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'The Most Radical Historicist'
It seems Leo Strauss is referring to one of two people - both of whom he greatly admired: either Heidegger or Schmitt. Which is the more likely candidate?
It is only at this point that we come face to face with the serious antagonist of political philosophy: historicism. After reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man's thinking orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity. Historicism rejects the question of the good society, that is to say, of the good society, because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought: there is no essential necessity for raising the question of the good society; this question is not in principle coeval with man; its very possibility is the outcome of a mysterious dispensation of fate. The crucial issue concerns the status of those permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists: can these permanencies be used as criteria for distinguishing between the good and bad dispensations of fate? The historicist answers this question in the negative. He looks down on the permanencies in question because of their objective, common, superficial and rudimentary character: to become relevant, they would have to be completed, and their completion is no longer common but historical. It was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason. ("What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 26-7)
As a matter of context, "What is Political Philosophy?," is the published version of the Judah L. Magnes lectures Strauss delivered at the Hebrew University in December 1954 and January 1955.
(Cross-posted to theoria.)
By Craig | September 8, 2007 in Carl Schmitt, Fascism, Heidegger, Politics | Permalink
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Comments
My money is on Heidegger...
Posted by: Barret Weber | Sep 10, 2007 12:25:27 AM
It is definitely Heidegger. It wouldn't even begin to make sense that it was Carl Schmitt since Schmitt was neither a historicist (at least, not in the sense Strauss dealt with it) nor did Strauss much "bother" with Schmitt after coming to the United States. With the exception of the "Notes on the Conception of the Political," the most direct comments Strauss ever made on Schmitt was a veiled reference in a postumously published lecture, "German Nihilism" and a more explicit one in another postumous lecture, "The Living Issues in German Postwar Philosophy" (now available in the English translation of Meier's Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem). I seem to remember Schmitt getting mentioned in a footnote in an early, German-era book of Struass's, but I may be confusing it with Schmitt's references to both Strauss's Hobbes and Spinoza books.
For the record, it is the subject of some minor debate why Strauss never bothered to mention Schmitt or Heidegger directly in any of his later writings. The "money" has been that Strauss didn't want to promote either or call direct attention to them given how much he intellectually distanced himself from them and the obvious dangers he identified in their respective thinking. The aforementioned lectures are interesting for their explicitness (especially "Living Issues..."), though both reveal a Strauss who hadn't quite grasped the whole of the problem historicism presented and his response to it. They work more as geneologies than critiques.
Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Sep 10, 2007 5:05:20 PM
It is interesting that the project Strauss outlines there and elsewhere in the volume echoes Heidegger's project of a discarding Western philosophy in favor of a new relationship between thinking and the world. (I hope this is an accurate summary of Heidegger; I don't know him as well as I ought.) Strauss rejected modern philosophy as mediated and dependent on pregiven categories that were unavailable to the ancients. Their thought was therefore free of convention and more valuable for that reason. The parallel suggests another avenue to explore the relationship between Heidegger and Strauss. Or is this already well known?
Posted by: luke | Sep 12, 2007 2:42:50 PM
Luke,
A few corrections...
"It is interesting that the project Strauss outlines there and elsewhere in the volume echoes Heidegger's project of a discarding Western philosophy in favor of a new relationship between thinking and the world."
That's an odd assessment given the fact that Strauss wasn't out to discard Western philosophy so much as expose where it had lost course. Though Strauss was highly critical of modern philosophers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, etc., he really only treats the type of thinking that arose in the ninteenth century as dangerous for philosophy since it denied (or, at least, obscured) the idea that there is natural right. Strauss's problem with modern Western philosophy stemmed from what he saw as a "lowering of the bar" and the seduction of progress.
"Strauss rejected modern philosophy as mediated and dependent on pregiven categories that were unavailable to the ancients."
I don't know if I would characterize it quite this way since Strauss was much more concerned about the view of the ancients that is unavailable to us. To my knowledge, Strauss never endorsed the view that the ancients "got it" all right, nor did he discard the possibility that we could discover something they couldn't. His concern was that the accretions and lowerings that became commonplace in modern philosophy, when coupled with the idea of progress, had caused the moderns to lose sight of their project and to obscure the possibility of true understanding.
"Their thought was therefore free of convention and more valuable for that reason."
Well, Strauss always hoped that their thought was free of convention. To prove that--as Strauss himself noted throughout his later writings--is different than looking to see whether they did or not (which, really, is what Strauss was trying to do). Strauss believed that since the ancients didn't suffer from the obscuring effects of progress and historicism, they were a more reliable source for uncovering the fundamental questions (which, presumably, could lead to the final answers, though there's good reason Strauss believed that to be impossible to verify once and for all). That is, of course, different than saying Plato and Aristotle did uncover those questions.
Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Sep 18, 2007 2:07:43 PM
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