Abstract
This article by a non-Straussian sets out to think about Leo Strauss’s theories of how to read Islamic philosophical texts. It considers the main components of Strauss’s hermeneutics and investigates in detail his presentation of his theory of persecution, provides a brief overview of the principal criticisms of Strauss’s approach to the history of philosophy, ponders the ramifications of this debate for reading philosophical texts and attempts to place this unique set of ideas in an early twentieth century perspective.
This study is the product of my attempts over two academic years (2007–2008 and 2008–2009) to teach a fourth-year undergraduate and taught graduate course on classical Arabic philosophical writings at the University of Cambridge. I owe much to the engagement, acumen and imagination of my students in allowing me to discern the contours of Leo Strauss’s presence in the study of these texts. I dedicate this article to them. I am also grateful to Anna and Guido, the organisers of the conference and the editors of this volume, for offering a soapbox to an impostor.
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Notes
- 1.
A standard Straussian objection to non-Straussian engagements with Strauss’s thought is to allege that the critic has not fully read all the relevant aspects of Strauss’s thought. I shall accordingly be clear about what I have read: Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1952]); ‘Farabi’s Plato’, in Louis Ginzberg: Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (New York: The American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 357–393; What is Political Philosophy? and Other Essays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1959]); On Tyranny, Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, eds Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1961]); Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965 [1953]). It is for my critics to decide whether I have read all the relevant aspects of Strauss’s thought. The same caveat applies, mutatis mutandis, to my coverage of the scholarly studies of Strauss and the work of the Straussians. Two important works came to my attention too late for me properly to take account of them in this study: Mark Bevir, ‘Esotericism and Modernity: An Encounter with Leo Strauss’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 1 (2007), pp. 201–218 (an intelligent examination of the hermeneutic ramifications of holding an esoteric philosophy of history); the articles contained in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Steven B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially the contributions by Leora Batnitzky, ‘Leo Strauss and the “Theologico-Political Predicament”’, pp. 41–62; Laurence Lampert, ‘Strauss’s Recovery of Esotericism’, pp. 63–92; and Joel L. Kraemer, ‘The Medieval Arabic Enlightenment’, pp. 137–170 (which is particularly illuminating on the centrality of Maimonides for Strauss).
- 2.
A convenient prospectus of Straussianism is to be found in Mahdi’s two introductions and the foreword by Butterworth and Pangle in: Al-Fārābī, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated with an introduction by Muhsin Mahdi, revised edition with a foreword by Charles E. Butterworth and Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
- 3.
I owe this observation to a lecture delivered by Professor Raymond Geuss of the University of Cambridge.
- 4.
See Wael Hallaq, Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christopher Melchert, ‘The Meaning of Qāla’l-Shāfiʿī in Ninth Century Sources’, in ʿAbbasid Studies: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies, Proceedings of the Cambridge Meeting 6–10 July 2002, ed. James E. Montgomery (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 277–301; James E. Montgomery, ‘Al-Ǧāʿiẓ and Hellenizing Philosophy’, in The Libraries of the Neoplatonists, ed. Cristina D’Ancona (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 443–456.
- 5.
Melchert, ‘The Meaning of Qāla’l-Shāfiʿī’, p. 297. An anonymous reader’s comment on this article brought home to me the fundamental ambiguity that takhrīj involves, not only for the authority, ownership and identification of the locutor’s words but also for the interpretation of an eponym’s words: an interpretation of what an eponym meant becomes in turn what the eponym said. My reader is anonymous, and it is thus not clear to me whether s/he is a Straussian, though I suspect so (its criticism of incomplete comprehension is an inflection of a common Straussian defence of Strauss). Takhrīj bestows on my reader the full advantage of its ambiguity when pointing out a key underlying philosophical assumption about Strauss which I fail to see. In this way, takhrīj enables Strauss to speak for as long as there are those who are prepared to interpret and so talk in his words.
- 6.
First published in Essays on Maimonides: An Octocentennial Volume, ed. Salo Wittmayer Baron (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 37–91.
- 7.
The reference to Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part 6, is telling, for in that work Descartes explains how he delayed publication of the treatise in reaction to the condemnation by persons of authority (i.e., the Inquisition) to another thinker’s theories on a matter of physics (i.e., Galileo), one which Descartes had previously found unexceptionable, but which had been deemed prejudicial to the interests of state and religion (the condemnation of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1633 by the Congregation of the Holy Office). Descartes’s text, however, is a supremely rhetorical and densely ambiguous exercise in self-justification, what one scholar has referred to as the ancestor of the modern grant application, and there seems to be artifice rather than self-censorship at work.
- 8.
Plato, The Republic, V, 450 C-E. As I understand Socrates’s point, it is not his personal security which he thinks is at risk but the damage he might do to the intellectual and moral wellbeing of his companions were he to make a mistake on the road to truth and implicate them in his error.
- 9.
Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 24.
- 10.
And here one of the principal weaknesses of Strauss’s brand of authorial intentionalism (what I see as the impossibility of discerning when a nod is a nod and when it is a wink) is attributed to a Straussian bogey-man, the censor. See further the next paragraph.
- 11.
I am unsure as to how to tell the difference between the respective exactitudes of such readings.
- 12.
In his respect for the work viewed holistically, Strauss seems to share some of the concerns of the mid-twentieth century American literary movement known as the New Criticism.
- 13.
This view, with which I have considerable sympathy, properly requires the historian to work with original manuscripts and codices, and I am not sure how far Strauss adopted this as a practice.
- 14.
For a discussion of irony and its interpretive possibilities, see James E. Montgomery, ‘Jahiz on Jest and Earnest’, in Humor in der arabischen Kultur, ed. Georges Tamer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 209–239.
- 15.
This criterion, which draws on criteria 3, 4 and possibly 5, goes beyond merely admitting that Homer nods to asserting that Homer’s nods are possibly more meaningful than when he does not nod, which is a position that differs in the significance it places on authorial intentionality from the postmodernist dictum of the uncontrollability of meaning, though what exactly a school boy’s blunders are is unclear to me, as is what Strauss would make of the vagaries of textual transmission or scribal errors.
- 16.
It may be worth comparing Strauss’s discussion of reading between the lines with what Yambo, the amnesiac protagonist of Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, trans. Geoffrey Brock (London: Vintage Books, 206 [2004]), pp. 179–180, says of reading the Italian press from the Second World War: ‘I could have reconstructed the sequences of actual events simply by reading the Fascist press in the right light, as everyone probably had then.’
- 17.
This is not to be confounded with whether Shakespeare intended Macbeth to be a legal document. He may have; we have no way of knowing. I may intend my shopping list to be a poem but it does not make a poem out of my shopping list. An author’s intention for a text remains no more than that: one among many possible intentions (however much we may be minded to accord this intention a special privilege).
- 18.
See the remark of Gadamer: ‘the interpreter is absolutely simultaneous with his author. This is the triumph of philological method’: Lorenz Krüger, ‘Why Do We Study the History of Philosophy?’, in Philosophy in History. Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, eds Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 77–101 (88).
- 19.
Once again it is not clear to me how to identify such a writer, or how I would know what this kind of knowledge would be.
- 20.
‘There are basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man, because they would do harm to many people who, having been hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths’ (p. 36).
- 21.
‘An ever-increasing number of heterodox philosophers … published their books not only to communicate their thoughts but also because they desired to contribute to the abolition of persecution as such’ (p. 33).
- 22.
I am unable to determine the significance of the singular, i.e., whether ‘the most important subject,’ advertises the essential philosophical truth or not.
- 23.
This is an analogy which in many respects I find compelling, though not because of any veracious or verisimilitudinous stance, but because it forces us to reconsider what we might mean by ‘philosopher’ and ‘philosophy’ (and by ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’).
- 24.
I am drawn to wonder whether I can infer that for Strauss al-Fārābī presents his Plato as a character disreputable in the eyes of his contemporary Muslim readers?
- 25.
I have drawn these from my reading of: Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- 26.
Such a Return to the Ancients has latterly received powerful support from Charles Taylor as a way of doing philosophy: ‘Philosophy and its History’, in Philosophy in History, pp. 17–31 and from Quentin Skinner as a vital way of ‘enlarging our present horizons instead of fortifying local prejudices’: Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 125; see further p. 89 and pp. 125–127. In this point Skinner and Strauss are surprisingly similar.
- 27.
See Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 5 and p. 177.
- 28.
Meier, Leo Strauss, p. 175; see pp. 22–23.
- 29.
See Strauss’s letters voicing his concerns over his reading of Maimonides in Meier, Leo Strauss, pp. 23–24, n. 32.
- 30.
Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 186 and p. 187.
- 31.
Incidentally, the text from ʿayy ibn Yaqẓān concerning the inconsistent position of al-Fārābī on the afterlife to which Leaman refers (Introduction, p. 188) does not make this distinction at all; Ibn ʿufayl’s artistry in the muqaddima to this work is at its most disingenuous in misdirecting his readers in his quest to deprive falsafa of ultimate authority in giving adequate accounts of existence. Thus, for example, Gutas has demonstrated the unreliability of the quotations from Ibn Sīnā and Ibn ʿufayl presumably treats al-Fārābī no differently from Ibn Sīnā: see Dimitri Gutas, ‘Ibn ʿufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern Philosophy’, Oriens, 34 (1994), 222–241.
- 32.
Leaman does not remark on the force of this paradox for Strauss who was, as we have seen, so professedly antipathetical to the historicised aspects of all philosophy.
- 33.
Oliver Leaman, ‘Orientalism and Islamic Philosophy’, in History of Islamic Philosophy, eds Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1996), II, pp. 1143–1148 (1145).
- 34.
See further Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’, in Philosophy in History, pp. 49–75 (‘historical reconstruction… and rational reconstruction’ ‘should be seen as two moments in a continuing movement around the hermeneutic circle’ [p. 53]); Bruce Kuklick, ‘Seven Thinkers and How They Grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant’, in Philosophy in History, pp. 125–139 (137, n. 13).
- 35.
Oliver Leaman, A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 13–22 (13).
- 36.
Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 226–227.
- 37.
Gutas, Avicenna, p. 227, n. 13: li-kay lā tubdhala al-falsafa.
- 38.
Dimitri Gutas, ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29 (2002), pp. 5–25 (19).
- 39.
Gutas, Avicenna, pp. 225–234.
- 40.
‘The Study’, p. 20. See also the comment on p. 22: ‘the biased orientalist attitude that philosophy could not thrive in “Islam” because of the intrinsically anti-rationalist nature of the latter.’
- 41.
Though we have seen earlier that Strauss can be quite coy about which texts to read between the lines, some of his acolytes, such as Charles Butterworth, have been less circumspect: see, e.g., Leaman’s discussion of Butterworth’s 1977 study of three of Ibn Rushd’s short commentaries (on the Topics, Rhetoric and Poetics): Introduction, pp. 192–194; and the reviews of Butterworth’s 1986 study of Ibn Rushd’s Middle Commentary on the Poetics by John Mattock in The Classical Review, 37 (1989), pp. 332–333 and Dimitri Gutas in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110 (1990), pp. 92–101.
- 42.
Gutas, ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century’, p. 23.
- 43.
Cf. G. R. F. Ferrari’s ‘Introduction’ to Plato, The Republic, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. xi–xxxi, especially pp. xxii–xxv.
- 44.
See the comment of Muhsin Mahdi, quoted by Gutas, ‘The Study’, p. 23.
- 45.
Gutas, ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century’, p. 21.
- 46.
Skinner, Visions, pp. 59–72.
- 47.
Jonathan Culler, ‘In Defence of Overinterpretation’, in Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 109–124 (114).
- 48.
Miles Burnyeat, ‘Sphinx without a Secret’ (Review of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss), New York Review of Books, 32/9 (May 30, 1985), pp. 30–36 (35).
- 49.
Al-Fārābī, De Platonis philosophia, eds and trans. Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer (London: The Warburg Institute, 1943); Al-Fārābī, Compendium Legum Platonis, ed. and trans. Francesco Gabrieli (London: The Warburg Institute, 1952) respectively. Compare the Straussian reading of this latter work by Joshua Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s Laws (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) and the source-critical study by Dimitri Gutas, ‘Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Fārābī’s Talʿīʿ’, in The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism: Studies on the Transmission of Greek Philosophy and Sciences Dedicated to H. J. Drossaart Lulofs on his Ninetieth Birthday, eds Gerhard Endress and Remke Kruk (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1997), pp. 101–119 (= Article V in Dimitri Gutas, Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition [Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2000]).
- 50.
Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 12. See ibid., p. 17: ‘Fārābī’s remarks on Plato’s policy define the general character of the activity of the falāsifa.’ It is unclear whether this definition is valid for the falāsifa themselves or for Strauss’s vision of al-Fārābī’s vision of the falāsifa, though the distinction will be nugatory if we agree that all parties involved are engaged in the same enterprise.
- 51.
We must remember that for Strauss ‘revelation as understood by Jews and Muslims has the character of Law’ and thus was ‘a social order, if an all-comprehensive order, which regulates not merely actions but thoughts or opinions as well’ (Persecution, pp. 9–10), i.e., it is a temporal and cultural zone of persecution. This seems to have led him to overlook the references to the wāʿi‛ al-nawāmīs at Philosophy of Plato, VII, § 29, p. 21, l. 12 and VII, § 30, p. 22, l. 6–7.
- 52.
Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 17.
- 53.
This last inference (on the exotericism of the Neoplatonism of the falāsifa) is entirely conjectural on my part.
- 54.
My sympathies in the present essay lie with Culler, though in a companion piece I have promoted the Econian dialectic of intentio operis and intentio lectoris: James E. Montgomery, ‘Abū Nuwās, the Justified Sinner?’, Oriens 39 (2011), pp. 75–164.
- 55.
Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979).
- 56.
Ibid., pp. 351–352.
- 57.
I do not follow Booth’s definition of ‘understanding’ as ‘the goal, process, and result whenever one mind succeeds in entering another mind’ (p. 262), largely because I am unsure how to recognise when this might happen to me.
- 58.
Booth, Critical Understanding, pp. 238–242.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 241.
- 60.
As with ‘understanding’ there are features of Booth’s notion of ‘overstanding’ about which I am unsure, as when he holds that ‘just “violations” will be those that are based on a prior act of understanding, and understanding will lead to deliberate violation when justice requires it’ (p. 259). My lack of comfort with this statement is connected with my comments about ‘data’: when it comes to so many Arabic texts from the period, there is no possibility of the kind of consensus that would make any such shared notion of ‘justice’ feasible.
- 61.
Nicholas Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2000 [1991]), p. 99.
- 62.
See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Id., Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 96–125; Jardine, Scenes of Inquiry, pp. 96–99.
- 63.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005 [1983]), p. 109 notes that ‘literary texts are “code-productive” and “code-transgressive” as well as “code-confirming”’. In this respect I do not see any difference between the texts which we identify as ‘literary’ and those we identify as ‘philosophical’: see note 67 below.
- 64.
‘As soon as a text becomes sacred for a certain culture, it becomes subject to the process of suspicious reading and therefore to what is undoubtedly an excess of interpretation … in the case of texts which are sacred […] one cannot allow oneself too much licence, as there is usually a religious authority and tradition that claims to hold the key to its interpretation … this attitude towards sacred texts … has also been transmitted, in secularised form, to texts which have become metaphorically sacred in the course of their reception’ (Interpretation, p. 52–53). I will explore this observation in my projected article on overstanding al-Fārābī’s Falsafat Aflāʿun, in the context of a discussion of the similarities I perceive between al-Fārābī’s ambagiously oracular texts and the Quran.
- 65.
See the remarks on genre made by Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past’, in Philosophy in History, pp. 31–48 (at p. 32); Skinner, Visions, p. 124.
- 66.
Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 126, reminds us that ‘philosophy, law, political theory work by metaphor just as poems do, and so are just as fictional.’
- 67.
Krüger, ‘Why Do We Study’, p. 79; Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy’, p. 63. Krüger, p. 86, clarifies the extension of this notion as ‘transcendental’ philosophy. An inflection of this approach is that when a scholar discerns in a text ‘certain typical problems’ or ‘certain fundamental alternative approaches to the solution’ (Krüger, p. 79), she identifies the text as philosophical. This, is of course, the hermeneutical circle: ‘individual features are intelligible in terms of the entire context’ (here the strong notion of ‘philosophy’) ‘and the entire context becomes intelligible through the individual features’: Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 64.
- 68.
Krüger, developing an insight of Rorty’s, argues that such autonomy is a corollary of this ideal of philosophy because ‘philosophy investigated the time-transcendent structure of human reason or human nature’. In an observation which is evocative of the Arabic ninth- and tenth-century textual heritage, he likens it in this respect to theology, the object of which, ‘God, is conceived as always present and immutable (more so than nature) but lacking availability’ (p. 86).
- 69.
That we know what al-Fārābī had in mind when he wrote implies that al-Fārābī knew what he had in mind, that he was in complete control of his meanings, that his intentions were fully achieved (that he did not set out to write a comedy but composed a tragedy, for example) and were not, say, contradictory, or deluded, or changed mid-way through composition; it also implies that the text which gives us access to al-Fārābī’s mind (intention) is a harmonious and integral whole, that it is not only an independent but also a coherent artefact; and anyway ‘an author’s intention is itself a complete “text”, which can be debated, translated and variously interpreted just like any other’; see Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 41, 60, 64, and 101. I would not want to dispense with all consideration of intentions completely, merely to argue for the insufficiency of any presumption that it is the hegemonic and over-riding consideration in interpreting the texts which we read.
- 70.
See Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy’, pp. 58–59, for the use of the term philosophy as a ‘honorific’.
- 71.
Quoted from Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 145.
- 72.
John Forrester, ‘Introduction’, in Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. xxiii–xxv.
- 73.
Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 44.
- 74.
Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 158; Forrester, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv.
- 75.
Quoted from Ginzburg, ‘Clues’, p. 99.
- 76.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 7.
- 77.
Forrester, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxvi.
- 78.
Lear’s interesting observation (Freud, p. 93) that ‘Freud is primarily concerned not with the interpretation of dream but the self-interpretation of dreamers’ does not obviate the need for interpretative assistance in the form of Freud or his surrogate, his dream book.
- 79.
See Lear, Freud, pp. 88–89; Forrester, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi.
- 80.
Forrester, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxi.
- 81.
Edmundson, The Death, pp. 129–130.
- 82.
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (London: Scholastic Ltd, 1995).
- 83.
See Kenneth Hart Green, ‘Leo Strauss’, in The History of Jewish Philosophy, eds Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1997), II, pp. 820–853.
- 84.
Strauss, ‘Farabi’s Plato’, p. 393.
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Montgomery, J.E. (2013). Leo Strauss and the Alethiometer. In: Akasoy, A., Giglioni, G. (eds) Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 211. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_15
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