of Arendt’s reflections is as follows.

Arendt undertakes two deconstructions, respectively, of philosophy and theology

or draws the consequences of their collapse as traditions. Her aim is, first, to

answer the question why the western tradition lacks a political philosophy in the

proper sense, and second to think of the possibility of an alternative—a ‘new

political philosophy’. Thus Arendt’s engagement with the defining thinkers of the

tradition is, on the one hand, ‘deconstructive’—notably in the cases of Plato,

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Hegel, and Aristotle—as well as ‘restorative’ or aimed at recovering their truly

political insights—notably in her reading of Kant, Socrates, and Heidegger. The

result is her own proposal to rethink some of the fundamental questions (and

concepts) of politics, drawing, I shall argue, mainly on Socrates and Heidegger.

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 Arendtian (Anti-) metaphysics

God is an ever-recurring theme in Arendt’s diary. ‘God’ appears in roughly the

same number of entries as ‘plurality’. And except for ‘philosophy’ and ‘politics’,

no other themes are discussed as often as ‘action’ and the ‘world’. Arendt thinks

continuously, year after year, about God, the world, and man (or human action).

What does Arendt have to say about these subjects?

To set her answers in context, it must be recalled that God, the world, and

man were traditionally the three central subjects of ‘special’ (as distinguished

from ‘general’) metaphysics—namely, of theology, cosmology, and psychology.

In spite of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, these subjects continued to occupy the

minds of some of the most important theological and philosophical thinkers of the

twentieth century. This was notably the case, as we saw in earlier chapters, of the

Jewish neo-orthodox thought of Rosenzweig and of its Christian counterpart,

specially as conceived by Bultmann. Neo-orthodox thought treated God, the

world, and man ‘dialectically’ in order to respond to their character as impossible

yet essential subjects of any discourse addressing the human situation.

To recall only the surface problem, the ‘dialectic’ for Rosenzweig

consisted in the fact that, on the one hand, “we know in the most precise manner,

we know it with the intuitional knowledge of experience, what God taken by

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Himself, what man taken by himself, what the world taken by itself ‘is’,”8 and yet,

on the other hand, “Of God we know nothing,” “Of the world we know nothing,”

“Of man … we … know nothing.”9 That is, we know what God, the world, and

man are—if taken by themselves, viz., “God is only what is divine; man only

human; the world only world.”10 But of these subjects we know nothing when we

miss the ontological difference and explain God or man in terms of nature, or

nature and man in terms of a divine essence, or God and nature as a representation

of the cogito. In a similar way, Bultmann insisted on the simultaneous

impossibility and necessity of addressing God, the world, and man. All talk of

God, he claimed, is either sin—viz., arguing whether He ‘Ought to have said?’—

or meaningless—if God does not exist.11 This, however, means that we cannot

talk about our existence either—about man—for “God is the reality that

determines our existence.”12 Furthermore, any talk of the world, any ‘world-

view’, necessarily misses those living relationships that hold ‘the world’ or

8
Franz Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’: A Few Supplementary Remarks on The Star,” in Alan
Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (eds.), Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking’ (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1999), 77.
9
Franz Rosenzwig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1985), 23, 42, 63.
10
Rosenzweig, “‘The New Thinking’,” 76.
11
Rudolf Bultmann, “What Does it Mean to Speak of God?,” in Faith and Understanding I, trans.
L.P. Smith, edited by Robert W. Funk (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 54, 65.
12
Ibid., 56-57.

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humanity together, such as love, gratitude, reverence.13 Yet, of course, Bultmann

also devoted his life to talking continuously about God, the world, and man.

God

Like Bultmann, Arendt denies that we can know anything about God:

“Theology—the science of God […is] actually a blasphemy.”14 “God is the only

[thing] I cannot think about. Theology tries to think about God” (277). We cannot

know anything about God’s attributes or about his judgment: “The so-called Thou

of God is only the blasphemy of absolutizing the Thou of the thinking dialogue

with myself” (220). Ranke’s claim that “‘Before God all generations of humanity

appear equally justified’” is an “outrageous, completely naïve blasphemy for a

Christian” (266). “The … blasphemy that lies in all talk about the power … of

God is grounded in the fact that power cannot be the property of an individual…”

(167-168).15

We cannot know anything about God, but Arendt thinks continuously of

God. Whether this is merely to dispel ‘God’s shadows’ is not clear. A

13
Ibid., 59.
14
Arendt, Denktagebuch, 261 (hereafter cited in parentheses). Compare, however, “Religion and
Politics,” in EU, 371 for a different, more ‘reasonable’, definition: “Theology treats man as a
reasonable being that asks questions and whose reason needs reconciliation even if he is expected
to believe in that which is beyond reason.”
15
See also “A Reply to Voegelin,” in EU, 406 f. (on “the wide-spread and strictly blasphemous
modern ‘ideas’ about a God who is ‘good for you’ … that is, ‘ideas’ which make of God a
function of man or society. This functionalization seems to me in many respects the last and
perhaps the most dangerous stage of atheism”). Cf. also “Religion and Politics,” EU, 369.

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characteristically ambiguous statement reads: “What is decisive about the so-

called religious crisis of our time is not that we no longer ‘know’ who God is, but

that in the collapse—in the justified collapse—of all piety it becomes apparent

that we do not know and have never known how to think God” (Ibid.). This

suggests that at least the question how not to think God is crucial: human

judgment is only possible “when one has a conception of God that in all

seriousness leaves everything open,” thus assuming “that God may not judge at

all and may judge completely differently” (8).

Why not change the subject, as perhaps Richard Rorty would suggest?

Arendt, in any case, never did so. It could also be retorted that her belief in God is

a private matter with little or no relevance for her political thought. My analysis

of Arendt’s dissertation suggests otherwise, and this shall also become clear in the

present chapter. Two statements suggest that such a dismissal of Arendt’s

‘religious beliefs’ would also be a dismissal of her very understanding of truth,

which she shared with a lineage of thinkers that include Cohen, Rosenzweig, and

Heidegger: “The truth of all revelation religions lies therein that truth announces

itself to us only as revelation” (205); “this [is] the truth of revelation religions,

that every thought and every truth open up only in a Blitz” (249).16

16
On truth, see Denktagebuch, 279-80 (on truth as Blitz in relation to Heidegger, viz., as
revelation of what is not present); 420 (truth is essentially particular, namely that which shows
itself to me in its unconcealedness); 469 (we expect truth from poets, not from philosophers); 489
(truth is not the result of but the origin of thinking: “Nobody even begins only to think who does
not already hold a truth in their hands”); 600 (“where truth is experienced primarily as something
seen—with the Greeks in the eidos—it must become arretos, ineffable; where it is experienced
primarily as something heard—with the Jews as the Word of God—its depiction must be
forbidden.” This explains why we tend to think of truth as something beyond the senses—in fact it

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 The World

Arendt’s understanding of the world manifests the same kind of ambiguity that

one also finds in the theological thought of the 1920s. According to Bultmann,

notably, “‘the world’ is not a constant” or “an ‘original’ reality”; it “is not

conceived at all as an objective phenomenon.”17 The world is God’s creation but

it is also what men make of it. We are in the world but not of the world; or, rather:

this is our choice—to ‘fall’ to the world or be saved by grace.18 In her dissertation

Arendt discusses Augustine’s conception of the world as a desert in which we

is because we lack a sense that connects the five senses); 684 (no argument reaches truth; at the
most an argument follows truth). See also 18 (the only possible justification for natural law: man
as created in the likeness of God has received the creative energy to organize men into the likeness
of divine creation; hence the task of politics would be to “establish a world as transparent for truth
as is God’s creation”); 39 (It depends on us whether there is truth in the world. Forgetting is the
only actual sin because it extinguishes “truth that has been [gewesene Wahrheit]”); Cf. “Truth and
Politics,” “while we may refuse even to ask ourselves whether life would still be worth living in a
world deprived of such notions as justice and freedom, the same, curiously, is not possible with
respect to the seemingly so much less political idea of truth. … no human world … will ever be
able to survive without men willing … to say what is” (229). “Conceptually, we may call truth
what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that
stretches above us (263-64). See also DT, 46; 48; 142. Cf. “Christianity and Revolution,” 155:
“Philosophy concerned with truth ever was and probably always will be a kind of docta
ignorantia—highly learned and therefore highly ignorant. The certainties of Thomas Aquinas
afford excellent spiritual guidance and are still much superior to almost anything in the way of
certainties which has been invented in more recent times. But certainty is not truth, and a system
of certainties is the end of philosophy.” On truth as revelation see, further, “Understanding and
Politics,” EU, 317, 322; OT, 477; “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 31: “our traditional
religion is essentially a revealed religion and holds, in harmony with ancient philosophy, that truth
is what reveals itself, that truth is revelation…”; 37.
17
R. Bultmann, “The Eschatology of the Gospel of John,” in Bultmann, Faith and Understanding
I, 166 (“not conceived at all as an objective phenomenon”).
18
See Ibid.

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thirst to go beyond to reach our proper source.19 In her diaries and in later

writings, she uses this metaphor, now attributed to Nietzsche, to refer to the

modern world.20 Arendt refers to the expansion of the desert in terms of “the

withering away of everything between us.”21 This is an expansion that threatens to

extinguish even those “oases” of worldlessness as “the isolation of the artist,” “the

solitude of the philosopher,” “the inherently worldless relationships between

human beings as it exists in love and sometimes in friendship,” or “the realm of

faith.”22 We “are not of the desert though we live in it,” and it is our decision, we

could say, whether to ‘fall’ and adjust to the desert, to feel at home in it, or to

“transform it into a human world.”23

But what is a human world? Echoing Augustine’s judgment against

making ourselves at home, Arendt argues that a human world is not a “man-made

reality.” A ‘man-made reality’ is bereft of truth, for truth is an event, and

precisely not reality (490). Neither is a human world a world in which each

person is treated as an end and never as a means. For in a ‘kingdom of ends’

where each person is understood as an end in itself nature becomes a mere means,

19
Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, edited by Joanna V. Scott and Judith C. Stark
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 81-82.
20
Arendt, Denktagebuch, 44, 54, 217, 524, 539; The Promise of Politics, 201-2.
21
The Promise of Politics, 201. (From the conclusion to the lecture, “The History of Political
Theory,” which Arendt delivered at UC Berkeley in the spring of 1955.)
22
Ibid., 202, 203.
23
Ibid., 201. Cf. Arendt, “What is Existential Philosophy?,” in EU, 186: “[W]e can [now] accept
the ‘fragmentation of Being’ … and we can accommodate the modern sense of alienation in the
world and the modern desire to create, in a world that is no longer a home to us, a human world
that could become our home.”

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and “one could not go any further in the ‘de-divinization’ of the world

[Entgötterung der Welt], in its vulgarization” (57).24 Indeed, in a world where

each is an end, not only nature and the whole world become a means, but the

other too becomes ‘worldly’, an “object of the will” (109).25 For “[i]n the

encounter between two human beings, two ends (Selbstzwecke), the world opens

up as an abyss that keeps the ends eternally apart separated by the sum of means

that the world is.” Under such circumstances “the respect for the ‘dignity of man’

is like an impotent [ohnmächtiger] salute over an abyss” (109).

Man

As her reflections on the world show, man for Arendt is a dweller in the world

who is somehow not of this world. Man’s ‘unworldliness’ becomes manifest in

the phenomenon of love. Love—understood philosophically as a power and not as

a feeling—is among the most recurrent themes in Arendt’s diaries. Precisely as a

power that manifests itself as an event (Ereignis) and not as a human feeling, love

is something divine (“ein Göttliches”) (49). “I have feelings; love has me” (51).

Love “takes possession of the heart, but it does not originate in the heart. Love is

a power of the universe insofar as the universe is alive. It is the power of life, and

24
For Kant’s concept of a ‘kingdom of ends’, see his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,
in Mary J. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83-88. On ‘dedivinization’ as a
consequence of Christianity, see also DT, 144.
25
“Das Böse bei Kant ist … den Anderen in den Abgrund der Mittel zu reissen, ihn zu
verweltlichen, zu ent-subjektivieren, ihn zu einem Objekt des Willens zu machen” (DT, 109).

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[it] guarantees its forward march against death” (372). “As a universal … power

of life love is not really of human origins. Nothing integrates us as securely and

inescapably into the living universe as love…” (373). And yet, love is a “world

destroying principle” as it burns away “the between of the world and its space”

(373). Love is thus “life without world.” As such it shows “that man without

world still is, that he is ‘more’ than world” (373).

Arendt finds in death a second phenomenon of man’s unworldliness. In

the singularity of death, “man is in fact no longer of this world”; “[a]s such [the

experience of death] corresponds to the solitude of God … we can only be close

to God in death, because only then … do we become what he eternally is” (460).

“Everything alive disappears in death; that through a process of passing away it

dissolves into non-aliveness only means that it disappears as that which it was …

while the rock survives … and outlasts all that is alive. Therefore there dwells in

everything that is alive … something non-earthly, and hence one can perhaps

determine life as dwelling” (314).26

Man’s unworldliness is one of the reasons why Arendt insists that of man

we know nothing or very little. “Could it not be that precisely the essential

‘unknowability’ of man is his being made in the image of God?” (126). Another

26
See Arendt’s annotations of her reading of Heidegger’s, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” at DT,
144: “The way in which … we humans are on this earth, is … dwelling.” “The human being is
‘not from this world’, he is on it only in the mode of dwelling.” See M. Heidegger, “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, revised and expanded ed. (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993): 347-363 (Arendt’s reference can be found on page 349). For a
superb analysis of Arendt’s mature work as a response to “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” see
Jussi Backman, “Für das Wohnen denken. Heidegger, Arendt und die praktische Bessinung,” in
Alfred Denker (ed.), Heidegger und Aristoteles (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2007).

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reason is the Augustinian notion that the human heart is too dark to be seen (125).

A third reason is human freedom: “Both together, the freedom and the darkness of

the heart, make the investigation of man impossible” (125-26).27

For Arendt, man is a creature that transcends the world. Yet precisely as

creature (and not creator) man—or human life—is not, after all, divine (491). One

central paradox of the modern world is that its atheism presupposes that man is

divine. For “Marx-Nietzsche,” Arendt writes, “God may have created the

universe, but man, insofar as he is man (and not an animal species), created

himself – through work etc. …Insofar, then, as man created himself qua man, he

is ‘over-man’ [Übermensch], that is, he is God.28 This form of atheism, the only

adequate one and axiomatically … accepted by modernity as a whole, makes man

more unearthly [unirdischer] than any Christianity ever tried” (454).

Secularization does not make our existence more worldly; rather the opposite is

true.29

27
See also DT, 537: man has no ‘nature’, even though he can only live under natural conditions.
We can only recognize (erkennen) nature insofar as we are not nature (“…dass wir nur ‘Natur’
erkennen können … einzig darum, wiel wir nicht Natur sind”). See also DT, 734 f.
28
See also 139-40 on Nietzsche: the overman is, like God, an spectator of the eternal return.
29
Secularization does not mean that the plan of salvation is ‘secularized’ into the notion of
progress, for example, but that the divine attributes are made worldly (verweltlicht). Arendt
suggests the following example of this process: “As a working being [Engels: labor created man]
and as a writer of history [Ranke] man has become his own creator and his own judge.” DT, 266.
See “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 21 f. (on “Labor created man”).

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 The ethical-political implications of Arendtian (Anti-) metaphysics

How does Arendt’s critique of secularism—that is, of a secularized understanding

of man as worldly creator; of the world as a kingdom of ends or as a man-made

reality; and of God as something we can talk about and whose judgments we can

replicate—manifest itself in her political theory? Three aspects are particularly

revealing.

Arendt’s critique of morality…

The first manifestation of Arendt’s critique of secularism is her critique of

morality on the grounds that it is anti-Christian. Indeed, according to Arendt, that

for Kant the duty to do something implies that one can do it—since reason would

not legislate anything unreasonable—is “the sharpest anti-Christian position or

the ‘moral’ position taken to the extreme against all religious [positions] that by

no means presuppose a ‘posse’ [a capacity to do] but even belie [such a capacity]”

(163).30 Or to take another example: Kant’s claim that “[h]appiness contains all

… that which nature provides us; but virtue contains what no one other than the

human being can give himself…” shows the “gracelessness of all morality in the

30
That morality cannot require us to do anything ‘unreasonable’ or ‘ultra posse’—beyond what
we can do—follows simply from the fact that “morality for Kant is nothing but the universal
legislation of reason” (DT, 164). Arendt’s references refer to Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual
Peace, in Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 338, and “On the common saying: That may be
correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice,” in Ibid., 280.

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face of all religion.31 Finally: “The will to power is nothing else than the will to

live the life into which I have been ‘thrown’ as if I had chosen it. – One can never

forget that Nietzsche was essentially a moralist” (308; my emphasis).32

Arendt’s critique (especially in the case of Kant) seems to be directed

against the attempt to make human and divine normativity coincide, not because

there is no such thing as divine normativity but because what is given to man, qua

given, already exceeds the human (see 163). Whether there is a ‘measure’ or a

‘norm’ for the humanity of man is an open question to which, as we shall see,

Arendt constantly returned. What is certain, though, is that a morality that goes

out of its way to avoid any possible conflict between theory and practice (namely,

by not demanding anything unpracticable) misses an essential aspect of the

human condition: precisely that it is conditioned by what is beyond the human—

the ‘natural’ or the ‘divine’. In contrast, a true ethics would not begin from what

the human being ‘gives himself’ but from an understanding of that to which the

human belongs, or that wherein it dwells.33

31
Ibid., 285 (my emphasis). See also DT, 68: the Kantian conception of action—pure
spontaneity—is a revolt; it is the highest unthankfulness vis-à-vis that to which we owe our
Dasein. Cf. 250: “Wie sehr überhaupt die christliche Religion, die als solche Moral werden
konnte, römmischen Ursprungs ist.” (Arendt seems to be suggesting here that early Christianity,
before it became ‘Romanized’, is pre-moral.)
33
For Arendt’s critique of morality see also: 73-74 (all morality can really be reduced to keeping
promises (on promises see 73-4, and esp. 135: as promising is the central moral phenomenon, so is
contract the central political phenomenon); 54 (“morality only reveals itself when life [i.e.,
inclination [Neigung] over duty] has been killed”; only once the heart has become deserted are we
left with morality and duty as the only exit. “As long as the desert reigns, morality has its Right,
and woe to us when it too no longer reigns. The rule-less desert is a greater horror than the ruled”);
140; 242-43 (“All morality is purely and simply Sittengesetz – a question of ‘mores’ – and nothing
else. Because one looked for good and evil in morality and then naturally only discovered
different prohibitions, tabus, etc. one thought that good and evil do not exist. Certainly not in
morality”).

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 …the Will

Arendt’s critique of autonomous morality is closely linked to her critique of the

will. “Since Kant [or] since Rousseau,” Arendt notes, “the will is the legislative

organ.” And, indeed, for Kant “…the will is nothing other than practical

reason…”34 What is wrong with this? Arendt suggests that the problem begins

with the loss of an understanding of the law as a norm prior to the human will.

The categorical imperative to will that the maxim of our actions become a

universal norm,35 she points out, implies that the man of good will “is not in need

of given laws since he can always find their principles in himself or can produce

them out of his will – just as the mathematician does not need formulas since he

can always derive them anew” (502).36

Is, then, a good will not unqualifiedly good, as Kant suggests?37 To see

why Arendt would reject this Kantian premise one must consider her genealogical

understanding of the will.38

Arendt links the will to the concept of sovereignty: “sovereignty becomes

a reality in willing” (84). Sovereignty, in turn, is grounded in the notion of “the

34
“…the will is a capacity to choose only that which reason independently of inclination cognizes
as practically necessary, that is, as good.” Kant, Groundwork, 66.
35
Ibid., 73.
36
See Ibid., 67.
37
Ibid., 49.
38
Arendt also develops a phenomenology of the will as determined by needs; as groundless; and
as indivisible. See DT, 95, 101, 102, 244.

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uniqueness and absoluteness of the individual, of each human being, as it was

understood in the Christian teaching of salvation” (158). According to this

teaching, the “sovereign individual, whose relation to the other is determined and

guided by the relation to himself—love your neighbor as yourself,” “does not

need others, but only the help – grace, redemption etc. – of God” (158-59). In

modern times, the secularization of this notion leads to Hegel’s view that “I am

created as will, i.e., as ‘infinitum actu’ [and thereby] I can ‘overcome’ both death

and my creatureliness” (84). Indeed, Hegel radicalizes the Kantian affirmation of

the practicality of reason: not only is the will “practical spirit” (as it was “practical

reason” in Kant), but “[a] will which resolves nothing, is not an actual will….”39

Thus, he becomes sovereign who has the power to will and the resolve to act.

This, according to Arendt, implies that “man—and neither God nor nature—is

sovereign on earth.”40 Further, it implies “that laws depend on the will and that

specific bodies [Körperschaften] or men must be equipped with the power to will,

to will for others” (141).41

39
G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7 (Frankfurt, a. M: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1986), § 4, addition (p. 48), § 13, addition (p. 64). Cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1, 57
(“For Hegel, knowing and willing are the same, which is to say, true knowledge is also already
action and action is only in knowledge.”).
40
On this absence of God and nature see also 244.
41
“Nietzsche’s will to power is only the inversion (Umkehrung) of this power to will as it was
expressed in all sovereign states of his time. This was a typical idea of the nineteenth century.
Namely, in order to have the power to will, there must be first of all a will that wills to will power
[der die Macht zu wollen will]; or in order to be able to will, I must will to will. Hence
Heidegger’s: will to will is will to power. This makes the problem of power the central political
factum of all politics that is grounded in sovereignty – hence all politics excluding American
politics: that I must have power in order to be able to will” (141). On Heidegger and the will to
power see also 185. Cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991):
“Nietzsche’s expression ‘will to power’ means to suggest that will as we usually understand it is

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 A good will would then be for Arendt, in opposition to Kant, a kind of

perversion of the idea of individual sovereignty that, far from being the

foundation of autonomous law, breaks the ‘law’—whose substance or source, of

course, is the question. Thus, Arendt argues that Kant’s good will would have to

be interpreted as a counterpart to radical evil—namely, as the “radical good”

(182). An example would be: “love your enemies” (181). This is a word meant by

Jesus as “a maxim of radical good that surmounts all laws” (182). And yet, “it is

clear that here injustice is immediately committed – who loves his enemies no

longer defends his friends. … The injustice (Unrecht) committed by the enemies,

since it is not persecuted, is not replaced by justice (Recht)” (182).

…and Justice

Justice—together with law, right, and standard (or measure [Maßstab])—are

themes that figure far more prominently in Arendt’s diaries than in her writings

meant for publication. Just like God, the world, and man, they are part of our

commonsense understanding of things that has been distorted—if not altogether

rendered meaningless—by the philosophical and theological traditions, as well as

by the secularizing responses to them. As the example above shows, Arendt

understands human affairs in terms of right and wrong or justice and injustice

(Recht/Unrecht). However, her political theory lacks a discussion of such

actually and only will to power” (42). Willing is different from “sheer desire, wishing, striving, or
mere representing.” Willing (as against mere wishing) is “the submission of ourselves to our own
command, and the resoluteness of such self-command…” (40); it is (in contrast to “get[ting]
wholly absorbed in … striving”), a “resolute openness to oneself, [which] is always a willing out
beyond oneself.” “Willing itself is mastery over… [it] is intrinsically power” (41).

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questions, for as she boldly claims: “in no way can [justice (Gerechtigkeit)] have

anything to do with politics” (20), or as she also suggests, “justice no longer exists

as a category” (245). The main reason why Arendt refrains from discussing

justice seems to be ‘the darkness of the human heart’. There cannot be “absolute

justice on earth because no-one can look into the human heart—or, in other

words, no-one can survey the whole reality of a deed or of an event” (20). “[T]he

limits of human justice [are] based on the absolute impenetrability

[Unerforschbarkeit] of the human heart” (38).42 The premise here—and the

reason why justice has nothing to do with politics for Arendt—is that justice

applies to individuals, and such an “absolute and absolutely required

individualization to the singular and single-most,” would make justice fall out of

“ta koina” (the common) (20).43

A different reason for the absence of justice in Arendt’s political theory is

that it is somehow no longer possible. “Justice always presupposes a ‘consensus’”

(244). For instance, the punishment of a criminal is an act of justice insofar as the

42
On what the darkness of the heart means, see DT, 721: we can only understand that which is
expressed or told in a story (Geschprochenes, Erzähltes); the object of understanding is meaning,
as against, for instance, trying to know how Orestes felt while he killed his mother—if that is
because he hated her or loved the father, etc.
43
The result is a form of Arendtian an-archism (in the literal sense) which prevails, paradoxically,
because “[t]here is in reality only religious authority,” such that “all else is an imposture
[Schwindel]” (185). Then again, one may also be tempted to characterize Arendt’s position as a
libertarianism of sorts. See, e.g., 150: “Laws should never be decreed for any domain except the
strictly ‘political’. They protect me from the injustice [Unrecht] of others, they protect the others
from the injustice that I can commit to them. But they should never pretend to protect myself from
myself—as in all legislation against vice, game, dipsomania [Trunksucht]. Any irruption of the
moral into the political, i.e., of moralistic reasoning … is always an attack on freedom.” Cf. 158:
“The horrible thing about laws is not the punishment or the rigorousness of the legal demands, but
that it implies judging and condemning.”

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criminal would himself judge his act as a crime, and “even the law of God

requires a listening and approving and (only in the last instance) obeying human

being” (244-45). But this consensus has broken down. Arendt suggests that

international law during times of war used to rest on the implicit consensus—if

not among states then at least within them—that murder should not occur, or that

the civilian population should be distinguished from the military such that an

unarmed person ceases to be an enemy. Since the First World War, however, this

consensus no longer exists (245). Hence the fact that justice “no longer exists as a

category” (245).

Having considered Arendt’s critique—and recasting—of the traditional

theological and anti-theological discourse on God, the world, and man and its

political consequences, we shall now refer to what can be seen as the second

branch of her ‘deconstruction’ of the western tradition, as it originated not in

‘Jerusalem’ but in ‘Athens’.

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 Arendt’s Critique of Platonic Political Science

For a thinker who is often read as a “nostalgic” “neo-Aristotelian” or

“Grecophile” who suffered from “polis-envy,” Arendt showed remarkably little

interest in ancient Greece until late in her life.44 Even though Arendt famously

knew ancient Greek as a youth well enough to conduct her own Graeca (or Greek

Circles) when she was fifteen,45 the young “Pallas Athena” did not begin to study

and write about the classics until she was about forty-four years old. Not

surprisingly, then, when Arendt did turn to a sustained engagement with classical

philosophy, it was largely—but by no means exclusively—for the sake of locating

and confirming the origins of the ‘anti-political’ prejudices of western thought

that had led to the crises that culminated in totalitarianism.

Over the decades, Arendt returned to Plato more often than she did to any

other thinker in her notebooks. The reason seems to be simple. As she explained

in a letter to Kurt Blumenfeld in 1952, her project at the time was “[to read]

philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche in order to find out why the West never really

had a proper political philosophy; or the other way around, why the great tradition
44
For “Grecophile,” see Hannah Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the
Social (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant
Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), xxiv-xxv. For
“neo-Aristotelian,” see Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 596. For “polis-envy,” see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children:
Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 69.
45
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982), 32.

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falls mute when we ask our questions.”46 Plato, that is, had to be investigated in

order to trace the origins of the failed political philosophy that the west inherited.

Nevertheless, as I shall argue, her confrontation with Plato—especially insofar as

it was informed by Heidegger—led to her discovery of Socrates. This means that

Arendt implicitly saw that Plato points beyond him—back to Socrates. Her

reading of Plato thus testifies to a deep fascination with what he saw—in spite of

all that he missed or neglected.

Arendt began her reading of Plato with three primordially political

dialogues: Laws, Statesman, and Republic. Drawing on certain key passages, she

began to articulate a critique which can be divided into the following five

headings.

The question of a techne politike:

Its matter: classes or parts?

In one of her first entries on Plato, Arendt notes that in raising the question

concerning the difference between a ‘class’ (genos) and a ‘part’ (meros) Plato

pointed to a “core question of the theme: What is politics?”47 “Politics does not

have to do with gene [classes] but with mere [parts].” For, example, Arendt

46
Letter to Kurt Blumenfeld, October 14, 1952, in Arendt and Blumenfeld, “…in keinem Besitz
Verwurzelt,” 68. See also “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 316: the crisis of
the early nineteenth century came when a society “could no longer give an account of its
categories of understanding and standards of judgment when they were seriously challenged.”
47
See Plato, Statesman, 263 a.

332
suggests, it makes no sense to organize “women qua women.”48 “The mortal sin is

to display the meros as a genos: the concept of race.” “What is it, however, that

gives the meros its consistency without turning it into a genos?” (19)

The “consistency” of the political community is elusive. Arendt notes that

Plato correctly grasped the truth that the political community—“the ‘res publica’,

the koinon”—does not exist “prior to or even for a moment independently of [the]

mutual reliance [between human beings]” (26). “This truth,” Arendt claims, “was

completely buried over by Aristotle’s zoon politikon” (25). Indeed, time and again

Arendt would insist that one of the central prejudices of the western philosophical

tradition is “the assumption that there is something political in man that belongs

to his essence. This simply is not so; man is apolitical. Politics arises between

men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance.

Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships” (17).

The problem with Plato—as Arendt understands it in her reading of the

Statesman—is that he sought to bridge the common and individual goods in his

characterization of the statesman as the shepherd that gives each one his due.49

But such legislation, Arendt argues, is always inadequate “because it can never

take into account the individual, and thus reality as it really is” (19-20). Yet, of

course, Plato knew this, and in that sense he confirms Arendt’s point: “the nomos

48
This may be in reference to Statesman 262 e: “A better division, of course—one which forms a
true division into two distinct classes—would be to divide the human race into male and female.”
49
Arendt refers to the Platonic definition of the political art (techne) in the Statesman (276 b7) as
“care of the whole human community together … kingly rule over all human beings” (23).

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acts atechnos,” or “techne is better than nomos.” A techne politike is necessary—

even if highly problematical—because, as Plato puts it in one of the passages

Arendt extracts: “[legislation] could never accurately embrace what is best and

most just for all at the same time, and so prescribe what is best. For the

dissimilarities between human beings and their actions, and the fact that

practically nothing in human affairs ever remains stable, prevent any sort of

expertise whatsoever from making any simple decision in any sphere that covers

all cases and will last for all time” (Statesman, 294 b1-b5).

Its principle (arche): beginning or rule?

Platonic political science, according to Arendt, is affected by the prejudice that

“there must necessarily be rulers and ruled in cities.”50 There is “always [an]

incapacitation – i.e., a deprivation of the spontaneity of the other” (33). And yet,

Platonic political science also allows us to see that the essence of rule is the

capacity to begin. “Archai [is] not power, but: power to begin something, archein:

to found a new beginning” (28). Plato mistrusts democracy “because in it the

archai are dissipated among many” (28). Thus, according to Arendt, he also

praises tyranny on the grounds that “the tyrant need only make the beginning –

towards good or bad – and all will follow him” (33).51 Plato’s understanding of

50
Plato, Laws, 689 e. Cf. Plato, Protagoras, 226 d; Republic, 305 d; Aristoteles, Politics, III 13,
1283 b.
51
Cf. Plato, Laws, 711 b2 ff: “You’d see that if a tyrant wishes to change a city’s habitual ways,
he doesn’t need to exert great efforts or spend enormous amount of time. What he has to do is first
proceed himself, along the route he’d like the citizens to turn toward, whether it be toward the
practices of virtue or the opposite.”

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beginnings reveals his autocratic understanding of action: the beginning, for Plato,

is more than “half the whole deed”:52 “Beginning: as if one could determine the

progress [of the action (Fortgang)] in a similar way as in an ergon [action] that

one begins oneself” (36). Then again, Plato also understood that “the beginning,

which among human beings is established as god, is the savior of all things

(37).”53

Its origins: wonder at human affairs or all things?

Arendt often remarked that, as Plato was the first to note, philosophy originates in

admiring wonder “at that which is as it is.”54 However, this wonder has never

been directed primarily at human affairs, for it has privileged the things that are

by necessity over “the factual existence of disharmony, ugliness, evil.”55 This

52
Plato, Laws, 754 a.
53
Ibid., 775 e 2-3. See Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future:
Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1993 [1961]), 18 (hereafter BPF);
“Martin Heidegger at Eighty.” On the traditional understanding of acting as beginning from one,
as against “act[ing] in concert,” see DT, 207. On the duality of archein as beginning and rule, see
also DT, 206, 465, as well as Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Kohn (ed.), Essays, 321.
54
H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Part II: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978 [1971]), 21.
See also, e.g., “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” in Kohn (ed.),
Essays, 445; “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 40. See ibid. on the fate of philosophical
wonder in modern society (“‘socialized men’… have decided never to leave what to Plato was ‘the
cave’ of everyday human affairs, and never to venture on their own into a world and a life which,
perhaps, the ubiquitous functionalization of modern society has deprived of one of its most
elementary characteristics—the instilling of wonder at that which is as it is.”).
55
Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Part I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978 [1971]), 150
(no Platonic dialogue deals with the question of evil). See also Arendt, “Concern with Politics,”
445 (on the failure of philosophy to reflect on “the sheer horror of contemporary political events”);
Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” (in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 2003)), 181: Neither Plato nor Socrates “knew what to do
philosophically with this disturbing fact [that men can and do commit evil voluntarily].”
Denktagebuch, 234 (referring to Republic, 486a7-9: “To an understanding endowed with

335
view appears problematic in light of the fact that, at least, Socrates is said to have

wondered primarily, if not indeed exclusively, about human affairs.56 As for Plato

and Aristotle, one must also wonder, for it would seem that their inquiries began

and culminated with the question of the good; and in particular with the question

concerning the perfection of man, which is precisely not by necessity but rather

presupposes certain political conditions and a certain science of politics or of

human affairs.57

In her notebooks, far more than in her published writings, Arendt is

brought closer to the truth—or, we could say, to the complexity of Plato’s

position—by constraint of the ‘facts’ or of what Plato’s characters actually say.

Echoing what is arguably the central concern of Plato’s dialogues—“We are

discussing no trivial subject, but how a man should live”58—the Athenian

Stranger in the Laws claims to be investigating “the outline of ways of life … and

what characteristics we should incorporate if we are going to be carried through

this voyage of existence on the best way of life.”59 Arendt points to this passage

as indicative of “the philosopher’s basic approach to politics: he projects “the

magnificence and the contemplation of all time and all being, do you think it possible that human
life seem anything great?”); 456.
56
See Xenophon, Memorabilia, I 1, 11 and I 1, 16; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987 b 1-3; Plato,
Phaedrus, 229 e 5ff.; Phaedo, 99 e3.
57
See chapter four, note 51.
58
Plato, Rep., 352 d.
59
Plato, Laws, 803 a8–b3.

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outlines of way of life” – and yet for him [as the Athenian Stranger goes on to

note]: “the affairs of human beings are not worthy of great seriousness….”60

Arendt had notoriously little to say about ‘human affairs’ as they relate to

‘ways of life’. Yet her rejection of Platonic ‘soul-craft’ did not amount to political

disinterest in the question concerning “the essence of man.”61 Anticipating

Aristotle’s claim that students of politics must “know somewhat the facts about

the soul,”62 Socrates suggests in the Republic that “it is necessary that there also

be as many forms of human characters [anthropon eide] as there are forms of

regimes … Or do you suppose that the regimes arise ‘from an oak or rocks’ and

not from the dispositions [ethon] of the men in the cities, which, tipping the scale

as it were, draw the rest along with them?”63

Arendt’s basic critique of this way of thinking about politics is that instead

of speaking of “constitutions of the soul” as giving rise to different regimes or

political orders, one should speak of “basic experiences in living together” (235-

36). Thus Arendt argues, for example, that kingship as well as social-contract

theories generally rest on the experience of keeping promises (338), while, on the

opposite extreme, totalitarian domination “bases itself on loneliness, on the

60
“…yet it is necessary to be serious about them.” Ibid., 803 b 3-4.
61
See, e.g., OT, viii; DT, 236; “Understanding and Politics,” in EU, 321 (man as a being “whose
essence is beginning”).
62
Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 1.13.
63
Plato, Rep., 544 d7- e2.

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experience of not belonging to the world at all.”64 Arendt drew support for this

idea from Montesquieu, whose three forms of government—republican,

monarchic, and despotic—she argues, corresponded to the regimes originally

experienced by the Greeks, “namely: baseileia—polis—turannis,” which rested

respectively on “promising … law … [and] the will of one over all” (338).

Along with “basic experiences in living together,” Arendt would also draw

on Montesquieu to argue that forms of government rest on certain principles

“which makes [them] act,” or on certain “human passions that set [them] in

motion.”65 Thus, republics depend on “virtue” or “love of equality”; monarchies

on “honor” or “love of distinction”; aristocracies on “moderation” or “self-

discipline”; and despotic governments on “fear” or “terror” (152).

How is this explanation different from Plato’s? For Arendt the key

difference lies in the fact that Montesquieu’s understanding of man presupposes

plurality as the human condition—in other words, “not man but men inhabit this

earth”—whereas Plato’s does not. Or at least, so it seems, for example, when

Plato speaks of democracy as corresponding to a certain “aner demokratikos

[democratic man]” or of tyranny as corresponding to a “psuche turannike

[tyrannical soul]” (236). Thus, against what would seem to be Plato’s position,

64
OT, 475. See also DT, 350: the ruler-ruled relation rests on the experience of slavery (in
reference to Aristotle). See also HC, 202 (on the relation between isolation and tyranny).
65
DT, 152: Arendt refers to Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III, I: “There is this difference
between the nature of the government and its principle: its nature is that which makes it what it is,
and its principle, that which makes it act. The one is its particular structure, and the other is the
human passions that set it in motion.” Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited
by A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, H. S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.

338
Arendt insists that “all state-building passions—‘vertu’ or ‘passion de l’égalité’,

‘Honneur’ or ‘Passion de distinction’, ‘Crainte’ or ‘Passion de déstruction’…

never refer to human beings but to that which is common to those who live

together in [a] state” (152).66

We recall here that the same point was stressed by Hobbes, Heidegger,

and Strauss—namely, that the passions are intrinsically social or interpersonal,

that they cannot be understood but ‘politically’. Whether this could be said to be

yet another footnote to something Plato had already seen is hard to say exactly.

Arendt acknowledges this difficulty. Thus she writes that “the fact that Plato

speaks of the constitutions of the soul instead of the basic experiences in living

together is all the more astonishing since in fact he had already found

Montesquieu’s principle of ‘distinction’ as the principle of a monarchical

aristocracy—namely, insofar as the basileus [monarch] is characterized as

diapheron [outstanding or pre-eminent] among others, as Primus inter pares”

(235-36).

Its essence: technological?

66
“Alle staatsbildenden Pasionen … richten sich nie auf Menschen, sondern was den Menschen,
die zusammen in diesem Staat leben, gemeinsam ist” (DT, 152). On Montesquieu and principles
of government, see also HC, 190-91 n.17; OT, 467; “Montesquieu’s Revision of the Tradition,” in
PP, 63-70.

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Arendt’s interpretation of the Socratic-Platonic (and Sophistic) idea of politics as

an art (or techne) begins from the equivalence of politics with rule and rule with

technique: “Ruling=techne.” “Domination and technique [stand] in the closest

possible connection” (206). The very idea of techne—art, skill, device, craft,

cunning—Arendt suggests, is “from the beginning determined as dominating and

ruling” (207). “Political action counts as a form of practical going-about with the

world that is a knowing going-about when man proves to be master of things. This

seems to speak completely for Heidegger’s thesis that the concept of domination

is grounded in technology [in der Technik]” (206-7).67

Arendt’s version of the Heideggerian critique of technological thinking is

worth quoting in full as it captures both her critique of politics as fabrication and

of thinking as contemplation.

67
For the further development of these theses, see Arendt, “What is Authority?,” in BPF, 112 f.,
and 291, n.16 (where Arendt acknowledges her “indebted[ness] to Martin Heidegger’s great
interpretation of the cave parable…”). Arendt derives her conclusions in this case from Socrates’
response to Trasymachus’ thesis that the just is what benefits those who rule. “But,
Thrasymachus,” Socrates replies, “the arts rule and are masters of that of which they are arts.”
And this means that “there is no kind of knowledge that considers or commands the advantage of
the stronger, but rather of what is weaker and ruled by it” (Rep., 342 c8-9). (For instance, a doctor
considers not his advantage but that of the sick man.) Socrates’ claim indeed links a “knowing
going-about” with mastery and rule. But one cannot fail to note that at least in this case Arendt is
not being constrained by the facts to actually see them. For it is not Socrates but Thrasymachus
and Heidegger who (respectively) insist on the fact that politics is an exact science
(Thrasymachus) that is dominated by a ‘technological’ going about with things modeled on the
paradigm of production (Heidegger). As David Lachterman notes, “It is Trasymachus who uses
the Greek word for science or true knowledge, episteme, for the first time in The Republic” (144).
Through such a science Thrasymachus claims to show that “all rulers, under every sort of
constitution, are seeking their own benefit” (144). It is also Thrasymachus who insists that “the
legitimacy of the rulers’ authority derives from their supposed knowledge of what will genuinely
benefit them” (145-46); and on the idea that one must specify “ruler in the precise sense” thus
introducing the vocabulary of the crafts in the term “precision” (akribes) (147). Thrasymachus and
Socrates hold very similar views (even on the essence of justice as doing one’s own business) but
it is the task of the Republic precisely to inquire into these views dialectically. Here Arendt is
content with remaining at the level of Heidegger’s opinion it seems. References to Lachterman are
from his “What is ‘The Good’ of Plato’s Republic?,” St. John's Review 39 (1989–1990): 139–71.

340
 The Roman fundamental experience [Grunderfahrung] is to found and to
preserve; this lead to tradition and authority in western politics. The Greek
fundamental experience is beginning (archein) and carrying-through (or
completing: zu-ende-führen; prattein). This had no consequences at all
because from so early on, due to the extraordinary talent of the people, the
experience of fabricating (poiein) suppressed all other experiences. Both
archein and prattein are always judged in Greek philosophy from the
experience of poiesis—either of [poiesis as] the fabrication of art, in which
case politics is techne of ruling, or of [poiesis as] contemplation [namely,
the contemplation that] sees the idea instead of realizing it, in which case
politics is only what makes contemplation possible (364-65).

The primary example Arendt discusses of Plato’s understanding of the relation

between contemplation and politics is the “idea of the good” as “the cause of all

that is right and fair in everything.” Of this “idea” Plato’s Socrates famously

claims that “the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see

it.”68 According to Arendt, this notion illustrates, first of all, the technical

conception of politics—in short: “Praxis under the idea of the good as production

of the bed under the idea of bed.” Second, it illustrates how praxis is understood

from an experience that is foreign to it (namely, that of contemplation or theoria):

“Praxis in the cave under the view from something that does not exist in the

cave.”69 Third, here “the same ‘idea’ [is used] for public and private! The

68
Plato, Rep., 517 c 4-5.
69
Arendt adopts Heidegger’s commentary on this: “Whoever wants to act and has to act in a world
determined by ‘the ideas’ needs, before all else, a view of the ideas.” Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s

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moralization of politics.” Fourth, this is the “emergence of omoiosis, of

assimilation, because something outside the cave must be applied to conditions

within it.” This leads to the “identification of aletheia [truth] with orthotes

[correctness]” (455). Fifth, it shows the necessary transformation of politics into

rule: “This idea turns then in the political realm into law that commands and that

is executed by those who have power” (455).70

Its measure: the good, the beautiful?

Arendt’s understanding of the Platonic techne politike as domination—ultimately

of the philosophical few over the many—hinges on a particular interpretation of

the Platonic forms or ideas, and in particular of the Platonic idea of the good.

Arendt distinguishes between Plato’s philosophical understanding of the ideas and

its political application. Philosophically, Arendt understands idea as “true

appearance (eidos)” (465) or as “the real essences” of things (465). As for the

idea of the good, Arendt understands it (with Heidegger) as “the expedient (das

Taugliche),” and hence as an “always already ‘practically’ oriented idea” which is

Doctrine of Truth,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998): 155-182, 176.
70
For two brilliant studies that depart from the Heideggerian and Arendtian ‘destruction’ of the
traditional understanding of theoretical rule as domination see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger On
Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros and R. Schürmann
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), as well as Ernst Vollrath, “Politik und
Metaphysik. Zum Politischen Denken Hannah Arendts,” Zeitschrift fur Politik,” XVIII, n. 3
(1971): 207-32. See also the important study of Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of
the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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also “morally indifferent” (457).71 From this perspective, the idea of the good

would be “the idea of ideas” because it is the most capable of “making possible

the appearing in all its visibility, of everything present.” “For this reason Plato

calls the agathon also tu ontos to phanotaton ([Republic] 518 c9), that which most

shines (the most able to shine of beings).”72

Arendt argues that Plato modified his philosophical understanding of the

ideas for political purposes. “Plato wanted to establish the rule of the ideas, of

true appearance (eidos) over perspectives [Ansichten] (doxa)” (465).73 In order to

do this, “it appeared to him completely self-evident to place the ideas as causes

(and not only as the real essences) of the real [des Wirklichen]” (465). Hence the

notion that the idea of the good is the “cause” [aitia] of all that is right [orthon]

and fair [kalon] in everything.” As causes of things, the ideas could then

legitimately be elevated to the rank of measures, rules, or standards. This required

a further and more specific transformation of the good from a morally indifferent

and practical idea to the “idea of ideas” and “highest,” “most shining” idea. In so

71
See Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” 174: “In Greek thought to agathon means that
which is capable of something and enables another to be capable of something.” Cf. Aristotle
(Met. 1021 b 20) who speaks of “a good thief and a good slanderer.”
72
Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” 175: “The essence of every idea certainly consists in
making possible and enabling the shining that allows a view of the visible form.” Idea or eidos
means “visible form.” But this ‘visible form’ is not a mere ‘aspect’. “For [Plato] the ‘visible form’
has in addition something of a ‘stepping forth’ whereby a thing ‘presents’ itself … According to
Plato, if people did not have these ‘ideas’ in view, that is to say, the respective ‘appearance’ of
things—living beings, humans, numbers, gods—they would never be able to perceive this or that
as a house, as a tree, as a god” (164).
73
What is decisive here, according to Arendt, is that the role of beginning no longer lies in man.
“As one can see in the Nomoi, for Plato the rule of philosophers was an emergency measure
[Notbehelf] which he gave up when he discovered in the laws an instrument through which one
could bring the ideas to rule directly” (DT, 465).

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doing Plato gave to the good the attributes of the beautiful—namely, both what

shines in itself and, above all, what is precisely not a measure of practical

expediency but is completely independent and ‘without why’ (Zwecklos) (457).74

“Plato took the idea of the Good (instead of the beautiful) on political grounds and

determined it then in the categories (phainesthai) that pertain to the idea of the

beautiful on philosophical grounds. Thus he brought philosophy into politics and

politics into philosophy. The result was: morality” (457).75

Platonic political science and modern nihilism

As we have seen, Arendt turned to the tradition of political philosophy to trace the

origins of the modern crises that culminated in totalitarianism and to conceive of

an alternative political philosophy. While she rejected the view that

74
Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, 80: “The ekphanestaton, what properly shows itself and is most
radiant of all, is the beautiful.”
75
Compare Arendt, The Human Condition, 226. See also “Religion and Politics,” EU, 381 ff. For
the further consequences, see DT, 500: “If Plato had determined the idea of the kalon as the
highest idea out of the kalon kagathon, such as actually corresponded to the essence of the
doctrine of the ideas, we would probably never have heard of standards [or measures: Masstaben]
that are necessary to all judging and even of highest standards and then too of standards for
judging the beautiful. For only the expedient [das Taugliche] is judged by standards, and not
absolute but … functional [ones]. What is not good for something cannot be measured according
to standards.” Instead the idea seems to be to base morality on ‘taste’: In moral taste I choose
conduct, not acts, the principles of acts, not goals. I decide how I want to appear. Inwardly I am a
coward, but courageous deeds please me (801). One can well think of a case of someone who has
bad inclinations (Neigungen) yet good taste: he doesn’t follow his instinct because he does not like
what he would do. This is to have a ‘bad conscience’: I did something that I do not like (794).

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totalitarianism could be explained as a result of a flawed philosophy,76 she did

suggest that western philosophy was “not altogether innocent,” “perhaps” insofar

as “[it] has never had a clear concept of what constitutes the political.”77

Arendt devoted several writings to the problem of tracing what she called

the ‘high road’ to totalitarianism, specially in Marxist thought. From these

inquiries what concerns us is not so much how traditional thought prepared or

otherwise made possible the modern crises, but how it made visible a crisis in the

very idea of political philosophy as it originated in Plato, thus requiring us to

rethink its roots.

The meaning of the crisis has already emerged from Arendt’s critique of

modern secularism as leading to worldlessness—a condition she describes in such

terms as “the withering away of everything between us”; the ‘dedivinization’ of

the world; the absence of truth or the loss of faith in the truth-revealing capacity

of the senses; the ‘blasphemy’ of conceiving ourselves as our own creators or as

the judges of our own history. Throughout her writings and lectures Arendt also

referred to the crisis in Nietzschean terms as a consummation of nihilism in which

“no standards are possible, everything is permitted,”78 God has been sacrificed for

76
See, e.g., “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” EU, 405: “I proceed from facts and events instead of
intellectual affinities and influences”; “Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 26 f.
77
Letter to Jaspers of March 4, 1951, in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 166.
78
Courses---University of California, Berkeley, Calif.---“History of Political Theory,” lectures---
Introduction---1955, p. 23952. Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

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nothing,79 the quest for meaning has been given up,80 and everything that is given

to us is denied.81

A nihilistic world is one in which the Platonic quest for standards and

truth has been abandoned:

If there is no God that makes the ideai available, there is also no truth. The
craftsman then no longer fabricates things according to their being-true
[gemäss ihrem Wahrsein] but according to their use… (Here it becomes
apparent that the consequential vulgarization of the world into a world of
ends [Zweckwelt] can only arise when the Platonic worldview is no longer
valid.) (133)82

Crucially, however, the Platonic worldview is no longer valid—paradoxically—

because Platonism has triumphed or because it has become part of our

commonsense understanding of things, or because—to use Strauss’s terms—the

79
DT, 140. For an early statement of the early 1930s to this effect see H. Arendt and Günther
Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature, ed. by Susannah
Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-24, 23.
80
Promise of Politics, 204 (on anti-nihilistic questions, e.g., Why is there anybody rather than
nobody?); “Understanding and Politics,” EU, 316-17; LMT, 62.
81
“Tradition and the Modern Age,” BPF, 34.
82
For the opposite argument see Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 164: what is truly nihilistic
according to Arendt (in Villa’s view) is the “investment in transcendent standards and ultimate
grounds,” or the habit of legitimating action and judgment via the appeal to such standards (162).
Cf. Arendt, Introduction into Politics, in PP: the modern crisis is not the nihilism that results from
the “failure of standards”: this presupposes that human beings can render judgments only if they
have standards (103). See also LMT, 176: The danger does not arise from the assertion that an
unexamined life is not worth living, but out of the desire to find results that would make further
thinking unnecessary.

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necessity and possibility of political philosophy has been taken for granted.83 This

is a thesis which Heidegger developed in his lectures on Nietzsche first delivered

in 1936-37. These lectures had a decisive impact on Arendt as well as Strauss.84

In order to see why it is necessary to briefly refer to them, specially insofar as

they shed further light on Heidegger as a political philosopher.

83
See, e.g., Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” EU, 382: “Since the truth of the ideas is self-evident,
the true standards for earthly life can never be satisfactorily argued out and demonstrated.”
84
Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche (1936-46) were only published in 1961. However, Arendt
had access to (at least) the transcript of the WS, 1936/37 lectures which is preserved in the
Marbach archives. (See the editors’ note at DT, 951.) For references to the lectures in her
correspondence, see the letter to Jaspers of September, 29, 1949 (in Arendt and Jaspers,
Correspondence, 142), and to Blücher of May 22 and 28, 1961 (in Hannah Arendt and Heinrich
Blücher, Within Four Walls. The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher,
ed. Lotte Kohler, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Hacourt, 1996), 373; 375-76). Strauss
apparently knew of the Nietzsche lectures through Löwith. In a letter of December 13, 1960
Strauss thanks him “for the information regarding Heidegger’s Nietzsche” and reports that “I
myself feel now more strongly than before the attraction exercised by Heidegger.” On March 15,
1962, Strauss reports to be “reading Heidegger’s book while preparing myself for a seminar on
Beyond Good and Evil” (GS3, 685-86). “The point which Heidegger learned from Nietzsche and
which he could not have learned from any other philosopher is: ‘There is no Without;’ i.e., there
cannot be ‘objectivity’ in the last analysis. From this point of view ‘nature’ is no longer possible
except as postulated in the critical moment, and eternal returns as Nietzsche understands it
primarily is nature qua being through being postulated” (GS3, 686). Strauss also claims that “I
agree with Heidegger against you concerning the subordinate status of the issue of Christianity as
distinguished from Platonism. I believe that the preface to Beyond Good and Evil is decisive in
this respect” (GS3, 686). On April 2, 1962 Strauss writes that “I do not understand the
‘Seinsgeschichte’ but many things [Heidegger] presents under this heading are intelligible to me
and some of them are in my opinion very profound insights. Especially he has cleared up
wonderfully the relation between science, art and the will to power. On the other hand I believe
that what he says about the apriori in Plato and particularly on the idea of the good is simply
wrong” (GS3, 688). Finally, Strauss suggests that Heidegger is “infinitely superior to everyone
else” in that he sees that the modern criticism of classical principles is “partly justified.” (The
letter says “infinitely inferior” but as Meier points out, this is most likely a mistake of the
secretary to whom Strauss dictated his letters.) (GS3, 688)

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 Heidegger’s critique of Platonic political science in the Nietzsche lectures

In the mid-1930s Heidegger argued that our age is essentially determined by the

consummation of Platonic metaphysics in Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to

power. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power is nihilism proper85—and it is

not a haphazard occurrence but a “gathering” or “completion” (I, 4) of the entire

history of western thought that begins with Plato. Nietzsche’s thought finally

exhausts “the essential possibilities of metaphysics” in a final reversal of

Platonism (IV, 148).

By metaphysics Heidegger means the differentiation of beings and Being

(IV, 154 f.), and specifically the determination of Being as “the universal in

beings” (IV, 156), which means that “of Being itself nothing further can be

predicated” (IV, 157): “metaphysics always affirms that Being is the most

universal and therefore emptiest concept.” Insofar as metaphysics is “the

determination of the truth of beings as a whole and of the essence of such truth”

(IV, 100), it is the grounds of an age.86 Our age, Heidegger argued, is determined

by the metaphysics of subjectivity. Man is “the relational center of that which is

as such.” To be means to be represented by a subject, and truth is the “certainty of

85
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. IV, 203. (Hereafter cited in parentheses.)
86
See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115:
“[m]etaphysics grounds an age” holding “complete dominion over all the phenomena that
distinguish the age.”

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[this] representing.”87 Such a metaphysics culminates in Nietzsche—in the

“absolute subjectivity of will to power” (IV, 147). For an age dominated by it,

“nothing else is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions”; all

beings are reckoned “according to the basic value of will to power”; “in general

the being as such is interpreted after the fashion of human Being” (IV, 85).

Nihilism reigns in the age of the metaphysics of subjectivity insofar as we are

indifferent to ‘Being’ and take ourselves to be ‘unconditioned’ (IV, 195 f.) thus

making man the measure, center, and ground of all being (II, 29).88

What does this have to do with Platonic political science? The answer is

contained in the claim that “we today think exclusively in ‘ideas’ and ‘values’”

(IV, 166), or that for us “appeal to ‘ideas’ and ‘values’ and their positing

constitute the most familiar and most intelligible framework for interpreting the

world and for guiding one’s life” (IV, 195). ‘Ideas’, of course, reminds us of

Plato, and ‘values’ of Nietzsche (IV, 195). Heidegger argued that Plato took the

decisive step of the history of western metaphysics by making the idea of the

good the ruling idea. The Good in Plato’s Republic is literally “sovereign” in that

87
Ibid., 127. “What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is
in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth” (129-130). This
modern understanding of the world stands in sharp contrast to the earlier medieval and particularly
ancient Greek conceptions. Greek being-in-the-world, Heidegger argues, is dominated by a
consciousness of the power and fullness of Being which remains concealed as a mystery: “That
which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it. … Rather,
man is the one who is looked upon by that which is … Greek man is as the one who apprehends
that which is, and this is why in the age of the Greeks the world cannot become picture” (131).
(German version in Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 3rd ed., 1957),
84.)
88
On ‘conditionlessness’, see also IV, 146.

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it is “‘above and beyond even Being in worth and power’” (IV, 168 f.).89 The idea

of the Good, which takes the sun as its image, makes beings “come to presence

into the unconcealed” (IV, 168). Indeed, the Good, which for the Greeks and for

Plato means “the suitable, what is good for something and itself makes something

else worthwhile … make[s] the being as such possible…” (IV, 169). Thus, even

though Plato cannot be taken to be the first philosopher of ‘values’, he does

prepare a form of thinking for which the condition of possibility of beings—and

hence what is to count as ‘being’ at all—is made to depend on our (subjective and

‘valuational’) representing. Metaphysics—the differentiation of Being and

beings—thus assumes several forms: from pre-Platonic physis to the Platonic idea

to Aristotle’s energeia, the history of the progressive forgetfulness of the mystery

of being leads through “Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will

to power,” to Nietzsche’s “Will to Will.”90

Nietzsche’s philosophy is the last act of the history of the modern

subjectivization of metaphysics. In accord with this movement, his philosophy is

a “conscious act of reversal”—“the only one that is real; that is, appropriate to

subjectivity” (IV, 148). Nietzsche’s philosophy is (in his own words) “an

inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the

89
See Plato, Rep. 517 c. For an earlier statement of the same thesis dating back to 1929, see
Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, 124.
90
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 66.

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better it is” (I, 154).91 Having realized the subjective ground of all human order

and meaning, “Nietzsche conceives the whole of Western philosophy as a

thinking in values and a reckoning with values, as value positing” (IV, 69).92

What is most important in this analysis for our purposes is, first, the

diagnosis of ‘European nihilism’ that Heidegger, Arendt, and (as one could also

show) Strauss share as centered on its anthropocentrism or—we could also say—

its humanism and the denial of the ‘given’—namely, not only of the ‘true world’

of God, Being, First Principles and Causes or Ideas but of the world of

appearances, and of the difference between them.93 Of particular importance for

us in Heidegger’s diagnosis is, secondly, the implicit critique of the idea of a

political science or philosophy, which Arendt and Strauss also shared.

This critique of ‘political science’ can be seen in two ways. Even though

Heidegger does not make this explicit, there is in the philosophy of history he

91
“…during the last years of his creative life [Nietzsche] labors at nothing else than the
overturning of Platonism.” “For Platonism, the Idea, the supersensuous, is the true.” For Nietzsche
“The true is the sensuous. That is what ‘positivism’ teaches” (I, 154).
92
“Properly thought, the revaluation carried out by Nietzsche does not consist in the fact that he
posits new values in the place of the highest values hitherto, but that he conceives of ‘Being’,
‘purpose’, and ‘truth’ as values and only as values” (IV, 69). “…Nietzsche’s metaphysics is
nihilism proper. This implies not only that Nietzsche’s nihilism does not overcome nihilism but
also that it can never overcome it. For it is precisely in the positing of new values from the will to
power, by which and through which Nietzsche believes he will overcome nihilism, that nihilism
first proclaims that there is nothing to Being itself, which has now become a value” (IV, 203). See
also Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 251: “it is important finally to realize that precisely
through the characterization of something as a ‘value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth …
thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being.”
93
LMT, 10-11. Cf. L. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” in RCPR, 243-44 where Strauss refers to the
“anthropocentric character” of modern thought for which “all truths, or all meaning, all order, all
beauty, originate in the thinking subject, in human thought, in man.” Strauss refers to Hobbes:
“‘We know only what we make’”; Kant: “‘Understanding prescribes nature its laws’”; and
Leibniz: “‘I have discovered a spontaneity, little known previously, of the monads of the
thoughts’.” On the modern idea that ‘we know only what we make’, see also NRH, 172-77.

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sketches in the form of a ‘history of Being’ an implicit history of philosophy as

determined ‘politically’ in certain key stages—first in Plato’s elevation of the idea

of the Good to sovereign status; second, in the claim that “‘power’ in its correctly

understood modern meaning—that is, as will to power—first becomes

metaphysically possible as modern history” “roughly since Machiavelli” (IV,

98)94—and finally in Nietzsche’s own understanding of philosophy as legislation

or as will to power.

The other way to see Heidegger’s implicit critique of political science

relates to the actual development of philosophy as ‘political philosophy’ on the

eve of the twentieth century.95

We recall here that one of the consequences of the rise of positivism in the

nineteenth century was a turn to various forms of philosophizing that can be

designated as ‘political’ insofar as their aim was to secure and orient the culture of

the nation or to guarantee its autonomy from various forms of naturalism (e.g.,

materialism or Darwinism). Nietzsche’s philosophy, in other words, was not the

only form of value philosophy, nor was it the only philosophy that understood its

primary task to be legislation, or that understood itself to be grounded in practical

faith and the will to truth. To see this somewhat more specifically, we must

94
See also IV, 165: where Heidegger refers to Nietzsche as a ‘Roman’ (and not Greek) thinker: for
the thinker of the will to power the only essential figure among the Greeks was Thucydides; cf.
also Vol. 1, 7 (on Nietzsche as Roman).
95
As Heidegger stresses, the fact that the talk of values and will and legislation (or man as a
lawgiver) dominates not only Nietzsche’s philosophy down to his metaphysics but also the
philosophy of his time is not a mere coincidence. In fact, value philosophy exerted the same power
over Heidegger’s own thought as a youth (see chapter one).

352
briefly refer to the goals of the main schools of philosophizing at the turn of the

century.96

Neo-Kantianism in one of its variants saw its task as the teaching of

“Weltanschauung” understood as an “orientation and goal for our position

towards the world and for our willing and acting.”97 In another variant, it meant to

“bring to light the norms which give value and validity to all thinking”98 in a

quest for “normative thinking” (in science), “normative willing” (in ethics) and

“normative feeling” (in aesthetics).99 In a third variant its aim was to work out and

purify the unity of reason [logos] in the work of culture, in its different provinces

of science, ethics, art, and religion.100 Husserl’s philosophy as ‘rigorous science’

was meant to “satisfy the highest theoretical needs and in regard to ethics and

religion render possible a life regulated by pure rational norms.”101 Finally,

Dilthey’s philosophy of life (at least in Heidegger’s understanding) engaged in

96
According to Strauss, “There existed at the end of the First World War three significant
academic positions … neo-Kantianism of the school of Marburg, Dilthey’s philosophy of life, and
phenomenology.” “Kurt Riezler,” in WPP, 241 f.
97
The essential means for this purpose was to be the study of history and specifically the history
of culture which could provide the material for the knowledge of value, that is, of the ideal goals
towards which humanity has striven and for which human beings have stood for. H. Rickert,
“Vom Begriff der Philosophie,” Logos 1 (1910/11), 6.
98
Wilhelm Windelband, Immanuel Kant. Zur Säkularfeier seiner Philosophie (Vortrag) 1881, in:
Präludien I, 5. Aufl., 139. Cited in Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2.
Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: V.
Klostermann, [1919] 1987), 144.
99
Wilhelm Windelband, Immanuel Kant, 139, cited in Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung Der
Philosophie: 2, 145.
100
Paul Natorp, “Kant und die Marburger Schule,” Kant-Studien, 17 (1912):193-221, 196-197.
101
E. Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Quentin Lauer (ed.), Phenomenology and the
Crisis of Philosophy, 71.

353
research into the history of cultural formations in order to attain “a consciousness

of consciousness,” or “a knowing of knowing” ultimately also with the aim of

giving norms to life.102

Heidegger’s project emerged as a response to the crisis of these forms of

normative philosophizing, which, much in accord with the Platonic idea of a

techne politike, understood philosophy as the art of giving rules to life.103

First and most importantly, Heidegger argued, this project is

fundamentally deficient insofar as in seeking to secure and orient human

existence philosophy from Plato to Husserl has forgotten to examine human

existence itself, and hence precisely the being “from out of which and for the sake

of which, philosophy ‘is’.”104 “There is no inquiry into what it is; instead, the idea

102
Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks: Theorie der philosophischen
Begriffsbildung. GA 59 (Frankfurt, a. M.: Klostermann, [1920] 1993), 154 (see also 153).
According to Eduard Spranger: “All of us–Rickert, the phenomenologists, the movement
associated with Dilthey—meet up with one another in the great struggle for the timeless in the
historical or beyond the historical, for the realm of meaning and its historical expression in a
concrete developed culture, for a theory of values which leads beyond the merely subjective
toward the objective and the valid.” Cited in Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität,
GA 63 (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, [1923] 1988), 33. (However, Heidegger adds that
this is not true of Dilthey.) The being investigated is being-available, present, “cultural
transformation and variation which are present” (ibid., 34).
103
Cf. M. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2, GA 56/57, 18. Heidegger’s early
critique was already aimed against “the Gegensatzformel wissenschaftliche Philosophie –
Weltanschauungsphilosophie,” which stands for the “Struktur der philosophischen Problematik,
wie sie seit Plato die Philosophie … beherrscht.” See Heidegger, Phänomenologie der
Anschauung, GA 59, 9-12.
104
M. Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 2.

354
of humanity and the concept of the human being are left in a routine sort of

contingency.”105

A techne politike is problematic, secondly, because of the ‘facticity’ and

‘historicity’ of individual existence:

Philosophy has no mission to take care of universal humanity and culture,

to release coming generations once and for all from care about
questioning, or to interfere with them simply through wrongheaded claims
to validity. Philosophy is what it can be only as a philosophy of ‘its time’.
For what Dasein happens to encounter itself … cannot be calculated and
worked out in advance and is not a matter for universal humanity or for a
public, but rather is in each case the definite and decisive possibility of
concrete facticity.”106

A final problem is that, at least in the most extreme expression of philosophizing

thus conceived (Heidegger has in mind Husserl), “…the possibility of a concrete

ethical life is made dependent upon the presence of an ethics as an absolutely

binding science…”107 “The theme is consciousness and, indeed, the lawfulness of

every possible behavior … in such a way that a thoroughgoing and absolutely

objective normative determination of the entire existence of humanity is attained.”

Yet “[t]he sense of the norm and normative lawfulness cannot be established as

long as one does not envision what type of being is meant by a normatively
105
M. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 66 (see also 68).
106
Heidegger, Ontology, 15.
107
Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 62.

355
determined and determinable being. The possibility of normativity cannot be

explained without being investigated as normativity for something…”108

108
Ibid., 63.

356
 Political philosophy: Out of the sources of Socrates and Heidegger?

Like Heidegger and Strauss, Arendt turned to classical political philosophy to find

the origins of the metaphysical tradition that dominates western thought and to

search for an alternative beginning. While the later Heidegger went back to the

pre-Socratics and famously claimed that “[t]he tragedies of Sophocles … preserve

the ethos in their sagas more primordially than Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics’,”109

the young Heidegger, as we saw, was a careful student of Aristotle’s ethical

works. Insofar as Aristotle’s task was to complete the “philosophy of human

affairs” pioneered by Socrates, I argued, Heidegger’s exceedingly careful reading

of Aristotle led—albeit unintentionally—to a rediscovery of Socrates.

Did Hannah Arendt see this? I shall argue that she did, and that her

conception of an alternative ‘political philosophy’ grows out of a ‘Socrates’ that

embodies the type of thinking that led Strauss to claim that modern philosophy

leads (with Heidegger) to the point where Socrates begins. Perhaps the clearest

indications of this are, on the one hand, her adoption of the Heideggerian premise

that Socrates was “the purest thinker of the West”—a premise she would develop

in her own political direction—and, on the other hand, her critique of Heidegger’s

turn to the pre-Socratics.110 The consensus in the literature, however, is that, if

109
M. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 256.
110
See LMW, 22-23: “It is as though at the very end, the thinkers of the modern age escaped into a
‘land of thought’ (Kant) where their own specifically modern preoccupations—with the future,

357
anything, Arendt saw Socrates as a kind of antidote to Heidegger, and specifically

to Heidegger’s Platonism. Before turning to Arendt’s understanding of Socratic

political philosophy it will hence be necessary to refer to this critique.

Margaret Canovan argues that Arendt wavered between two models “for

the political implications of philosophical thought”—between Heidegger and

Socrates.111 “When Arendt is focusing on Plato or Heidegger she is inclined to

fear that philosophy is intrinsically solitary, anti-political and sympathetic to

coercion, whereas when she concentrates on Socrates or Jaspers she is tempted to

believe that true philosophy may be communicative and in harmony with free

politics.”112 Canovan argues that to the extent that Arendt draws on Heidegger to

think politically, it is the late Heidegger she relies on—namely a Heidegger for

whom “thinking is as endless and inconclusive a business as political discussion

itself” and for whom, more specifically, “philosophy does not establish or seek for

truth.”113

Canovan’s argument is based on extensive familiarity with Arendt’s

writings, but is lacking in evidence concerning Heidegger’s thought. To remain

with what she says about Arendt, the fact is that while she indeed feared that

philosophic thought as practiced by Heidegger is dangerously solitary, anti-

with the Will as the mental organ for it, and with freedom as a problem—had been non-existent
[viz the pre-Socratics], where, in other words, there was no notion of a mental faculty that might
correspond to freedom as the faculty of thinking corresponding to truth.”
111
Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 270.
112
Ibid., 264.
113
Ibid., 268, 273.

358
political and sympathetic to coercion, she also said that Heidegger’s thought could

serve as a response to such problems.114 As for Arendt’s reliance on the later

Heidegger whose thinking does not “seek for truth,” this too is an overly general

claim that can be confirmed or refuted without any clear consequences.115

114
Concerning the solitariness of philosophical thinking and its political dangers, see, e.g., “What
is Existenz Philosophy?,” in EU, esp. 181: “what emerges from this absolute isolation [of
authentic existence as conceived by Heidegger] is a concept of the Self as the total opposite of
man”; “the concept of the self is a concept of man that leaves the individual existing independent
of humanity and representative of no one but himself—of nothing but his own nothingness. If
Kant’s categorical imperative insisted that every human act had to bear responsibility for all of
humanity, then the experience of guilty nothingness insists on precisely the opposite: the
destruction in every individual of the presence of all humanity.” See also “Martin Heidegger at
Eighty,” 157: “In its essential isolation from the world, thinking always deals only with what is
absent.” “Seen from the vantage of the residence of thinking, the ‘withdrawal from being’ or the
‘oblivion of being’ do in fact reign around it in the ‘usual order of everyday human affairs’. It is
the withdrawal of what thinking (which, in accordance with its nature, pays attention to what is
absent) has to deal with. The sublation of this ‘withdrawal’ always means a withdrawal from the
world of human affairs, even when thinking thinks about such affairs themselves in its own
secluded silence (158). Yet a few years later Arendt would also argue the opposite—viz., that
Heidegger’s thought makes it possible for the first time to think plurality, and in a way, ‘political
philosophy’. See, e.g., “Concern with Politics,” in EU, 443: “…because Heidegger defines human
existence as being-in-the-world, he insists on giving philosophic significance to structures of
everyday life that are completely incomprehensible if man is not primarily understood as being
together with others.” Concerning the anti-political bias of philosophy see Ibid., 432-33: the new
philosophical concern with politics “does not proceed unequivocally. Thus we find the old
hostility of the philosopher toward the polis in Heidegger’s analyses of average everyday life in
terms of das Man … in which the public realm has the function of hiding reality and preventing
even the appearance of truth.” Then again: “[Heidegger’s] phenomenological descriptions offer
most penetrating insights into one of the basic aspects of society and, moreover, insist that these
structures of human life are inherent in the human condition as such, from which there is no
escape into an ‘authenticity’ which would be the philosopher’s prerogative.” Finally, as regards
the coercive character of truth, it must be recalled that, according to Arendt herself, it was
Heidegger who saw this problem most clearly in his critique of “Plato’s doctrine of truth.”
Arendt’s judgment of Heidegger changed radically over the years. To understand her response it is
necessary to take a broader view of the movement of both Heidegger’s and her own thought—as
well as of alternative responses—as this study attempts to do. Perhaps the clearest evidence of
Arendt’s inconsistent judgment on Heidegger is what she once said to a student of Paul Tillich
who was doing research on Heidegger: “I have to warn you from my Existentialism essay,
especially from the part about Heidegger, which not only is inadequate [unangemessen], but also
in part simply false. Please simply forget about that.” See Antonia Grünenberg, Hannah Arendt
und Martin Heidegger: Geschichte Einer Liebe (Munich: Piper, 2006), 267.
115
As Arendt points out, Heidegger “has laid out quite a network of … thought paths … [and]
understandably, only one immediate result was heeded, and it led to a school of thought: he caused
the structure of traditional metaphysics, in which nobody had felt at ease for quite some time
anyway, to collapse. … This is a historical matter, perhaps even of the first order, but it need not

359
 Jacques Taminiaux makes a more compelling case which probes deeper

into Heidegger’s early thought and Arendt’s response. Since a discussion of

Taminiaux’s studies of Arendt and Heidegger which extend over various writings

is impossible here, it will have to suffice to refer to the following three points he

makes with regards to Arendt’s Socrates as a response to Heidegger.

First, whereas the young Heidegger Arendt knew from the 1924/25

lectures on Plato’s Sophist “supports the [Platonic] opposition aletheia-doxa

[truth-opinion], Arendt’s whole effort is to contest its pertinence.”116 Thus, Arendt

argues that Socrates’ impulse was radically different from Plato’s: “[t]he

opposition of truth and opinion was certainly the most anti-Socratic conclusion

that Plato drew from Socrates’ trial.”117 Socrates’ impulse was to “make the city

more truthful by delivering each of the citizens of their truths … not by destroying

concern those of us who are outside all past and present guilds” (153). The claim that Arendt was
closer to the later Heidegger presumes Arendt’s affinity with ‘anti-foundationalism’ or ‘post-
metaphysics’, but, as our discussion has shown, this is too simple a way of characterizing her
thought. Cf., e.g., Canovan’s view that “[Arendt] was an ‘anti-foundationalist’ long before the
term came into use, doing her thinking ‘without a bannister’, convinced of what Rorty has called
‘the priority of democracy to philosophy’” (278). (This is not to deny that Arendt’s statements
make possible such characterizations. See, e.g., LMT, 212: “I have clearly joined the ranks of
those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics…” (212).)
116
J. Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres à Heidegger,” in Sillages phénoménologiques: Auditeurs et
lecteurs de Heidegger (Bruxelles; Paris: Editions Ousia, 2002), 69-90, 74. In the 1924/25 lecture
on Plato’s Sophist Heidegger argued that the “genuine impulse of the spiritual work of Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle” was the conquest of a life dedicated to aletheuein, that is to say, to
“disclos[ing], to remov[ing] the world from concealedness and coveredness,” against a life guided
by doxadzein or the formation of opinions which when “repeated over and over…[have] the
consequence that what was originally disclosed comes to be covered up again.” M. Heidegger,
Plato’s Sophist, 12; 11.
117
H. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research, Vol. 57, No. 1, 1990: 73-103, 79: “In
the process of reasoning out the implications of Socrates’ trial, Plato arrived both at his concept of
truth as the very opposite of opinion and at his notion of a specifically philosophical form of
speech, dialegesthai, as the opposite of persuasion and rhetoric. Aristotle takes these distinctions
and oppositions as a matter of course…”

360
doxa or opinion, but on the contrary [by revealing] doxa in its own truthfulness.”

Socrates’ method was “dialegesthai, talking something through,” and thus to the

extent that “the quintessence of the Sophists’ teaching consisted in the dyo logoi

… Socrates was the greatest Sophist of them all.”118

Second, Heidegger “considered that … the ‘spiritual work of Socrates,

Plato and Aristotle’ consisted in one and the same task: ‘the struggle against

rhetoric and sophistry’.”119 For Arendt, by contrast, Socrates was not only “the

greatest Sophist of them all”120 but his Apology was “one of [the] great examples

[of rhetoric],” that is to say, of “the art of persuasion, the highest, the truly

political art.”121

Third, Heidegger “would not cease to repeat” the thesis that “the true

philosopher is the best politician.” Specifically, in 1924/25, Taminiaux argues, he

does not fail to “make it appear that he pacts with the Platonic notion of the

philosopher-king.”122

118
Ibid., 81, 85.
119
Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 74 citing Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 11.
120
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 85.
121
Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 76, 74.
122
Thus, in a statement that sums up Heidegger’s attempt at debunking the prejudice that sophia
(or philosophical wisdom) is the highest expression of knowledge (as against phronesis, or
practical wisdom) we read the following: “Phronesis in itself claims, as we said, to be the highest
mode of human knowledge, namely insofar as one can say that it is the gravest of all knowledge,
since it is concerned with human existence itself …. Sophia may indeed deal with the … highest
beings; but these beings are not ones that concern man in his existence. What concerns man is
Dasein itself … namely eudaimonia. And for this phronesis provides direction. Phronesis is
supposed to render Dasein transparent in the accomplishment of those actions which lead man to
the eu zen [or good life]. If, accordingly, phronesis is the gravest and most decisive knowledge,
then that science which moves within the field of phronesis will be the highest. And insofar as no

361
For Arendt, in contrast to what Taminiaux takes to be the position of Plato-

Heidegger, “the role of the philosopher … is not to rule the city but to be its

‘gadfly’, not to tell philosophical truths but to make citizens more truthful.”123

More specifically, while “Heidegger pretends that the Platonic doctrine of

aletheia as it is summed up in the allegory [of the cave] justifies the right that the

philosophers have to govern the polis, Arendt deconstructs the allegory step by

step ‘[i]n order to comprehend the enormity of Plato’s demand that the

philosopher should become the ruler of the city’.”124

man is alone, insofar as people are together, politike (…) is the highest science. Accordingly,
politike episteme is genuine sophia, and the politikos is the true philosophos; that is the conception
of Plato.” Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 93. Taminiaux also refers to Heidegger’s 1931-32 lecture on
“The Essence of Truth,” and specifically to the following passage which he reads as a
philosophical justification for Heidegger’s political involvement a year later: “…Plato maintains
as his first principle that the authentic guardians of human association [Miteinandersein] in the
unity of the polis must be those that philosophize. He does not mean that philosophy professors
are to become chancellors of the state [Reich], but that philosophers are to become phulakes,
guardians. Control and organization of the state is to be undertaken by philosophers
[philosophierenden Menschen], who set standards and rules in accordance with their widest and
deepest freely inquiring knowledge, thus determining the general course which society should
follow [Bahnen der Entscheidung erschliessen]. As philosophers they must be in a position to
know clearly and rigorously what man is, and how things stand with respect to his being and
ability-to-be.” M. Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus,
trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 72-73.
123
Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 81.
124
Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76; Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 75. According to
Taminiaux the parable of the cave for Arendt is a condensed biography of the life of the
philosopher which serves as a “preemptive demonstration that the philosopher in the Platonic (or
Heideggerian) sense is the least qualified to deal with human affairs.” From the very beginning,
the parable “suspends the two dimensions of the human condition that are the raison d’etre of the
political … In contrast to the inhabitants of the common world of appearances, the inhabitants of
the cave do not act or speak” (77). “[E]ach of [the] steps [of the parable] goes together with ‘a loss
of direction and orientation’…” (77). Indeed, the very experience that ignites the ascent, the
experience of wonder, is apolitical as it is “speechless” and prompted first of all by “ ‘the
experience of the nothing’.” In its highest reach, when the light is finally seen, it remains ineffable
(77). Worst of all, if the philosopher decides like Heidegger to dedicate his life to enduring the
“pathos” of “speechless wonder” “he cannot as he returns to the cave but be inclined to tyranny for

362
 Taminiaux’s analyses point to serious problems at the heart of Heidegger’s

thought. Each of the points he makes can be further corroborated not only on the

grounds of Arendt’s critiques of Heidegger but of those of other students. As I

have attempted to show, however, the main impulse of such critiques was,

ironically, Heidegger’s thought itself. Strauss expressed this most clearly when he

referred to the movement of Hans Jonas’ thought as aiming “in the same direction

[as his own and Jacob Klein’s], beyond and also back to Heidegger.”125 To

understand Arendt’s response to Heidegger it is hence important to situate it in the

broader context of the critiques attempted by some of his other students, for only

then will her own distinctive approach come to light.

With regards to Taminiaux’s first point, Heidegger indeed failed to raise

the difficult and perhaps impossible question of the relation between Socratic and

Platonic philosophizing—even when his own observations required that such a

question be raised. As Francisco Gonzales points out, one is confronted in

Heidegger’s writings with the strange fact that “the figure who normally bears the

name ‘Plato’ … is a dogmatic metaphysician and thus the complete antithesis to

the figure Heidegger himself names ‘Socrates’.”126 Gadamer, Strauss, Arendt,

Krüger, and Klein, by contrast, all pointed to the necessity of ‘re-Socratizing’

the reason … that having founded all his life in such a pathos ‘he has destroyed the plurality of the
human condition within himself’.” Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 78; Arendt, “Philosophy and
Politics,” 98, 101, 100.
125
“In den Gesprächen mit Jonas war mir interessant, dass auch er … in derselben Richtung über
Heidegger hinaus bzw. zurückstrebt wie wir” (GS3, 494).
126
Francisco Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Sara Ahbel-
Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006),
431.

363
Plato to understand the fourth-century, pre-philosophical context from which

Socratic-Platonic thought emerged.

Gadamer and Strauss also objected to Heidegger’s way of opposing truth

to opinion. Thus, as we saw, Strauss’s response to Heidegger in the early 1930s

seems also to have been targeted against Heidegger’s privileging (in the Sophist

lectures and elsewhere) of “original intuition” over “what is merely said”;127 of

“substance” over “semblance”;128 and generally of phenomenology over dialectic,

or, as Heidegger would also put it, of “silent questioning [as] an openness to the

self-concealing, self-withdrawal of being” over “distracting chatter.”129

As for the solipsistic and hence anti-political bias of Heidegger’s

philosophy, this too was a common critique made by Strauss and others.130

What according to Taminiaux is an Arendtian critique of Heidegger can

thus be shown to be an expression of a broader wave of opposition to the anti-

political biases of the German ontologist. More importantly, this opposition was

made possible by Heidegger’s own capacity to show what the classics “really

127
Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 137.
128
Ibid., 148.
129
Gonzales, “The Socratic Hermeneutics,” 432. See also LMT, 118 where Arendt quotes
Heidegger’s lecture on the Sophist as a case in point of the privileging of speechless intuition over
dialogue.
130
See, e.g., Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” RCPR, 32, 37
(“existential philosophy is subjective truth about subjective truth”). Cf. Strauss’s letter to Klein of
December 1, 1932, GS3, 457: “we today lack an Existenz philosophy in the strict sense.” Strauss,
“Kurt Riezler,” WPP, 260 (on Heidegger’s silence about love, charity, laughter); “Preface to
Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” 233 (“It was obvious that Heidegger’s new thinking led far away
from any charity as well as from any humanity.”); “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political
Philosophy,” in SPPP, 30 (There is no room for political philosophy in Heidegger’s work; it is
perhaps occupied by god of the gods.)

364
meant, which phenomena Plato and Aristotle had in mind when talking of

whatever they were talking [about].”131 As other scholars have argued,

Taminiaux’s critique of Heidegger can be proven wrong on the grounds of

Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle.132 Indeed, it seems to me that what Arendt

had to say—allegedly against Heidegger—concerning the relation between truth

and opinion, (Socratic) philosophy and sophistry, and rhetoric as “the truly

political art” was said by Heidegger with greater precision and depth in those

early lectures.133

To understand Arendt’s response to the challenge posed by Heidegger one

has to take a broader view. One has to go beyond what are taken to be the core

theses of an Arendtian ‘political philosophy’ conceived with and against

Heidegger—for instance, that political thought, “reveal[s] doxa in its own

truthfulness”;134 that “the deep structure of human action is interaction”;135 that,

contra Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s ‘thrownness’ and being-in-the-world,

Arendt elucidates freedom as a mode of being-of-the world;136 that in a

“supremely un-Heideggerian” way Arendt locates “authentic disclosedness … in

131
Strauss, “Living Issues in German Post-War Philosophy,” in H. Meier, Leo Strauss and the
Theological-Political Problem,” 135.
132
See, e.g., Robert Metcalf, “Aristoteles und Sein und Zeit,” in Denker (ed.), Heidegger und
Aristoteles.
133
See chapter 1 as well as Gross and Kemmann (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric.
134
Taminiaux, “Sur deux lettres,” 76.
135
S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 112.
136
Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 119.

365
a realm of opinion and talk”;137 or that, contrary to Heidegger who regards praxis

as a form of theory, Arendt reestablishes the dignity of praxis as an end in

itself.138

Arendt attempted to think philosophically, or, in her words, to ‘save’—

even if not necessarily to explain—such political phenomena as action, new

beginnings, power, violence, speech, promising, evil, natality and mortality,

worldliness and unworldliness, authority, and the quest for meaning in a way that

followed upon, expanded, and radically revised Heidegger’s phenomenological

analyses of human being-in-the-world.139 However, as I have tried to show,

Heidegger’s thought represented an even greater challenge, first insofar as it was

always concerned with matters of thought rather than objects of scholarship,

worldviews, or theories; second, insofar as these matters of thought, as Arendt put

it, were “concerns of thinking men … from time immemorial”; and third, insofar

as—at least in the eyes of Arendt or Strauss—no one at the time, or perhaps ever,

had addressed such matters with the self-consciousness attained by Heidegger.

This—and particularly the last point—implies that beyond the already formidable

137
Ibid., 140.
138
Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. Michael
Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 133 ff.
139
Cf. S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism, 51: Heidegger’s concept of the world “opens up
and yet also closes down philosophical access to the phenomena of the political.” For Arendt’s
understanding of theory as a means of ‘saving the phenomena’ by a theory that is adequate to what
appears (versus a hypothesis upon which to go to work—this being the modern understanding of
theory), see her lecture notes for the 1969 course delivered at the New School on “What is
Political Philosophy?”: Courses---New School for Social Research, New York, N.Y.---
“Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?” lectures and seminar---1969, 24417.
Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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challenge of responding to Heidegger by ‘saving’ the phenomena of the political

for the most part neglected by Heidegger, Arendt (like Strauss) would have to

think through the matters of thought or the fundamental problems addressed by

Heidegger.

Among such fundamental problems discussed in this dissertation, we

recall here two. The first concerns the relation between theory and practice. Is the

modern understanding of practical and theoretical reason as different forms of

consciousness meaningful? Does it correspond to the phenomena? Is not theory

itself a practical comportment? And is not genuine human praxis—for instance

the praxis of friendship—always already ‘theoretical’, namely insofar as it

presupposes a capacity to see the other?140 The second and more fundamental

problem concerns the proper ‘work’ of man, or the most ‘radical’ possibility of

human existence. Is it political life, as Heidegger suggests it was for the Greeks—

if “man is truly man insofar as he lives in the polis”?, if man is a living being for

whom “being-in-the-world is determined in its grounds by speech”?, if, finally,

the “fundamental character of the Dasein of man [is] being-with-one-another …

in the sense of … sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-with”?141 Or is faith the

most radical human possibility—if the grounds (or non-grounds) of existence are

140
As Gadamer puts it: “Is [praxis] not, when it is human, a looking away from itself and an
attending and listening to the other?” Is it not a “seeing beyond oneself [Absehen] von sich] to
what is [Hinsehen auf das was ist]?” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Lob der Theorie. Reden und Aufsätze
(Frankfurt, a. M: Suhrkamp, 1991), 49-50. Cited in Walter A. Brogan, “Gadamer’s Praise of
Theory: Aristotle’s Friend and the Reciprocity Between Theory and Practice,” Research in
Phenomenology, 32 (2002): 141-155, 142.
141
Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 56, 18, 47.

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only grasped in the experience of finitude as lived paradigmatically by the early

Christians?, if “[t]he way in which … we humans are on this earth, is …

dwelling”;142 if, finally, we may only know of the indebtedness of life, of our

openness to (revealed) meaning, of truth-revealing anxiety, and of the existential

possibility of rebirth through faith? Or is it science or philosophy through which

we grasp these things such that we would have to say that the best human life is

spent in philosophizing? Is not theory the possibility for existence “to stand

exclusively on its own,” to “break through … to the matters themselves,” “to

remove the world”—and ourselves—“from concealedness and coveredness”?143

This reference to some of the fundamental problems raised by Heidegger’s

thought should suffice to show that Arendt’s response cannot be grasped when the

aim of her project is expressed in such terms as giving “existential supremacy” to

political action over all human activities;144 as effecting “a systematic renewal of

the Aristotelian concept of praxis”;145 as “reasserting the Aristotelian notion of

koinonia”;146 as “celebrat[ing] ancient practice … [while] denigrat[ing] ancient

theory”;147 or as giving “priority [to] democracy [over] philosophy’.”148 For at the

142
Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 349.
143
Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 6, 11, 17.
144
Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 11.
145
Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 174.
146
Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 7.
147
Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue,” Political
Theory, Vol. 18, No. 2. (May, 1990): 238-254, 239.

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very least on the decisive questions of theory and practice and of the highest

realization of the human condition, Arendt was a genuine political philosopher

who faced these fundamental problems Socratically, that is, in a way prior to the

bifurcation of thinking into questions of theory and practice or metaphysics and

ethics—let alone ‘democracy and philosophy’ or ‘individualism and

communitarianism’. We shall now take a closer look at the meaning of Socratism

for Arendt.

Arendt’s Socrates

We begin by noting the central characteristics of the Arendtian Socrates.

Arendt’s Socrates is the discoverer of an ethics in which “what is

fundamental are neither divine nor human commands, but the Socratic ‘being in

harmony with oneself’” (437).149 Socratic ethics presupposes plurality as “the law

of the earth,” first insofar as being alone is always already a being with myself

resulting in what Arendt called the ‘two-in-one of thinking’,150 and second,

148
Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 278.
149
See, e.g., Plato, Gorgias 482 b-c and 474 a-b. See also Plato, Hippias Major, 304: at the end of
the dialogue, “Socrates tells Hippias… ‘how blissfully fortunate’ he is compared with himself
who, when he goes home, is awaited by a very obnoxious fellow ‘who always cross-examines
[him], a close relative, living in the same house’.” Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,”
185-86.
150
LMT, 19, 187. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 88: “Men not only exist in the plural as do
all earthly beings, but have an indication of this plurality within themselves.” Cf. Plato, Sophist,
263 e: “Are not thinking and reasonable speech the same, except that the former, which takes
place inside as a voiceless dialogue of the soul with itself is called by us thinking.” Arendt,
“Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 185: “What thinking actualizes in its process is the
difference given in consciousness.”

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insofar as being is appearing such that a core ethical precept becomes to be as you

want to appear.151

Socrates, according to Arendt, “withdraws from the polloi on one side and

from the sophoi on the other! That is his and only his position. The many rest

satisfied with the semblance of opinion, the wise with the Being of truth; only

Socrates can have no rest [Ruhe] because he thinks and thinking brings no results”

(590).152

The Socratic quest to “know thyself” points beyond the semblance of

opinion and the knowledge of being. “It means first: recognize that you are only

one and can only have particular knowledge [Erkenntnis], know that you are a

human being and no God; second: follow this particular and find its [truth] and

therewith your truth. –Maintaining both at the same time, you will have truth,

human truth, without forcing it on others” (413).153

The Socratic way sees in doxa or opinion a political expression of the fact

that we cannot know (432). Doxa is not unfounded opinion (only “Plato turns it

151
DT, 443: be as you want to appear (drawing on Cicero referring to Xenophon, Memorabilia II,
6, 39). Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 74: The relation to oneself in the ‘two-in-one’ is
formally identical to the phenomenal relation of every individual to the plurality of the world.
152
Arendt refers to Plato, Euthyphron, where “Euthyphron is against the polloi, not Socrates” (DT,
590). Euthyphron argues that “the pious is to … prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or
temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone
else…” He cites “powerful evidence that the law is so,” referring to the gods and to Zeus in
particular who “bound his father because he unjustly swallowed his sons, and … castrated his
father for similar reasons.” The many are “angry with me because I am prosecuting my father for
his wrongdoing” but they agree with what Zeus did. “They contradict themselves…” Plato,
Euthyphron, 5 d – 6 a. Socrates wants to bring to the many what is only for the few, he is keen on
teaching [lehrlustig] (DT, 592, referring to Euthyphron, 3).
153
Arendt draws attention to the characterization of Socratic wisdom in Plato’s Apology as
“anthropine Sophia” (DT, 585, referring to Plato, Apology, 20 d).

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into that”) but the expression of what “seems to me.” Doxa only shows one aspect

of the phenomenon as a whole, but this aspect is “not at all semblance” (391).

There is “in fact [in doxa] an orthotes [which is] not correctness but adequacy or

appropriateness: concerning that which appears to me doxa speaks appropriately

or inappropriately. However, that does not settle anything concerning the question

whether there is in an appearance truth or untruth, being or non-being, on or me

on” (532). From a Socratic standpoint, “[t]he ‘goodness’ of the polis depends

upon the adequacy of ‘expressing’ my doxa, or upon the rightness with which I

translate the visual appearance into logos: phronesis. This [is] the Socratic view

of truth as opposed to Plato, where orthotes appears as adequacy of

measurements” (532).154 Therefore, according to Arendt, “[t]he true techne

politike,” Socratically conceived, “is not the art of ruling but of convincing,

peithesthai.” This “is the original connection between rhetoric and politics” (391).

But how exactly does a techne politike proceed? When Plato’s Socrates

claims that he is the only Athenian who possesses the true political art, does he

mean that he possesses the art of persuasion (cf. 387f.)? A closer look at the task

of the Socratic political art or science as Arendt understands it reveals the

following.

154
On phronesis see also Arendt, Introduction into Politics, 168 where Arendt refers to phronesis
as “the [Greek] standard for an aptitude that is specifically political.” It means having “the greatest
possible overview of all the possible standpoints and viewpoints from which an issue can be seen
and judged.” Arendt claims that “over the ensuing centuries, hardly anyone speaks of phronesis”
until Kant referred to it as a form of “‘enlarged mentality’” defined as “the ability ‘to think from
the position of every other person’” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 40).

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 First, the Socratic art, we can say, establishes plurality as “the law of the

earth.” That in a Socratic ethics “neither divine nor human commands” are

fundamental means, as Arendt puts it in another context, that “[n]either is man the

measure of things, nor is God the measure of human things, nor are things [Dinge]

the measure of man. What conditions us [was uns bedingt] is the fact of plurality

as such” (392). This train of thought developed throughout Arendt’s diaries is an

answer to Heidegger elaborated in ‘Socratic’ terms. According to Heidegger, “[i]n

the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the be-thinged, the

conditioned ones [Be-dingten]. We have left behind us the presumption of all

unconditionedness” (195).155 Arendt sees this as a failed attempt to invert the

saying that man is the measure of all things. “When man is seen as the measure of

things, the question arises: And what is the measure of man who of course cannot

be his own ‘measure’…? [W]ithin a way of thinking that avoids all transcendence

[viz., Heidegger’s], the only answer is: things are the measure of man” (338-39).

That not things but the fact of plurality conditions us means in Socratic terms, as

we have suggested, that the measure of my actions is how they appear in a world

constituted by a plurality of standpoints, as well as how I myself relate to those

actions in the silent dialogue of thinking.

The Socratic techne politike establishes plurality as a measure of human

things, but it also individuates: Socrates’ questioning “dissolves the many again

into individuals!” (587). Contrary to the Platonic cave allegory in which the many

155
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Harper Collings, 1971), 178-79.

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do not give to the philosopher the calm that he needs, Socrates’ “philosophizing

thinking does not let either himself or the others rest.” Thus “the initiative has

switched. The philosopher needs calm, with Socrates it is the opposite: He does

not even have the necessary schole [leisure, rest, ease] for the public affairs”

(586-587).156 The Socratic political art individuates by igniting the silent dialogue

of thinking through which we remove ourselves from the common world.157

Thus the Socratic political art liberates judgment: thinking has a

“corrosive” or even “destructive” effect on “established criteria, values,

measurements for good and evil.” It “dissolves accepted rules of conduct.”

Particularly—or perhaps exclusively—“when the chips are down,” when

“everybody is swept unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes,”

thinking makes us stop—and think (188).158

But what exactly does thinking think about? Thinking thinks what is

beyond common sense or indeed beyond reality.159 “[T]hinking always deals only

with what is absent”160—for instance with the Being of being (158). Thinking is

not about “what something is or whether it exists at all—its existence is always

156
Arendt refers to Plato, Apology, 23.
157
See “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 166.
158
Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 175-6, 188. See Dana Villa, “The Philosopher
Versus the Citizen: Arendt, Strauss, and Socrates,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the
Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 155-180, esp. 166.
159
LMT, 52-53.
160
Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 157; DT, 725-726.

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taken for granted—but what it means for it to be.”161 Thinking is a natural activity

“whereby men, since time immemorial have tried to think rationally beyond the

limits of human knowledge.”162 Beyond the limits of knowledge we seek

meaning. Thinking is driven by “the appetite for meaning” and not by the desire

to know or to escape ignorance. It is not because “all men by nature desire to

know” but because of wonder, and the need for meaning, that thinking and

philosophy arise.163 But thinking and philosophizing are not the same. Thinking is

an activity without results, like taking a walk. Philosophy understood (for

instance, with Hegel) as thinking about thinking is a special case of thinking; as

such, it wants to achieve results and is not pure activity (727; see also 786).

Thinking is a passion that one endures; it is an entirely uncontemplative activity;

it is literally delf-destructive: any results it obtains it undermines in order to begin

again.

Is this the Socratic political art? Arendt suggests, for instance, that “the

Socratic” consists in this, that “the more I think justice, the less I know what it is

and the more just I become” (735). This would seem to be an answer to the

question concerning the Socratic political art as a means of making human beings

better. But it seems to be a non sequitur, for, as Arendt herself notes, thinking as

161
LMT, 58-9.
162
Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in BPF, 231.
163
Cf. Arendt’s critique of the growth of philosophy into science which she finds already
prefigured in Aristotle at LMT, 114. Arendt cites Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983a14-20: “‘all men
begin by wondering … but one must end with the opposite and with what is better [than
wondering], as is the case when men learn’.”

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an activity that “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established

criteria, values, measurements for good and evil” may just as well lead to “license

and cynicism” and indeed to nihilism.164 Moreover, the element of dialogue or

dialectic is missing, and one could argue that precisely the point of the Socratic

way is that it does not think, for instance, justice in itself—or at least does not

begin by doing that—but what people say about it.165

As Dana Villa has argued, Arendt did not provide a consistent account of

the Socratic art.166 However, one can hardly hold this against her. Indeed, a

consistent account of Socrates would arguably miss what is specifically

Socratic—for, contrary to his own assurance that he always said the same thing

about the same things, Plato’s Socrates contradicts himself. Still, an effort must be

164
Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 175-76, 177.
165
See chapter four.
166
See Dana Villa, “Arendt and Socrates,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 204-219. According to
Villa, Arendt developed at least three versions of Socrates: in “Philosophy and Politics” (1954)
Socrates is a citizen among citizens; maieutic serves the function of beautifying the world, of
‘finding the truth in one’s doxa’, of multiplying and sharpening individual perspectives, and thus
of making the common world richer. Here the purpose of political philosophy is decidedly
political; the life of the mind becomes the servant of ‘common sense’ (215); Socrates appears as a
soldier of Pericles helping people fall in love with Athens. In “Civil Disobedience” (1970), by
contrast, the Socratic care of the soul is characterized as ‘unpolitical’ (209). Finally, in “Thinking
and Moral Considerations” (1971), Villa argues, Arendt’s life-long defense of the bios politikos is
inverted (211): maieutic has the function of purging opinions, and of deciding if they should live
at all; it paralyzes and suspends action. Socratic thinking appears as ‘a dangerous and resultless
enterprise’ (210). What is puzzling, argues Villa, is that Arendt only saw the necessity of thinking
‘in those rare moments when the chips are down’. This is due, first, to her fear that individualism
and subjectivism go hand in hand (she approves and then damns the Socratic injunction to be in
harmony with ourselves above all); second, to her insistence on the conflict between philosophy
and politics as different ways of life in a kind of ‘inverted Platonism’ which leads to a portrait of a
‘civic’ Socrates (218) that may not be “genuinely Socratic—that is to say, philosophical—at all”
(9); and, third, to her “strange insistence that the world can be beautified through political action,”
which blinded her “to the possibility that care for the world may take a variety of forms” (218).

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made to explain the contradictions and tensions in the work of serious thinkers—

in this case in the work of Arendt.

Arendt seems to have followed Heidegger when in 1951/52 he suggested

that Socrates was the purest thinker of the west.167 Over the years, Arendt began

to conceive of a Heideggerian Socrates that embodies the idea of pure thinking.

As we have seen, pure thinking deals with invisibles and with what cannot be

known; it is an unending and resultless task; and it is not concerned with truth but

with meaning. Strikingly, the invisible realm of pure thinking is the field of at

least one of Arendt’s conceptions of political theory or ‘political philosophy’—

namely, the “unending” quest for understanding which “transcends … facts and

figures” and whose ‘result’—never final for we are never quite at home in the

world—is meaning.168 Political philosophy in this understanding deals with

questions such as these: “Why is there anybody at all and not rather nobody?”169

“What is thinking? What is action?” Why do we think or act at all?170 What is

radical evil? “What is politics? Who is man as a political being? What is

freedom?”171 What is the measure of human things?172

167
Arendt visited Freiburg in May of 1952 and attended Heidegger’s lecture “What is Called
Thinking?” on May 23 and 30. See DT, 973 f. See Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?,
trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 17, where Heidegger refers to Socrates as
“the purest thinker of the West.” Cf. LMT, 174.
168
Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” EU 308, 316-17.
169
Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 204.
170
Arendt, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 24418, 24419.
171
Arendt, “Concern with Politics,” EU, 433.

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 Ironically, these questions of ‘political philosophy’ are not the questions

of the common citizen, and in that sense they can hardly be designated as

‘political’. Indeed, the variation to the question of Leibniz, Schelling, and

Heidegger—“Why is there anything at all and not rather nothing?”—presupposes

“the conditions of worldlessness that first appeared in the modern age,”173 and

thus—we may surmise—it would also have struck Socrates as odd. If “no one can

think when he is with others”174 then ‘Socrates’ cannot stand for both ‘pure’ and

‘political’ thinking.

However, we also find in Arendt another meaning of Socratic ‘political

philosophy’ as an art or method that, far from taking leave of the common world,

invariably adheres to opinions in order to understand or see the essence of things.

“Socrates’ method: … let us consider what we say: always starts from logos as

what is spoken” (594).175 An opinion or “doxa in its true form … in contrast to

phainesthai [to bring to light, make to appear] only shows one aspect, not the

whole…” But this aspect, as noted earlier, is not at all mere semblance (391). For

example, “a description of the [concentration] camps as Hell on earth is more

‘objective’, that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely

172
Arendt, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 24428.
173
Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 203.
174
Arendt, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 24445.
175
Arendt refers to Plato, Euthyphron, 9 e4-7: “[Soc:] Then shall we examine this again,
Euthyphro, to see if it is correct, or shall we let it go and accept our own statement, and those of
others, agreeing that it is so, if anyone merely says that it is? Or ought we to inquire into the
correctness of the statement [σκεπτέον τί λέγει ὁ λέγων]?” (Arendt cites the last part of the
statement in Greek. Schleiermacher translates: Or must one first ponder what he says who says
something? [DT, 1085: Oder muss man erst erwägen, was der wohl sagt, der etwas sagt?”].)

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sociological or psychological nature.”176 Similarly, Arendt suggests that in order

to understand the essence of religion one must take seriously “what people say,”

for instance, about God. Generally, it is advisable to look at “history as it reveals

itself in the utterances of great statesmen, or the intellectual and spiritual

manifestations of a period,” and take them at face value.177 A good example—

except for the fact that it does not involve great statesmen, or indeed intellect or

spirit—is what Arendt did with the opinions of Adolph Eichmann, which for her

revealed the essence of evil in the twentieth century.

176
Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in EU, 404. “The ‘phenomenal differences’, far from
‘obscuring’ some essential sameness, are those phenomena which make totalitarianism
‘totalitarian’, which distinguish this one form of government and movement from all others and
therefore can alone help us in finding its essence” (Ibid., 405). Cf. Strauss’s similar argument in
On Tyranny, 177, 192.
177
Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” EU, 374 f.

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 Concluding remarks

This chapter’s search for the Arendtian understanding of Socratic political

philosophy has remained inconclusive. Arendt’s ambition, as we saw, was to

think of a ‘new political philosophy’ since the west ‘never really had a proper

political philosophy’. Given the complexity of her thinking, which was both

theological and philosophical, Jewish and Christian, political and apolitical—in a

way, moreover, that transcends these labels—I attempted in this chapter to follow

its movement towards ‘political philosophy’ without prejudging its content. I tried

to show thereby that the core of Arendt’s thought is fundamentally missed when it

is understood as ‘post-metaphysical’, ‘Grecophile’, ‘neo-Aristotelian’ or ‘anti-

Platonic’ as is commonly done in the scholarly literature. Instead I proposed to

designate her thought as ‘Socratic’, thus implying a fundamental coincidence with

the path followed by Leo Strauss—as Dana Villa, for instance, has done—while

probing deeper into the sources of such Socratism in Heidegger’s thought as well

as in her strong attraction (shared by the young Heidegger and Strauss) to the

possibility of a life that is anti-political insofar as it is guided by divine revelation

or by faith.

The logic leading Arendt to Socrates is perhaps readily apparent:

‘Socrates’—the political philosopher par excellence who allegedly had nothing to

learn from nature but only from what speech reveals about human nature; the

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person torn between divine conscience and the laws of the state; the ‘purest

thinker’ and the ‘prototype of the theoretical optimist’ who nevertheless ‘knew

nothing’ and wrote nothing.

Arendt was a Socratic, we could say, first of all, insofar as her thought

expresses similar tensions. On the one hand, for her (as for Socrates) physics or

the study of nature would seem to be uninteresting: physics settles nothing with

respect to the space in-between human beings—hence it is literally uninteresting

(‘inter-esse’); this is all the more so since for Arendt we cannot really know

anything about human nature. Rather than physically, we would seem to be

conditioned by human experiences, by the passions that we share (e.g., fear, love

of distinction, or love of equality), and by the way we reveal ourselves through

action and speech. Physics for Arendt appears to be uninteresting, furthermore,

insofar as it is not quite true that ‘all men by nature desire to know’. Rather, we

desire to ‘see’ and be seen, to understand, and to give meaning to the misery and

greatness of human life (for example, through storytelling). On the other hand,

however, Arendt is concerned, like Socrates seems to have been, with things other

than human. Thus in her thought human experience is pervaded by the non-

human—by the divine or the natural or by the ‘truth’ that ‘we cannot change’ or

that is a ‘revelation’. We found the same kind of tension between the centrality of

ethics and a persistent concern with ontology (or the question of Being) in

Heidegger; and in Strauss—between his concern with understanding ‘the human

things’ as different from ‘the nature of man’—or ‘the perfection of human nature’

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as different from ‘human nature’—without, however, abandoning the discourse

on ‘nature’.

There is a second Socratic perplexity in the thought of Arendt. On the one

hand, man is apolitical, and all would seem to suggest that human realization is

possible without others: thus, we are not quite of this world (or ‘man without

world still is’); truth is beyond reality (or it is an event that ‘breaks into’ reality);

conscience is activated in the ‘silent dialogue with myself’; phronesis (or

prudence) depends on an adequate translation of what (visually) ‘seems to me’

into logos. Indeed, Arendt often seems to come close to the Christian view that

the ‘sovereign individual … does not need others, but only the help—grace,

redemption etc.—of God’. (We recall here her young attraction to Christian

possibilities of existence.) On the other hand, however, a life guided by a

sovereign morality that we prescribe to ourselves—by the virtue which ‘contains

what no one other than the human being can give himself’ or by the life that I

choose—represents for Arendt a rebellion against what is given to us that results

in the ‘de-divinization’ of the world, in the world becoming a ‘desert’, and in the

transformation of the world into a mere means for the realization of our will.

Arendt, in other words, reproduces in a novel way the tension we find in Socrates

between a life guided by divine conscience and the conditions with which life is

given to man.

The result—to turn to a final affinity to Socrates—is a way of thinking

that is deeply concerned with ‘ethics’ (i.e., with the question of man’s place in the

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world and his relation to the other or with the human ‘conditionedness’) that

nevertheless, in a sense, teaches nothing. Indeed, with the important exception of

her private diaries and her lecture notes, we find in the work of Arendt ironically

little philosophizing concerned with the traditional normative questions of ethics-

politics (e.g., justice and standards, measures and norms).

This is in part to suggest that Arendt was a political philosopher more

concerned with fundamental problems or questions than with their solutions—

e.g., What is the highest human capacity?, What is the measure of human things?

What is the relation between thinking and action? In this, I think, she closely

resembles Strauss. That is, one meaning of political philosophy upheld by the

work of both thinkers is ‘genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the

fundamental and comprehensive problems’ without ‘succumbing to the attraction

of solutions’, and specially of those solutions that have long been traded over in

western thought. And yet, there is a telling difference: Arendt was far more

reluctant than Strauss to develop a worldview which, however provisionally,

could provide an answer to such questions in order to articulate a ‘system to live

by’. There seem to be three reasons for this. First, Arendt seems to have been

more lastingly affected by the theological and philosophical Destruktion of the

‘gods’ of this world—e.g., Nature, History, the Will, culture, ‘good and evil’,

theoria—undertaken by Heidegger and neo-orthodox theology, which means that

she considered the traditional language of political philosophy (good and evil, just

and unjust, etc.) to be unavailable. Furthermore, she seems to have drawn more

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radical conclusions from the loss of common sense that characterizes the modern

age. That is, contra the Straussian view that just and unjust, good and evil, noble

and base, right and wrong are ‘natural’ valuations or valuations that arise from

‘common sense’, Arendt would hold that this common sense somehow no longer

exists (because of such phenomena as the inward turn and subjectization

characteristic of the modern age or the collapse of the traditions manifested above

all in the Holocaust). Second, contrary to Strauss, Arendt did not intend to

develop a ‘political theory’ for edifying or pedagogical purposes. A final and

related reason is that for Arendt—ironically, given her reputation—political

philosophy, or, more generally put, thinking about the human condition as a

political condition, has an aim that is far less practical than the aim of Strauss’s

own political philosophizing (specially his mature, American thought). Indeed,

thinking for Arendt deals with what is absent, with unanswerable questions, and

satisfies the quest for meaning, not truth. However much Arendt stressed the

importance of developing a political philosophy out of political experiences (and

not the experience of the thinking ego), there is—again, ironically—surprisingly

little in Arendt’s work that manifests an interest in practical deliberation or

political argument.

Arendt’s work, then, does not manifest a concern with the traditional

questions of political philosophy, even if it is clear from her unpublished writings

that she was (personally) deeply concerned with such questions. One conclusion I

draw is that her thought, following Heidegger and in a way similar to Strauss,

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represents a return to elementary problems as apparently first confronted—more

or less secretly insofar as he claims not to have taught anything—by Socrates: is

nature the key to understanding human being-in-the-world? That is, can one

understand the human being as other beings of the world, or must naturalism be

rejected? If so, how can the human ‘conditionedness’ be accounted for, i.e., the

fact that the human world is pervaded by natural or divine manifestations—to the

point, indeed, that for Arendt a human world is ‘not a man-made reality’? What

follows from this for any possible ‘humanism’ or any possible ‘ethics’? Are we to

make ourselves at home in the world, or is true responsibility for the world only

thinkable when we understand our condition as beings that are not quite of this

world?

There is very little to be gained for ‘systematic’ purposes from discovering

this dimension of Arendt’s thought. And one may be tempted to dismiss her

whole endeavor as a ‘stream of metaphysical associations’ (Isaiah Berlin) or to

enlist it in the service of one or the other causes favored by contemporary political

theorizing—deliberative, agonistic, post-modernist, neo-Aristotelian—in order to

make it more ‘useful’ and palatable. I have taken a third approach in which I have

tried to do justice to her ‘metaphysical’ thought about God, the world, and man

while also enlisting her in a cause—namely, what I have called neo-Socratic

political philosophizing. The conclusions that follow are an attempt to elucidate

this concept in light of the historical and philosophical trajectory delineated in this

dissertation.

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 CONCLUSION

In writing this dissertation I have been guided by the conviction that ‘philosophy

is not the construction of a system, but the resolution once made to look naively at

the world and into oneself’ (Bergson). Along with this anti-systemic—or, one

could also say, Socratic—conviction, I have been guided by the impulse to

contribute to a cause, or, academically speaking, to participate in an existing

conversation and propose a ‘theory’ with a certain ‘intent’. This conviction and

this impulse do not go easily together. I have tried to combine them in the idea of

a neo-Socratic political philosophy. If this could be said to constitute a ‘theory’, it

is a theory about theory, and its intent is theoretical. That is to say, I have tried to

take seriously the claim that Socrates was the prototype of the theoretical optimist

and that his most important achievement—for good or bad—was to discover the

uses (and perhaps abuses) of theory for life. Following that Socratic intent I have

attempted to recover certain possibilities of political theorizing as they emerged in

the early twentieth century in the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss. These

possibilities have either been missed by the literature or they have not been

understood in their proper context, that is, as responding to certain historical

necessities and as enabling certain ways of existence.

The first possibility of neo-Socratic theorizing that I have tried to recover

stems from the early work of Heidegger. Heidegger was responding to the

exhaustion of ethico-normative theorizing in neo-Kantianism and generally to the

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failure of systems—theological or philosophical—to speak to life or to concrete

historical existence after the ‘death of God’, that is, after the highest values had

been rendered incredible thanks especially to the advance of the positive and

historical sciences. Heidegger sought to refound philosophy on its existential

genesis. This means to begin from elementary experiences or from simply human

things like words, or opinions, or the passions that give rise to them. If it is true

that, as Heidegger suggests, the theoretical always points to such a pre-theoretical

dimension, the following possibilities arise for political philosophy.

Socratic history of political philosophy

A major achievement of the work of Leo Strauss is that it has made possible a

new way of reading the history of philosophy as political philosophy. Thus

Heinrich Meier, for instance, has argued that on the basis of Strauss’s work one

would have to supplant (or perhaps complement) Heidegger’s guiding question

for understanding the history of western thought, viz., what is metaphysics? with

the question, what is political philosophy? This would mean, in effect, to rewrite

the canon of foundational thinkers by shifting the focus from ‘pre-Socratics’ to

‘Socratics’, that is, from thinkers that did not engage in a critical evaluation of

political, moral, and religious opinions—especially their own—to thinkers who

did. The reason for this can be illustrated with the case of Hermann Cohen

discussed in this dissertation. Cohen, we could say, forced himself as a matter of

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intellectual conscience or honesty to renounce his early neo-Kantian

convictions—moral, religious, political—and particularly his early understanding

of God as an idea of reason. The case of Cohen would seem to be paradigmatic of

a way of thinking that begins from moral, religious, and political convictions (or

prejudices) as a necessary starting point in the quest for truth—to ultimately take

leave from them. Or one could also refer to the case of Nietzsche as an even more

extreme example of a truly critical philosophy in which the idea of ‘intellectual

honesty’ leading to ‘absolutely honest atheism’ was itself subjected to critical

scrutiny and partly transcended as a consequence of ‘long moral training’ in

Christianity. Meier refers to Heidegger, Frege, and Wittgenstein as examples of

contemporary ‘pre-Socratics’, and to Aristotle, Machiavelli, Alfarabi,

Maimonides, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Strauss as paradigmatic

‘Socratics’.

This dissertation complements but also revises Meier’s thesis as follows.

First, the guiding question of the thought of Strauss seems to me to be both the

(Socratic) question of the right life and the (Platonic-Aristotelian) question of the

meaning of Being, which were recovered respectively by Nietzsche and

Heidegger. Neither was Heidegger a ‘pre-Socratic’ for Strauss—Heidegger did

confront the problem of ethics—nor was Strauss an anti-metaphysician

unconcerned with the question of Being or the whole. Thus, Heidegger was

important for Strauss because he saw that there is a ‘revolting disproportion

between ethics and the phenomena it seeks to articulate’, or in other words: it is at

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least an open question for Strauss whether what we refer to as ‘good’ is in fact

morally good or points to something stable that we can agree to be good, or,

differently put, whether our understanding of good does justice to the

phenomenon (which could perhaps just as well be described as ‘fit for’ or

‘beautiful’). (The same, I think, could be said with respect to the phenomenon of

evil and the need to conceive ‘radical evil’ beyond moral categories.)

Second, the merits of the thesis that a Socratic ‘turn’ to a critical scrutiny

of moral, political, and religious standpoints clears the way towards a more

truthful account of the nature of things must be evaluated in light of the fact that

Strauss himself seems to have undergone such a turn. Indeed, this dissertation

shows that Strauss’s early thought is radically different from his mature American

‘political philosophy’. Apart from the obvious difference between Strauss’s early

support of a politics that is ‘fascist, authoritarian, imperial’ and his later embrace

of liberal democracy as a regime that receives ‘powerful support’ from ancient

thought, one has to consider the evidence of Strauss’s early atheism—and his

quest for a ‘conscientious, scientifically unobjectionable’ interpretation of

religion—which conflicts with the later view that ‘the new intellectual probity is

something different from the old love of truth’; his early critique of the

‘supremacy of theory’ which would turn into an opposite affirmation of ‘the

superiority of contemplation as such to action as such’ and of the ‘radical

detachment from human concerns’ that philosophy requires; as well as, finally,

his early conviction that political science could provide an answer to the question

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of ‘the right order of human life as living together’ which contrasts with his later

insistence that ‘all political life is necessarily imperfect’ and that the human

problem cannot be solved at the political level. The fact that Strauss seems to

have undertaken a turn away from early Heideggerian positions—the critique of

the supremacy of theory, the attempt to explain the Bible atheistically, the quest

for Bodenständig (or autochtonous) thinking and acting—to their opposite

extreme—the primacy of theory, the irrefutability of revelation, the praise of the

life of the philosopher in exile—may say more about Strauss’s own philosophical

politics—or what Rosen calls ‘philosophical propaganda’—than about the

inherent deficiencies of forms of thought that fail to address the moral, political,

and religious question of the right life. Then again, if that is true—that is, if

Strauss engaged in such propaganda as a means of averting the pitfalls of his own

early Heideggerian convictions—this may say more about the continuing

relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy for the mature Strauss than about his

apparent embrace of exoteric writing for a moral-political cause. (And indeed,

reading Strauss’s mature works and correspondence in light of his encounter with

Heidegger shows that, with Heidegger, Strauss remained committed to an

unbelieving standpoint (though not to atheism), that he did not regard detached

contemplation as sufficient for grasping the truth, and that he remained convinced

that a life that belongs entirely to the city—or to a closed political community—

remains morally-politically the best.)

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 Thus, this dissertation sheds light on the motifs that may have led

Strauss—and scholars of Strauss like Meier—to suggest that a confrontation with

moral, political, and religious standpoints is essential to understanding the

development of western thought. One of the reasons, I have suggested, is that

Strauss found himself compelled to confront his own early moral, political, and

religious convictions. Does this make Socratic self-examination less important in

general (i.e., beyond Strauss’s own case)? By no means. To see this it is

necessary to refer to a second way in which this dissertation confirms and

expands on Meier’s thesis.

The fact that Strauss made important contributions to our understanding of

the history of philosophy as political philosophy has been recognized by thinkers

of the rank of Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, Michael Oakeshott, Gerhard

Krüger, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Rémi Brague—to refer only to non-Straussian

scholars who have studied Strauss’s readings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and classical

and medieval political philosophy. What remains to be explored is the way

Strauss may also have shed light on the thinker he considered to be the greatest of

his time, namely Heidegger. This dissertation suggests that Strauss must indeed

be counted as an important source for our understanding of Heidegger. Strauss

pointed to the connection between the thought of Heidegger and Rosenzweig in

the early 1930s, almost two decades before Löwith’s seminal study and seven

decades before the reappraisal of Rosenzweig by post-modern scholars such as

Bonnie Honnig and William Connolly. Perhaps less originally, also in the early

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1930s, Strauss proposed a critique of Heidegger as a neo-Aristotelian who favored

‘phenomenological intuition’ over ‘dialectic’ in a way that complements the

critique of Gadamer and others. This critique was based on Strauss’s acquaintance

with an earlier expression of Heidegger’s thought—his interpretations of the

Metaphysics and Rhetoric—which led Strauss to the view that Heidegger’s

interpretation of Aristotle was the most important intellectual phenomenon which

emerged in Germany after the First World War. This view, expressed in the

1940s, has now received support—especially since the publication of Heidegger’s

early lectures beginning in the late 1980s—from scholars such as Franco Volpi,

Thomas Sheehan, Theodore Kisiel, and Stanley Rosen. Finally, and most

importantly, Strauss also pointed early on to the kinship between Heidegger’s and

Martin Luther’s Destruktion of the tradition as has lately been emphasized by

John Van Buren, Jacques Derrida, Otto Pöggeler and others.

More specifically (and more originally), however, Strauss pointed to the

pervasiveness of the ‘deconstructive’ project in modern thought by studying the

foundational work of Thomas Hobbes. That is, one central contribution of Strauss

was to point to the genealogy not only of (Heideggerian) ‘deconstruction’ but of

the modern mind generally through his studies of Hobbes. The fact that Strauss

turned to Hobbes for primordially ‘Heideggerian’ reasons—that is, first, to

somehow combine Heidegger and Hobbes and then to ‘deconstruct’ Heidegger

through Hobbes—has been missed by the literature.

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 John McCormick has hinted at the first possibility by suggesting that,

using Heidegger, Strauss may have attempted a ‘Germanization of Hobbes’, that

is, a politicization of ‘the significance of anxiety over death’ recast in Hobbesian

terms as the fear of violent death. It is this fear, McCormick argues, ‘that brings

an other into proximity with a being and thus raises the question of the social and

political in Schmitt’s sense of the terms’. Strauss’s interest in Hobbes and

Heidegger can be made clearer as follows. Before 1933 Strauss emphasized and

praised the radicality of both thinkers, meaning that both confronted in a non-

traditional way the question of the best life by putting into question the view that

it is the life of theoretical contemplation. Both also sought to provide an atheistic

justification of human existence. Drawing on Heidegger, Strauss attempted an

immanent critique of Hobbes which objected to Hobbes’ ‘missing’ of the question

of the essence of virtue—thus assuming that the end of social life is necessarily

peace, which in turn implies that ‘Hobbes’ philosophy remain[ed] before death: it

is a philosophy of averageness’. After 1933—and, particularly, after Heidegger’s

inversion of the meaning of ancient theoria from ‘awed perseverance in the face

of what is’ into ‘completely unguarded exposure’ to the questionable—Strauss

began to trace the blurring of the traditional distinction between theory and praxis

back to Hobbes. More generally, Strauss pointed to the fact that Heidegger’s

philosophy must be understood, if not as a consequence, at least as a

manifestation of the same spirit that dominates the philosophy of Hobbes.

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 This spirit is pervaded by Christianity, and particularly by the reaction

against it. Both Hobbes and Heidegger engage in a critique of (Christian)

theology that is, at first, ‘only destruktiv’ insofar as ‘it is not guided by a positive,

original understanding of Scripture’. This critique is, more generally, a critique of

onto-theology or the belief that ‘there be in the world certain Essences separated

from Bodies, which they call Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes’. Such

beliefs arise for Hobbes and Heidegger because of idle speculation (or, in

Heidegger’s terms, because of the ‘care-less’ looking of theoria). For both, rather,

it is only through the fear of death that man comes to his senses. However, this

rejection of the Aristotelian tradition is coupled with a strange—highly original

and ‘extreme’—dependence on it. Indeed, Hobbes and Heidegger are perhaps

unique in the history of western thought for regarding and using Aristotle’s

Rhetoric as a foundational work. Strauss shows that every stage in the

development of Hobbes’ ‘political science’ was preceded by a reading of the

Rhetoric. Heidegger too, as we have seen, developed a ‘political philosophy’

based on his reading of Aristotle’s ethical-political works and especially his

Rhetoric. Following Hobbes and Heidegger the Rhetoric can be read as a

culminating work in the Socratic-Aristotelian project of developing a ‘philosophy

of human affairs’ or a ‘political science’ which includes an ontological account of

the passions and the virtues. The thought of Hobbes and Heidegger seems to have

been thoroughly pervaded by this project: in a sense, they thus ‘repeat’ the

Socratic project of a techne politike. But they also ‘reduce’ it by taking an

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extreme of the tradition—in this case, Aristotle’s account of fear—and making it

foundational—ironically, in order to find (in the fear of death) an unshakable

ground to reject the tradition (the fear of violent death is the passion everyone can

agree on, as Angst is the basic experience in light of which everything must be

understood).

Among the peculiarities of this repetition and reduction of the tradition is

that, as a consequence of the critique of theoria, ‘the difference between prudence

and wisdom loses any relation to the difference between praxis and theory’. This

is true of Hobbes, for whom ‘only he that understandeth what conduceth to the

good and government of the people, is called a wise man’, as well as for

Heidegger who in 1924/25 argued that wisdom (or sophia) ‘does not settle

anything as regards human Dasein’ (in contrast to phronesis which he elevated to

the rank of conscience). Another peculiarity is the fate of the virtue of courage.

Hobbes negates that courage is a virtue, insofar as he regards the end of social life

to be necessarily peace. The ‘Destruktion’ of theoretical wisdom and the critique

of courage would lead to various attempts to restore the meaning of theoria (e.g.,

Hegel and Nietzsche) as well as to a reaffirmation of the ‘original’ virtue of

‘manliness’ (or andreia) which in one manifestation would become the

philosophical ‘courage [or fortitude] … to look one’s forsakenness in its face’ or

to see the ‘abyss’ at the grounds of reason (Nietzsche and Heidegger). Thus,

theory and praxis become fundamentally confused, such that ‘praxis ceases … to

be actually praxis and transforms itself into ‘existence’, while theory is reduced to

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a radically individual and particular moment of vision (the ‘Augenblick’ or look

of an eye in the blink of an eye).

This seems to me to be a better account of the reasons that make it

necessary to study the history of philosophy Socratically as the history of political

philosophy, namely, as requiring a critical examination of the moral, political, and

religious presuppositions of any system of thought.

Comparative political theory

A further possibility of neo-Socratic theorizing must be treated more succinctly

since it was merely hinted at in this dissertation. One of the distinctive traits of the

thought of Arendt and Strauss is a certain kind of conservatism for which a

philosophy of the human things or of the human condition would seem to be

(quite literally) the one thing needful. The insight behind such a view can only be

expressed inexactly with claims such as that ‘Man is generated by man and the

sun and not by society’, ethics is ‘the all-encompassing’, or ethics is ‘the first

philosophy’. Both Arendt and Strauss suggest that there is a natural awareness of

limits that grows out of an understanding of the fact that we are creatures and not

creators; that we are conditioned by what is ‘given’ to us; that man cannot be his

own measure. More exactly, it could be said that their thinking is characterized by

the affirmation of the ethical as a sphere irreducible both to the natural and the

supernatural. In Strauss’s terms naturalism amounts merely to ‘the sanctioning of

the savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man, the instincts of the master

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and the conqueror’, while supernaturalism ‘tends to become the basis of slave

morality’. In Arendt’s terms, the natural stands for sheer metabolism which is not

quite human while supernaturalism would amount to an escape from the world

and the renunciation of responsibility. Strauss and Arendt both seek to affirm the

autonomy of an ethics that is beyond any naturalism and supernaturalism, but also

beyond any humanism (that is, beyond the belief that the humanity of the human

can be explained in its own terms). As is well known, Heidegger too embarked on

a quest for an ‘original ethics’ beyond naturalism, supernaturalism, and

humanism.

This dissertation does not provide any further insights into the substantive

core of the understanding of ethics of the three German Sokrates. However,

thanks to its comparative approach, it enables us to see the historical-political

reasons behind at least the type of ethical understanding that Strauss and Arendt

attempted to articulate due to their extraordinary awareness of the problem of

ethics. Certainly this awareness has to do with their experience of statelessness

and exile. Indeed, one must ask: what can ‘political science’ understood (in the

young Strauss’s terms) as ‘the quest for the right order of human life as living

together’ be for those who are ‘apolis’? Or what can it be for someone like the

young Arendt whose life and thought was pervaded by the awareness that we can

never be quite at home in the world, or that we are in the world but not of the

world? The lasting importance of the thought of Arendt and Strauss seems to me

to derive from such insights as can only be gained through ‘lived experience’.

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Insofar as man is ‘‘more than world’ (in Arendt’s terms) and ‘generated by man

and the sun and not by society’ (Strauss) he is compelled to find a law (or an

‘ethics’ understood as dwelling) beyond the political community. Arendt and

Strauss were well aware of the most radical alternatives. To live ‘only in the law’

as a ‘people in exile’ ‘numb to the concerns, the doing, and the struggling of the

world’ as Rosenzweig suggested was out of the question (if only for reasons of

sheer survival). Similarly, Cohen’s masterful attempt to extract the ethical core of

Judeo-Christian religion to lay the basis for a synthesis of Deutschtum and

Judentum resulted in a philosophical—and, especially, political—dead-end.

Finally, Heidegger’s attempt to ground philosophy and human life on the ‘soil’ of

a political community—such that ‘man is truly man insofar as he lives in the

polis’ and the ‘fundamental character of the Dasein of man [is] being-with-one-

another … in … sharing-with, contradicting, engaging-with’—would also result

in an exclusionary political project.

Again, what exactly was the response to this predicament proposed by

Arendt and Strauss cannot be further discussed here. However, the course that

they charted seems to me of great potential insofar as it points to the possibility of

conceptions of ‘political science’ that reject naturalism and supernaturalism as

well as the premise that man must be completely at home in the world; and that

are, as a matter of historical circumstance, beyond the metaphysical and anti-

metaphysical traditions that dominate Western thought as transmitted through

Christianity. In that respect, a further characterization of the ‘ethics’ of Arendt

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and Strauss could make possible a better understanding of non-Western, specially

Islamic, understandings of ‘political science’.

New political philosophy

A strange fact about the current state of the art in political theory is that almost

everyone would agree that studying the history of political philosophy is

necessary to understand our present condition, to learn about the past and even

from the past, as well as to expand our conceptual horizons and thus shed light on

current predicaments and alternatives. And yet, even if all agree that political

philosophy is necessary, very few, it seems, actually believe that it is possible.

That is, apart from Rawls (especially in A Theory of Justice), it is hard to think of

systematic attempts at providing comprehensive answers to the question of the

right or the good society as political philosophers from Plato to (at least) Marx

attempted to do. Arendt and Strauss, it seems to me, must be counted among those

few who believed that if political philosophy is treated as necessary it must also

be treated as (at least potentially) possible. Two misconceptions prevent us from

seeing this. The first is that especially Arendt made it clear that for her the

tradition of political philosophy ended in disaster and is over. The second

misconception is that, again especially for Arendt, we stand on safer grounds

when—as it is believed to be the case now—‘political philosophy’ is no longer

‘philosophical’ (or ‘metaphysical’) but ‘political’. (The idea, as expressed more

bluntly among ‘Arendtian’ circles, is that Arendt called upon ‘us Arendtians’ not

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to be philosophers.) But the truth is that Arendt and Strauss were both concerned

for decades with the question, ‘What is political philosophy?’ and with the

possibility of a new political philosophy. In fact, Arendt considered Strauss

(together with Kojève and Voegelin) to be among the few who kept political

philosophy alive, thus implying a fundamental kinship between them (even

though Arendt faulted Strauss for remaining a traditionalist, and, specifically, an

Aristotelian). The truth, admittedly, is complicated: both were deeply concerned

with the necessity and possibility of a new political philosophy; however, they

also thought that contemporary political thought was ‘more philosophic than ever

in a sense’ (as Strauss put it) or too ideological (as Arendt suggested). I have tried

to point to their unique standpoint by suggesting that they were neo-Socratics—

and not, as Catherine Zuckert, for instance, has argued with respect to Strauss,

‘Postmodern Platos’, or, as is commonly assumed with regards to Arendt, pre-

Socratics in the quest for the pre-philosophical and truly political polis. Neo-

Socratics, more exactly, means: against the Sophistic standpoint—as well as what

the young Strauss apparently took the Platonic standpoint to be—not to assume

that ‘political science’ is unproblematically possible, but neither, on the other

hand, to assume with postmodernism that ‘the time of Socratic man is gone’.

This, indeed, seems to be the most learned and profound reading of the

political consequences of Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Reiner Schürmann

argues that the philosophical and political revolution effected by the thought of

Heidegger leads from an era of principles to a new era of anarchy. The era of

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principles lasts from Socrates to Heidegger: ‘The opening moment and the closing

moment of epochal history provide the framework for the genealogy of principles.

These are born with the Socratic turn and they wither with the Heideggerian turn’.

Specifically, the era of principles ends when ‘the ancient procession and

legitimation of praxis from theoria comes to exhaustion. Then, in its essence,

action proves to be an-archic’. The legitimating role of theoria comes to

exhaustion once it is recognized that ‘Western man has incurred his tutelage by

endowing some of his representations with ultimacy’. We recognize this by

‘win[ning] back the originative experiences of metaphysics through a

deconstruction of representations that have become current and empty’. In turn

this enables a genealogy of principles, e.g., ‘of morals, of the scientific mind, of

the democratic ideal, etc.’ Thus, at certain moments in history, ‘in the divide

between one era and the next anarchism appears, the absence of an ultimate

reason in the succession of the many principles that have run their course in the

west. It may be that as this absence becomes apparent, human practice, notably

political action, becomes thinkable in a way that it is not when life and thought

obey the order made for them between two reversals’. For, after all—and this is

perhaps the central Heideggerian principle—‘higher than actuality stands

possibility’, thus ‘higher than arche and telos stand an-archy and a-teleocracy’.

The young Strauss stood for a similar view: ‘the traditions have ceased to

be authoritative’, hence ‘we are completely free; we do not know what we are free

for, what we live for, what the right and the good is’. ‘We must start completely

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from the beginning’. Arendt too often repeated that the traditions no longer hold

any authority, or that they have been handed over to us without a testament. But

their (existential) condition and their fate made them see things differently—and

better. Thus Strauss began to see with increasing clarity that ‘without Biblical

belief one … does not arrive in modern philosophy’—that is, in the fight against

prejudice (initiated because of the existence of revelation religions), in the

Destruktion of theoria, and in the affirmation of the primacy of praxis. The

genealogy of the problem of theory and praxis that Strauss thereby made possible

certainly casts doubt on the Heideggerian conclusions drawn by Schürmann.

More importantly, Schürmann (as many others) reads Heidegger from the

perspective of his late work. Reading Heidegger from the start, it seems to me,

makes clear that his early project was sound—even politically. His fundamental

point was that western philosophy had missed existence: precisely the being ‘from

out of which and for the sake of which, philosophy ‘is’’. The question was: what

would philosophy be if it arose and remained within the limits of existence alone,

that is, if it remained always a quest for the truth and never an attempt to secure

the truth—or, simply, a way of life committed to the highest possible

wakefulness? This project led perhaps naturally to the question of political

existence. Hence the project of political philosophy: in Arendt’s terms, to think

what we are doing or to confront anew the elementary problems of human living-

together. To begin philosophy as it arises from political experience alone. In

Schürmann’s terms the focus on political existence is necessary because the

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political is ‘[t]he arena where an epochal constellation most obviously displays its

principle’ or ‘the correlation in broad daylight of speech, of acting, and of a state

of affairs. This correlation produces the order into which the code obeyed by an

epoch concretely translates itself’. This insight seems to me to be correct, but it

still seems to be an insight won not from political experience but from the

experience of the thinking ego. Thus the project of Socratically founding a

political philosophy that does not rely on ‘constructive concepts’ or on

philosophies of history, but on the concepts and experiences inherent in political

society remains an open one.

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