Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism

Corine Pelluchon, Robert Howse

Description

How can Leo Strauss's critique of modernity and his return to tradition, especially Maimonides, help us to save democracy from its inner dangers? In this book, Corine Pelluchon examines Strauss's provocative claim that the conception of man and reason in the thought of the Enlightenment is self-destructive and leads to a new tyranny. Writing in a direct and lucid style, Pelluchon avoids the polemics that have characterized recent debates concerning the links between Strauss and neoconservatives, particularly concerns over Strauss's relation to the extreme right in Germany. Instead she aims to demystify the origins of Strauss's thought and present his relationship to German and Jewish thought in the early twentieth century in a manner accessible not just to the small circles devoted to the study of Strauss, but to a larger public. Strauss's critique of modernity is, she argues, constructive; he neither condemns modernity as a whole nor does he desire a retreat back to the Ancients, where slaves existed and women were not considered citizens. The question is to know whether we can learn something from the Ancients and from Maimonides—and not merely about them.
Translator’s Note

Introduction
The Crisis of Rationalism
Two Historical Shocks and a Threat
The Crisis of Political Philosophy
Modern Rationalism as the Destruction of Reason
The Archeology and Overcoming of Nihilism

Part I. The Dissection of the Modern Religious Consciousness

Introduction: The Perplexity of the Modern Religious Consciousness

1. Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment
The Jacobi Question
The Pantheism Debate
            The Critique of Natural Religion
            There Is No Such Thing as Moderate Enlightenment
            The Rejection of the Kantian Solution
            The Controversy over the French Revolution
The Crisis of the Tradition
            The Science of Judaism and the Dialectic of Assimilation
            The Discontinuity of the Ancients and Moderns
            The Aporias of Zionism

2. Critique of Religion and Biblical Criticism
The Critique of Religion and Revelation in Hobbes
            Epicureanism
            The Interpretation of the Bible
            Socinianism and the Radical Enlightment
            The Need to Reconsider the Radical Enlightenment
Spinoza’s Particular Contribution to the Critique of Religion
            Persecution and the Art of Writing
            The Religion of the Ignorant and Weak
            Biblical Criticism (Bibelswissenschaft)
The Social Function of Religion
            The Universal Religion and the “Christianity” of Spinoza
            The Ambiguity of Spinoza
            The Limits of Secular Morality
            The Enlightenment of Spinoza
The Legacy of the Critique of Religion
            The Critique of Revelation Has Not Destroyed the Interest in Revelation
            The Challenge of Philosophy
            The Debt of the New Orthodoxy to the Enlightenment and Religious Liberalism

3. The Return to the Tradition
Rationalism and Mysticism
            Allegory and Symbol
            Reason and Experience
The Human Experience of the Absolute
            Religion and Philosophy
            Ethics and Spirituality
            Redemption and Politics
The Jewish Enlightenment of Maimonides
            Cohen and Strauss
     &nbs

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438449685
• Langue: English

Extrait

Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism
SUNY series in the Thought and Legacy of Leo Strauss
—————
Kenneth Hart Green, editor
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism
Another Reason, Another Enlightenment
CORINE PELLUCHON
Translated by
ROBERT HOWSE
Original translation:  Corine Pelluchon— Leo Strauss, une autre raison, d’autres Luminères © Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2005
Cover image / WikiPaintings.org / Red and White Domes by Paul Klee
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pelluchon, Corine.
[Leo Strauss. English]
Leo Strauss and the crisis of rationalism : another reason, another enlightenment / Corine Pelluchon ; translated by Robert Howse.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in the thought and legacy of Leo Strauss)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4967-8 (alk. paper)
1. Strauss, Leo. I. Title.
B945.S84P4513 2014 181'.06—dc221
2013006634
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
The Crisis of Rationalism
Two Historical Shocks and a Threat
The Crisis of Political Philosophy
Modern Rationalism as the Destruction of Reason
The Archeology and Overcoming of Nihilism
P ART I T HE D ISSECTION OF THE M ODERN R ELIGIOUS C ONSCIOUSNESS
INTRODUCTION: The Perplexity of the Modern Religious Consciousness
CHAPTER 1: Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment
The Jacobi Question
The Pantheism Debate
The Critique of Natural Religion
There Is No Such Thing as Moderate Enlightenment
The Rejection of the Kantian Solution
The Controversy over the French Revolution
The Crisis of the Tradition
The Science of Judaism and the Dialectic of Assimilation
The Discontinuity of the Ancients and Moderns
The Aporias of Zionism
CHAPTER 2: Critique of Religion and Biblical Criticism
The Critique of Religion and Revelation in Hobbes
Epicureanism
The Interpretation of the Bible
Socinianism and the Radical Enlightenment
The Need to Reconsider the Radical Enlightenment
Spinoza’s Particular Contribution to the Critique of Religion
Persecution and the Art of Writing
The Religion of the Ignorant and Weak
Biblical Criticism ( Bibelswissenschaft )
The Social Function of Religion
The Universal Religion and the “Christianity” of Spinoza
The Ambiguity of Spinoza
The Limits of Secular Morality
The Enlightenment of Spinoza
The Legacy of the Critique of Religion
The Critique of Revelation Has Not Destroyed the Interest in Revelation
The Challenge of Philosophy
The Debt of the New Orthodoxy to the Enlightenment and Religious Liberalism
CHAPTER 3: The Return to the Tradition
Rationalism and Mysticism
Allegory and Symbol
Reason and Experience
The Human Experience of the Absolute
Religion and Philosophy
Ethics and Spirituality
Redemption and Politics
The Jewish Enlightenment of Maimonides
Cohen and Strauss
From Morality to Politics
The Rational Critique of Reason
P ART II T HE D ISSECTIONS OF M ODERN P OLITICAL C ONSCIOUSNESS
INTRODUCTION: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
CHAPTER 1: The First Wave of Modernity
Machiavelli, the Originator of the Modern Enlightenment
The End of the Renaissance Humanist Ideal
Power, the Mastery of Men, and the Mastery of Nature
Philosophy, Propaganda, and Barbarism
Hobbes or the Founding of the Modern State
Political Science
Vanity and Fear
Individualism, Liberalism, and Absolutism
From War to Commerce
The Crisis of Liberalism: The Dialogue between Strauss and Schmitt
From the Rechtsstaat to the Total State in the Era of Technology
War and the Affirmation of the Political
Decisionism and Political Philosophy
Resoluteness in Heidegger
CHAPTER 2: The Second and Third Waves of Modernity
The Rousseauian Moment
The Paradoxes of Rousseau
Society and the Rich
Revolution, History, and the General Will
Modern Tyranny, Marxism, and Capitalism
The Dialogue between Strauss and Kojeve
Philosophy and Politics
Locke’s Liberalism
The Contemporary Form of Tyranny
Nihilism according to Nietzsche and after Nietzsche
The Repetition of Antiquity at the Peak of Modernity
The Law as Denaturing and the Religious Atheism of Nietzsche
The Radicalism of the Straussian Critique of Christianity
CHAPTER 3: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy
The Return to Socrates
Political Philosophy as the Fulfillment of Phenomenology
The Conflict between Poetry and Philosophy
Wisdom and Moderation
The Medieval Enlightenment
The Platonism of Farabi and Maimonides
The Enlightenment of Maimonides
The Natural Conditions of Prophecy
Esoteric Teaching and the Enlightenment
The Task for Thinking and the Rebirth of Philosophy
Phenomenology and the Meaning of the Law
The Conception of Truth in Maimonides
What Is Called Thinking?
Surpassing Heidegger on His Own Ground
CONCLUSION: The Straussian Enlightenment
Strauss’s Radical Questioning
From Jacobi to Maimonides: Neither Kant nor Hegel
This Is Not an Ethics
Strauss’s Legacy
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Translator’s Note
The original French-language work upon which this translation is based was the doctoral dissertation of Corine Pelluchon, a prominent contemporary French intellectual and philosopher who has since written a number of books and articles on subjects such as bioethics, environmental ethics, and animal welfare and was recently honored by the French Academy. The dissertation was published by Vrin in France in 2005 and won the François Furet prize in 2006. Professor Pelluchon chose not to revise the work for purposes of an English-language version, except the bibliography, which has been updated; it goes without saying that her thinking may nevertheless have evolved since it was written. I had Professor Pelluchon’s full cooperation throughout the preparation of the translation; she was unfailingly generous with her time and patient, with a translator engaged in many other projects simultaneously. I learned much of value for my own scholarship on Strauss through our interactions.
Robert Howse
New York City, December 2012.
Introduction
“Liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds. (…) The greatest minds utter monologues. We must transform their monologues into a dialogue. (…) Since the greatest minds contradict one another regarding the most important matters, they compel us to judge of their monologues. (…) Yet we must face our awesome situation, created by the necessity that we try to be more than attentive and docile listeners, namely, judges, and yet we are not competent to be judges. (…) Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions.” 1
The Crisis of Rationalism
In the text that reproduces an exchange that took place in early 1970 between Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, both of whom were invited at the end of their careers to present their intellectual autobiographies before a select audience, Klein said of his old friend: “His primary interests were two-fold: first, the question of God; and second, the question of politics.” 2
Strauss was born in 1899 in a small town near Marburg, in a former county of the Hesse region that had become a Prussian province in 1866, and was brought up in a Conservative and even Orthodox Jewish home. 3 He was exposed right from high school to the message of German humanism. Furtively he read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. “I formed the plan, or the wish, to spend my life reading Plato and breeding rabbits while earning my livelihood as a rural postmaster.” 4
Most of today’s scholars think that the philosophical career of Strauss is confined to a series of commentaries on the great texts of antiquity. The incarnation of philosophical Eros , Socrates represents the problem that unifies the thought of Strauss: the possibility of philosophy, which implies a certain organization of society that allows thinkers the full liberty to write and teach, but which is not self-evident, even when one lives in a democracy that appears to have solved the theological-political problem. There is always a break between philosophy and the city, because philosophers substitute for commonsense opinions ideas that embarrass other human beings and undermine any authority other than reason, which the political authorities perceive as a menace against established order. Finally, modern presuppositions prohibit us from really philosophizing, that is, returning to Plato or Aristotle—through Maimonides, one should add (and here one indicates Strauss’s contribution to philosophy).
This portrait of Strauss is that of a man who lived through the twentieth century exactly as if he had remained in Germany raising rabbits. His 1921 thesis on Jacobi 5 the philosopher of