Classical Skepticism

The first aspect is the minimalism or extreme skepticism of classical rationalism. Strauss returned to classical thought via medieval thought, especially via Maimonides and, on the latter's express recommendation, Alfarabi. It is with the help of these thinkers, who speak explicitly of their own esotericism and that of the classical writers, that Strauss was led to his own rediscovery of the phenomenon. And guided by Alfarabi's esoteric reading of Plato, Strauss came to the view that the true Platonic philosopher—who does not differ essentially from the Socratic or Aristotelian philosopher—was not the dogmatic metaphysician who knows the Ideas but rather the zetetic skeptic who knows his own ignorance and who lives in wonder and questioning. Strauss found crucial confirmation for this unorthodox reading of Plato in another long-neglected source, Xenophon—a writer who, since the end of the eighteenth century, had been dismissed as philosophically superficial for the good reason that if one does not see the esoteric depths of his Socratic writings one sees only the sometimes charming, sometimes boring recollections of a retired general.

In Strauss's new, skeptical interpretation of classical rationalism, derived from Alfarabi, Plato and Xenophon:

The Double Challenge of Religion and Poetry

Related to this emphasis on skepticism is the second key aspect of Strauss's reinterpretation of classical thought: the centrality of the confrontation with religion and poetry. For if it is true that the philosopher “in the original Socratic sense” possesses no completed metaphysical system but lives “in the light of the mysterious character of the whole,” through what means can he defend his rationalism in the face of the sacred claims of the city and the poets? Similarly, if we have no certain theoretical knowledge of the larger whole, if we must fall back on our direct human experience of the human—well, isn't the philosopher very clumsy and ill-equipped for this, as is classically argued by Aristophanes in the Clouds? For, the philosophers are typically detached from and contemptuous of the human things, the merely mortal realm; they are rationalists seeking the universal, the necessary, and the eternal. It follows that true wisdom is the preserve not of the philosophers but of the poets who immerse themselves in human life, who know it from the inside, and who are able to imitate and articulate the unique experience of the human in all its inescapable particularity, contingency, and changeableness. In Strauss's new interpretation, the need to meet this fundamental difficulty—the inevitable challenge to skeptical rationalism posed by divine and poetic wisdom—is the defining task of classical political philosophy and the core meaning of the Socratic revolution.

But this is not at all the teaching of the surface of the Platonic dialogs—or of the conventional scholarship based on it—which rather hold, in Strauss's words, that “the opposite, or the opponent, of classical political philosophy is sophistry, the teaching and the practice of the Greek sophists.” Socrates is the citizen-philosopher, the great defender of virtue and justice against the sophists. But in Strauss's esoteric reading, it is not the sophists but the poets who are truly central. “The great alternative to classical political philosophy is poetry.” Again: “I limit myself to the question concerning the character and claim of classical political philosophy, to the question concerning the problem which it tried to solve, concerning the obstacle it tried to overcome. That problem and that obstacle appeared clearly in Aristophanes' presentation of Socrates” (1989f, 169, 171, 168–69). For “Aristophanes' presentation of Socrates is the most important document available to us on the ancient disagreement and opposition between poetry and philosophy as such” (1966, 311).⁵

The crucial significance of this second interpretive claim is this: beneath the surface, the real problem that Socrates—and classical political philosophy generally—faced was something quite similar to the great problem that confronts philosophy in Strauss's and our own time: the double challenge of religion and, not of course historicism, but poetry—for poetry appeals to many of the same phenomena and experiences as does historicism. Indeed, the Nietzschean attack on Socrates was in many respects a restatement of the ancient poetic attack as epitomized by Aristophanes (see 1966, 3–8; 1989f, 103). Thus, the main purpose of the dialogs of Plato and Xenophon, on Strauss's esoteric reading, is to show how Socrates, by virtue of his unique turn to political philosophy, was able to defend the philosophic life successfully against this double challenge to its legitimacy, the religious and the poetic (or “historicist”).

Indeed, Socratic political rationalism is not only able to defend itself, in Strauss's view, but also to form the basis of a counterattack against historicism and against its third, “experiential” basis. Radical historicism understands itself to rest ultimately on a unique inner experience of historicity that has been granted to the late modern mind like a revelation. But Strauss suggests that this unique “discovery of History” may in fact be “an arbitrary interpretation of phenomena which had always been known and which had been interpreted much more adequately prior to the emergence of ‘the historical consciousness’ than afterward” (1953, 32, 33). That more adequate interpretation, Strauss tries to show, can be found in Socrates' sympathetic understanding of and response to the challenge of poetic wisdom. To put it differently, through his esoteric interpretations of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, Strauss brings out the striking resemblance of the Socratic turn to the historicist turn—and the fundamental superiority of the former to the latter.

The Theory of Esotericism: The Conflict of Theory and Practice

The third theme of Strauss's esoteric reading of classical thought is the necessary tension between the philosopher and the city, theory and practice. This theme follows from the first two, from Socratic skepticism and the critique of poetry and religion. For cities cannot be skeptics: they have and need their certainties. And because these certainties cannot be grounded in reason, they require divine and poetic support. Therefore, there is an inescapable tension between rationalism and social existence, between the philosopher's way of life and the citizen's, between theory and practice.

Once again, this is a theme almost wholly absent from the traditional scholarship on classical thought. But here we have a theme that not only derives from esoteric reading but also points to the derivation of esoteric writing. It is largely because philosophy and the city are inherently opposed, are dangerous one to another, that philosophers must write esoterically.

Now, this fact, in turn, points to a more direct and essential relation between esotericism and historicism than we have seen thus far. What classical esotericism and historicism are, are two opposing answers to the same fundamental question; namely, what is the relation between theory and practice, that is, between rationalism and politics, thought and action, reason and history? Generally speaking, two answers are possible: either they are in harmony or opposition.

The belief in a harmony of theory and practice—which, Strauss will argue, is the defining characteristic of modern thought—itself logically divides into two opposite forms, depending on which of the two forces is seen as dominant. Thus, one view is that of the Enlightenment according to which theory is in harmony with practice because it is able to rule practice, to bring society into accord with reason. The opposite—but still harmonist—view is the historicist thesis, according to which theory is in harmony with practice because it ultimately serves practice, being an outgrowth or expression of existing social life (see 1993, 65–66, 71, 75).

We are in the habit of regarding this famous opposition—Enlightenment rationalism versus romanticism and historicism—as exhaustive, a habit that stems from and hides the basic presupposition of modern thought. But standing opposed to both of these harmonist views is the classical understanding, which denies that practice rules theory or theory, practice. Rather there is an unbridgeable gulf, a fundamental opposition or incompatibility between the two—which must therefore be mediated by esotericism, to protect each from the other.

Thus, the third element of Strauss's new understanding of classical thought—the theory of esotericism—constitutes a direct attack on historicism (as well as on the modern harmonist view generally). It holds that the philosopher's deepest knowledge—the knowledge that makes him a philosopher—is not an expression of his society's beliefs for the simple reason that this socially destructive knowledge could never form the basis of a society. His truths are not the expression of his historical actuality because such truths could not be embodied in any historical actuality. The theory of esotericism argues that historicism is based on a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the relation of reason and history (see 1952a, 7–8, 21; 1993, 66, 75–76).

Historicism is True—of Modern Thought

Part of the answer we have seen. Our ignorance of esotericism causes us to mistake the conventional and historically parochial surface for the true teaching in the writings of past philosophers.

But Strauss also provides another, deeper answer. For a variety of reasons, he suggests, the modern mind has worked itself into a very unusual and unnatural condition—what he occasionally calls, playing on the famous Platonic metaphor, the “cave beneath the cave” (1952a, 155; 1987c, 112n2, 37–38; see Meier 1994, 3n2). “The cave” is Plato's term for the imbeddedness of the human mind in its historical situation. For Plato, we naturally grow up in a cave of prejudice and illusion—deriving from the limitations of the human senses and the arbitrary conventions of social life. But at the same time, these elemental illusions tend to be crude and riddled with contradictions, so that there is a clear dialectical path, for those willing to follow it, leading beyond these illusions and into the light of reality. In speaking of the cave beneath the cave, Strauss suggests that modern thought has created for itself a second, artificial layer of prejudice and historical entrapment—and one that, being a product of philosophical thought, is much more difficult to escape. The modern mind is uniquely imprisoned in its historical situation.

With this strange-seeming claim, Strauss is just giving his own elaboration to the observation of a long line of thinkers—Schiller, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger among them—to the effect that modern thought, especially as compared with ancient thought, is peculiarly abstract and derivative: it lacks direct connection to pretheoretical, commonsense experience. It is out of touch with the sources of its own premises, concepts, and questions (see Schiller 1966; Hegel 1967, 94; Husserl 1970, 366–67, 373–75; Strauss 1959a, 75, 1983, 31; Klein 1968, 117–25, 1985, 65–84). Because of this, when we moderns study the thought of some earlier modern philosopher or even when we consider our own thought in an honest and reflective way, we almost always have the same experience: we are struck by the fact that this thought is based on presuppositions that remain unproved and even unexamined, that it is based on ideas and attitudes that were inherited from some time in the past and never radically questioned. In short, our repeated experience is of the historical imbeddedness, the historicity, of our own minds. That is why we moderns naturally gravitate to historicism and find it so immediately plausible: it corresponds to our own inner experience.

According to Strauss, then, there is a relative truth to historicism: it is true of modern thought. Somehow the modern mind, for all its proud claims to liberation, is actually more enslaved to its history and traditions, more trapped in a cave, than was the case in earlier ages. And then modern thinkers compound this problem by naively generalizing their particular situation—the historicity of their own minds—attributing it to all human thought as such.

The Idea of Progress as the Source of the Historicity of Modern Thought

To account for the rise of historicism in modern times, as Strauss is attempting to do, it remains to explain why modern thought is so abstract and self-ignorant, so out of touch with its own foundations, and thus so trapped in its historical cave. Strauss cites a number of different factors. First, modern thought rests on a long tradition of philosophy stretching back two thousand years, and it is the nature of tradition to cause many things to be taken for granted and forgotten. Second, this philosophical tradition was for a very long time intertwined, in ways now difficult to disentangle, with a tradition of revelation, of intellectual acceptance and unquestioning obedience.

Third, modern philosophy emerged through an indignant revolt against medieval and classical thought. This polemical character of modernity has had two consequences. It has made it particularly difficult for modern thinkers to recognize, beneath all their noisy opposition, the degree and character of their continued dependence on earlier thought. And it has given modern philosophy a reactive and academic character, because it means that modern philosophy did not arise “naturally” from a direct confrontation with the phenomena or from wonder at the permanent riddles of life, but from a reaction against an already existing body of philosophical ideas. In other words, classical philosophy was defined against nonphilosophic life and the realm of commonsense “opinion” out of which it emerged. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is defined against an existing false philosophy, against scholasticism, and so has a far more academic and historically contingent character (Strauss 1989c, 49–50; 1959d, 27–29; 1959a, 73–77; 1987c, 37–38, 112n2; 1952a, 154–58; see Klein 1968, 117–25).

But the feature of modern thought that is most responsible for its self-ignorance and historicity, according to Strauss, is its famous reliance on the idea of progress. In its commitment to being practical and politically effective—and in its resulting need finally to overcome skepticism and arrive at settled answers—modern rationalism embraces a kind of hyperfoundationalism: it hopes once and for all to lay down solid, even indubitable, foundations and on this basis to build up a great and ever-increasing edifice of reliable knowledge. In a word, it seeks to make philosophy progressive, like the technical arts.

Now, if modern thought as a whole rests on the idea of progress, what does this methodological posture do to philosophy? The idea of progress means that the premises are laid by one thinker, the conclusions are drawn at a later date by others. Thus, progress has the effect of spreading philosophy out over time. It separates the philosopher temporally from his own foundations and thus makes his thought historical. The more that philosophy makes progress, the more its basic presuppositions—what they are, how they are to be justified, and what the real alternatives to them are—become lost in the past and unavailable to it. In other words, from the beginning, modern thought—enlightened and progressive—prided itself especially in its freedom from tradition and its willingness to question everything anew. But the great irony is that the belief in progress necessarily creates a new, more inescapable kind of tradition. Under the sway of this idea, not just religion or custom, but philosophy itself prompts one to accept the teachings of the past without serious examination and move on. All modern thinkers stand on the shoulders of giants—that is why their thought is so ungrounded.

In sum, the growth in modern times of historicism—meaning now the development, not of the will to such a view, but of the inner sense of its plausibility—is largely due to the rise of the idea of progress. For this latter idea is what caused modern philosophy to be so uniquely dependent on its own history and traditions, trapped in a cave beneath the cave. And eventually the modern mind, judging of things from its own inner experience, came to its unique “insight,” which all earlier ages had found implausible: the historical imprisonment of all human thought.

The Rise of Progress and the Decline of Esotericism

If the idea of progress was crucial in this way to the rise of historicism, then what does all this have to do with esotericism and its decline in the modern period? The answer is that the idea of esotericism and of progress are opposites—opposite conceptions of how philosophy should relate to its own roots or foundations. (Earlier, we saw that esotericism is, in a different sense, the opposite of both historicism and enlightenment rationalism—opposite concerning how philosophy should relate to political practice). Because of this essential opposition, the decline of esotericism was the crucial precondition for the rise in modernity of the idea of progress and therewith of historicism.

The point here is this. We have seen that the methodology of progress tends to historicize philosophical thinking by putting a thinker out of touch with his foundations or presuppositions. But the practice of esotericism—considering it now in its pedagogical meaning and use—is designed to have the precise opposite effect: when successful, it permits, indeed forces, a thinker to examine and fully appropriate his foundations. There are at least two distinct ways in which esotericism exercises this self-appropriating function.

First, the esoteric writer, by hiding his true thoughts, refuses to give the philosophic reader anything that he can take on authority or take for granted. By limiting himself to hints and puzzles, he forces the reader to rediscover everything for himself. Such compulsion is necessary because philosophy has a natural tendency to decay over time—to turn into a tradition, to “historicize”—because people tend to accept too passively and unquestioningly the conclusions of the great philosophers of the past. This tendency is deadly to genuine philosophy which requires that one always think everything through from the beginning and for oneself. In the modern period, this dangerous natural tendency to rely on the findings of others was artificially strengthened by the idea of progress which turns this very tendency into a virtue, into a philosophical method. For, whereas such dependence is harmful to clarity and self-knowledge, it is very useful for system building.

But premodern rationalism, which seeks not to build systems but to see clearly, is exquisitely aware of just this danger to philosophy. It puzzles over the question: how do you transmit to others something that can never genuinely be given from without, but only generated from within? The answer it found is esotericism: by hiding the truth in the right way, one entices others to discover it for themselves. Esotericism is the literary counterpart of the Socratic method. A properly esoteric text does not allow the philosophic reader to form a dependence on the writer or on foundations laid in the past; rather it artfully compels him to develop and rely on his own inner powers. In precise opposition to the method of progress, esotericism is a device for forcing thinkers to be self-reliant, for constraining them to stand, not on the shoulders of others and thus within history, but on their own two feet.

Esotericism as Preserving the Possibility of Return

There also seems to be a second way in which esotericism—in opposition to the methodology of progress—is crucial in enabling the philosophic mind to appropriate its own foundations, although I am less certain that I understand Strauss correctly on this point. It concerns a second natural danger to the genuinely philosophic life. Even if a thinker remains free of excessive reliance on others, his thought may still rest on certain fundamental presuppositions of which he is insufficiently aware. That, of course, is the core of the historicist critique. If philosophy is to hope to escape dependence on such unexamined presuppositions, then the primary task of philosophy must become, not moving progressively forward to elaborate its principles, but moving backward to search its origins and foundations. In a word, philosophy must embrace, not progress, but return.

The philosophical need for return to the ordinary and pretheoretical is an imperative Strauss shares with many late modern thinkers, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—although, in Strauss's view, the truest fulfillment of this need is rather to be found in the famous Socratic turn, that is, his return to the human things. No matter how high philosophy, with divine madness, soars toward the sun, it must always recollect its origin in and continued dependence on the cave, the world of opinion, the average-everyday, the commonsense surface of things. It must continually test itself by returning to the phenomena as they present themselves to the ordinary, prephilosophic consciousness.

But here is the great problem that confronts a philosophy of return: once one leaves the cave, it is very difficult genuinely to return to it. As Socrates remarks, one's eyes can no longer see in the dark (Republic 516eff). Few things are more difficult than trying to regain lost innocence or to become naive again. Moreover, this loss of access or awareness is not confined to the philosophers themselves, but afflicts to some extent the society around them. Even where there is no deliberate cultivation of popular enlightenment, the very existence of philosophy or science within a culture tends to modify or distort its natural, prephilosophic consciousness. The second danger to philosophy, then, is this: philosophy is to a certain extent a self-undermining activity because, to remain healthy, it needs to maintain awareness of its origins in the world of pretheoretical experience, and yet it inevitably tends to obscure or transform that world, to render it inaccessible.

Now, in the modern period, this second natural danger to philosophy has been, once again, artificially strengthened by the ideas of progress and enlightenment. The great, but obstructed task for philosophy is return; but the idea of progress proclaims that the proper task of philosophy is rather to move ever forward, without looking back. It teaches that the origin, the prescientific, commonsense world is a realm of mere superstition and folklore that should be transcended and forgotten. Similarly, the related idea of enlightenment involves modern philosophy in the deliberate attempt to transform popular awareness, to abolish traditional society and the old world of prescientific commonsense and to replace it with a new form of consciousness, a secularized, disenchanted, scientific culture. In these ways, modern philosophy aggressively tears up its own roots and closes off every access to the pretheoretical world. It climbs up a ladder and then throws that ladder away. That is why modern thought is so un-Socratic, so lacking in the self-awareness that comes only from continually returning to and grounding oneself in the experiences of ordinary life.

Classical thought avoids these evils—it remains remarkably concrete, self-aware, and rooted in ordinary experience—because it is a philosophy not of progress and enlightenment but of return. And, though there are formidable natural obstacles to return, as we have just seen, classical thought possesses a device for dealing with these: through esotericism, the philosophers protect and preserve the commonsense, pretheoretical awareness of the city. They do not allow it to be corrupted or degraded by their own theoretical pursuits. In other words, Strauss often emphasizes that Socrates practiced esotericism because he became fully aware of his dependence on the city. But this dependence is not limited to his bodily needs—of which, presumably, earlier thinkers were not unaware. It is also and especially an intellectual dependence on the city as the natural repository of prephilosophical experience. It is this he seeks to protect. Esotericism is, then, the necessary supplement for a philosophy of return: it helps to preserve that to which philosophy needs to return—preserve it from the effects of philosophy. It is the natural corrective for the inherently self-undermining character of philosophy: it makes it possible for philosophic activity to live safely side by side with the prephilosophic awareness that it needs.

This preservative aspect of esotericism has also a second dimension. Esoteric writings help to secure the philosophers' access to the pretheoretical perspective not only by protecting that perspective within living society but also by presenting and preserving it in books. As Strauss frequently emphasizes, the writings of classical political philosophy have a unique directness, freshness, and concreteness that are not to be found in modern writings because—on their surface as distinguished from their depth—they deliberately adopt and elaborate the ordinary citizen's perspective on political things. They do not look down on the political world from some scientific standpoint outside and above, but rather take on the internal, practical, prephilosophical point of view. These writings are forever the great corrective to every kind of excessive sophistication. They are agents of Socratic simplicity and return, helping one to recall and to get back in touch with elemental, pretheoretical commonsense.

Thus, in two ways, the classical philosophers wrote in a manner that preserved their access to the prephilosophical. By writing esoterically—that is, by hiding the truth—they sheltered society and its pretheoretical perspective from corruption. And by writing exoterically—that is, by presenting an alternative, salutary doctrine on the surface of their writings—they described and preserved in literary form a version of the prephilosophical view.

I am not claiming, of course, that preserving the prephilosophical perspective of the city is the only or even the primary purpose of classical esotericism. Preserving philosophy itself is obviously a more urgent and fundamental aim, and it is one that is in some tension with the first. It seems clear, for example, that Plato seeks not simply to protect existing Greek ideas about the gods but to reform them in such a way as to make philosophy appear to be a pious and thus respectable activity. But within the bounds set by this latter concern, Plato does also seek to preserve, if not heighten, the moral and religious hopes, longings, and beliefs of the pretheoretical world.

To summarize the second half of Strauss's overall argument, having revived the great alternative to historicism—Socratic skeptical rationalism—he seeks to give an historical account of the unique modern susceptibility to historicism. He traces the historicist imperative—the need to see reason as imbedded in history—largely to a reaction against the political dangers that resulted when philosophers abandoned esoteric restraint in favor of crusading Enlightenment rationalism. More ultimately, he traces it to the modern effort to combat “the kingdom of darkness” through the denial of all transcendence, including that of theory over practice.

But Strauss also tries to explain the genesis of the unique inner experience of the modern mind that causes it to find historicism not only desirable but immediately plausible. Modern thought, he argues, is fundamentally different from classical thought in that the former attempts to ground philosophy through progress and the latter through return. Classical philosophy endeavored to legitimize itself, to illuminate and test its basic presuppositions, through the constant return to and confrontation with the world of prephilosophic experience (relying on esotericism to preserve that world from transformation in the face of this confrontation).

Modern thought is built on the opposite hope that by its success in transforming, enlightening, and disenchanting the world and by its continual progress in explaining the kinds of things that it can explain, all testimony to or experience of the kinds of things that it cannot explain will simply wither away. The world of traditional society, with its spirits, gods, and poets, will simply disappear, refuted by history. In short, modern thought hopes to legitimize itself precisely through the obliteration of pretheoretical experience.

But having thus systematically cut itself off from its own roots and foundations, modern “progress philosophy” eventually discovers to its surprise that it rests on choices and presuppositions of which it has lost awareness. And that is why historicism carries an immediate plausibility for modern thinkers that it simply did not possess for earlier generations: our recurring inner experience, whenever we honestly introspect, is of the historicity of our own thought.

But eventually, historicism facilitates the recovery of esotericism, which—if something like Strauss's readings and arguments are correct— restores to view the lost path of Socratic rationalism while also uncovering the hidden history of the rise of historicism as the characteristic modern prejudice. This will in turn lead to a genuine postmodernism—which is posthistoricism.⁸