Notes on Strauss & Husserl
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[1]Edmund Husserl
6,312 words
Leo Strauss credited Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a critical resource for his project of overthrowing modern political thought and vindicating the ancients. This may come as some surprise to readers of Strauss, given the prominence of his critique of historicism, which applies to Husserl as well. But Strauss’s late essay, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”[1] [2] as well as posthumously published lectures and correspondence reveal significant debts to Husserl.
Husserl was not, moreover, a mere “negative influence” — i.e., someone whose ideas Strauss rejected. Husserl was a “positive influence,” meaning that Strauss accepted and incorporated some of his ideas.
Moreover, Husserl influenced some of Strauss’s central ideas. First, Husserl aided Strauss in vindicating the method of ancient Socratic philosophy against its critics. Second, Husserl influenced Strauss’ hermeneutic strategy of uncovering the “esoteric” teachings of the great thinkers of the tradition.
Strauss’ Encounter with Husserl
Husserl was a presence throughout Strauss’s formative years as an intellectual. From 1912 to 1917 Strauss attended the Gymnasium Philippinum, which was affiliated with the University of Marburg. Strauss was attracted to the Marburg school of the late Hermann Cohen, a neo-Kantian and committed Jew. When Strauss arrived in Marburg, however, he found Cohen’s school in “a state of disintegration. The disintegration was chiefly due to the emergence and ever-increasing power of phenomenology — an approach opened up by Edmund Husserl.”[2] [3]
After finishing his Ph.D. in Hamburg in 1921, Strauss went to the University of Freiburg in 1922 “in order to see and hear Husserl.” At the time, Strauss “did not derive great benefit from Husserl,” because he was “probably not mature enough.”[3] [4] But eventually Strauss grew into an appreciation of Husserl.
It was Husserl’s final writings of the 1930s that had the greatest effect on Strauss. For instance, in his 1940 lecture, “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” Strauss writes:
As regards Husserl’swork, I can only say that I believe that it surpasses in significance everything that I know of, which has been done in Germany in the last 50 years. [This would include Heidegger.] Such an analysis as that of the transformation of geometry underlying Galileo’s physics, as we find it in one of his latest publications, is the model for any analysis concerning the basic assumptions of modern science and philosophy.[4] [5]
The recent Husserl essay on geometry is probably “The Origin of Geometry,” which was written for Husserl’s last great but unfinished book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,[5] [6] and published in 1939 after Husserl’s death.[6] [7]
In a letter to Eric Voegelin dated May 9, 1943, Strauss writes:
Husserl’s phenomenological analysis ended in the radical analysis of the whole development of modern science (the essay in Philosophia and the essay on geometric evidence, as well as the great fragment on space consciousness in the Husserl memorial volume) — I know nothing in the literature of our century that would be comparable to this analysis in rigor, depth, and breadth. Husserl has seen with incomparable clarity that the restoration of philosophy or science—because he denies that that which today passes as science is genuine science — presupposes the restoration of the Platonic-Aristotelian level of questioning.[7] [8]
The “essay in Philosophia” refers to the first two parts of The Crisis which were published in the journal Philosophia in Belgrade in 1936.[8] [9] The “essay on geometric evidence” is probably the aforementioned “The Origin of Geometry.” The “great fragment on space consciousness” refers to “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature.” Written May 7 to 9, 1934, this essay precedes the period of The Crisis but feeds into its larger project. The essay was first published in German in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, edited by Marvin Farber.[9] [10] Thus it is the late Husserl of The Crisis who helped Strauss overcome modern political thought. [10] [11]
In “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” Strauss pinpoints the teaching of The Crisis that most influenced him:
Husserl . . . realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such a way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing.[11] [12]
Husserl generally referred to this “common understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing” as the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt). The lifeworld is not merely the “sense data” of empiricists. It is a cultural world of meanings, including values, even “gods, demons, etc.”[12] [13] The late Husserl often speaks of the lifeworld as the object of “natural” as opposed to “scientific” awareness, but “nature” here includes a great deal of cultural baggage as well, so it might be better to speak of “naïve” consciousness, as opposed to forms of reflective and self-critical awareness, which would include science.
Husserl’s target in the Crisis is scientific realism. Scientific realism is not the thesis that reality exists regardless of our awareness of it. Instead, scientific realism is the thesis that reality is simply what is known by modern mathematical natural sciences, and the lifeworld and non-scientific forms of knowledge, including values, are demoted to the status of mere appearances and opinions. Scientific realism, in short, makes modern science into a “metaphysics,” understood as an account of ultimate reality, as opposed to “mere appearances” — i.e., all other forms of knowledge. Because scientific realism divorces science from the rest of life, it brings about the “crisis of European sciences” of Husserl’s title.
Husserl held modern science in high regard, but he did not see it as metaphysics. Nor did he regard scientific knowledge as wholly different from other kinds of knowledge. Husserl’s aim in the Crisis was to overcome the alienation of science and the lifeworld by showing that modern mathematical natural science actually arises from the modification of ordinary knowledge, rather than its complete rejection. Husserl accomplished this by carefully describing the process by which, for instance, idealized geometric objects arise from actual experience.
Natural Right & History, Chapter 2
Strauss usually refers to the Husserlian lifeworld as the world of “common sense,” often in quotation marks. For instance, at the end of Chapter 2 of Natural Right & History, “Natural Right and the Distinction between Facts and Values,”[13] [14] Strauss writes about the lifeworld in these terms:
[Max Weber] could not deny that there is an articulation of reality that precedes all scientific articulation: that articulation, that wealth of meaning, which we have in mind when speaking of the world of common experience or of the natural understanding of the world. But he did not even attempt a coherent analysis of the social world as it is known to “common sense,” or of social reality as it is known in social life or in action. . . .
In the spirit of a tradition of three centuries [i.e., modern philosophy], Weber would have rejected the suggestion that social science must be based on an analysis of social reality as it is experienced in social life or known to “common sense.”[14] [15]
Modern philosophy and modern science instead begin by rejecting “common sense” as groundless, and thus as incapable of grounding knowledge.
Strauss then offers phenomenology as an alternative approach:
. . . in the nineteenth century, it became more and more apparent that a drastic distinction must be made between what was then called the “scientific” understanding (or “the world of science”) and the “natural” understanding (or “the world in which we live”). It became apparent that the scientific understanding of the world emerges by way of a radical modification, as distinguished from a perfection, of the natural understanding.
This last sentence was repeated almost verbatim in the passage from “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” that we examined above. Strauss continues:
Since the natural understanding is the presupposition of the scientific understanding, the analysis of science and of the world of science presupposes the analysis of the natural understanding, the natural world, or the world of common sense.[15] [16]
Modern science wishes to replace common sense with scientifically-grounded knowledge. But this is impossible if modern science is merely an outgrowth or modification of common sense.
Strauss does not name Husserl here. He merely mentions that that this outlook is rooted in nineteenth-century thought. But the concept of “the world in which we live” is a translation of the “Lebenswelt,” which is contrasted with the constructs of modern natural science. Also, Strauss uses “nature,” as in “natural understanding, the natural world,” as Husserl does, to denote naïve, pre-scientific awareness.
Moreover, Strauss’ very next sentence summarizes a key idea in Heidegger’s Being and Time:
The natural world, the world in which we live and act, is not the object or the product of a theoretical attitude; it is a world not of mere objects at which we detachedly look but of “things” or “affairs” which we handle.[16] [17]
Compare Heidegger’s formulation:
The Being of those entities which we encounter as closest to us can be exhibited phenomenologically if we take as our clue our everyday Being-in-the-world, which we also call our “dealings” in the world and with entities within the world. . . . The kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use . . .[17] [18]
This is a central idea of the “early Heidegger.”
Strauss then continues with something that sounds very much like the “later Heidegger,” except for the bit about ghosts and witches, which sounds a bit like Husserl:
Yet as long as we identify the natural world or prescientific world with the world in which we live, we are dealing with an abstraction. The world in which we live is already a product of science, or at any rate it is profoundly affected by the existence of science. To say nothing of technology, the world in which we live is free from ghosts, witches, and so on, with which, but for the existence of science, it would abound.[18] [19]
Our lifeworld is not the lifeworld of the Ancients, because our lifeworld itself has been shaped by modern science. Modern science may be a product of reflective, self-critical consciousness, but modern science has so permeated our culture that it has become part of naïve, unreflective awareness of the world.
[20]You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here [21]
The early Heidegger sought to undermine the modern Cartesian, representationalist model of knowledge in a way that parallels Husserl’s critique of scientific realism in The Crisis. (Being and Time was written first, so if there is any influence, it goes from Heidegger to Husserl.)
Husserl shows how the supposed opposition between science and the lifeworld arises essentially by forgetting that science emerges from the lifeworld.
The early Heidegger shows that the opposition of gazing subject and decontextualized object (consciousness vs. the world “out there”) arises from the breakdown of a more primordial unity of an active being and its meaningful projects. Subject and object originally enjoy great intimacy in the practical dealings of ordinary life. It is only when these practical dealings break down somehow that we feel thrown back as a gazing subject confronting a stubbornly alien object. For instance, when we reach for a tool and find it missing, or when we turn the key and nothing happens, the unreflective flow of life is sundered into subject and object, between which now hovers a question. Modern philosophers like Descartes take a snapshot of this situation and then turn it into a metaphysics of the theoretical subject pondering if there really is a world out there or not. The goal of philosophy becomes determining whether or not our consciousness “represents” the world out there.
The later Heidegger came to believe that the manipulative dealings of ordinary life and the representational model of consciousness had a common root: the drive to render all beings available for manipulation and control. Heidegger called this drive the “essence of technology.”
To arrive at a vision of the world free of the essence of technology, Heidegger turned to pre-Platonic Greek thought as well as poetry and mysticism. Strauss had no patience with mysticism, but he too looked to the ancient Greek philosophers and poets:
To grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic, one has to go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy. It is not necessary for this purpose to engage in extensive and necessarily hypothetical anthropological studies. The information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins suffices . . .[19] [22]
Why does Strauss reject empirical research into anthropology and folklore as a route back to the prescientific Greek mind? In what sense are these studies “necessarily hypothetical”? What is his alternative method?
Strauss does not name names here, but James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough might be an example of the sort of scholarship Strauss rejects. In trying to reconstruct aspects of European paganism, Frazer constantly appeals to recent studies of primitive peoples in places like Melanesia, on the assumption that their myths, rituals, and thought patterns throw light on those of ancient Europeans. Frazer’s method depends on the assumption that all primitive peoples think more or less alike. Perhaps Strauss questioned this.
[23]You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here [24]
Another work Strauss might have been thinking of is Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. II, Mythical Thinking (1925), which draws upon extensive ethnographical studies in order to recapture the prescientific, premodern way in which the world showed up. In Being and Time, Heidegger noted that Cassirer himself believed that the foundations of his studies might be inadequate and that they might benefit from “the phenomenological horizons disclosed by Husserl.”[20] [25] Strauss was certainly familiar with Cassirer’s work. One of the most prominent students of Hermann Cohen, Cassirer directed Strauss’ doctoral dissertation in Hamburg in 1921. Strauss denigrated Cassirer in comparison to Heidegger in his essay “Kurt Riezler” and his lecture “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism.”[21] [26] Strauss also at least alludes to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: “Having been a disciple of Hermann Cohen he 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.”[22] [27]
Whatever his methodological reservations about such ethnographic studies, in the end Strauss probably found them simply unnecessary, for by reading the classics with a phenomenological eye, it is possible to get a sense of the original Greek lifeworld. In this, Strauss follows both Husserl and Heidegger: for instance, Husserl’s reconstruction of how geometrical idealizations arise from experience and Heidegger’s etymologies of Greek words such as aletheia (truth) and physis (nature), which conjure up the concrete experiences the words sought to capture.
Natural Right & History, Chapter 3
The next chapter of Natural Right and History, “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right,” makes Strauss’ debt to phenomenology clear. Strauss begins:
To understand the problem of natural right, one must start, not from the “scientific” understanding of political things but from their “natural” understanding, i.e., from the way in which they present themselves in political life, in action, when they are our business, when we have to make decisions.[23] [28]
This passage is pure phenomenology. First, there is the distinction between the scientific and the naïve (“natural”) understanding of political things. Second, phenomenology is often defined as the study of how things “present themselves.” Third, there is the emphasis on the practical context of “life,” “action,” and “decisions.”
Since the idea of natural right depends upon the idea of nature, Strauss’ approach in this chapter is to begin with the pre-scientific, pre-philosophical conception of order as the “way of things” that embraces both nature and human conventions, then to explore how the distinction between nature and convention emerges from experience, along with other key philosophical distinctions — e.g., between direct knowledge and hearsay and between the objective and subjective viewpoints.
Natural Right & History, Chapter 4
The next chapter, “Classical Natural Right,” also leans heavily on phenomenology. Socrates’ turn toward the human things was not based on disregarding nature or the divine, but rather on a new approach to the whole that gave all three realms — man, nature, and the divine — their own room to breathe:
Contrary to appearances, Socrates’ turn to the study of the human things was based, not upon disregard of the divine or natural things, but upon a new approach to the understanding of all things. That approach was indeed of such a character that it permitted, and favored, the study of human things as such, i.e., of the human things insofar as they are not reducible to the divine or natural things.[24] [29]
The reference to reductionism is crucial. Phenomenology is opposed to all forms of reductionism, i.e., the claim that one realm of phenomena is “nothing but” another realm of phenomena: for example, that politics is nothing but economics, altruism is nothing but selfishness, or culture is nothing but mating strategies. Or as it is most broadly stated: Human things are nothing but animal things. Phenomenology rejects this because human things present themselves in fundamentally different ways than the things of nature, and those appearances should not be dismissed as “mere” appearances, as opposed to the “reality” revealed by the “hard,” i.e., non-human sciences.
Materialists, both ancient and modern, seek to explain the emergence of the many kinds of things we experience from the starting point of one or a few simple material causes. Socrates, like the phenomenologists of today, treats the whole of experience, with all its bewildering variety, as the starting point of thought. Instead of trying to understand the world of experience as the product of much simpler, material causes, Socrates and the phenomenologists treat the world of experience as primary and understand science within its horizon:
The thing itself, the completed thing, cannot be understood as a product of the process leading up to it, but, on the contrary, the process cannot be understood except in the light of the completed thing or the end of the process. The What is, as such, the character of a class of things or of a “tribe” of things — of things which by nature belong together or form a natural group. The whole has a natural articulation. To understand the whole, therefore, means no longer primarily to discover the roots out of which the completed whole, the articulated whole, the whole consisting of distinct groups of things, the intelligible whole, the cosmos, has grown, or to discover the cause which has transformed the chaos into a cosmos [classical natural philosophy or modern scientific naturalism], or to perceive the unity which is hidden behind the variety of things or appearances [classical metaphysics], but to understand the unity that is revealed in the manifest articulation of the completed whole. This view supplies the basis for the distinction between the sciences: the distinction between the various sciences corresponds to the natural articulation of the whole.[25] [30]
Strauss describes the Socratic move to make room for the human things within the whole in phenomenological terms, using “common sense” and the “world of common sense” to render the concept of the lifeworld:
In present-day parlance one can describe the change in question as a return to “common sense” or to “the world of common sense.” That to which the question “What is?” points is the eidos of a thing, the shape or form or character or “idea” of a thing. It is no accident that the term eidos signifies primarily that which is visible to all without any particular effort or what one might call the “surface” of the things.[26] [31]
Metaphysical thinking is constructed on a hard and fast distinction between surface and depth, appearance and reality, and it consistently privileges depth over surface, reality over appearance. Phenomenology, by contrast, rejects these hard and fast distinctions. It begins with the things that appear to us and shows that scientific and philosophical attempts to explain the world of appearances do not so much break through appearances into a fundamentally different realm as they unfold previously unglimpsed aspects of appearances. In the end, everything — even what is hidden on first glance — remains metaphysically on the “surface,” in the realm of “appearances.”
But surfaces, appearances, are no longer “mere” or superficial. Indeed, as Husserl sees them the surfaces implicitly contain the whole plenitude of meaning and depth, which merely have to be rendered explicit, i.e., unfolded. The surfaces of things are no longer negligible and impoverished, like a flat, blank sheet of paper, a page we simply want to turn. Instead, they are like a densely inscribed and wadded-up ball of paper, which must be unfolded and smoothed out to reveal its hidden depths.
Strauss also uses the language of phenomenology to explain how Socratic dialectic works:
All knowledge, however limited or “scientific,” presupposes a horizon, a comprehensive view of the whole within which knowledge is possible. All understanding presupposes a fundamental awareness of the whole: prior to any perception of particular things the human soul must have had a vision of the ideas, a vision of the articulated whole. However much the comprehensive visions which animate the various societies may differ, they all are visions of the same — of the whole. Therefore, they do not merely differ from, but contradict, one another. This very fact forces man to realize that each of those visions, taken by itself, is merely an opinion about the whole or an inadequate articulation of the fundamental awareness of the whole and thus points beyond itself toward an adequate articulation. There is no guaranty that the quest for adequate articulation will ever lead beyond an understanding of the fundamental alternatives or that philosophy will ever legitimately go beyond the stage of discussion or disputation will ever reach the stage of decision. The unfinishable character of the quest for adequate articulation of the whole does not entitle one, however, to limit philosophy to the understanding of a part, however important. For the meaning of a part depends on the meaning of the whole.[27] [32]
Explicit, articulated knowledge presupposes implicit, non-articulated knowledge. The first phenomenological touch here is to describe this context of implicit knowledge as a “horizon.” Socratic dialectic presupposes that in some sense we already know the ideas we are trying to articulate. Plato explains this with a myth: the soul glimpsed the forms before embodiment, then “forgot” them. Forgetting, in this context, means that knowledge is still there, but one is not conscious of it. Dialectic is therefore a process of remembering what one already knows, but has forgotten. In Being and Time, Heidegger explains the same process in terms of the “hermeneutic circle,” whereas in the Logical Investigations, Husserl describes dialectic in terms of the logic of parts and wholes.[28] [33] All of these threads are woven together here by Strauss.
“On Classical Political Philosophy”
[34]You can buy Greg Johnson’s From Plato to Postmodernism here [35]
Strauss’s 1945 essay, “On Classical Political Philosophy,”[29] [36] also makes extensive use of phenomenology.
First, Strauss frames the recovery of classical political philosophy in phenomenological terms. “Classical political philosophy is characterized by the fact that it was related to political life directly.”[30] [37] However, when political philosophy became “established” as a tradition, it “thus acquired a certain remoteness from political life.”[31] [38] Concepts that were once drawn from the wellspring of political experience were later passed on simply by teachers. Eventually, with the rise of modern science, political philosophy was “related to political life through the medium of the inherited general notion of political philosophy or political science, and through the medium of a new concept of science.”
Strauss’ aim is to dismantle the increasingly empty and abstract tradition of political philosophy and political science and return to the primordial experiences that gave rise to political philosophy in the first place. Heidegger applied the same process of dismantling (Destruktion) to the metaphysical tradition in order to return to the primordial Greek experience of Being. Husserl called the same process of dismantling Abbau, which he used to trace the idealities of modern mathematical physics back to the concrete experiences that gave them birth.
Second, Strauss frames the discovery of classical political philosophy in phenomenological terms. Instead of abstracting from political experience and common sense as modern political philosophy does,
[c]lassical political philosophy attempted to reach its goal by accepting the basic distinctions made in political life exactly in the sense and with the orientation in which they are made in political life, and by thinking them through, by understanding them as perfectly as possible. . . . it followed carefully and even scrupulously the articulation which is inherent in, and natural to, political life and its objectives.[32] [39]
Classical political philosophy, in short, is based upon the lifeworld. The content of classical political philosophy is dictated by the questions debated in all manner of political assemblies, and the method of classical political philosophy is dictated by such discussions as well. Classical political philosophy carries forward the conversations of ordinary political life but with increasing rigor; i.e., classical political philosophy is dialectical.
“Social Science & Humanism”
Phenomenology also plays a prominent role in Strauss’ 1956 lecture “Social Science and Humanism.”[33] [40] Strauss begins by developing the contrast between scientific and humanistic approaches to the study of man in terms of Pascal’s distinction between the spirit of geometry (social science) and the spirit of finesse (humanism). Strauss’ characterization of the spirit of finesse takes a phenomenological turn when he characterizes it as “grasping in one view unanalyzed wholes in their distinctive characters.”[34] [41] Strauss then contrasts humanist holism with scientific reductionism:
Specialization may be said to originate ultimately in this premise: In order to understand a whole, one must analyze or resolve it into its elements, one must study the elements by themselves, and then one must reconstruct the whole or recompose it by starting from the elements. Reconstruction requires the whole be grasped in advance, prior to an analysis. . . . The reason for the impossibility of reconstruction can be stated as follows: the whole as primarily known is an object of common sense; but it is of the essence of the scientific spirit, at least as this spirit shows itself within the social sciences, to be distrustful of common sense or even to discard it altogether.[35] [42]
Strauss, like Husserl, does not think that modern science is false or useless. One can analyze phenomena into their elements. One can also study them “genetically” — i.e., trace their genesis and disintegration. But modern science dissolves into meaninglessness as soon as one asks “What, exactly, are you analyzing?” For the wholes that it analyzes are given in ordinary, naïve experience, which modern science denigrates and discards from the start.
But if one accepts that the starting point of science is the world of naïve experience, then one can answer the “what?” question. One has a context in which analytical and genetic studies of phenomena are meaningful. The Socratic question “What is x?” is answered by articulating naïve experience. This question has priority over analytical and genetic studies, since these only make sense if we have a firm grasp of what, exactly, we are talking about.
To avoid the dangers of reductionism, Strauss counsels that we assert and hold fast to the primacy of naïve, commonsense experience over analytical and genetic studies:
To counteract the dangers inherent in specialization, as far as these dangers can be counteracted within the social sciences, a conscious return to commonsense thinking is needed — a return to the perspective of the citizen.[36] [43]
“The Problem of Socrates”
Strauss beautifully weaves phenomenology’s antireductionism and defense of the primacy of the lifeworld together with classical political philosophy in his 1958 course of lectures, “The Problem of Socrates”:
Socrates is distinguished from all philosophers who preceded him by the fact that he sees the core of nature, or of the whole, in noetic heterogeneity. The whole is not one, nor homogeneous, but heterogeneous. Yet heterogeneity is not sensible heterogeneity, like the heterogeneity of the four elements, for example, but noetic heterogeneity, essential heterogeneity. It is for this reason that Socrates founded political science. Only if there is essential heterogeneity can there be an essential difference between political things and things which are not political. The discovery of noetic heterogeneity permits one to let things be what they are and takes away the compulsion to reduce essential differences to something common. The discovery of noetic heterogeneity means the vindication of what one could call common sense. Socrates called it a return from madness to sanity or sobriety, or, to use the Greek term, sophrosyne, which I would translate as moderation. Socrates discovered the paradoxical fact that, in a way, the most important truth is the most obvious truth, or the truth of the surface.[37] [44]
Noetic heterogeneity means that a plurality of different kinds of beings shows up to naïve, commonsense awareness. Human things present themselves differently — look different — from natural and divine things. Therefore, there are different methods for studying things natural, human, and divine. Each kind of being has room to be. One kind of being is not made the measure of the real, in accord with which the others are demoted to mere appearances. One kind of knowing is not made the measure of knowing, in accord with which the others are demoted to mere opinion. The rejection of reductionism is equivalent to granting priority to common sense experience. It rehabilitates the surfaces of things by asserting that the plenitude of meaning lies within rather than behind appearances.
The Golden Passage
Strauss’ debt to phenomenology throws light on one of his most obscure but quotable statements, the so-called “golden passage” from Thoughts on Machiavelli:
There is no surer protection against the understanding of anything than taking for granted or otherwise despising the obvious and the surface. The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.[38] [45]
Here we have a version of the phenomenological imperative “Back to the things themselves,” meaning, “Back to things as they present themselves to naïve consciousness” or “Back to the obvious.” “Back to the superficial.” This approach is opposed to the metaphysical and scientistic prejudice against common sense and the surfaces of things. According to Strauss, we gain access to the heart of things by doing justice to their surfaces, not by ignoring them altogether. Phenomena wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Here, however, Strauss is not talking about modern science versus classical political philosophy. Instead, he is talking about the interpretation of texts.
The context of this statement is the meaning of Machiavelli. Strauss wishes to defend the “simple” view that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil from the “sophisticated” view that he was not. Strauss, of course, wishes to argue that Machiavelli is more than a simple teacher of evil. But to do that, Strauss has to acknowledge the truth in the view that Machiavelli did indeed teach evil. The simple view of Machiavelli is based on the surface of his texts. It can, therefore, be dismissed as “superficial.” But the more sophisticated readers who dismiss the surface of Machiavelli’s texts don’t even rise to the level of superficiality. It is only by doing justice to the surfaces of Machiavelli’s texts that one can get beyond them.
This may seem to be a surprising teaching from Strauss. Didn’t Strauss teach that the surface of great philosophical texts communicates merely an “exoteric” teaching, whereas the true, “esoteric” teaching is concealed within?
This is actually a misunderstanding of Strauss. The esoteric teaching of a philosopher is not in some sense “hidden inside” the exoteric teaching. An esoteric teaching is not, for instance, an encrypted message which requires a cipher book in order to decode it. This method could convey a message to a known individual who has the cipher key. But it would make it nearly impossible for anyone else to discover the secret teaching. But this would make publishing such a book a futile endeavor, because philosophers want to communicate their esoteric teachings to new people and future generations, but not to everyone.
Thus, both the exoteric and the esoteric meanings of a text must both be found on the “surface.” Esoteric teachings must be hidden in plain view. Everybody can see them, but few will understand them, primarily because the exoteric meaning will be more prominent, whereas the esoteric meaning will be less so. Thus, esoteric reading requires full and exacting fidelity to the surface of texts in order to grasp their deepest meaning.[39] [46]
Strauss is therefore not just a phenomenologist when he reflects on method. He is also a phenomenologist whenever he interprets the great texts of the past. Without phenomenology, Strauss would not be Strauss.
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Notes
[1] [48] Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Strauss published “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” in the Straussian movement journal Interpretation in 1971. He later chose it to be the first essay in the anthology Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, which was published after his death under the editorship of Thomas Pangle.
[2] [49] Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 460.
[3] [50] Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” pp. 460–61.
[4] [51] Leo Strauss, “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 137.
[5] [52] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
[6] [53] Edmund Husserl, “Die Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem,” Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 1, no. 2 (1939). It is included as Appendix VI of Carr’s translation of the Crisis.
[7] [54] Leo Strauss to Eric Voegelin, May 9, 1943, in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, trans. and ed. Peter Emberly and Barry Cooper (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), p. 17.
[8] [55] The first two parts of The Crisis were published in 1936 in the journal Philosophia. Parts I and II along with Husserl’s manuscript for part III were published in 1954. The projected parts IV and V were never written.
[9] [56] Edmund Husserl, “Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlichkeit der Natur,” in Marvin Farber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940). In English: “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” trans. Fred Kersten, in Edmund Husserl, Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981).
[10] [57] Strauss credited his oldest philosophical friend, Jacob Klein, with first understanding how phenomenology made possible a return to the ancients: “Klein was the first to understand the possibility which Heidegger had opened without intending it: the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato, a return with open eyes and in full clarity about the infinite difficulties which it entails.” (“An Unspoken Prologue,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Jewish Thought, p. 450.) What applies to Heidegger’s phenomenology applies to Husserl’s as well. Klein’s debts to Husserl’s Crisis are clear in his essays “The World of Physics and the ‘Natural’ World” and “Phenomenology and the History of Science” in Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis: Saint John’s College Press, 1985).
[11] [58] Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 31.
[12] [59] In the Vienna lecture of 1935, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” Husserl writes:
. . . the historical surrounding world of the Greeks is not the objective world in our sense but rather their “world representation,” i.e., their own subjective validity with all the actualities which are valid for them within it, including, for example, gods, demons, etc. (Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” Appendix I of The Crisis, trans. Carr, p. 272)
[13] [60] The transition from the discussion of Max Weber and the distinction between facts and values to Chapter 3, “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right,” which deals with classical political philosophy.
[14] [61] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 77–78. Natural Right and History first appeared as a series of lectures in 1949, then parts of it appeared in journals in 1950 to 1952. Finally, it was published as a book in 1953.
[15] [62] Natural Right and History, p. 79.
[16] [63] Natural Right and History, p. 79.
[17] [64] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, first published in 1927, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 95. (Sein und Zeit, 16th printing [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986], pp. 66–67).
[18] [65] Natural Right and History, p. 79.
[19] [66] Natural Right and History, pp. 79–80.
[20] [67] Being and Time, p. 490, note xi/Sein und Zeit, p. 51, note 1.
[21] [68] Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[22] [69] Leo Strauss, “Kurt Riezler,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 246. Strauss also mentions the “philosophy of symbolic forms” (the doctrine, not the books) in his review of Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (What Is Political Philosophy?, pp. 292–96).
[23] [70] Natural Right and History, p. 81.
[24] [71] Natural Right and History, p. 122.
[25] [72] Natural Right and History, p. 123.
[26] [73] Natural Right and History, p. 123.
[27] [74] Natural Right and History, pp. 125–26.
[28] [75] For a comparison of Platonic, Hegelian, Heideggerian, and Husserlian dialectic, see my essay “Notes on Philosophical Dialectic,” in From Plato to Postmodernism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).
[29] [76] Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” Social Research (February, 1945), reprinted in What Is Political Philosophy? and The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism.
[30] [77] “On Classical Political Philosophy,” Rebirth, p. 49.
[31] [78] “On Classical Political Philosophy,” Rebirth, p. 49.
[32] [79] “On Classical Political Philosophy,” Rebirth, p. 50.
[33] [80] Leo Strauss, “Social Science and Humanism,” in Leonard D. White, ed., The State of the Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), reprinted in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism.
[34] [81] “Social Science and Humanism,” Rebirth, p. 3.
[35] [82] “Social Science and Humanism,” Rebirth, p. 4.
[36] [83] “Social Science and Humanism,” Rebirth, p. 5.
[37] [84] “The Problem of Socrates,” Rebirth, p. 142.
[38] [85] Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 13.
[39] [86] For more on Strauss’ hermeneutics, see my essay “Strauss on Persecution and the Art of Writing [87],” Counter-Currents, January 3, 2013.