I

A generation ago, an English critic, Myles Burnyeat, wrote an excoriating attack upon Leo Strauss in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Among other things, Burnyeat declared that while Strauss's writings contained much discussion of “the philosopher” there was “no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”Footnote ¹ If true, this would be a damning indictment. The question, though, is whether it is true and whether Burnyeat's confidence in identifying what it means to be “actively involved in philosophy” is justified.

To begin with, what does Burnyeat mean when he refers to being actively engaged in philosophy? He does not say himself, but it is possible that he means either one of two things. First, the idea of philosophy, at least in the Anglo-American world, was shaped to a large degree in the post-World War II years by the “ordinary language” approach adopted by J.L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein. Philosophy meant here the analysis of concepts found in everyday language. The analytical movement, as it became known, assumed that all philosophical problems were linguistic in nature and that these problems could be solved with ever more careful scrutiny of ordinary usages. More recently and to some degree in opposition to the ordinary language approach, some philosophers have opted to engage in more ambitious, reconstructive attempts to address substantive moral and political issues. The work of philosophers like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas has attempted to engage in a kind of public philosophy.

What is clear is that Strauss is not a philosopher in either of these two senses. His work has not, on the whole, focused on the meaning of isolated political concepts such as justice, authority, freedom, or equality. Nor has he written philosophical treatises with titles like A Theory of Justice or A Theory of Communicative Action. Strauss's work has taken the form not of the analytical treatise but of the commentary. His writings have remained firmly nested within the genre of the history of political philosophy, leading some readers—and even on occasion Strauss himself—to deny that he is a philosopher at all. Nevertheless, Strauss himself speaks of the commentary as a unique form of philosophic communication and even of the “specific immunity of the commentator.”Footnote ²

One reason that might explain this confusion is that Strauss's understanding of philosophy is marked by a return to an older—a much older—meaning of the word. Philosophy in its oldest sense is philo-sophia or, literally, the love of wisdom. But what does it mean to love wisdom? Long before philosophy became a name for an academic discipline, it was associated by its practitioners with a way of life. To practice philosophy meant not necessarily to adhere to a specific set of doctrines, a method, much less to anything like a system of ideas, but to live in a certain way. Philosophy was not just a theoretical exercise, but a practical one designed to answer the questions “How ought I to live?” “What is the best way of life?” or simply “Why philosophy?”

There is some evidence that interest in the older conception of philosophy as a way of life is receiving renewed attention. In a book titled Philosophy as a Way of Life, the French classicist Pierre Hadot argues that the ancient philosophical sects—Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans—all understood philosophy first and foremost as a “spiritual exercise” designed to liberate the mind and free themselves from the grip of the passions.Footnote ³ Their aim was to create spiritual communities in which the individual members could seek to live freely and in friendship with others who had chosen a similar way of life. In a similar vein Alexander Nehamas has sought to revive the idea of philosophy as “the art of living.” While denying that he is urging readers to return to a philosophical way of life, he wants to remind analytical philosophers in particular that the type of philosophy one espouses affects the type of person one is. Philosophical discourse, like the great works of literature, shapes character, and the greatest proponents of philosophy as the art of living have been Socrates, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.Footnote ⁴

Only when we think of philosophy in this older sense as a way of life can we begin to appreciate Strauss's role in recent philosophic debate. For Strauss, though, philosophy is not the kind of “spiritual exercise” Hadot associates with certain ancient ascetic cults; nor is the philosophic way of life a form of individual self-expression as Nehamas maintains. Philosophy as Strauss understands it is less a constructive or architectonic activity than a skeptical one. Philosophy for Strauss is zetetic or, as he puts it, “skeptic in the original sense of the term,” that is, knowing that one does not know or knowing the limits of knowledge.Footnote ⁵ The task of the philosopher is not so much to propound answers, but to indicate the problematic character of all answers. At the moment when the certainty of our solutions outweighs the awareness of the problematic character of the solution, the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher. This is in many ways a rigorous and demanding conception of philosophy. To use a modern category to express a Socratic insight, the philosopher must be a practitioner of “negative dialectics.”Footnote ⁶

This passage in which Strauss defines philosophy as “skeptic in the original sense of the term” provides the key for his understanding of philosophy as a way of life. The question is, what kind of life is it? What promises and responsibilities does it hold out for its followers? And, most fundamentally, what can justify the choice of philosophy as a way of life?

II

Strauss is, of course, most famous as a student of political philosophy, but his understanding of political philosophy cannot dispense with some general account of philosophy. Philosophy, he explains, is a quest for “universal knowledge” or knowledge of “the whole.”Footnote ⁷ By the whole he does not mean some kind of encyclopedic inventory, a catalogue raisonée, of everything that exists, but a knowledge of “the natures of things,” that is, the basic categories of being that allow us to ask “what is. . . ?” type questions. We know a thing by knowing its nature or the category to which it belongs. Philosophy strives for categorial knowledge, not knowledge of things in their particularity. Strauss gives as examples of these categories the knowledge of God, man, and world.

Philosophy as a distinctive enterprise emerges because knowledge of these natures is not immediately accessible. We have a variety of more or less reliable opinions about things, but these opinions often exhibit internal inconsistencies, not to say contradict one another. Philosophy in Strauss's famous formulation is “the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole.”Footnote ⁸ But even as philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole, the whole is fundamentally elusive. We may have knowledge of the parts, but the whole remains mysterious, and even knowledge of the parts, without knowledge of the whole, remains incomplete knowledge. Strauss admits that the discrepancy between the loftiness of the ambition and the puniness of the results “could appear as Sisyphean or ugly,” but he then goes on to affirm philosophy “is necessarily accompanied, sustained, and elevated by eros.”Footnote ⁹ In other words, philosophy is first and foremost an erotic activity consisting more in the quest, the desire for knowledge, than in the completion or achievement of wisdom.

On occasion Strauss associates philosophy with a certain type of causal knowledge. “The philosopher's dominating passion is the desire for truth, [that is], for knowledge of the eternal order, or the eternal cause or causes of the whole.”Footnote ¹⁰ Once again Strauss emphasizes the specific kind of desire or passion—eros—that characterizes philosophy. This passion is for knowledge of the causes of the whole rather than knowledge of any particular kind of thing. In fact this desire for knowledge leads the philosopher to look askance at the human things that cannot but appear “paltry and ephemeral” in comparison to the eternal order.Footnote ¹¹ Being chiefly concerned with causes—with the form or eidos of things—philosophy seems to care little about things, including human beings, in their individuality.

Strauss is aware—deeply aware—of an obvious objection to this conception of philosophy. The ancient or Socratic conception of philosophy as “knowledge of the whole” or of an “eternal order” seems to presuppose an “antiquated cosmology,” namely one in which the universe appears as an ordered cosmos in which human beings and other species have their predetermined roles. Such an idea is completely at odds with the modern notion of the infinitely expanding universe. The teleological conception of nature seems as obsolete today as the claims of creationism and other pseudo-sciences. Strauss states the objection with admirable clarity in the Introduction to Natural Right and History:

He admits that “an adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”Footnote ¹³ Strauss does not exactly say what such a solution would look like, but does he have an answer to this very pointed objection?

Indeed, Strauss denies that the classical conception of human nature presupposes any specific cosmology or underlying metaphysics. The desire for knowledge of the whole remains precisely that, a desire; it does not dogmatically presuppose, much less claim to demonstrate, one or another specific cosmology. Modern natural science has no doubt vastly increased our power over nature in precisely the way imagined by Bacon and Descartes, but this is scarcely a guarantee that science has provided anything like a comprehensive understanding of nature, including human nature, unless one equates power with understanding. Strauss even toys with the idea that the ancients considered this idea of science but rejected it as “destructive of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁴

Strauss addresses this objection in What Is Political Philosophy? wherein he claims that ancient philosophy, unlike modern science, understood the human situation in terms of “the quest for cosmology” rather than any specific answer to the problem of cosmology. It is this very openness to or skepticism about knowledge of the whole that distinguishes the ancients from modern natural science:

Strauss's understanding of philosophy begins with a desire for knowledge of the whole and concludes with an awareness of “the elusive character of the truth.” How does he arrive at this conclusion?

Knowledge of the whole is necessarily preceded by knowledge of the parts. Since we cannot achieve knowledge of the whole immediately as if “shot out of the barrel of a gun” (in Hegel's famous metaphor), our access to the whole must take the form of an “ascent,” a movement from the things most immediate and known to us to those things that remain obscure and shrouded in mystery. Philosophy must proceed “dialectically” from premises that are generally agreed upon.Footnote ¹⁶ This ascent begins with the opinions we share about those things that most closely approximate the whole, that is, about the foundations of the political community, the rights and duties of its citizens, the relation of law and liberty, and the imperatives of war and peace. It is the “political” that provides our clearest point of access to the whole. Why is this?

Political philosophy is not simply a branch of general philosophy like ethics, logic, or aesthetics. For Strauss, political philosophy is a kind of first philosophy. The investigation of political things requires that we begin with the investigation of the opinions about the better and worse, the just and unjust, which give shape and meaning to political life. All politics is governed by opinion and political philosophy takes as its starting point the investigation of opinion—the often authoritative opinions as handed down in laws, statutes, and other official documents—that govern a community. These opinions, while not philosophy itself, nevertheless share something with philosophy, namely, a concern for the political good, the good of the community. But what distinguishes the political philosopher from even the best citizen or statesman is not knowledge or concern for the well-being of this or that political community, but a certain breadth of perspective: a search for the “true standards” that shape “the good political order.”Footnote ¹⁷

The political community is from one point of view a category of being, merely one aspect or part of the whole, but from another it is the very microcosm of the whole. The political is the most comprehensive human grouping within the order of nature. As such, the political order provides the basic structure or ranking of all other orders. Of all the perishable things, the heterogeneity of the political order is the closest expression to the heterogeneity of the eternal order. Knowledge of the whole must begin and begin necessarily with political philosophy. Whether political philosophy becomes an end in itself or a means to an understanding of metaphysics is a problem not clearly resolved by Strauss.

Throughout his various writings Strauss emphasized that his approach to philosophy was given its canonical expression in the writings of the classical political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. This was not simply because theirs was chronologically first, but because the ancients stood in a privileged position in regard to the political opinion that shaped their communities. These opinions—Strauss refers to them as forming the “natural consciousness” or the “pre-philosophic consciousness”— form the horizon out of which the fundamental concepts and categories of political philosophy arose and against which they can be checked.Footnote ¹⁸ Classical political philosophy was related directly to political life, whereas all subsequent philosophies represent modifications of this tradition and hence could only experience their world indirectly, viewing it, so to speak, through a glass darkly. Natural experience has become further distorted through a tradition of philosophy that has become at various times intermingled with theology, science, and more recently history. Consequently, we experience the world today through a prism of concepts that prevents access to the “original position”— apologies to John Rawls—of philosophy vis-à-vis the city.Footnote ¹⁹

How, then, can we recover these opinions, this “pre-philosophic consciousness,” that has been blocked or sedimented over by layers of theoretical abstraction? Strauss's project, to some degree like Rousseau's genealogical approach, consists of peeling away, onion-like, the layers of congealed tradition that have succeeded in obscuring the natural consciousness that it presupposes. There have always been and always will be certain natural obstacles to the philosophic life; Strauss mentions such things as natural ignorance, the imagination, and superstition. What blocks our access today is a set of wholly artificial “pseudo-philosophies”—historicism, scientism—that have distorted our relation to experience. Strauss's paradoxical answer is that only through historical studies carried out not in the spirit of the reigning academic historicism, but by reacquiring the art of careful reading can we think ourselves back into the original situation of philosophy.Footnote ²⁰ Only through reading certain “old books” will we be able to begin the slow and painstaking ascent from the artificial cave we now inhabit back into the “natural cave” that is the foundation for all later philosophy.Footnote ²¹

III

All philosophy is political philosophy in another sense for Strauss. In the first place, the form or shape of the political community is the closest approximation to the natural articulation of the whole that is the true object of philosophic knowledge. But philosophy is political in a much more obvious sense. Strauss puts this in the form of a syllogism. Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion, including opinions about political things, by knowledge; but opinion is the medium of society; therefore philosophy is necessarily at odds with society. Strauss drew from this the following conclusion: philosophy is necessarily a function of the “few,” an elite, that must conceal its activity from the hostility of the “many.”Footnote ²² It is this tension between philosophy and society, given its most vivid expression in Plato's Apology of Socrates, which constitutes the political situation of philosophy. The philosopher's way of life is forced to pay homage to politics.

Strauss's most developed thoughts on the tension between philosophy and politics occur in his exchange with the Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève over the nature of modern tyranny. Strauss's On Tyranny was an attempt to resuscitate the ancient concept of tyranny as presented in Xenophon's dialogue Hiero in order better to understand the phenomenon of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin). Unlike many of his contemporaries who emphasized the novelty of totalitarianism, Strauss somewhat counterintuitively saw a continuity between ancient and modern tyranny. Strauss did not deny that modern tyrannies supported by the powers of technology and ideology had become vastly more dangerous than tyrannies in the past, but he wondered whether this changed the essential nature of the phenomenon (“Tyranny is a danger coeval with political life”).Footnote ²³ Kojève, by contrast, suggested that modern tyrannies could play a historically progressive role in the struggle to achieve the classless society of the future. In the course of their exchange, Strauss and Kojève turned the debate over tyranny into a discussion of the philosopher's responsibility to the city.Footnote ²⁴

Strauss begins by considering the philosopher's motives, the peculiar desire or eros, that drives the philosophic quest. For Kojève, it is recognition above all that intellectuals crave, desire to have their ideas “realized” by being adopted in practice, whether it be by a court, a president, or a tyrant. The test of the truth of an idea is its success in the public sphere.Footnote ²⁵ For Strauss, however, it is not public recognition, but the satisfaction that derives from philosophy itself that is its own reward. The justification of philosophy is entirely internal to philosophy. “We do not have to pry into the heart of any one in order to know that, insofar as the philosopher, owing to the weakness of the flesh, becomes concerned with being recognized by others, he ceases to be a philosopher,” Strauss retorts. “According to the strict view of the classics he turns into a sophist.”Footnote ²⁶

Kojève's complaint is that Strauss's understanding of philosophy remains isolated from the life of the city, from political praxis, and the historical process. This retreat has historically taken the form of the Epicurean garden, the Republic of Letters, or the academic ivory tower. These all represent efforts to escape the judgment of history by retreating into the inner citadel of the mind. Strauss accepts that the philosopher's quest is a lonely one that requires liberation from “the most potent natural charm” of attachment to the city, but this does not render it absolutely self-regarding. Fully aware of the fallibility of the mind, the philosopher must seek out others of his kind with whom to share, challenge, and test his ideas. The cultivation of friendship becomes one of the highest duties of philosophy.Footnote ²⁷

To be sure, Strauss agrees with Kojève regarding the danger of self-referentiality that comes from “the cultivation and perpetuation of common prejudices by a closely knit group of kindred spirits.”Footnote ²⁸ He appears to be fully cognizant of all the dangers later associated with “Straussianism.” But if one danger to philosophy comes from “the snobbish silence and whispering of the sect,” an even greater danger derives from the desire to turn philosophy into a mass doctrine (“propaganda”). The idea of a public philosophy is an oxymoron. “If we must choose between the sect and the party,” Strauss writes, “we must choose the sect.”Footnote ²⁹ There will always be rival philosophical sects—Platonists, Spinozists, Heideggerians—that check and balance one another. The true danger to philosophy is when it is turned into an ideology adapted to the needs of political rule.

It is in this context that Strauss confirms the skeptical or zetetic nature of philosophy referred to earlier. Philosophy is a matter of knowledge, but knowledge of one's ignorance, of knowing the limits of knowledge:

This is Strauss's boldest statement on the nature of philosophy and surely refutes the charge that there is “no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.” Yet Strauss leaves many questions unanswered. Strauss's affection for Socratic moderation notwithstanding, where exactly does one draw the line between knowledge and ignorance? Even if we accept the claim that the evidence of the problems of philosophy is greater than the evidence for the solutions, does this render all solutions equally problematic? Are we not entitled to claim that some solutions are preferable to others even if they lack certainty? Is the only choice between absolute wisdom or zetetic skepticism? More seriously, Strauss's zetetic understanding of philosophy seems to undercut the ground of political judgment. If, as he remarks above, one cannot think about the problems without becoming “inclined” toward a solution, on the basis of what is one so inclined? If knowledge of the right or good political order remains fundamentally problematic, what standard can be used for judgment in political life?

Strauss probably exaggerates philosophy's radical detachment from the concerns of the city. He recognizes that the philosopher “cannot help living as a human being who as such cannot be dead to human concerns.”Footnote ³¹ Among these concerns are the philosopher's twin responsibilities to both philosophy and the city. The philosopher's first and primary concern must always be to philosophy itself, to ensure its survival even in the most endangered times. “The philosopher must go to the market place in order to fish there for potential philosophers.”Footnote ³² These fishing expeditions will necessarily be seen by the city as an attempt to corrupt the young by weaning them away from politics and business to philosophy. In this way the philosopher is forced to defend himself and his way of life, not only before other philosophers, but before the tribunal of public opinion.

In what does the philosopher's responsibility to the city consist? Recognizing that philosophy can only take place within the context of the city—how else to guarantee its continuation?—the philosopher must show a decent respect to the opinions on which the city is based. To be sure, the philosopher's public responsibilities are entirely exoteric as the following admission makes clear. It is sufficient to satisfy the city “that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens, and even the best of citizens.”Footnote ³³ Knowing that true happiness is found only in the activity of philosophy, the philosopher will find it easy to accommodate himself to the nomoi of the city. Plato's allegory of the cave always remained Strauss's Exhibit A for the intransigent hostility between philosophy and even the best social order.

The philosopher may be convinced, may even believe he knows, that the philosophic life is best. It is this very certainty that leads philosophy to entertain only modest expectations from politics:

Strauss's philosophical politics raises the troubling question of the limits of the philosopher's accommodation to the city. Does this accommodation include acquiescence to tyranny as something “coeval with political life”? Must a tyrannical regime be tolerated as one of the evils “inseparable from the human condition”? How far must the philosopher maintain the fiction that philosophy is not atheistic and reveres the gods of the city?

Strauss's answer to these questions is best summed up in a phrase he uses in regard to Judah Halevi: “[T]he line of demarcation between timidity and responsibility is drawn differently in different ages.”Footnote ³⁵ He might also have added “and according to the temperament and judgment of each individual.” This is clearly true for Strauss himself whose own philosophical politics displayed a combination of inner resistance and outer conformity. There will always remain the lingering question of how far Strauss was recommending such a strategy to his own readers. To what degree does esotericism remain an historical thesis about the interpretation of the thought of the past or a responsibility of philosophy even in the present?Footnote ³⁶ This is a theme on which Strauss remained tantalizingly and, I suspect, deliberately opaque. It is certainly far from evident that a strategy adopted by Halevi, Alfarabi, and Maimonides, writing in times of considerable hostility to philosophy, remains applicable in a modern democratic age where the demands for intellectual probity and “transparency” have become not just private but public virtues.

Strauss holds out the possibility that philosophy may yet be able to confer certain indirect benefactions on the city through humanizing its political and ethical practices. The chief benefit that philosophy confers is a sense of limits or moral restraints on politics, an awareness that not everything is permitted.Footnote ³⁷ Among the evils that philosophy can hope to mitigate are the dangers of utopianism (“idealism”), overly zealous forms of nationalism and patriotism, the excesses of group identity, and other “delusions bred by collective egoisms.”Footnote ³⁸ But it is precisely because these evils are ineradicable that our expectations from politics must be modest.

IV

The philosopher may believe—Strauss may even believe—that the philosophic life is best. The question is what makes it so. Strauss refers to the sense of satisfaction bordering on “self-admiration” felt by the philosopher. But this is not so much a proof as an expression of the philosophic life. It is also less than clear how knowledge of one's ignorance contributes to the sense of satisfaction or happiness experienced by the philosopher, but as Strauss would say, “be that as it may.” Can philosophy justify itself and its way of life before the most serious alternatives? This is perhaps the central question of Strauss's philosophical writings.

The most serious alternative, in fact the only real alternative, to philosophy is the challenge posed by divine revelation.Footnote ³⁹ Other choices and other life plans—even the classical conflict between the philosophical and the political life—pale in comparison. The alternatives of reason and revelation or, in Strauss's idiom, Athens and Jerusalem, remain the sharpest and most comprehensive question that philosophy must confront in defending itself and its way of life. The difference between Athens and Jerusalem centers on their respective views of the role of morality in the overall economy of human life. For adherents of Jerusalem, it is morality—the passionate quest for righteousness—that represents the pinnacle of humanity, while for partisans of Athens, morality is at most instrumental to the attainment of a kind of contemplative autonomy. This contrast, even more than the famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, remains the philosophic question because if philosophy cannot defend itself against the adherents of revelation, then philosophy itself threatens to become just another faith based upon an arbitrary decision or an act of will.Footnote ⁴⁰

Strauss states this contrast nowhere more starkly than in the pages of Natural Right and History:

Strauss provocatively denies that a grand synthesis of reason and revelation like that imagined by Thomas Aquinas or Hegel is possible. In every synthesis one side gets the upper hand and thus blunts the edge of the other. Philosophy and revelation necessarily conflict because each declares itself “the one thing needful”:

There seems, then, to be a standoff between philosophy and revelation. Can either side refute the other?

In good Socratic fashion Strauss considers a variety of opinions on both sides of the argument. Consider the matter first from the side of theology. Within the Jewish tradition what is called the Call of God is often said to be verified by a long line of tradition.Footnote ⁴³ This Call was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, handed down to Joshua, to the elders, and the prophets all in an unbroken chain of tradition to the rabbis. Is this tradition reliable?

Strauss questions the validity of this kind of historical proof. The Call of God cannot be distinguished from those who claim to have experienced the Call. In other words, the Call is only as reliable as the individuals who claim to have received it. But this makes the Call dependent on the interpretation of the believer, and such interpretations will inevitably vary from person to person and sect to sect. A believing Jew will interpret the Call very differently from a believing Muslim. Furthermore, those who claimed to be witnesses to the revelation or the inheritors of this revelation are in all known cases already adherents of their respective faiths. There are no impartial or neutral witnesses apart from the believers themselves.Footnote ⁴⁴

The same objections hold regarding the alleged existence of miracles. No one who does not already believe in the possibility of miracles has ever testified to their existence. “No miracle was performed in the presence of first-rate physicists,” Strauss impiously remarks.Footnote ⁴⁵ He also considers the argument from what he calls “the intrinsic quality of revelation,” namely, that the revealed law is the best of all possible laws. But if the revealed law is said to be best, this can only be a judgment of reason. The revealed law would be in this case subordinate to or at least answerable to the claims of reason and not faith or belief.Footnote ⁴⁶

Strauss considers and rejects the various arguments used to defend the primacy of revelation, but how do things look from the standpoint of philosophy? No better. Philosophy demands that revelation defend itself before the bar of reason, our human reason. But revelation resolutely refuses to do this. The argument that revelation must justify itself rationally is circular. It presupposes what it needs to prove, namely, that revelation is a rational experience. At most philosophy can claim to have refuted the various theological arguments in defense of revelation; it has not disproved the possibility of revelation itself.

Strauss considers a number of more specific arguments against revelation drawn from the historical and archaeological criticism of the Bible and others from modern scientific theories (Darwinism), but he pays the greatest respect to the claims of philosophical theology or what goes by the name of natural theology. According to the argument of natural theology, God's attributes are in principle knowable and accessible to human reason. The opening axioms and demonstrations of book one of Spinoza's Ethics is the clearest proof text of this approach. According to Spinoza, we can know the attributes of God because God is nature, and the operations of nature can be known through the application of unaided human intelligence. Just as everything exists within the ordered sphere of nature, so can everything be known according to the principle of sufficient reason. According to this principle, there is a perfect unity between reason and nature and this unity is God.

Strauss takes Spinoza's argument with the utmost seriousness, but in the end finds it just as arbitrary as the assertion of revelation. The attributes of God proposed by Spinoza have all been pre-selected to prove God's perfect rationality and intelligibility, to deny all mystery to the universe. Whether Spinoza's disenchantment of the universe represents a form of concealed atheism or a higher form of piety is not a question that concerns Strauss. His point is that the Spinozist conception of God as Deus sive natura may well follow the criteria for clarity and distinctness, but clarity and distinctness are not a guarantee of truth. A clear and distinct proof for the existence of God is only clear and distinct from our point of view, from the standpoint of philosophy; it cannot begin to penetrate the existence of an infinite being whose ways may not be our ways. The Ethics remains a castle built on sand.

The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem seems to have concluded with a draw. Strauss writes: “All alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbelief in revelation, and all alleged refutations of philosophy presuppose faith in revelation.”Footnote ⁴⁷ No common ground or neutral standpoint seems possible. But a standoff between philosophy and faith would seem to tilt the balance in favor of faith. If philosophy cannot prove in the sense of rationally demonstrate its superiority to revelation, if every proof against revelation turns out to be hypothetical, or to rest upon “unevident premises” no different from the premises of faith, then one must accept that the philosophical life is itself based on faith, an act of will, or on a decision that cannot in the last instance be rationally grounded. In such a competition, the adherents of faith would win on a technicality.Footnote ⁴⁸

Strauss goes out of his way to make the strongest case for revelation or, what amounts to the same thing, to create the highest possible hurdle for philosophy. He often seems to demand a much higher burden of proof from philosophy than from theology. Theology merely needs to hold open the possibility of revelation, whereas philosophy is required to refute its very premises. Anything less must be taken as an admission of failure. Strauss was himself a product of the early twentieth-century “reawakening of theology” associated with the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig who “appeared to make it necessary to investigate how far the critique of orthodox theology—Jewish and Christian—deserved to be victorious.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Strauss clearly took it for granted that the critique of theology had not yet proved deserving of victory.

At the same time that the reawakening of theology alerted Strauss to the failure of the Enlightenment critique of religion, it would be a mistake, as some have tried, to place him in the camp of counter-Enlightenment political theology, to turn him into a defender of faith. Through his dissatisfaction with Spinoza, Strauss fought his way back not to a reaffirmation of orthodoxy, but to a much older conception of philosophy as zetetic philosophy. This, I take it, is the meaning of his statement that a return to premodern philosophy is not an impossibility but only a very great difficulty.Footnote ⁵⁰

Strauss's “return” to classical political philosophy—a return he always described as “tentative or experimental”—is not, as some have seen, an endorsement of natural hierarchy or any other form of ancient biology or eugenics.Footnote ⁵¹ Strauss's understanding of ancient philosophy has more to do with the political problem of philosophy or the issue of the philosophic life and not a philosophy of politics as this is usually understood. This has certainly not inhibited all manner of interpreters from attributing all manners of doctrinal positions to him from neoconservatism to a nihilistic antimodernity. His concern was with the original position of philosophy as a mode of questioning and not with the defense of any particular philosophical school or sect, much less a political movement or cause.

Strauss makes clear that the philosophic life is to be understood as a form of zetetic questioning. Even here zeteticism is not a return to the questions of the Stoa, but to a whole range of topics unknown to the ancients, mainly the problem of Athens and Jerusalem or, to what he later called, the “theologico-political problem” (“the theme of my investigations”).Footnote ⁵² Zetetic or skeptical philosophy does not claim to have found an answer, much less the answer, to the reason/revelation problem, but rather to keep that problem alive for future investigation. Zetetic understanding is precisely what protects the philosopher from the twin dogmatisms of faith and unbelief. Neither of these can withstand the test of rational justification. Only the philosopher who lives in constant awareness of and engagement with the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, who is able to engage each side with the claims of the other, is in a position to justify philosophy as a way of life.Footnote ⁵³

V

If Strauss is correct that we have lost sight of the question of the philosophic life, then it is hardly surprising that many today fail to see him as a philosopher, often mistaking him for a commentator or a historian of ideas. Strauss's interests were not with the techniques or methods of philosophy, much less with advancing knowledge of concepts and propositions. Strauss's interest was with the prior question, “Why philosophy?” This is obviously not a question one would ask of activities like cookery or military strategy or business enterprise where the ends in question are not fundamentally controversial. But the ends of philosophy are and will always remain an open question. More specifically, Strauss was concerned with what the philosophic life is and what value, if any, it confers on the life of the community. His single-minded examination of this question fulfills the offices of philosophy to the highest degree.