|
April 8, 2005
Strauss says that his return to antiquity is necessitated by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West. Strauss, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, sees a crisis of nihilism at the heart of modernity. This crisis opens up the possibilty of a return to a principle forgotten or lost sight of within modernity.
Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss holds that the recovery of this lost principle involves a return to the ancients who are now able to speak to us free from the distorting effects of modern assumptions.For Strauss, the problem of modernity is not represented by phrases "the death of God" (Nietzsche) or "the forgetting of Being" (Heidegger).It is represented by relativism, by which Strauss means that for the moderns no particular way of life has inherent worth.
Relativism means the rejection of natural right. The principle to be recovered is natural right.
In contrast to Heidegger, Strauss does not turn to the pre-Socratics. He returns to Plato and Aristotle--those thinkers who Nietzsche and Heidegger argue are the architects of Western metaphysics and thus fully implicated in the presuppositions of a nihilistic modernity.
|
