Plato's Socrates famously remarks in the Apology (38a5–6) that the unexamined life is not worth living, and we often infer from this claim that only the examined life is worth living or at least that it is the life most worth living. This inference, however, is speculative at best. The examined life might also not be worth living and in fact there is no guarantee that it is not less worth living than the unexamined life. We thus must at least consider the possibility that the life of the philosopher in this sense may not be the best and may even be the worst of all human possibilities.

This conclusion may seem strange since, drawing on Plato and Aristotle, we have come to think of the pursuit of philosophy as the happiest and best form of life, entailing the contemplation of the most beautiful and noble things, but there is no guarantee that at the end of thinking we will not encounter the ugly and horrifying rather than the beautiful and the noble. Indeed, as Catherine Zuckert shows in her thoughtful Postmodern Platos, many of the most profound thinkers of our time have come to exactly this conclusion. But perhaps such a conclusion should not surprise us since melancholia has long been recognized as the characteristic philosophic disposition.

The examined life can only be the most worth living under two conditions: if it reveals something that is wondrous, beautiful, exalted, noble, praiseworthy, or pleasurable, that is higher than any other possible good, and if the revelation or realization of that good is worth more than the labor, pain, horror, and so on that is necessary to attain it. Since the advent of the Enlightenment, we have generally come to believe that it is better to know than not to know and to put no limits on our questioning. As Bacon put it, “What deserves to exist deserves to be known,” and as Descartes added, at least once in one's life, it is necessary to question everything.Footnote ¹ These statements stand in stark contrast to the classical Greek view and the core tenets of all of the Abrahamic religions. The fear of the gods or of God is accounted the beginning of wisdom. The Delphic maxims on the temple of Apollo, Know Yourself and Everything in Measure, originally were understood to mean “Know that you are a man and not a god” and “Act according to the human and not the divine measure.” In this context, the fate of Oedipus is illuminating and emblematic. According to Sophocles, Oedipus was recognized as great not because of his physical strength but because of his ability to solve riddles, to answer questions that no one else could answer. He was the one who saved Thebes by out-Sphinxing the Sphinx. He was the master questioner, who was willing to follow the path of questioning until he came to the truth, willing to go where others, quite rightly as it turned out, feared to tread. What his questioning revealed in the end, however, was not elevating, pleasurable, or beautiful, but monstrous and horrifying, so horrifying in fact that Oedipus blinded himself in order to see no more.

What is it that Oedipus and all those who overstep the bounds of conventional life learn that is so disheartening? On the surface, the answer to this question seems obvious in the case of Oedipus: he killed his father and married his mother; but the answer is perhaps not as obvious as it seems. If the play were rewritten today, it is easy to imagine a modern Oedipus proclaiming at the moment of insight that he was a victim too and in need of therapy or counseling. It is thus not merely the fact that Oedipus is guilty of patricide or incest that is so horrifying. It is rather that his relentless questioning opens up an abyss that is deeper than either of these crimes and yet that was represented for the Greeks by both of them. His questioning and all primordial or truly philosophic questioning that tries to get to the roots of things always and inevitably calls into question the questioner, cuts the ground out from under one's own feet as it were, and leaves one hanging in nothingness. This is especially true in the case of Oedipus. For most of his life, asking and answering questions led him to greatness but only when he did not examine himself. When it becomes necessary in the course of his investigation for him to actually inquire into his own origins, his questioning leads to devastation. His questioning and all such radical questioning in this sense undermines all reasons for living. If the radical questioner continues to live, it is thus not because he is rationally justified in doing so, but only, as Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov puts it, because he loves “the sticky leaves in the spring and the blue sky—that's all it is,” that is, he lives on only for accidental irrational and unphilosophic reasons.Footnote ²

Such questioning can therefore only be bearable if it produces an understanding of the whole that justifies the depth of the pain and suffering that the questioning itself engenders. But is such knowledge possible? This is the question that underlies and constantly threatens to undermine the discussion in Zuckert's book. This question arises in her discussion of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom identify the life of philosophy as the life of questioning and see such questioning as extraordinarily dangerous. Nietzsche, for example, asks startlingly at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, “Who of us here is Oedipus? Who the Sphinx?” and his alter ego Zarathustra almost dies when he is finally able to summon up his deepest and most questionable thought, the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same.Footnote ³ Heidegger similarly argues that a confrontation with the possibility of one's own death or the experience of nothingness or existential boredom is necessary to open up a path to an appreciation of the primordial question of Being, and even then we will never find an answer since Being itself always only appears to us as a terrifying and awe-inspiring question.

The pursuit of philosophy for both Nietzsche and Heidegger thus seems to require a confrontation with nihilism, with the death of God or the withdrawal of being, which leaves one face to face with the realization that there is no meaning, purpose, or goal for human life. What is even more important to note, however, is that for both of them nihilism is not just a recent phenomenon that can be easily remedied by a return to piety or existing traditions, but an intrinsic element of the Western tradition that has characterized Western life since its very beginning.

It is this reflection on nihilism that brings both thinkers back to Plato, to the question of the origin of European thought, and to the question of what went wrong with this beginning. Both see the origin of nihilism in Plato's turn away from the pre-Socratics. While they disagree about why he went astray, they both see his thought as the crucial turning point, concealing the deep and primordial questions uncovered by earlier and greater Greek thinkers. Plato in this sense articulated a doctrine that at its core both embodied and concealed European nihilism, and all of the thinkers in the Western tradition since, according to Nietzsche and Heidegger, have amounted to little more than a series of attempts to shore up Platonic metaphysics against the deconstructive power of radical questioning, or in other words to defend doctrine and dogma against real philosophy. These attempts, however, ended not in the security of self-certain reason but in the rational demonstration of the impossibility of rationality (in Kant's antinomy doctrine), which Nietzsche characterizes as an incidence of the inevitable fact that the highest values always eventually devalue themselves.

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger seek a solution to the problem of nihilism, but, as Zuckert points out, at the end of this pursuit, they both abandon philosophy in the traditional sense for art and/or religion. After a lifetime of questioning, Nietzsche became convinced that he had found an answer to nihilism with the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. In his view, only the acceptance of this horrifying idea would make possible the arrival of “the golden bark and its wonder, the vintager [Dionysus] with his diamond knife, for whom only future songs shall find names.”Footnote ⁴ Dionysus, the god of the eternal recurrence, in his view will usher in a new tragic age and a thousand-year Reich.Footnote ⁵ Heidegger similarly counsels patience in anticipation of a future transformation, citing Hölderlin that “where the danger is, also grows the saving power,” asserting that in the end “only a God can save us.”Footnote ⁶ He, like Nietzsche, hopes to prepare for this God's arrival (or return) but in his later thought he no longer sees continued questioning as the piety of thinking, counseling instead an attentive listening. Such conclusions on their part thus suggest that the philosophic life, at least in its most radical sense, is not worth living. Indeed they almost seem to agree with Dostoevsky, that such a life can perhaps not be lived for very long without the danger of suicide or madness. They themselves thus ultimately abandon philosophy in favor of art or religion or some combination of both. In the end, these hopes alone and not a continued questioning or self-examination seem to make life worth living.

The other three thinkers Zuckert considers, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida, confront not only the philosophical or theological question of nihilism that these first two raise but also the practical political consequences that seem in their minds to derive from it, consequences that are too obvious at this point in time to need elaboration.Footnote ⁷ These thinkers thus recognize the danger of the phenomenon that Nietzsche and Heidegger call nihilism but reject their conclusions in large part as a result of a reconsideration of Plato.

Gadamer in Zuckert's reading is a hermeneuticist who believes that everything is always open to reinterpretation. The process of thinking is thus essentially a historical activity in which what is necessary is a continuing, if inevitably only a partially successful, attempt to fuse horizons between different times and different cultures. At its core this doctrine promotes a relativism that cannot provide an answer to Nietzsche, who showed that such relativism inevitably becomes nihilism because it undermines the possibility of finding a meaning, goal, or purpose to human life. Gadamer thus can provide no answer to the question of the best life and cannot show that the examined life is worth living.

For Derrida, according to Zuckert, philosophy is a not a way of life because there is no self, ego, or human singularity that could constitute such a life. The examined life in this sense is no more worth living than the unexamined life. Like Nietzsche Derrida is convinced that every form of life is in fact only a particular form or constellation of power, but in contrast to Nietzsche he does not believe that the totality of these forms of life constitute a whole. Indeed, he derides the eternal recurrence of the same, not as Nietzsche's antimetaphysical apogee but as a lamentable fall back into Western metaphysics.

Strauss in this sense seems to represent for Zuckert the strongest argument in favor of philosophy and of the supreme value of the examined life. The philosopher in Strauss's account has some knowledge of the ends of human life, and therefore knowledge of what makes us human; he thus has knowledge of a whole, and consequently knowledge of some part of the whole—a knowledge that is uniquely human and available only to the philosopher (as opposed to the scientist). Only the philosopher's examinations thus can constitute the best possible life. This is a powerful claim, but the question is whether it is sustainable in the face of the nihilism that both Nietzsche and Heidegger recognize. I will focus on this question for the remainder of this essay.

Zuckert's account of the development of Strauss's thought is insightful, meticulous, and convincing. She describes Strauss's original acceptance of Nietzsche's claims that God is dead and that we live in a nihilistic world, but she also points to his early desire to repeat the peaks of antiquity in the modern age. Moreover, she sees that like Heidegger, the early Strauss believed that this nihilism was embodied in modern technology. However, she argues that Strauss's reading of Spinoza convinced him that God was not necessarily dead and that, as a result, he came to believe that the decisive problem of modernity was thus neither theological nor technological, thus parting company with Nietzsche and Heidegger.

While Strauss's early thought was deeply influenced by both thinkers, then, he came to see what they called nihilism from a much different perspective and as a result developed an alternative account of its origin and nature. In doing so he tried to show that nihilism was not in fact a Western problem that had its origins in the Greeks but a modern problem (beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes), and that the crisis of modernity was not theological or technological but moral and political. Philosophy in his view was not practiced in isolation but in the context of a community, and thus had to come to terms in one way or another with the conventional moral, theological, and political beliefs of those in the community. Strauss, however, did not think that there was a simple or universal solution to this problem that could make the activity of the philosopher compatible with the religion or mores of any society. He believed rather that a philosopher always has to recognize that his activity inevitably takes place within an unphilosophic community that is shaped at a conventional level by its theology, morality, and culture. Zuckert suggests that this problem was apparent to Strauss from his reading of Plato's description of the fate of Socrates.

In contrast to Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss saw Plato not as the source of nihilism but as a potential solution to it. Reading Plato through Farabi (and Maimonides), Strauss saw two possibilities for the philosopher. The first was that through the study of philosophy, the philosopher could come to recognize the nature of a just society and become in the guise of a prophet either a philosopher king or a lawgiver who would shape the mores of society to make it more just and thus ultimately more tolerant of philosophy. In such a case, the philosopher would have to examine and understand not merely himself but the moral and political opinions of his community. The second possibility that Strauss took from Farabi was the possibility of a philosopher's existing and being active in an unjust regime. In such a situation, to avoid the fate of Socrates, the philosopher would have to practice philosophy in private and not participate in politics. But even here, the philosopher, according to Strauss (drawing on Aristophanes), might, like Socrates, not survive owing to the anger of the fathers whose sons choose to pursue a philosophic (rather than an active) life, contrary to their fathers’ wishes.Footnote ⁸

Zuckert points out that Strauss, following Farabi and Maimonides, concluded that because both Jewish and Islamic thinkers lived under the shadow of divine law, they had to justify philosophy as fulfilling the command to know God. As a result, both religions were less open to philosophy than Christianity, and therefore Jewish and Islamic philosophers had to develop a more private or esoteric notion of philosophy. This conclusion suggests that following Farabi and Maimonides, Strauss recognized the necessity of an exoteric teaching compatible with culture, law, and religion and an esoteric teaching that recognized that such conventional doctrines were relative and not absolute. By emulating this way of thinking and acting, it thus seems to me, Strauss hoped to consider many of the same questions that Nietzsche and Heidegger had faced without furthering the moral and political decay that they in his view had exacerbated.

Of crucial importance in this context was his belief that the crisis of modernity was not rooted in philosophy or metaphysics but in the attempt to combine philosophy with religion, morality, and politics. By keeping them separate, he would thus make it possible to avoid the practical and political disruption of such radical questioning without abandoning the consideration of the questions posed by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Under such circumstances the philosophic life, which was the life most worth living, might be undertaken without suffering the fate of Socrates.

Assuming these points are correct, the philosopher according to Plato, as read by Strauss through Farabi and Maimonides, might both promote the best possible conventional life and enjoy the life of questioning and contemplation. To practice philosophy, however, the philosopher would thus have to do a great deal more than examine himself. Indeed, first and foremost, he would have to secure the space, time, and companions for such examination. In this sense to be a philosopher one would also have to be a political and moral teacher, defending the best possible conventional realm that philosophizing revealed for a particular people and culture.

Zuckert lucidly and persuasively presents Strauss as he presented himself to the world. I have no quarrel with her depiction of Strauss and learned a great deal from her presentation. The question is not about Zuckert's interpretation of Strauss but whether the argument that Strauss himself presents is what he really believed, and whether it is coherent, complete, and noncontradictory. Here for a variety of reasons I am more skeptical than Zuckert about Strauss's arguments and self-presentation.

Accepting Strauss's account depends at its core upon accepting his interpretation of Plato and especially the Platonic doctrine of the forms because every attempt to escape from the nihilism of Nietzsche and Heiedgger by recourse to Plato depends upon the ultimate intelligibility of the forms as the foundation of rationality. What Strauss has to say about the knowledge of the forms, however, is mysterious at best and seems on many occasions to be incoherent.

In contrast to the later skepticism of the Academy, Strauss argues that the claim of Plato's Socrates that the only thing he knows is that he does not know is still a form of knowledge. This position became known as Pyrrhonian skepticism and implies a suspension of belief, but was never recognized within the Academy as a form of knowledge. Moreover, to those who take their skepticism seriously, the so-called absolute skeptics, this claim seems to be a performative contradiction. Although Strauss himself accuses Nietzsche of a performative contradiction in a similar case, he rejects this possibility when it comes to Plato's Socrates. But it is fairly obvious that it is possible to call Socrates's claim to know nothing knowledge only if one uses the terms “know” and “knowledge” equivocally.

Strauss's assertion is rendered even more mysterious by several of his other claims. He asserts, for example, that the forms are not super-instances of things but perennial questions that are ultimately unanswerable or at least that (in Heideggerian fashion) require different answers in different times and places. Consequently, it is not wisdom that is essential to philosophy but the pursuit of wisdom that is noble and beautiful and thus essential to the best life. This claim, however, leaves unexplained how we can be happy to be on the way to a destination that we can never reach, indeed on our way without any idea whether we are nearing our goal or heading away from it.

Strauss seems at least in part to recognize this problem and asserts that it is not the knowledge of things per se, which science better comprehends than philosophy, but the knowledge of the human ends that is essential to philosophy, and that this is a knowledge that no teaching of science can ever undermine. One has to wonder here what Strauss means since this claim seems to suggest that our knowledge of evolutionary theory or cosmology, for example, can have no impact on our knowledge of ourselves, as if somehow we were not a part of the natural world. Moreover, even if Strauss's claim is true, what is the source of the knowledge Strauss is pointing toward? Perhaps he means something like the knowledge Kant believed we have of the moral law, that is, knowledge that is available to us from some mysterious source different from the understanding. Given Strauss's critique of the fact/value distinction, however, this seems unlikely and would in any case again rest on an equivocal use of the term “knowledge.”

Strauss does suggest repeatedly, contrary to Nietzsche, that we have knowledge of the natural human ends (which, given his other claims, must in some sense be different from those uncovered by natural science). Moreover, we apparently know enough about them to recognize that they are heterogeneous and appear in many different forms or rank orders in different societies with different norms and conventions. That said, he also asserts that we can gain the knowledge of the natural rank order among these ends through the study of philosophy. But how is this possible? In the Republic and other dialogues, Plato's Socrates defends such a position on the grounds that the eternal or unchanging is superior to the changing. But of course it was precisely the existence of anything unchanging or eternal that not only Nietzsche and Heidegger but Darwin and all biological science since called into question. How is it then that Strauss imagines we can know the unchanging human ends, especially given Strauss's claim that the final things are unknowable? What he means here is, to say the least, elusive.

Moreover, even if we imagine that we have some sort of preliminary knowledge of the human and the heterogeneous ends of human life, how is it possible for us to know their natural rank order unless they are in some sense commensurable? But how can this be known? Is friendship, for example, more important than truth, or truth than beauty, or nobility than preservation? Why should we not assume that the ends of human life, however we experience them, are incommensurable or at least idiosyncratic to individual human beings and thus incomparable between different human beings and different civilizations?

Or to take the matter one step further, how do we know that the whole that Strauss refers to is in fact a whole? In his late thought, Nietzsche suggests that such a whole exists with his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, although there is no intelligible order to this whole. It thus can be willed but never known in the way Strauss seems to suggest. Heidegger and Derrida both argue there is no wholeness at all. Strauss seems to come to the belief in such a whole from the individual philosopher's experience of his own wholeness, but what can this mean? Is it somehow a sense of our own psychic identity or bodily existence? Or our sense of ourselves as members of a particular species? All of these ideas of the whole seem at best questionable and have repeatedly been rejected by modern philosophy and science.

Given all these questions (which Strauss himself must have recognized), it seems to me that we need to ask whether Strauss's presentation of Plato as an answer to nihilism is not merely an exoteric teaching meant to conceal his deeper philosophic commitment to radical questioning, a teaching meant to reassure the multitude with a doctrine that he knows is not rationally defensible. If this is the case, then Plato, esoterically understood, differs from Nietzsche and Heidegger not in what he ultimately knows but in his recognition that there is an inevitable and irresolvable contradiction between the conventional life of religion, morality, and politics and the life of the philosopher. Moreover, if this is his position, then it would suggest that nonphilosophers, that is, ordinary people, do not have the same ends or goals as philosophers, because they love and thus prefer their own property and their own offspring over those of others, choose bodily pleasure over the difficulties of thinking, love honor more than wisdom, and cling to tradition and religion even when these cannot be rationally justified. In this sense, the philosophic life might be best for the philosopher but not for others.

But if we follow this path, why should we not conclude that what Strauss's Plato (and thus Strauss) understood, and what every philosopher who pursues the most fundamental questions will also come to understand, is that by nature there are a multiplicity of incommensurable goods, and that as a result there is no highest good or natural rank order of goods, that there is therefore no ultimate distinction between good and evil, and that in the absence of such a distinction only positive religion or culture, rooted not in reason but in belief, can give us the moral order necessary to lead our lives with others? The choice for religion, however, is for Strauss as it was for the early Nietzsche and the early Heidegger less admirable, less noble, and less courageous than the choice to pursue philosophy which recognizes and lives with the knowledge that the highest things are not answers but fundamental questions.

But where in all this does philosophy remain and to what extent can we still imagine that the philosophic, that is, the examined life, is still worth living? Nietzsche claimed that he knew himself better than anyone who had ever lived, but for him this was not the result of living a philosophic life, but a consequence of the terrible physical pain that had wiped away all of the illusions most of us use to cover over the pettiness and meaninglessness of life. For Nietzsche life was only worth living as the last disciple of Dionysus, as a martyr whose sacrifice could alone redeem humanity. Strauss, by contrast, sees the philosophic life as portrayed by Plato and exemplified by Socrates as the answer to nihilism because he sees wrestling with perennial questions as noble and beautiful in itself and moral in protecting the multitude from the disastrous psychological and political consequences of facing those questions.

But one has to wonder what the source of this nobility and greatness is. What distinguishes the philosopher from Oedipus? Is a life of fundamental questioning worth living? And if so how? One thus has to ask about the real value of the philosophic life for Strauss.

If in fact one of the foremost goals of the philosopher is to maintain his life and independence in a regime, as Strauss suggests, it is hard to see how the philosopher himself is any different from the man Hobbes describes in the state of nature, driven above all else by a desire for self-preservation. What can it mean to call this life ennobling and beautifying? Zuckert suggests that for Strauss, Plato's depiction of Socrates showed that it was the most satisfying life, but is this enough to convince us that this is correct? She also points out that, according to Strauss, this life was an exemplification of moderation since Socrates recognized that he could only pursue knowledge and not attain it, but it is hard to see how this is a satisfying conclusion.

Finally, to what extent should we trust that Strauss is telling us the truth when he describes the philosophic life that Plato presents to us in the person of Socrates as preferable to any other life? Why, for example, should we not assume that Strauss's praise of Plato's arguments is intended merely to attract many of the most ambitious young men away from the pursuit of political power with the false promise of a better life in just the way Socrates sought to convince young Athenians such as Glaucon and Alcibiades to abandon politics? In that sense we might see Strauss as an opponent of tyranny and a defender of political moderation but at the same time recognize his claims about the philosophic life to be disingenuous.

While this may seem unlikely, Strauss would not have been the first to make such a use of Plato. Arguably he has often been used in this fashion. To give just one example, when the Medici helped Ficino refound the Platonic Academy in 1438–1439, they hoped for a revival of classical culture but also sought to attract many of the most ambitious young men away from republican politics in order to avoid challenges to their quasi-princely rule. The results for art and philosophy were spectacular but so was the decline of Florentine republicanism. With the fall of the Medici, the return of such men to politics was inevitable but it was a return to a politics typified not by political moderation but by the harsh anti-Platonism of Machiavelli.

At the end of the day, the hopes of Plato, Farabi, Maimonides, and Strauss may come down to the question of the relative value of the vita activa versus the vita contemplativa. It seems to me that Strauss does not give us a clear or unequivocal answer to this question, and I take it that it is no accident that Zuckert's two works following Postmodern Platos were on Plato and Machiavelli. Perhaps some of the answers to my many questions may be found there.