Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
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Leo Strauss on the Underst<strong>and</strong>ing of the Politically Better <strong>and</strong> Worse<br />
7<br />
Zetetic skepticism so understood is compatible with arriving at conclusions.<br />
But are such conclusions compatible with the absence of<br />
answers to the fundamental <strong>and</strong> most comprehensive problems? Is knowledge<br />
of what political life “is <strong>and</strong> can be” compatible with the lack of such answers?<br />
Did Socrates, as interpreted by Strauss, not possess such knowledge? Did<br />
Socrates, according to Strauss, not believe that “the city is the only whole<br />
within the whole or the only part of the whole whose essence can be wholly<br />
known?” How can such knowledge be ascribed by Strauss to a Socrates who<br />
knew he knew nothing (1964, 29)?<br />
Socrates, according to Strauss, believed that “we are more<br />
familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that<br />
situation” (1959, 39). It is our underst<strong>and</strong>ing of the human condition that<br />
enables us to inquire in a proper manner into what its sources might be. It provides<br />
us with the initial clues we need in order to undertake a philosophically<br />
sound investigation into the whole of which the human condition is a part.<br />
Strauss also makes this point by saying that Socrates “viewed man in the light<br />
of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental <strong>and</strong> permanent problems”<br />
(1959, 39; emphasis supplied). The link between “ideas” <strong>and</strong> “problems” is supplied<br />
by Strauss’s description of the whole which philosophy strives to know as<br />
“the natures in their totality” (1959, 11). The “natures” are the What’s regarding<br />
which Socrates asks his “What is” questions. Strauss describes these What’s as<br />
the essentially different <strong>and</strong> irreducible class characteristics of different kinds<br />
of beings. Strauss’s Socrates neither claimed nor possessed knowledge of the<br />
whole, but he does seem to have arrived at some conclusions concerning it,<br />
which are incompatible with any reductionist accounts. “To underst<strong>and</strong> man<br />
in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to underst<strong>and</strong> man<br />
in the light of the subhuman. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible”<br />
(1959, 38). Man as open to the whole is essentially different from the<br />
subhuman. Recognizing that difference means acknowledging the existence of<br />
essential differences in the whole. To quote Strauss again: “This seems to me to<br />
be the difference between Plato <strong>and</strong> Aristotle, a difference which presupposes<br />
the acceptance by both of the doctrine of ideas, i.e., of the doctrine that the<br />
whole is characterized neither by noetic homogeneity (the exoteric Parmenides<br />
<strong>and</strong> all “mathematical” philosophy) nor by sensible heterogeneity (four elements,<br />
&c.) but by noetic heterogeneity” (1991, 277). Neither Strauss nor<br />
Socrates as he underst<strong>and</strong>s him simply rejects the doctrine of ideas.<br />
Affirming that there is an essential difference between human<br />
beings <strong>and</strong> other beings is by no means peculiar to Strauss among his philo-