As the title indicates, the primary subject of this book is Leo Strauss, in particular the degree to which Strauss's appropriation of Maimonides played a crucial role in shaping the development of his thought. Green's argument is that it was Strauss's reading of Maimonides that made him question whether modern philosophers like Spinoza were justified in thinking that they had disposed of the assumptions that lay behind ancient and medieval philosophy. Did Spinoza really know more about human life than Maimonides? Did Nietzsche and Heidegger? Do we? Strauss came to believe that the answer to these questions was no and that, as a result, we need to read Maimonides in a radical new way.
Let me supply some background. There has been an explosion of interest in Maimonides over the past forty years. Although a number of factors have contributed to this phenomenon, including the rise of Jewish studies programs and renewed interest in the history of philosophy, there is no doubt that Strauss deserves some of the credit as well. Before Strauss the leading expositors of Maimonides were Munk, Husik, Guttmann, Cohen, and Wolfson. The available alternatives were to read Maimonides as a rational theologian along the lines of Thomas Aquinas, a practitioner of the Neoplatonized Aristotelianism that permeated Islamic and Jewish thought in the twelfth century, or an early proponent of the ethical monotheism later articulated by Kant and Cohen. No one paid much attention to the literary form in which Maimonides chose to write The Guide for the Perplexed, or to the fact that he said he intended to contradict himself, or to the general question of how a free-thinking philosopher can exist in a society whose laws and social cohesion derive from a revealed text.
It was Strauss who challenged all of this by calling attention to several facts: (1) Although Maimonides was a product of his age, he was critical of much of what passed for conventional wisdom and thus cannot be read as only a product of his age; (2) We cannot assume that the conventional wisdom of our age is a legitimate standpoint from which to approach his thought; (3) We must take account of everything Maimonides said and the way he said it; and (4) We have to take seriously the possibility that Maimonides was searching for, and in some cases may have hit upon, a truth that is valid for all ages. In short, Maimonides's thought is both richer and more nuanced than historicist, secularist, or neo-Kantian approaches would suggest.
Green's account of Strauss's dissatisfaction with his predecessors and his attempt to free himself from the question-begging assumptions that marred their interpretations is both clear and thorough. To the best of my knowledge, no one has gone into this aspect of Strauss's thought with Green's diligence. As Green shows in convincing detail, Strauss's frustration with the literature on Maimonides is symptomatic of a wider dissatisfaction with modern philosophy as a whole. It was W. V. O. Quine who said that there is philosophy and then there is the history of philosophy. For Strauss, the distinction is not only questionable but bespeaks an arrogance that prevents us from reading our predecessors in a clear and intellectually respectable way.
Green's formulation of the alternative gets right to the point: “To Strauss, the great medieval philosophic books are not just archeological relics appealing to the antiquarian impulses or romantic urges in the modern student of history, but are the best access we possess to the minds of great philosophic thinkers. In other words, these ‘old books’ are our best access to the highest truths and the deepest thoughts of the greatest minds, irrespective of historical era” (61). Now that the history of philosophy has become a respectable discipline, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Strauss's view was out of favor during much of his lifetime. Not only were there analytic philosophers like Quine, but Hegelians, Marxists, existentialists, neo-Kantians, phenomenologists, and, in general, all those people who thought that revelation was no longer a workable concept. As Green shows, Strauss's rediscovery of Maimonides was also a rediscovery of how to do philosophy in a way that sees value in the eternal questions and looks askance at those who think they have answered them once and for all.
Part of what makes this book worth reading is the moral seriousness with which Green approaches his subject. He is convinced that Strauss is right and does everything possible to cast his thought in a favorable light. The question is whether Green does too much. Adjectives of praise come thick and fast: masterful, groundbreaking, subtle, insightful, profound, artistic, etc. Although some of Strauss's critics are mentioned in passing, Green mainly avoids the opportunity to discuss their criticisms in detail.
No one would dispute that the Guide is a challenging book. It presupposes familiarity with classical Jewish sources, physics, metaphysics, medieval astronomy, moral psychology, and various aspects of the philosophy of language. Although some of what it offers counts as demonstration, much of it proceeds in a dialectical fashion, presenting a range of alternatives and trying to learn from the various strengths and weaknesses they manifest. Even in the Middle Ages, before Marxism, existentialism, or modern analytic philosophy came on the scene, scholars disagreed about what Maimonides was trying to say.
Does it follow from this that the Guide is deeply esoteric in the way Strauss suggests––a mystery wrapped in a paradox concealed in a riddle? Granted that it is not intended for a general audience, why do the educated few for whom it was intended still disagree about its meaning? Why was it that when he wrote “How to Begin to Study The Guide for the Perplexed” Strauss expressed himself in so cryptic a fashion that it is difficult to say what he regarded as Maimonides's philosophic contribution? Finally there is the familiar Jerusalem/Athens dichotomy that permeates so much of Strauss's thought, the unresolvable tension that accounts for the continued vitality of Western culture. The dichotomy is clearly present in the dedicatory epistle that opens the Guide. But once the book gets going and argues that the prophets were themselves philosophers, is it clear which insights emanate from one city and which from the other? Does it even matter?
Perhaps these questions are unfair. As I said, this is a book about Strauss's reading of Maimonides, not Maimonides himself. At best Strauss gave rise to a generation of scholars who paid closer attention to the details of Maimonides's arguments than anyone had in the past. At worst he fed the tendency to ignore the cogency of those arguments and pore over the text for hidden clues or subtly disguised suggestions pointing the way to a truth too dangerous to expose in public. What is that truth? Strauss's followers have never been able to agree.
Strauss was nothing if not controversial. Mention his name at an academic conference and people will either cringe or speak of him in the glowing terms used by Green. What Green has given us is essentially a tribute. One mark of its success is that even a critic of Strauss like me found much in it to agree with. But there is still the question of whether Strauss's emphasis on secrecy and dissimulation captured the true spirit of Maimonidean philosophy or whether it amounts to yet another literary projection alongside those he criticized in his predecessors.
