Abstract
One of the persistent puzzles of Strauss scholarship is the absence in any of his published works of a thematic treatment of Immanuel Kant (The sole exception is his early dissertation on Jacobi, which includes an extensive treatment of Kant from the perspective of Jacobi’s critique. See Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis (1921)). This absence is all the more striking given Kant’s importance in shaping the intellectual milieu in which the younger Strauss was educated and against which he, along with many of his early intellectual companions, including Gerhard Krüger, Jacob Klein, Gerschom Scholem, and others, rebelled more or less explicitly. And it gives the two seminars that he dedicated to Kant, in 1958 and 1967, respectively (an additional seminar, given in the early 1950s, was evidently not recorded), (with the sole exception of his early dissertation on Jacobi) special importance for anyone wishing to better grasp Strauss’s understanding and appraisal of Kant’s thought, including the meaning of that relative public silence.
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Notes
- 1.
The sole exception is his early dissertation on Jacobi, which includes an extensive treatment of Kant from the perspective of Jacobi’s critique. See Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis (1921).
- 2.
Strauss seems to have also offered a course on “Aristotle and Kant” at the New School in 1944, which was attended by Harry Jaffa. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/396209/house-jaffa-john-j-miller.
- 3.
For Strauss’s youthful assessment of Cassirer , whom he later described as a “remarkable representative of established academic philosophy,” see RCPR 28.
- 4.
Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties [6: 517–18].
- 5.
See his letter to Karl Löwith , 23 June 1935 [GS-3: 648].
- 6.
Strauss also mentions Krüger appreciatively, albeit with reservations, in Strauss’s 1959 Seminar on Plato’s Symposium. See Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Pangle, Reorientation, 58.
- 7.
See, for example, their shared contempt for the work of Karl Mannheim , Strauss’s satirical treatment of whom [in the essay “Conspectivism”] he asked for Krüger’s help in publishing.
- 8.
See, in this regard, Strauss’s later references to Ebbinghaus at [58: 229, 348–9].
- 9.
On Kant’s ongoing openness to interpretations other than a neo-Kantian one, see [58: 56, 229]; on Krüger’s own linkage of Kant with Hobbes, see Strauss’s letter of 28 June 1931.
- 10.
In “The Intellectual Situation of the Present,” Strauss claims to discover in Cohen a more genuine religious motivation than is initially evident, given his apparent reduction of religion to social ethics: when neo-orthodox Protestants complain that the “entire science of religion has been devised without paying heed to religion,” they forget, if they thereby have Cohen in mind, that “the entire context of Cohen’s philosophic system rests on religious presuppositions,” in marked contrast with an apparent acolyte like Cassirer , for whom, “in a typically idealistic manner,” the world of myth “loses its ‘compulsory’ character” insofar as it is read as the mind’s own product. Cohen’s polemic against myth differs from that of Cassirer in being guided not by an idealistic celebration of “the autonomous human spirit,” but by the non-idealist, and genuinely ethical question “to what end?” “In Cohen,” as Strauss goes on to say, “the ethical motive of transcendence contains within it…the power and depth of the religious motive of transcendence.” “In the concrete context of human existence, the transcendence of the Ought in relation to Being, demands by its very nature , as Cohen stated again and again, that ethics be further developed into religion .” [LSEW 110, 114]
- 11.
It is not known how much of the text contained in the rather lengthy extant manuscript was actually delivered. See the editor’s note, [LSMC, 173].
- 12.
Cf. [58: 76].
- 13.
For the fullest explicit discussion , see “What is Political Philosophy ?,” 9–55. In “Cohen and Maimonides ,” Strauss already stresses the necessary ambiguity of the term. For an alternative account, see Rodrigo Chacon, “Reading Strauss from the Start: on the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy ,’” European Journal of Political Theory 9 (3), 2010, 287–307. Chacon, in my view, draws much too sharp a distinction between Strauss’s early and later uses of the term. On the continuity of Strauss’s usage, see especially his interest at this time in Lessing, and especially the dialogue “Ernst and Falk.” See Strauss, “A Remembrance of Lessing” (1937), [2: 607–8]; “Esoteric Teaching” (1939); cf. “Reason and Revelation,” LSTPP, 178–9.
- 14.
See, for example, his letter to Krüger of 15 October 1931.
- 15.
On Kant’s relation to Descartes , see also [58: 276, 283–84]: Kant, as Strauss there puts it, “wants morality to apply equally to God ” in order to “secure us against any theological objections to the perfect sovereignty of man,” that is, to leave us not “unprotected…against God” by establishing a sphere of uniquely human responsibility in which “no God, however powerful, can have power over man.” [58: 239, 276, 284, 292] Strauss’s analysis seems to draw partly on Krüger’s own early essay on Descartes, which Strauss praises in his letter of 12 May 1935. Cf. Krüger, “Die Herkunft des philosophischen Selbstbewusstseins,” Logos 22 (1933); an English translation “The Origin of Philosophical Self-Consciousness” was published in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (2007), 209–59. Cf. the reservation expressed by Strauss in his 1941 notes on Descartes : “[Against Krüger: K. asserts that the reaction to the Biblical tradition is the only reason of Desc.’s new foundation. But: the doubt of mathematical certainty is required equally by the Deus deceptor and by the fortuna-casus-possibility. What have these 2 possibilities in common? They both are opposed to Plato-Aristotle; the Aristotelian answer has become problematic; but his and Plato’s fundamental insight: only the intelligible can be understood, is recognized. Therefore, Desc. must try to make the foundation of intelligibility independent of the nous en kosmo.]” [Leo Strauss Archives, Box 6, file 8]. (I am grateful to Svetovar Minkov for bringing this passage to my attention.)
- 16.
In a final, and perhaps unsent, letter to Krüger (his correspondence with whom would not resume until June 1958), Strauss grants that he is now far more willing to concede Krüger’s view that “Kant is really the only Platonist among the modern philosophers.” At the same time, Strauss also holds the “Christian tradition” to task for the “main deficiencies of traditional conceptions of Plato – even in today’s research”—an allusion, it would seem, to Heidegger as much as Krüger, who continues to be more “convinced” than is Strauss (thanks to his own discovery of a path back to Plato via Alfarabi) that “historicity as such is a philosophic problem.” Letter of Dec. 1935 (unsent draft). For a late discussion of Kant’s “Platonism ,” see [67: 137].
- 17.
For a thorough account of Strauss’s qualified debt to Jacobi, see David Janssens, “The Problem of the Enlightenment : Strauss, Jacobi, and the Pantheism Controversy,” in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s, ed. Martin Jaffe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 18.
See Meier , LSTPP, 29; cf. WIPP 78–94. Accordingly, as he puts it an accompanying note, Strauss “find[s himself] compelled” to change his work plans, which presumably included a previously outlined book to be “tentatively entitled Philosophy and Law: Selected Essays,” which was devoted to the subject of esotericism and was to culminate with a chapter on the “Pantheism” controversy. Strauss’s subsequent treatments of the history of natural right no longer explicitly link, in the manner of his earlier writings, the Christian understanding of natural law with the emergence of historicism , now presented as the culminating moment of the three “waves” of modernity initiated by Machiavelli .
- 19.
While Strauss mentions both Bultmann and Gogarten , he focuses on the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, whose Reason and Revelation (1946; original German edition 1941), Strauss quotes from at some length (and whose title he both imitates and, in order to “clarify the issue,” implicitly corrects [LSTPP 141]). On Brunner, see also Strauss’s 26 November 1946 letter to Lowith [3: 671]. For a fuller discussion of Strauss’s treatment of neo-orthodoxy, see Daniel Tanguay, Strauss: an Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 145–66).
- 20.
Cf. Luke 10: 41–2.
- 21.
On the importance for Strauss of an understanding of the genealogy of this obfuscation, see his Collingwood essay.
- 22.
There is some question as whether these notes properly belong to the period in which he composed “Reason and Revelation,” or, instead, to Strauss’s earlier lecture on “Jerusalem and Athens,” which was delivered in November 1946, much closer to the date of his “shipwreck” letter to Lowith . (I am grateful to David Bolotin and Peter Hansen for drawing my attention to this issue.)
- 23.
Compare, in this regard, the “radical existentialism” of Heidegger , who, recognizing the impossibility of ethics, was permeated, as Strauss later puts it, by an awareness of the “abyss of freedom ” that this “fact” opens up. [RCPR 28–9, 34] See also [58: 143]; Strauss here traces Kant’s treatment of justice in a way that guarantees its “realizability” partly to the importance for him of morality . At the same time, Strauss also suggests that freedom may count for Kant even more than morality itself, contributing to the peculiar tension in his understanding of the just order as both morally required and in itself a-moral. [58: 182, 193]
- 24.
Cf. LSTPP, 176 and letter [28]; the terms are borrowed from Lucien Laberthonnière, Le réalisme chrétien et l’idéalisme grec (Paris, 1904).
- 25.
See, in this regard, Strauss’s 1941 attribution to Descartes and Plato-Aristotle alike of the insight that only the intelligible can be understood, along with Strauss’s related reservation with respect to Krüger’s criticism of Descartes, as cited in note 15 above.
- 26.
“This is the meaning of science . It supplies a frame of reference which in principle can be common to all men as men. Now there are two ways of conceiving this natural frame of reference, if I may call it this for the moment. One is the Kantian way, the other the Platonic way. Kant says there is a natural frame of reference which is given by the structure of the human mind. This implies the distinction between the thing in itself and the phenomenon . This whole perception or understanding through this natural frame of reference is relative to man. The Platonic assertion is the opposite. This natural frame of reference is identical with the inner order of the whole . We are by nature dimly aware of the essential structure of the whole.” (Leo Strauss, Seminar on Plato’s Republic, 1957, session 11)
- 27.
Letter to Krüger, 27 December 1932 [25d].
- 28.
Cf. Strauss, On Tyranny (written at around the same time as the lecture on “Reason and Revelation”): Man as man is not thinkable “as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restrains” or as a being solely guided by the “desire for recognition” [192].
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Shell, S.M. (2018). Gerhard Krüger and Leo Strauss: The Kant Motif. In: Shell, S. (eds) The Strauss-Krüger Correspondence. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74201-4_7
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