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May 11, 2006
Some passages from an excerpt from Steven B. Smith's Reading Leo Strauss Politics, Philosophy, Judais that highlight what Strauss is trying to do.
The first passage states Strauss's view of modernity:
Strauss offered a deliberately provocative account of what might be called the “modernity problem” that had been widely debated in prewar European circles, but which was still relatively unknown to Americans of that era. Prior to Strauss, the most important current of twentieth-century American political thought was John Dewey's "progressivism." Against the view that the advance of science, especially the modern social sciences, was bringing about the progressive triumph of freedom and democracy, Strauss rang an alarm bell. Strauss argued by contrast that the dynamics of modern philosophy and Vertfrei, or value-free social science, were moving not toward freedom and well-being but to a condition he diagnosed as nihilism. In Strauss's counternarrative of decline, the foundations of constitutional government as understood by the American framers were gradually being sapped and eroded by the emergence of German-style historicism according to which all standards of justice and right are relative to their time and place.
So how does Strauss approach this problematic?
Smith's understanding on this is clear.: Strauss presented a distinctive way of asking questions or posing problems. Smith says that:
There is rather a set of common problems or questions that characterize Strauss's work: for example, the difference between ancients and moderns, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and of course the tension between reason and revelation. None of these problems can be said to have a priority over the others nor do they cohere in anything as crude as a system. Whatever may be alleged, there is hardly a single thread that runs throughout these different interests. Strauss did not bequeath a system, doctrine, or an "ism," despite what may be attributed to him. Rather, he presented a distinctive way of asking questions or posing problems that may have been loosely related but that scarcely derived from a single Archimedean point of view. It is questions that motivate all of Strauss’s writings---questions like "Is reason or revelation the ultimate guide to life?" "Has the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns been decided in favor of modernity?" and "Are the philosophers or the poets better educators of civic life?"
Smith then goes on to say that the great theme of Strauss's life work--what he himself referred to as "the theme of my investigations"---is the theologico-political problem, a term he drew from his early studies of Spinoza. What does this mean? Smith says:
At the center of the theologico-political problem is a choice or conflict between two comprehensive and apparently irreconcilable alternatives: revelation and reason, or as he refers to them metaphorically, Jerusalem and Athens. The difference between Jerusalem and Athens is not simply a philosophical or theological problem; it is at heart a political one. It is a matter of authority and who holds ultimate authority. Does final authority rest with the claims of revelation and all that it implies or with one's autonomous human reason as the most fundamental guide to life?
The Enlightenment's answer, of course, is autonomous human reason. By re-thinking the question the end of modernity Strauss can be seen to be questioning one of the key assumptions of modernity.
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