Leo Strauss and the Theopolitics of Culture

Philipp von Wussow

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438478401, 9781438478395
• eBook ISBN: 9781438478418
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

This archive-based study of the philosophy of Leo Strauss provides in-depth interpretations of key texts and their larger theoretical contexts.

2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

In this book, Philipp von Wussow argues that the philosophical project of Leo Strauss must be located in the intersection of culture, religion, and the political. Based on archival research on the philosophy of Strauss, von Wussow provides in-depth interpretations of key texts and their larger theoretical contexts. Presenting the necessary background in German-Jewish philosophy of the interwar period, von Wussow then offers detailed accounts and comprehensive interpretations of Strauss's early masterwork, Philosophy and Law, his wartime lecture "German Nihilism," the sources and the scope of Strauss's critique of modern "relativism," and a close commentary on the late text "Jerusalem and Athens." With its rare blend of close reading and larger perspectives, this book is valuable for students of political philosophy, continental thought, and twentieth-century Jewish philosophy alike. It is indispensable as a guide to Strauss's philosophical project, as well as to some of the most intricate details of his writings.

PART I

THE RETURN OF RELIGION, THE REMNANTS OF NEO-KANTIANISM, AND THE SYSTEMATIC PLACE OF “THE POLITICAL”

Introduction

Leo Strauss did little to draw his readers’ attention to a systematic layer in his thought. His writings typically combine the loose form of the essay with some unfathomable principle of organization and densification. One can best describe them as theologico-political treatises that are traditionally situated on the border of commentary, wisdom literature, and political treatise. Strauss often seems to rely on loose observations and on tiny details he found on the textual surface, but he also had a knack for the long (and sometimes exhausting) mimetic reproductions of an author’s view.

Reading experiences with this kind of writing vary. But no matter whether readers see the contours of some hidden teaching or the absence of any genuine teaching in Strauss’s writings, they all find it difficult to come to terms with his concept of political philosophy. Often his own statements are not particularly helpful here. An obvious starting point is the terminological attempt to distinguish political philosophy from political thought, political theory, political theology, social philosophy, or political science.¹ Another option is to start from Strauss’s historical and historiographical considerations and hence to arrive at a concept of political philosophy that is based on the traditions—both ancient and modern—on which he wrote. Both approaches have produced valuable insights, but they have not led to a systematic understanding of Strauss’s concept of political philosophy.

As I wish to suggest, a more systematic understanding must start from the relationship between political philosophy and philosophy proper: Is political philosophy one philosophical discipline among others or a key to the whole of philosophy? Partial answers in Strauss’s writings point in both directions. He argued for political philosophy as “a branch” of philosophy and emphasized the need to distinguish political things from things that are not political.² But he also argued that the phenomenon of “the political” could only be understood if it was no longer represented as one of several cultural fields or “provinces.”³ And contrary to the understanding of political philosophy as a “branch” of philosophy, he argued that the term political indicated “a manner of treatment” of all philosophy, as in, “the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy.”⁴ He seriously considered political philosophy to be “the rightful queen of the social sciences,”⁵ and ultimately the queen of the philosophical disciplines.

Overall, then, Strauss understood political philosophy both as “a branch” of philosophy and as a comprehensive view on philosophy. It was both the quest for knowledge of political things and a guide to the political treatment of philosophy. Strauss qualified these two different notions with many historical considerations, but there is a principal conflict at work here that runs through many of his writings: He could either opt for a precise systematic location or for a systematic omnipresence of the political—or he could avoid a decision altogether and leave the problem unresolved.

Strauss had a knack for leaving problems unresolved. He loved to point out the intricacies of philosophical problems, but he was suspicious of all solutions. All too often his discussions of a problem disembogue into a cascade of paradoxies that leave the reader perplexed. The problem of the systematic status of political philosophy is no exception here. But it is also more severe than any other. It is perhaps the best example of problems that cannot be solved, only understood. Speaking in terms of theory construction, both options had their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, both were replete with political ramifications. The first option by and large amounted to a containment of the political and rendered its full articulation impossible. This was the situation from which Carl Schmitt had started, and Strauss understood well Schmitt’s rejection of situating the political “next to, and equivalent to, the other ‘provinces of culture.’”⁶ But he also had good reason to treat political philosophy as a branch of philosophy. For the other option was to politicize philosophy altogether, and that left little space for sound political judgment. It was Carl Schmitt who embodied the pitfalls of this option even before his eventual turn to National Socialism. Strauss henceforth moved between the two options, demonstrating why the scope of political philosophizing must be both restricted and widened. It must be widened to see the whole of philosophy with regard to its political dimension and restricted to prevent an all-out politicization of philosophy.

The question of whether political philosophy is “a branch” of philosophy or a key to the whole of philosophy did not come out of nowhere. It was built upon the template of a nearly forgotten problem in the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism: the place of religion in the system of philosophy. In a nutshell, the question can be stated as follows: If philosophy is divided into the Kantian triad of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, what is the place of religion? Does religion belong to ethics? Should the Kantian triadic structure be changed by adding religion as a fourth pillar of the system? Or does it actually destroy the system altogether? The place of religion in the system of philosophy has been a major issue in the late thought of Hermann Cohen, and it became a bone of contention in the canonization of Cohen’s philosophy through Franz Rosenzweig and others during the 1920s. It was the subject if a variety of dissertations written by young Jewish thinkers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The problem still resonated in the quarrels over the neo-Kantian legacy during the Weimar Republic, which Strauss knew as a firsthand witness and critical commentator. Religion became recognizable through this discussion as the paradigmatic noncultural, which did not fit into the system of philosophy as it was devised by neo-Kantian philosophy of culture.

It was Strauss who transferred the problem to the new context of political philosophy. He discussed “the political” within the conceptual framework that was built and prepared in the prior discussion on the place of religion within the neo-Kantian system of philosophy. When he argued in his “Notes on Carl Schmitt” that the political cannot be located within the systematic structure of the philosophy of culture, he understood Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political in terms he had acquired from the prior debates on the systematic place of religion. He formed these terms into a structural analogy between religion and the political. This analogy caused a string of secondary problems, but the general idea is indeed sustainable: neither religion nor the political can be located in the systematics of “culture.”

The historical and theoretical context of neo-Kantian philosophy of religion is hardly known today, even by historians of twentieth-century philosophy, but it was an integral part of the world from which Strauss had emerged. The guiding questions vanished in the overall turn against the philosophical systems. They were pushed aside and eventually forgotten through the predominance of phenomenology and the resurgence of theology in the 1920s. Strauss later claimed these two related developments as the double origin of his own philosophical endeavor.⁷ Together with a number of diatribes against the remaining neo-Kantians, his accounts of the intellectual climate in German thought of the interwar period—often to be found in his late semiautobiographical recollections—have given the impression of a profound hostility toward the Marburg School. Strauss was a master of the polemical discourse against neo-Kantianism. But like no other of his generation, he also shows how the philosophical systems exerted a subterranean influence long after their purported demise.

To see the systematic problem of Strauss’s political philosophy in its historical genesis, then, we must seek to understand the prior problem of religion in neo-Kantian philosophy. We must seek to understand what initially seemed to speak against the inclusion of religion, why the matter turned out to be a serious challenge to the overall system and how it became a bone of contention over the neo-Kantian legacy in the 1920s and thereafter. In the first place, we must acquaint ourselves with Hermann Cohen, the post-Cohenian debates in Jewish philosophy, and Strauss’s complex position on Cohen throughout his work.

1

Hermann Cohen on the Systematic Place of Religion

Strauss himself pointed to the template of Hermann Cohen’s question of how “religion ‘enters into the system of philosophy’”⁸ in a number of writings, from his early review essays to the late introductory essay to Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Cohen, the mastermind of the Marburg School, who was widely regarded as the last great systematic philosopher and a preeminent figure of German-Jewish thought, built his system upon the Kantian division of philosophy (epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics), to which he added a slight Hegelian touch. There are two versions of the system. The first was devised as a tripartite commentary on Kant (Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 1871; Kants Begründung der Ethik, 1877; Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 1889) that was meant to elevate Kantian idealism back to its former glory. The second version, a more independent outline of the system along the same lines, comprised Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902), Ethik des reinen Willens (1904), and Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (1912). The common denominator of these three parts, which also designate three independent “directions of consciousness” or “directions of culture,”⁹ lies in the word rein (pure). It means that all content of the system is constituted purely by the human mind, so that it is free from all empirical determination; but it also invokes the purity of the heart by which the individual would stand before God.¹⁰ The purity of knowledge, will, and feeling assures that the system is independent and free from reality, for Cohen thought that only such independence would guarantee that reality could be changed. Hence, the emphasis on philosophical idealism was connected from the beginning to his social idealism. Idealism designated that reality, with its characteristic features of poverty and social suffering, could be profoundly transformed.

The problem with religion was that it is not pure in this sense: it is historical; it is replete with mystical elements; and most notably, there are many religions, so that religion is not universal. It needed to undergo what Cohen called the “transcendental inquisition,” just as did all basic facts of culture: “We start from their facticity and then ask for their right.”¹¹ Yet the system itself seemed to demand the inclusion of religion to be comprehensive. And, pushing back against the predominant historical and psychological accounts of religion, Cohen reiterated that religion needed to be properly integrated into the system of philosophy: “There is only one kind of philosophy: systematic philosophy.”¹² Cohen was aware of the common “contempt for systematic philosophizing” in his time, but he saw it as a matter of “incompetence” on the part of his colleagues.¹³

Most likely, he would in turn be criticized for the misrecognition of religious reality. The standard argument was provided by Alfred Jospe, who wrote in his 1932 dissertation that “the methodology of neo-Kantianism eliminates the tangible reality by putting the spontaneity of thinking at the beginning. Deforming the concept of reality into the idea of truth, and identifying truth with science, it strips man of his tangible existence and God of his sense of reality.” As Jospe argued, Cohen’s social idealism excluded “man’s necessary, natural reality”¹⁴—and this common sentiment against neo-Kantianism was prevalent in German philosophy as well as in Jewish thought.

Some careful readers cautioned that Cohenian idealism does not truly exclude any claims of reality. As Heinz Graupe noted in his dissertation on the place of religion in the Marburg system of philosophy, the “characteristic elasticity” of the system makes it possible to include the claims of religion in the methodological process.¹⁵ Another option was to argue that the religious teaching transcended Cohen’s idealistic position.¹⁶

Adding to the general problem of system and reality, Cohen was also bound by the tripartite structure he had adopted from Kant. After all, the three parts were meant to represent the three pillars of human culture. Each of them was determined by a particular “direction” of consciousness, and there was nothing left to be added as an independent fourth part. To name only the most severe restrictions: Religion could not be a part of aesthetics, because the feeling could not stand for two parts of the system at once.¹⁷ Ethics was conceived as the part of the system that dealt with all human affairs; therefore the integration of religion alongside ethics would strip the latter of its unique status within the system. And despite many points of contact, a fusion of epistemology and religion would have stripped the former of its purity. Finally, there was the “danger of a false, not methodologically-systematically founded independence of religion.”¹⁸ Faced with these problems, Cohen initially drew the conclusion that religion was to be dissolved into ethics.¹⁹ In the course of this examination, he was led to profound changes in the theoretical design, but he nevertheless kept the basic structure of the system intact. Three phases are to be distinguished: first, the attempt to fit religion to the system; second, a modification of the system; third, the resolute non-location of religion in the system.²⁰

Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens (1904) is the major reference...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Leo Strauss and the Theopolitics of Culture
• Part I The Return of Religion, the Remnants of Neo-Kantianism, and the Systematic Place of “the Political”
• Part II The Argument and the Action of Philosophy and Law
• Part III “German Nihilism” and the Intellectual Origins of National Socialism
• Part IV Strauss on Modern Relativism
• Part V Jerusalem and Athens
• Conclusion: Leo Strauss and “the Natural Way” of Reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover