Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion

Heinrich Meier, Robert Berman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226565705, 9780226275857
• eBook ISBN: 9780226275994
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Heinrich Meier's guiding insight in Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed religion. Philosophy must rationally justify and politically defend its free and unreserved questioning, and, in doing so, turns decisively to political philosophy.

In the first of three chapters, Meier determines four intertwined moments constituting the concept of political philosophy as an articulated and internally dynamic whole. The following two chapters develop the concept through the interpretation of two masterpieces of political philosophy that have occupied Meier's attention for more than thirty years: Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. Meier provides a detailed investigation of Thoughts on Machiavelli, with an appendix containing Strauss's original manuscript headings for each of his paragraphs. Linking the problem of Socrates (the origin of political philosophy) with the problem of Machiavelli (the beginning of modern political philosophy), while placing between them the political and theological claims opposed to philosophy, Strauss's most complex and controversial book proves to be, as Meier shows, the most astonishing treatise on the challenge of revealed religion. The final chapter, which offers a new interpretation of the Social Contract, demonstrates that Rousseau's most famous work can be adequately understood only as a coherent political-philosophic response to theocracy in all its forms.

CHAPTER TWO

The Renewal of Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion:

On the Intention of Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli

Zwei so grundverschiedene Menschen, wie Plato und Aristoteles, kamen in dem überein, was das höchste Glück ausmache, nicht nur für sie oder für Menschen, sondern an sich, selbst für Götter der letzten Seligkeiten: Sie fanden es im Erkennen . . . Ähnlich urteilten Descartes und Spinoza.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe

Thoughts on Machiavelli has a special place in the œuvre of Leo Strauss. It is the only book for which Strauss chooses a title that refers to his own activity and, insofar as thinking designates the central activity in the life of the philosopher, points to the center of his life. At the same time, it is the book in which Strauss confronts revealed religion in the most detailed way. Again, the title gives important hints. It invites comparison with the most famous title that announced thoughts of an author. They concerned religion. Strauss, however, neither holds out the prospect of Thoughts on Religion, nor leaves it at Thoughts without further specification. He will communicate his thoughts about religion by speaking about Machiavelli. He will present his confrontation with revealed religion in the guise of an interpretation of the thought that determined the life of a predecessor. Thus he will be compelled as commentator and as critic to lend his voice to one with a reputation for evil.1 In Thoughts on Machiavelli, unlike Pascal’s Pensées, we have before us, not a collection of disparate notes, but rather a theologico-political treatise, secured through commentary and critique and written with the greatest care.

As he does in almost all his writings, Strauss appears in Thoughts on Machiavelli with the persona of the traditional interpreter. Yet the first mention of Machiavelli apart from the title already makes clear that here a philosopher speaks and that his interpretation envisages an entirely nontraditional Machiavelli. In the preface, Strauss expresses thanks to the sponsor of the 1953 lecture series at the University of Chicago from which the book emerged “for giving me the opportunity to present my observations and reflections on the problem of Machiavelli.”2 In Thoughts on Machiavelli Strauss places the problem of Machiavelli on the philosophic agenda as Nietzsche did seventy years before in Götzen-Dämmerung with the problem of Socrates. By declaring Machiavelli to be a problem, Strauss singles him out as in his other writings he singles out only Socrates.3 He elevates him to a historical key figure, the adequate understanding of which is a task of philosophic importance. In fact, in Thoughts on Machiavelli he engages the thought of Machiavelli as no one before who wrote about Machiavelli engaged his thought. And he speaks of him as Machiavelli was never spoken of before. Strauss takes Machiavelli seriously as a philosopher. This explains the exceptional character of his book among all books about Machiavelli. And Strauss is the first philosopher who not only reads Machiavelli as a philosopher, but also calls Machiavelli a philosopher.4 In this lies an innovation that is, as no one knew better than Strauss, of importance beyond his own œuvre.

Thoughts on Machiavelli is the work of an innovator. It is part of Strauss’s enterprise of the renewal of philosophy. Stated more precisely, it is one of the most prominent parts of this enterprise, which Strauss preferred to present as a revival of the philosophic tradition. Not surprisingly, his followers and his enemies for the most part share the opinion that Strauss was concerned with the return to “the teaching of the ancients,” or with the restoration of a position for which he himself coined the expression “classical political philosophy.” Yet the revival of a tradition by a philosopher necessarily includes a critique of the tradition needing such revival. What he restores in particular and what he leaves aside comply with his insight. The deviations in the presentation and the conceptual innovations he carries out are due to the judgment at which he arrives in view of the historical situation of philosophy. Faced with an avowed proponent of the tradition, one easily loses sight of these deviations and innovations. In the case of Strauss, that holds precisely for the innovations, without which his enterprise would not be thinkable at all. I mention three aspects of his innovations, which Strauss makes prominent in rapid succession during the 1940s, and which will come to have considerable significance for all that follows. (1) Strauss is the first philosopher to give a coherent presentation of the art of careful writing, of which the philosophers of the past availed themselves, and a philosophic grounding of the exoteric-esoteric mode of presentation, which from the end of the eighteenth century was increasingly forgotten.5 (2) No philosopher before Strauss stressed with similar emphasis that philosophy has to be conceived as a way of life, and few have so sharply grasped the philosophic life and separated it from edifying trivializations or pious appropriations as Strauss does in the very same essay in which he introduces the concept for the first time.6 (3) The concept of the philosophic life stands in the closest connection with the concept of political philosophy, which was almost not to be found in the tradition and which Strauss makes into the veritable guiding concept of his œuvre. Once again the essay in which he introduces the concept takes up the sharpest, philosophically most demanding determination, repudiating most clearly all the nonphilosophic adaptations. Strauss indicates the necessary interconnection of the two concepts when he has the first part of the essay culminate in the assertion that the highest subject of political philosophy is the philosophic life, and when in the second part he assigns to political philosophy the task of the political defense and rational justification of philosophy, consequently answering the question, Why philosophy?7 All three innovations—making prominent the exoteric-esoteric distinction, making the philosophic life central, and introducing the concept of political philosophy—take into account the historical situation of philosophy. Strauss responds to the challenge of historicism, which identifies philosophy with the time-bounded character of its teachings and has philosophic activity merge with the doctrinal contents that it underlies. He encounters the danger of decisionism and irrationalism, which have made inroads in philosophy and deny or misunderstand that philosophy must justify its right and its necessity if it is going to be adequate to itself. He opposes the pusillanimous character of the philosophy of culture, which parcels out human life into a plurality of autonomous domains and assigns to philosophy a narrowly circumscribed field in the realm of cultural provinces coexisting separately and peacefully. Strauss demonstrates the fruitfulness of his innovations in a long series of penetrating studies, in which he subjects to revision the history of philosophy and its unfinished disputes from Heidegger to the pre-Socratics. In particular, however, he exemplifies it in his interpretation of three authors, whom he wins over first and foremost for philosophy or retrieves for the history of philosophy, one a philosopher of the Middle Ages, one ancient, and one modern: First Maimonides,8 whom Strauss in his first book did not yet recognize as a philosopher.9 Then Xenophon,10 whom barely anyone since the eighteenth century regarded as a philosopher. And finally Machiavelli.

To draw attention to philosophers who previously were not conceived of as philosophers or who long maintained a shadowy existence in the tradition is an effective move for a philosopher in order to indicate the thrust of his enterprise of the renewal of philosophy and to allow its contours to emerge vividly. Conversely, the philosophers brought to light in this way take on such weight for the enterprise itself that the question to what extent they correspond to its founding determinations comes to be more than a merely historical question. By calling Machiavelli a philosopher, Strauss places demands on Machiavelli’s thought, on Machiavelli’s self-understanding, and on Machiavelli’s own enterprise, whose fulfillment must be a central subject of his book. How is Machiavelli’s enterprise related to the political defense and rational justification of philosophy? What status does the philosophic life have in Machiavelli’s thought? How do things stand with Machiavelli’s art of careful writing? These questions, which Strauss’s œuvre occasions, point the way to the intention that led Strauss to put the problem of Machiavelli on the philosophic agenda. And access to an adequate understanding of the problem is opened up by the intention of Thoughts on Machiavelli.

I

The answer to the question about the art of careful writing in the case of Machiavelli seems to be obvious. What reader of Thoughts on Machiavelli could fail to see that Strauss presents Machiavelli as a master in the art of writing? But the purpose to which Machiavelli put this art is in no way obvious. Did it stand entirely in the service of Machiavelli’s “spiritual warfare”?11 Was it exhausted by political cunning and a strategically targeted practice for the deliberate conquest and final transformation of the world? Or are the Prince and the Discourses also “written speeches caused by love”?12 Stated otherwise: who is the primary addressee of Machiavelli’s books, whom Strauss circumscribes with the expression “the young,” and by using this uniform designation seems to present as one? For while the philosophers before and after Machiavelli who avail themselves of the art of careful writing seek to reach with their esoteric communication one addressee, “the young” in the sense of the potential philosophers, it turns out on closer consideration that Machiavelli’s presumably one addressee actually comprises two addressees.13 Accordingly, Machiavelli’s exoteric-esoteric presentation is directed to not two addressees, an exoteric and an esoteric, but rather at least three distinct addressees. The twofold addressee of Machiavelli’s esoteric address might be the reason that in Thoughts on Machiavelli, in which the art of writing plays a greater role than in any other of his books, Strauss speaks nowhere of the exoteric-esoteric distinction.14 The demonstrative avoidance of the traditional talk of exoteric and esoteric points to Machiavelli’s deviation from the traditional practice of careful writing, which Strauss nowhere makes explicit, an ambiguity that is nevertheless of extremely far-reaching significance for the understanding of Thoughts on Machiavelli.

Not making the twofold addressee concealed in the expression “the young” explicit is all the more remarkable since Strauss makes twofoldness into the key to his interpretation of Machiavelli and the structural principle for the composition of his theologico-political treatise. The interplay between twofoldness and division into two, between duality and doubling, determines the structure and the orientation of the entire book. Beginning with the duality of Machiavelli’s thought and teaching, which from the introduction on are carefully distinguished;15 to the programmatic exposition of the twofold character of Machiavelli’s teaching in chapter I; the doubling of Machiavelli’s intention in the two central chapters II and III; and the twofold treatment of Machiavelli’s teaching that the titles of chapters I and IV announce; up to the duality of Strauss’s thought and teaching, which is constitutive for Thoughts on Machiavelli and develops within the span of the arc that marks the title and conclusion of the book. The first chapter, which explicitly deals with the twofold presentation of Machiavelli’s teaching and is devoted to Machiavelli’s art of writing, consists of two parts. While the second part provides an answer to the hermeneutic question, how to read Machiavelli, and culminates in the discussion of ten devices to which the reader of the Prince and the Discourses has to pay attention—devices that also are employed in Thoughts on Machiavelli16—the first part shows that the hermeneutic question is the actual philosophic question. This first part exemplifies, in the problem that the “surface” of Machiavelli’s œuvre contains, the significance of the sentence with which the first part of the introduction concludes: “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.”17 Strauss begins with a problem that is so obvious it could not remain hidden from any interpreter, namely, the difficult relationship between the Prince and the Discourses. In contrast to most interpreters, who seek to resolve the question of how the two books are to be brought into harmony with one another, either through historical constructions or through a hierarchy based upon Machiavelli’s political conviction, Strauss sharpens the problem of the twofold presentation by being the first to offer the argument that Machiavelli asserted in the dedicatory letters of both books that each of them contains everything the author knows. If Machiavelli makes a comprehensive claim both for the Prince and for the Discourses, the “surface” of the one as well as of the other work compels the reader to pose the question of the intention that underlies both, but that can be identified with neither alone. But if the question of the intention that moved Machiavelli to present his teaching in twofold shape is posed in all seriousness, Machiavelli’s thought is shifted into the center. Strauss’s choice of the starting point serves his approach to “what is truly admirable in Machiavelli.” Conversely, the same holds for the rejection of the common practice of identifying Machiavelli’s perspective with the perspective of the Prince or of the Discourses. The hasty identification of Machiavelli with either of the two perspectives—for some considerable time mostly with the “republican” Discourses—reduces the Florentine to a political partisan or to an ideologue.18 The inadequate hermeneutic blocks access to the philosopher Machiavelli, whom Strauss, with his insistence on the twofold character of his teaching, has in view from the very beginning.

The structure of Thoughts on Machiavelli emerges from the result of chapter I, “The Twofold Character of Machiavelli’s Teaching.”19 Since Machiavelli presents his teaching not as a whole but in parts, each of which claims to be a whole in itself, Machiavelli’s teaching can be arrived at only by means of a detailed study of these parts, which Machiavelli’s art of writing brought forth as works, each with its own aim and particular “surface.” The detailed study demands recourse to the intention of the author as the organizing principle that makes the work into an independent whole. Accordingly, the headings of chapters II and III read “Machiavelli’s Intention: The Prince” and “Machiavelli’s Intention: The Discourses.” Only t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• Preface
• Note on Translation
• Note on Citations
• I. Why Political Philosophy?
• II. The Renewal of Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion: On the Intention of Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli
• III. The Right of Politics and the Knowledge of the Philosopher: On the Intention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social
• Appendix: Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli: The Headings
• Index of Names