Joshua Parens's book offers an examination of Strauss's attempt to reinterpret the works of Alfarabi and Maimonides by starting from the general framework of Platonic political philosophy. I am not qualified to take up, still less to settle, the sometimes acrimonious debates surrounding Strauss's interpretation of Alfarabi and Maimonides. I note at the outset only that Parens accepts the main lines of Strauss's interpretation of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought. An agreement of this kind presupposes an understanding of Strauss's thought itself and of its development. I would like to examine two theses elaborated by Parens which seem to me to be valuable and illuminating, even if I do not accept them completely.

According to the first thesis, Strauss's thought underwent an internal evolution which led him to modify substantially both his view of philosophy and, by extension, his final understanding of Maimonides (2–3, 6, 88–89, 94, 108, 123–24). Parens in fact distinguishes three stages in the evolution of Strauss's interpretation of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. The first stage is marked by Strauss's first investigations in Philosophy and Law (1935), where he was on the way to liberating himself from the traditional interpretation of Maimonides but had not yet completely broken with it. The second stage is the “Farabian Turn” following which Strauss abandoned the traditional interpretation of Maimonides and interpreted him henceforth within the framework of Platonic political philosophy as provided by Alfarabi (83–84).

The “Farabian Turn,” which began toward the end of the thirties, lasted for only a short time in Strauss's thought. According to Parens, the publication of the article entitled “Farabi's Plato” in 1945 marked the peak of the Farabian influence on Strauss. Moreover, Strauss experienced in 1946 a profound philosophic crisis (a “shipwreck”) which led him to his Second Sailing or his Socratic Turn, and thus to his final understanding of political philosophy and of the true meaning of philosophy inspired by Socrates (5).

How is one to understand this final transformation of Strauss? Parens correctly remarks that in “Farabi's Plato” Strauss accepted the essentially theoretical definition of philosophy proposed by Alfarabi. According to this definition, the philosophic way of life is a contemplative way of life, oriented towards the knowledge of “the essence of all beings” (FP 365–66). Certainly the philosopher must take care to protect his way of life, and he is thus compelled to elaborate a practical or political philosophy, but this political philosophy is exoteric in the sense that it does not affect the esoteric essence of the philosophic life, that is to say, theoretical contemplation. In “Farabi's Plato,” Strauss defended the traditional view of the superiority of the theoretical life over the practical life.

According to Parens, it is precisely this traditional conception of philosophy which prevented Strauss, at first, from drawing out the full implications of his discovery that Platonic political philosophy is the key to the interpretation of Maimonides. Even more fundamentally, the Farabian definition of the essence of philosophy as theoretical activity prevented Strauss from seeing all of the “metaphysical” implications of political philosophy itself. After the crisis of 1946, Strauss would more and more clearly come to regard political philosophy as the essential point of departure for any philosophic inquiry, and he would go so far as to affirm, in The City and Man, that “political philosophy broadly understood [is] ‘the first philosophy’” (94, with CM 20).

Parens's thesis is appealing, but it is perhaps too cut and dried. One can argue that Strauss, even after his Socratic Turn, never moved away as strongly from the traditional conception of philosophy as Parens seems to think. The ultimate goal of philosophy for Strauss, that is to say the understanding of the Whole, inevitably leads one to try to discover the truth outside of the partial Whole constituted by the City and the human world. The philosophic way of life, which aims precisely at the contemplation of this Whole, makes the philosopher a stranger in the City. He can never feel himself to be entirely at home in the City, because he belongs to a world that is beyond its walls.

Parens's first thesis concerning Strauss's abandonment of a purely contemplative ideal of philosophy is linked to a second thesis, namely, the recognition by Strauss of political philosophy as first philosophy. This question is very tricky. To clarify it, one must at the outset make a distinction allowing one to grasp correctly the nature of this first philosophy. According to Strauss, political philosophy is first philosophy to the extent that the starting point of philosophic inquiry is “what is first for us” and not “what is first by nature.” “What is first for us” is the moral and political opinions that belong to man in the City. But philosophic inquiry cannot leave it at these opinions, because, as Strauss says in the final pages of The City and Man, “philosophy is the ascent from what is first for us to what is first by nature” (CM 240). A little later on Strauss explains: “Only by beginning at this point will we be open to the full impact of the all-important question which is coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it—the question quid sit deus” (CM 241). Far from rejecting the most traditional metaphysical question quid sit deus, Strauss considers it to be the goal of the ascent that leads us from political philosophy to metaphysics.

However, even if this point is granted, Parens's intuition––namely, that political philosophy is first philosophy in the strong sense of the term––is sound. Every reader of Strauss notices that he carefully avoids making clear pronouncements on questions of metaphysics or of “first philosophy” in the traditional sense. Indeed this is one of the reasons for his appeal. Strauss's thought is in fact in many respects a postmetaphysical, not to say postmodern, thought, which thus adapts itself well to the contemporary attitude that has little taste for metaphysical speculations. The great majority of scholars reject the Straussian interpretation of Alfarabi and Maimonides precisely because it attributes to these philosophers a form of metaphysical skepticism that contradicts the thesis that medieval philosophy attempted a synthesis of ancient Greek metaphysics and revealed religion. According to Strauss, Alfarabi, faithful to “true Platonism,” denies the immortality of the soul and does not mention Plato's metaphysical speculations. Strauss's interpretation forces us then to undertake a major reconsideration of our manner of conceiving the history of ancient and medieval philosophy.

Parens defended such a line of interpretation in his first book (MR), and even if he indicates that “I never argued that Alfarabi does not have any metaphysical views or that metaphysics is ultimately irrelevant” (67), he continues to defend it in his present book. Like Strauss, he wants to liberate the thought of Alfarabi and Maimonides as much as possible from overly burdensome metaphysical presuppositions. If they have any metaphysics, it is, so to speak, a “metaphysics light”! This is why one can be surprised by the rather severe judgment that Parens pronounces on the famous and controversial 1979 article by Shlomo Pines entitled “Limitations of Human Knowledge according to al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja and Maimonides”Footnote ² (114, 137–47). This article does indeed push Strauss's interpretation to its furthest limits by acknowledging the fundamental skepticism of Alfarabi and Maimonides regarding the possibility of man's attaining knowledge of any substantiae separatae (“separate substances,” FP 390–92). It is certainly true that Pines does not help his case by appealing to Kant concerning the limits of human knowledge according to Alfarabi and Maimonides, but what he asserts could equally well apply to Strauss's own zetetic philosophy.

It is worth emphasizing the reason that pushes Parens to resist Pines's interpretation so strongly: “Above all, the vague acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge in Alfarabi and Maimonides regarding metaphysics does not indicate that theoretical truth is wholly uninteresting to them; on the contrary, it indicates that theoretical truth, the knowledge of eternal things, is not limited to an inquiry into the heavenly bodies. Political philosophy can be first philosophy only if inquiry into the divine has its basis in the inquiry into human things” (147). This observation of Parens's points to an internal difficulty in Strauss's thought. In order for Strauss's return to “true Platonism” to be credible today, Platonism has to be detached from overly “strong” metaphysical presuppositions. However, this critique of metaphysics must not go so far as to undermine completely the idea of nature and above all the idea that the human soul is characterized by its openness to a Whole that surpasses it. Strauss had to preserve something of ancient metaphysics in order to resist effectively the deconstruction of this latter idea which was carried out by the moderns. Nevertheless, in Strauss's thought, as in that of Parens who follows him on this point, the content of this “residual” metaphysics is frequently as evanescent as the Platonic ideas, conceived of by Strauss no longer as separate substances, but rather as “fundamental problems.”