Know Thyself: one can hear in that famous oracle the insistent tone of the teacher's voice, not to say her occasional impatience or irritation. Don't know me, that tone of voice says, know you. But that famous oracle not only talks for the teacher, it also talks to her –gives her a talking to, as much as she gives a talking to her students. Postmodern Platos, it seems to me, shows Catherine Zuckert giving voice to this oracle, and she listens first to its demand on her, to come to terms with what philosophy here and now can be for her, to find the way to having something she can say that will be her terms, her voice. Her readers, her students, will feel the demand, too, but feel it in the curious way that Plato analyzed most deeply in his Phaedrus: the teacher shapes the student by shaping herself, a self-shaping the student imitates to find the student's own self, more truly and more strange.

Anyone who seriously asks the question, What can philosophy be here and now? must engage with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Zuckert agrees with this judgment of the teacher who most shaped her, Leo Strauss. I appreciate Strauss's formative power, and I have felt it, too. But my first suggestion is that Strauss has led Zuckert to sojourn in a darker valley than either of them really needs to inhabit. They both are too concerned with rather ethereal worries about “the whole” or with cosmology. But understanding “the whole” is not the real first philosophy. Such understanding is wonderful, even the little we may hope to have, but having or not having that little is not the condition of philosophy so much as its crown. The emblematic passage of this cosmological worrying, the very thing Aristophanes made fun of in the Clouds, comes at the end of the introduction of Postmodern Platos. Zuckert earnestly quotes a passage from Xenophon's Memorabilia where Socrates wonders what natural philosophers hope to achieve. Control over the natural world, perhaps? Or do they devote themselves to cosmology and meteorology because they already know everything about human affairs? Zuckert takes these to be serious questions. I am temperamentally incapable of this seriousness; but I can no more prove the passage is funny, in fact an imitation of Aristophanes, than Strauss could prove every point of his close readings. Like Strauss, I feel myself close here to the loathsome business of explaining a joke. I take Socrates to be laughing at the naturalists, rather like he laughs at Phaedrus's desire to use naturalistic explanations to explain away mythic truths in the Phaedrus. This cosmological seriousness about nature and “the whole,” which I take Socrates and Xenophon to be mocking, functions in this passage of Xenophon exactly as it functions for Phaedrus: it detours around the demand to “know thyself.”

Taking a further hint from the Phaedrus, my second suggestion is that this cosmological worrying prevents Strauss and Zuckert from exploiting as much as they might a different response to Heidegger, the solid and not-so-low ground of the experience of teaching.

Let me put this suggestion, that we engage Heidegger through a phenomenology of teaching, into a Kantian form: what are the conditions of possibility for the very form of philosophical writing and thinking that Heidegger exemplifies? Is his account of the world he inhabits sufficient to explain how he can do what he manifestly does as a teacher? Does he fulfill the oracle's demand, and know himself, and thereby let his students find who they are?

I might put my suggestion this way: rather than take the starry heaven above me as the paradigm of the philosophical quest, let me take the lived experience of philosophy. In a passage that surely will have extraordinary resonance for all of us whose teaching has been formed by Strauss's exemplary practice, even if at the remove of a generation or more of teachers who transmit this practice, Xenophon illustrates this lived experience and its erotic intimacy within the Socratic circle by the practice of common reading. “The treasures that the wise men of the past have left written in their books,” says Socrates, “I open and go through in common with my friends; and if we see anything good, we pick it out, and we believe it a great profit if we prove useful to one another” (Memorabilia 1.6.14). This is not a theory of philosophy, not a hermeneutics or an analytic of human existence; it is something more precious by far, an account of the experience itself. This is, I suggest, the prephilosophic experience to which philosophy must be responsible.

Strauss was deeply indebted to Heidegger's account of philosophy's responsibilities to prephilosophic experience. I think Strauss should have extended this debt to the lived experience of teaching, described so concretely and precisely by Xenophon. (And there are passages in Strauss where he comes close to doing this; for example, his description of his response to Alexandre Kojève, of the attraction between teacher and student, irrespective of ultimate cosmological views.) Strauss sometimes suggests that one could challenge Heidegger's understanding of the starting points of philosophic ascent in something like the way Heidegger himself challenged Husserl. Heidegger argued that Husserl had truncated and washed out the human experience of the prephilosophic world, transforming pragmata, that is, objects of caring engagement, into ousiai, that is, objects of mere theoretical inspection. Strauss suggests that Heidegger in turn truncates prephilosophic experience by overlooking or removing our experience of something external cutting across our grain, “a kind of divination that not everything is permitted.”Footnote ¹

To put this point another way, the city in its “natural,” prephilosophic self-understanding is a sacred city, not a secular city.Footnote ² Receptive openness to “the evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is natural right,”Footnote ³ not to say unquestioning obedience to God's commandments, is the foundation of piety as it is normally understood, the piety of the believer. Heidegger arrives at his own piety of mere thinking only by fleeing from this prephilosophic evidence; but with what justification?

But for Strauss, and perhaps for Zuckert, it appears that such “evidence” cannot be built upon. The rejection of the evidentness or givenness of such experiences means that the philosopher's ascent, driven by a restless eros, from the simple experience of sacred restraints results in a rupture or a discontinuity between anything the decent political man could recognize as piety and anything the erotic man could recognize as philosophy. Obedience is the piety of belief; but for Strauss, questioning is the piety of thinking.

Strauss did indicate in the concluding sentence of his commentary on Xenophon's Hiero where one must turn to find his analysis of these questions: “a comprehensive and detailed analysis of Xenophon's Socratic writings.”Footnote ⁴ Strauss's late works devoted to this project are protected by a much denser veil of esotericism than any of the covert engagements with Heidegger of Strauss's middle period with which we have been concerned. Rather than “reflect[ing] a diminution of power,” as Stanley Rosen held,Footnote ⁵ this denser veil reflects Strauss's judgment that the question of piety is ultimately the deepest human question, deeper than any political question properly speaking. “Only by beginning [with this prephilosophic piety of the city] 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 [what is god].”Footnote ⁶ Even here, Strauss shows greater reserve about piety than tyranny. This greater reserve reflects Strauss's sense of kinship with Xenophon's portrayal of the rather rootless intellectual Simonides. Although, Strauss points out, Simonides was willing to stoop to the morally dubious business of advising the tyrant Hiero without preaching against tyranny, this wise man “is said to have repeatedly postponed and finally abandoned the attempt to answer the question which Hiero had posed to him, What is God?”Footnote ⁷ There must have been some logographic necessity that explains these two invocations of “the all-important question,” nearly two decades apart. The repetition indicates as gracefully as one could wish Strauss's own sense of both the focus and the limit of his middle period engagement with Heidegger: he could not understand Being without facing tyranny, and could not understand tyranny without facing God.

Strauss's 1947 commentary on Xenophon's Hiero, and Strauss's subsequent debate with Alexandre Kojève, centered on an essential passage from Heidegger's 1933 Rectoral Address: “For the Greeks, science is not just one cultural good among others, but the innermost determining center of the whole of national and political existence [des ganzen volklich-staatlichen Daseins].” To counteract Kojève's embrace of this politicized vision of philosophy, Strauss promulgated an exaggerated private vision of the stranger-sage Simonides. But Strauss corrects the exaggeration by pointing, at the end of his commentary, to the piety of “citizen-philosopher” Socrates, the very theme that concludes The City and Man. When Strauss appeals to “simple experiences of right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is natural right,” “a kind of divination that not everything is permitted,” he is suggesting that Heidegger has suppressed a crucial prephilosophical phenomenological datum from which questioning must take its orientation. Socrates's famous question “What is virtue?” is a more authentic and honest starting point than anything imagined in Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger became loquacious only by silencing the oracle.

One more suggestion: What if the divination, the datum, the given, the gift, to which we must be true, which we must acknowledge, has the character not just of knowledge, but of love? Strauss seems to have thought of the divination on the model of Socrates's divine sign, taking only the form of prohibition. But if the divination is of something we love—perfectly consistent, as all lovers know, with necessary restraint—perhaps the gap between piety and philosophic eros will not be so abysmal as Strauss and Zuckert seem to me to make it. A thinker not especially prominent either in Strauss or in Zuckert, Thomas Aquinas, suggested that love exceeds knowledge, because we can love what we cannot comprehend, what we can only apprehend, what draws us by love even though we do not understand it. We may have to be more like humble pilgrims, stumbling toward Bethlehem, and less like bold Oedipus who commands every way.

This is a chastening piety, and it is to be sure full of questions. But it is not the elevation of what Strauss called “zetetic philosophy” into the piety of thinking as mere questioning. Perhaps Strauss learned from Heidegger a certain unwillingness to be chastened, and preferred a broader horizon even if a darker one. But I think there is a failure of self-knowledge lurking here. Did Strauss have a metaphysics sufficiently robust to account for the possibility of his practice, as a writer and especially as a teacher? If Heidegger had given himself more of a talking to about how and why he loved being a teacher, would his data have supported a richer phenomenology, a more habitable world?

There is something about students that makes it hard to avoid cheerfulness. Yea though she walks through the valley of death in Postmodern Platos, Zuckert retains her cheerfulness, and her identity as a teacher. Her appreciation for what is given is too rich for Heidegger. One of the clearest marks of this cheerful identity is something very rare in a book published by a major academic press: a profusion of exclamation points! These markers of excitement and discovery are the voice of self-discovery, always shared with the shaping of students. The treasure hunt of common reading is the very oracle Heidegger rejected and Socrates defended in the Phaedrus: if we do not know our students, we will have forgotten who we are.