The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss

By Laurence Lampert

The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss takes on the crucial task of separating what is truly important in the work of Leo Strauss from the ephemeral politics associated with his school. Laurence Lampert focuses on exotericism: the use of artful rhetoric to simultaneously communicate a socially responsible message to the public at large and a more radical message of philosophic truth to a smaller, more intellectually inclined audience. Largely forgotten after the Enlightenment, exotericism, he shows, deeply informed Strauss both as a reader and as a philosophic writer—indeed, Lampert argues, Strauss learned from the finest practitioners of exoteric writing how to become one himself.

Examining some of Strauss’s most important books and essays through this exoteric lens, Lampert reevaluates not only Strauss but the philosophers—from Plato to Halevi to Nietzsche—with whom Strauss most deeply engaged. Ultimately Lampert shows that Strauss’s famous distinction between ancient and modern thinkers is primarily rhetorical, one of the great examples of Strauss’s exoteric craft. Celebrating Strauss’s achievements while recognizing one main shortcoming—unlike Nietzsche, he failed to appreciate the ramifications of modern natural science for philosophy and its public presentation—Lampert illuminates Strauss as having even greater philosophic importance than we have thought before. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226039510

Book preview

LAURENCE LAMPERT is emeritus professor of philosophy at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. He is the author of several books, most recently How Philosophy Became Socratic, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03948-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03951-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lampert, Laurence, 1941–, author.

The enduring importance of Leo Strauss / Laurence Lampert.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-03948-0 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-03951-0 (e-book) 1. Strauss, Leo. 2. Philosophy—History—20th century. 3. Philosophy, Ancient. 4. Enlightenment. 5. Political science—Philosophy.   I. Title.

B945.S84L36 2013

181'.06—dc23

2013000530

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

THE ENDURING IMPORTANCE OF LEO STRAUSS

LAURENCE LAMPERT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One. Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism

1. Exotericism Exposed: Letters to Jacob Klein

2. Exotericism Embraced: "The Law of Reason in the Kuzari"

Part Two. The Socratic Enlightenment

3. The Peculiarly Socratic Philosophizing: Xenophon’s Gynaikologia

4. Socrates, the Real Real Man: Xenophon’s Andrologia

5. Platonic Political Philosophy: Ministerial Poetry

6. Extending the History of Philosophy Back to Homer: Seth Benardete’s Odyssey

Part Three. The Modern Enlightenment

7. Attacking the Enlightenment on Behalf of Orthodoxy: The Introduction to Philosophy and Law

8. Attacking the Enlightenment on Behalf of Socrates: What Is Political Philosophy?

9. Advancing the Enlightenment: Strauss’s Recovery of Nietzsche’s Theological-Political Program

Epilogue: Strauss’s Farewell

Notes

Works Cited

Index

At the very least the observations I have made will force historians sooner or later to abandon the complacency with which they claim to know what the great thinkers thought, to admit that the thought of the past is much more enigmatic than it is generally held to be, and to begin to wonder whether the historical truth is not as difficult of access as the philosophical truth.

—Leo Strauss, On a Forgotten Kind of Writing (1954)

ABBREVIATIONS

AAPL:

The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws

CM:

The City and Man

ET:

Exoteric Teaching

EW:

Early Writings

GS:

Gesammelte Schriften

HPP:

History of Political Philosophy

JPCM:

Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity

LAM:

Liberalism Ancient and Modern

NRH:

Natural Right and History

OPS:

On Plato’s Symposium

OT:

On Tyranny

PAW:

Persecution and the Art of Writing

PL:

Philosophy and Law

PPH:

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes

SA:

Socrates and Aristophanes

SCR:

Spinoza’s Critique of Religion

SPPP:

Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy

TM:

Thoughts on Machiavelli

WIPP:

What Is Political Philosophy?

XS:

Xenophon’s Socrates

XSD:

Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to identify what is of enduring importance in the work of Leo Strauss and to sever it from the politics in which it threatens to be lost. Strauss’s enduring importance rests on a monumental achievement: he rediscovered the art of writing practiced by all philosophers prior to the modern Enlightenment; he helped make possible the new history of philosophy that recovers the genuine teaching of the greatest thinkers and poets of our tradition.

The politics that threatens the loss of Strauss’s great achievement is, in large measure, Strauss’s own practice of elevating ancient or classical political philosophy at the expense of modern political philosophy. That practice or politics led him to a rhetoric of praise of the ancients and blame of the moderns that misrepresents the true greatness of each, a greatness that becomes accessible with Strauss’s guidance to the beautiful intricacies of the writing art employed by ancients and moderns alike. For what ancient and modern thinkers of the first rank share far outweighs in importance what makes them different: both understood and acted upon the difference between philosophy and poetry, combining understanding with action by adding to philosophy political philosophy. In Strauss’s words, thinkers both ancient and modern came to see the necessity of developing a theological-political program in the service of true understanding. Strauss recovered that shared greatness and made it visible for us; with his help the true and continuous greatness of political philosophy from ancient Socrates to modern Nietzsche can be seen to merit the same response: gratitude for instruction on what matters most, a rational view of things.

In smaller measure, the politics that threatens Strauss’s enduring contribution is the politics of the school he founded. Nietzsche gave the fitting reminder to that school: whispered to conservatives . . . No one is free to be a crab.¹ Understanding philosophy’s art of writing in its consistency-in-difference from Socrates, no, from Homer to Nietzsche equips us to see that philosophy’s genuine past makes it an instrument not of return but of informed and grateful advance of the sort Nietzsche described: We are Hyperboreans, we know the road, we found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth,² an exit that passes through an understanding of the art of writing.

Strauss rediscovered the art of writing in the long aftereffects of the modern Enlightenment or, as he believed, in the crisis of its waning. And he came to practice his own form of the art he rediscovered, a form that proves highly instructive in teaching the subtleties of the writing art even to readers unpersuaded that it is still necessary in the old way for the old reasons. Strauss said of the writings produced by this art: all [such] writings would have to be, strictly speaking, exoteric (PAW, 35). I follow Strauss’s usage in this book: the artfulness that covers yet conveys the esoteric thinking of the philosophers produces texts that are exoteric writings. Strauss can thus say, An exoteric book contains then two teachings: a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines (PAW, 36). My book celebrates Strauss’s recovery of exotericism partly through exegetical studies of selected examples of his matchless commentaries on monuments of philosophy, and partly through exegetical criticism of his exoteric teaching on modern philosophy.

Strauss is an exoteric guide to exoteric writings, but I feel freed to expose the rhetoric of Strauss’s writing because the perspective of my book is derived not from Strauss but from Nietzsche. Strauss’s discoveries can lead to an unexpected conclusion: true understanding of the classical writings advances the modern Enlightenment broadly understood, the enlightenment Nietzsche worked to advance. The esoteric truth preserved in the exoteric writings of the great thinkers of our past can serve as a millennialong argument on behalf of the Enlightenment. The continuity of truth, of the consistent human attainment of a truer view of the world and the human, attests to the possibility of philosophy as a true understanding of the world and the human within the limits of reason that philosophy recognizes. It was Nietzsche—Nietzsche!—who spoke of the deep and fundamental happiness science brings through its power to grasp things that hold their ground against the constant flux of human laws and concepts—and Nietzsche was speaking here of the science of nature and human nature that stretches back to Epicurus and Democritus.³ The modern Enlightenment broadly understood—as having its crucial origins in Francis Bacon and René Descartes, as grounded in the new science of nature of which they were the most powerful spokesmen, as aiming at a new social order free of rule by religion and ruled instead by reason and its handmaid religion—that modern Enlightenment has had singular achievements: a public science that displays to all the world dependable knowledge of the universe and the human, a technology that improves the human estate, and a political order leading to ever more comprehensive units of allied human beings united under a modern banner. Those singular achievements make the modern Enlightenment irreversible in the sense that only its advancement is desirable—presupposing fundamental alterations in its moral foundation that Nietzsche saw as part of his task. Strauss’s recovery of Nietzsche shows that Nietzsche repeats what the greatest thinkers and actors in our millennia-long tradition exemplify: a three-step odyssey in which the primary drive to understand nature entails the consequent need to understand the spiritual situation of the present,⁴ which in turn entails the need to act in order to advance understanding through a theological-political program. Strauss’s recovery of exotericism, so far from being a tool for the restoration of pre-Enlightenment practices or beliefs, can be a tool for the advancement of learning that Nietzsche advocated; the recovery of exotericism can aid in carrying forward the great modern experiment, the experiment with the truth⁵ that aspired to ground a social order on the true view of things and for which Nietzsche discovered the appropriate poetry.

.   .   .

Two chronologies compete in the unfolding structure of my book, the chronology of Strauss’s development as a thinker and the chronology of the history of philosophy on which Strauss’s work is a continuous reflection. Part 1, Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism, begins with the decisive moment in Strauss’s career, his recovery of exotericism, and moves to its consequence for Strauss, his choice to practice his own version of exotericism. Parts 2 and 3 suspend the chronology of Strauss’s own development in order to follow the chronology of the history of philosophy and treat serially the two focuses of Strauss’s work, ancients and moderns. Part 2, The Socratic Enlightenment, treats the Socrates of Xenophon and Plato and ends with a chapter on how it all began, with Homer. Part 3, The Modern Enlightenment, reverts to the chronology of Strauss’s work in order to trace his response to the modern Enlightenment in three pivotal essays spread across almost four decades of his thinking. One figure, Nietzsche, rises to crucial importance as Strauss’s assessment of the necessary response to the modern Enlightenment deepens. This book too, then, with its theme of Strauss’s understanding of the history of philosophy, is what all my books are, an installment in the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche.

PART ONE

Strauss’s Recovery of Exotericism

Luckily for us Strauss left a record of the great event of his rediscovery of exotericism. In letters to his friend Jacob Klein he set out the chief items of his rediscovery on the very days of their occurrence. The letters are fresh, excited, compact, and anxious about the future: how will he ever report such discoveries to the wider world? Strauss showed how he settled that question in an essay written a few years after the event of recovery: he too would be an exoteric writer modeled on the great masters he had been privileged to recover. The two chapters of part 1 consider first Strauss’s letters to Klein and then his first great work of exegesis recovering the exotericism of a philosopher, a work in which he also provides the reason for practicing his own brand of exotericism.

CHAPTER ONE

Exotericism Exposed: Letters to Jacob Klein

Strauss’s studies in the history of philosophy were already well advanced in December 1937 when he traveled to the United States to find a teaching position. He had completed his Ph.D. seventeen years earlier with a dissertation on Friedrich Jacobi. He had written a book on Spinoza in 1925–28 that contained a history of atheism in Western philosophy. He had been an editor of the works of Moses Mendelssohn, which required close acquaintance with the debates of the German Enlightenment involving Jacobi, Lessing, Kant, Leibniz, and others. In the 1930s he made himself a specialist in Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophy, publishing a book in 1935 on Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors. And he made himself an authority on Hobbes, on whom he wrote two books, one of which he had translated into English and published in 1936. In all three published books, classical philosophy played an important role, with Plato serving as a standard in the Maimonides and Hobbes books. In this work on the history of philosophy Strauss had often encountered the fact and vocabulary of exoteric writing, and after writing Philosophy and Law he had learned still more about it, especially in its appearance in Maimonides and the Islamic philosophers.¹ But January 1938 marks a turning point in the life of an already established scholar in his thirty-ninth year, for only then did Strauss recover exotericism in its full radicality—and report it with complete candor in the outspoken, unvarnished detail of private letters spread across almost two years to his best friend who also shared his intellectual interests, Jacob Klein.²

Strauss’s letters to Klein on the recovery of exotericism deserve to become famous. They surge with the exhilaration, yes, the hilarity of serial revelations spread across twenty-two months of precarious living. They contain, in Heinrich Meier’s metaphor, a whole series of philosophic supernovas³ that can now serve Strauss’s reader as orienting points for renewed study of his writings and of the figures in the history of philosophy they mention. More than anything else Strauss wrote, these letters, taken collectively, provide indisputable evidence of his mastery as a reader and of his own practice of exoteric writing: the letters show what he learned, the later writings show how he chose to present it.

Strauss and Klein had been friends since meeting at the University of Marburg in 1920 when both turned twenty-one, and they continued their friendship in Berlin after Strauss was hired as a researcher at the Akademie der Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1925. After Strauss left Germany in 1932 they maintained an extensive correspondence. Strauss’s letters on exotericism begin with his first letter from New York, on January 20, 1938. He had traveled alone from Cambridge, England, in late 1937 to scout firsthand the opportunities in the United States for an almost-forty-year-old German Jewish scholar who had published many books and articles but never held a teaching position at a university. Amid the rigors of travel and failure to find encouraging leads for a full-time position for himself and also for Klein, Strauss reports that Maimonides is getting more and more exciting. Maimonides had been a subject of Strauss’s study at least since his focus on Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, beginning in 1922, had taken him back to Maimonides; but a different Maimonides now comes to light for him. In his first book Strauss called Maimonides a believing Jew (SCR, 185), but now he can say, "He was a truly free mind . . . The crucial question for him was not world creation or world eternity (for he was persuaded of world eternity); instead, it was whether the ideal lawgiver must be a prophet." The crucial question had become political because the ontological issue of the eternity of the world had been settled, and the necessity of the ideal legislator’s being a prophet he—denied, as Farabi had before him and Averroes did in his own time. Strauss then adds something almost poignant, given the difficulties his own eventual art of writing would hand his readers: It’s very difficult to prove that because he discusses the question in an exegetical form.

Strauss’s next letter (February 7), a brief report on his attempts to secure Klein (and himself) a position at the New School for Social Research, ends, Now I have to go to Maimonides. He reports the results a little over a week later (February 16): "With Maimonides I’ve gone a good bit further—I mean in understanding the Guide—but I haven’t written a line." A joking little preface to his report betrays his giddy mood: he refers to a book that bibliographers had sought in vain, On the Three Imposters, a rumored book about the three founding imposters, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. It had been assigned to various authors but Strauss says it could not be found "simply because it was sought even though it was in everyone’s hands: it’s the Guide (or as the case may be, the works of Averroes and Farabi). Then comes his discovery: You can’t imagine with what infinite refinement and irony Maimonides handles ‘religion’ . . . One misunderstands Maimonides simply because one does not reckon with the possibility that he was an ‘Averroist’: consider it and all the difficulties in principle just dissolve. Before stating his actual discovery Strauss looks to its consequences: If in a few years I explode this bomb (in case I live so long), a great battle will be kindled." Strauss suggests the destructiveness of the bomb by relating what an acquaintance⁴ said to him: for Judaism Maimonides is more important than the Bible. Therefore: to pull Maimonides out of Judaism is to pull out its foundation. Strauss comments coolly: "This will yield the interesting result that a simply historical determination—the determination that Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew—is of considerable present-day significance: the incompatibility in principle of philosophy and Judaism (‘clearly’ expressed in the second verse of Genesis) would be demonstrated ad oculos." The thinker more important to Judaism than the Bible was absolutely no Jew; he was a philosopher, and philosophy and Judaism are incompatible—that’s the bomb. How will Strauss explode it? For now, he says, he’s a long way away from such important matters; what concerns him meanwhile is collecting a lexicon of secret words—the patient piecework that will always be foundational to his actually writing a line on such matters. But secret words is misleading: "An essential point in Maim.’s technique is of course that he says everything completely openly, if in the places where an idiot doesn’t look. Maimonides’s exotericism is not a matter of secret depths or curtained enclosures: everything essential is hidden in plain sight. What is needed is the proper perspective for viewing the surface of the text in its planned complexity. From the beginning, then, Strauss knew that exotericism was not a matter of arcane, occult mysteries. He ends his account of his initial entry into Maimonides’s exotericism: The reading is an unbelievable pleasure that compensates me for so much. He signs off but he can’t let go, adding a note that confirms how his discovery burdens him: There’s an aphorism in N.: when I hold the truth in my fist, dare I open my fist?⁵ Alone in New York, missing his wife,⁶ burdened by fears for his future and that of his family and dearest friends, Strauss begins making the discoveries that transform his view of philosophy and assign him his lifework. He knows he holds a bomb in his fist, and he thinks of Nietzsche, who said, I am dynamite."⁷

Back in England five months later, Strauss refers on July 4 to the mystical treatise known to you; then, on July 23, preparing his permanent move to the United States, he reports being deeply immersed in my work, that is, in the completion of that mystical treatise which you partly already know. Yesterday I finally finished it. The mystical treatise is the essay on Maimonides that he published in 1941 and republished in 1952 as the third or central chapter of Persecution and the Art of Writing: "The Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed."⁸ Strauss briefly describes this first writing after discovering Maimonides’s exotericism: "There are six little chapters from which the exacting reader will understand everything and which will give the superficial reader a sheaf of useful information. He thus holds two audiences in view, those who will understand and those who can profit without understanding—he has already seen to it that his own writing will bear the single most important feature of the writing by Maimonides that he has just learned to understand. He continues: The view I succeeded in coming to in N.Y. has confirmed itself even more: the Guide is the most amazing book that I at least know. What N. had in mind with his Zarathustra, namely, a parody of the Bible, succeeds in the Guide in far greater measure." The idea of imposter still pleases him: The paradox is that the very people who present the three imposters doctrine are themselves exactly what they imagine the founders of religion are: they themselves dupe the populace. Strauss describes precisely what Maimonides aims at: The guide of the perplexed, or the instruction of the perplexed, is a repetition of the Torah (= instruction) for the perplexed, i.e., for the philosophers—i.e., an imitation of the Torah with ‘little’ ‘additions’ which only the expert notices and which imply a radical critique of the Torah. And Strauss confirms his reading of the Guide by finding that Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah has the same character, no less a satire of genius.

The rest of this letter betrays Strauss’s mix of feelings about his discoveries in Maimonides and his own mystical treatise, speaking first with a modesty that hardly fits what he knows is a historic advance: I could actually be a bit proud that I’ve solved this riddle. But personal pride pales at the thought of what he holds in his fist: "But maybe my nerves aren’t strong enough—or I lack ‘scientia’—or both are the case. In short, at times I shudder in the face of what I may cause by my interpretation. His shudder can’t extinguish his high-spirits: The upshot will be that I, poor devil, have to spoon up the soup in which this diabolical sorcerer of the twelfth century landed me. But, as the heathens say, fata nolentem trahunt. Esto! The heathen quoted by the Jew who entered Maimonides’s non-Judaism is Seneca, whose complete thought runs: the consenting fate leads, the resisting she schleps along with her"—Strauss counts himself a consenter together with the heathen Seneca.

In the next letter to refer to exotericism, on October 15, Strauss is back in New York and reduced to what will become a depressing ritual, asking Klein for small loans that he pays back punctually after a few weeks.⁹ Strauss reports: I’m starting to work. And what work it is, for the gains made with Maimonides Strauss now begins to make with Maimonides’s ultimate teacher, Plato.¹⁰ His report is laconic: "I’m starting to work: Nomoi!" Plato’s Laws has begun to open itself to him: "Above all, understanding the meaning of ‘ambiguous speech’ polynoia in the work. He adds in parentheses what will become a frequent lament in his reports on Greek matters: he’s reading the scholarly commentators, but to a reader making discoveries in Greek exotericism, the superficiality of the scholars coupled with their conviction that they already know everything is almost more than he can bear. But he has help in reading Plato:¹¹ I’m now reading Herodotus, who—I swear it as a Catholic Christian—is also an esoteric writer and one in perfection. In short, it’s happening again. What happened with Maimonides is happening with Greek authors and will happen repeatedly until Strauss has the whole tradition of Greek exotericism in view. After puckishly describing his and his wife’s life in the United States as a continuation of their English life—except boosted by the invasion of wurst, pickles, and grapefruit juice—he signs off his brief letter with a fine little joke: Cordially greeting you, also in the name of his wife, your friend, Leo Strauss." A superscript affixed to Frau leads to a footnote, three lines of Greek from the first full story in Herodotus, Candaulus’s offer to Gyges to view his wife naked to confirm that she is the most beautiful of women.¹² Strauss explains the esoteric meaning of the clever story that greatly pleased M. [Mirjam, his wife]: the wives are the ‘patriarchal laws’ which everyone holds for the most beautiful. Woe to Gyges, who views a ‘wife’ who is not his own. Therefore: esotericism. Now there’s a letter fit to be sent on Nietzsche’s birthday.

Five days later (October 20), Strauss reports further on Herodotus: I’m really stunned, and prostrate myself before such artistry (= capability). Bowled over as he is by Herodotus, his focus lies elsewhere: My lucky star wants it that his work is really the single model for Plato known to me. But that singleness may stem from his own ignorance: (But then maybe all we learned about the tragedians, for example, is completely false). What Herodotus points Strauss to in Plato is by any measure a supernova: I can therefore show that what is nearest my heart about Plato is independent of the specifically Platonic philosophy. Plato is separable from Platonism, and it is that separated Plato who is dear to Strauss. He makes one Herodotus-Plato connection explicit: "Herodotus: a book of logoi (histories, stories) with the antidote to logoi. Nomoi: a book of nomoi with the antidote to Nomoi. He then adds a parenthetical remark that reveals how he now reads Plato: (Besides, the Phaedrus passage on Egyptian logoi was certainly not written without an express relation to a very particular paragraph in Herodotus.) Esoteric Plato is fully aware of esoteric Herodotus and responds in kind. Strauss expresses his great pleasure: With my customary naiveté and modesty I declare that the riddle of Herodotus is solved! He can go on: The unitary ground for (a) history of the Persian wars, (b) short stories, ‘novellas,’ (c) ethnography has been found—wait, more on that orally. This unfortunate halt can serve as a reminder that we’re lucky Strauss couldn’t afford a telephone, as he says in his letter on December 15. He signs off in English: I am perfectly happy in spite of the great financial troubles."

Two weeks later (November 2), there’s more: I find myself in a state of frenzy that’s consuming me: after Herodotus now Thucydides too! Strauss’s frenzy involves Plato: Pericles’s funeral speech is "a pure parody—exactly like the Protagoras speech in Protagoras. Thucydides’s exotericism includes conveying his meaning through silences: the word sôphrosunê does not appear in the funeral speech: that is Thucyd.’s critique of Periclean Athens and of Pericles himself. Thucydides’s exotericism is systematically present in his mix of speeches and deeds: His history is no ‘history’ but an attempt to show by deeds those who are unteachable by speeches just where ignorance of sôphrosunê leads. Strauss is certain about where the historian Thucydides stands: but it’s settled for Thuc. that the speeches are more important than the deeds. Strauss inserted Plato parenthetically into his sentence—(a completely Platonic theme–cf. Apology and Crito)—and he expands the thought: Spoken Platonically, the deeds are only paidia, and therefore they are . . . essentially comedies. He appended a footnote to his comment on Plato: Pay attention to the titles: no heroes! Only 4 titles indicate the theme: Politeia, Nomoi, Politikos, Sophistes—that already says everything!"¹³ Strauss shows how he reads Plato esoterically: "Moreover, the Apology ends with the word theos, i.e., with the word with which the Laws begins. I.e. the problem intentionally conjured away in the Apology—the gods in which the city believes—becomes the theme of the Laws. The Laws are Plato’s greatest work of art. He adds a sentence after signing off, It’s beginning to dawn on me how misunderstood the ancients are."

Three weeks later (November 27), Strauss reports that he has started a new essay, On the study of classical political philosophy. He intends it to show that "Herodotus, Thucyd., and Xenophon are no historians—of course not—but authors of exoteric, protreptic writings. Thus does Xenophon enter Strauss’s letters on the misunderstood ancients, and he will soon occupy a favored place, though always in a way that points to Plato’s still greater importance. Their history books, he says of all three Greek historians, are exactly those readings for youths that Plato recommends in the third book of the Republic: prose writings in which what is between the speeches (i.e., the presentation of deeds) is outweighed by the speeches (i.e., the logoi which are inserted into the historical-works). He offers a parenthetical remark: (The Platon. dialogues in which the author fully hides himself belong after Plato to a higher plane.)" The whole history of exotericism is starting to come into view with Plato the crowning figure; Plato’s art of philosophic exotericism, his dialogues, surpass all previous Greek efforts at esoteric communication. Strauss then reports just what Xenophon aimed at in The Education of Cyrus. Calling it a wholly great book of sublime irony, he says that "what Socrates is is shown through his caricature of Cyrus. Only through that medium does Xenophon show the true, hidden Socrates, whereas he shows the manifest Socrates in his Memorabilia. Distinguishing this way among Xenophon’s writings leads Strauss to one of his greatest insights into the Socratic circle: His Socrates image is therefore not fundamentally different from that of Plato. This insight will lead Strauss to his history-making recovery of the true Socrates passed on through both Xenophon and Plato, surely the greatest of all recoveries given Socrates’s singularity as the vortex and turning point of so-called world history."¹⁴

Five days later (December 2), Strauss can say that the history of Greek political philosophy still remains most highly exciting. Beginning from Aristotle, he can see that the ‘inferiority’ of ethics and politics . . . was of course shared by Plato, who . . . wrote only ironically about politics. Then comes the first notice of what will become the most explosive bomb of all: "Socrates too was no ‘ethicist’: he simply replaced the myths (Herodotus’s) and the history (Herodotus’s and Thucydides’s) with dialogues about the human things. Strauss does not elaborate his stunning insight into Socrates except to say, One can prove this from—Xenophon’s Memorabilia—that is, from the very book that seems most to prove that Socrates was an ethicist and nothing but. Strauss wants to know more: I’m curious about what is hidden in Sophocles who, according to tradition, was a friend of Herodotus—I’m afraid that here too it’s philosophy and not the city and the ancestors. I already wrote you that the correct translation of daimonion is: nous [mind]. The Socrates who is not an ethicist piously called what guided him a personal daimonion while guiding himself by mind alone. Strauss expands on this Socrates: science is the true Mantik [art of divination], the true knowledge of the teleutê [end] because [it is] of the archê [principle or cause or beginning]."

Ten days later (December 12), Strauss reports that he’s working on the problem of the dialogue "as the ideal form for the disguised presentation of the truth."¹⁵ Strauss offers capsule interpretations of four of Plato’s dialogues to support his claim, the Symposium, the Apology, Phaedo, and the Laws. His comments on the Laws show how he now views the Platonic corpus as a whole. "The Laws rests on the fiction that Socrates escaped from the prison! The opening for the Laws (the opening through which Socrates slipped off to Crete) is clearly shown in the Crito! A short sentence draws the necessary conclusion, and it is that sentence that most demands an exclamation mark: There is therefore no ‘earlier and later’ in Plato’s authorship. Strauss thus suspends the greatest preoccupation of modern Plato scholars, arranging the dialogue chronologically into early, middle, late in accord with some scheme of Plato’s development." Strauss now sees that in the so-called early Crito, the laws present Socrates with the options for his escape, but the disjunction that persuaded Crito that Socrates had to stay was not exhaustive; it left unspoken a possible escape to a law-abiding place far away, an escape to Crete, say, as portrayed in the so-called late Laws. An early dialogue sets the scene for a late dialogue—Strauss’s refusal of scholarly orthodoxy, the now pervasive prejudice, allows him to view the Platonic corpus as a unified whole in which one dialogue can silently illuminate another.

A second indispensable item about Socrates appears as an aside in this letter: "Socrates teaches peri phuseôs [on or about nature], Strauss says parenthetically, and he adds a footnote: Aristophanes was completely right—he just didn’t know what the difference was between Anaxagoras and Socrates." Here is a Socrates completely lost to modern scholarship, which understands the defensive rhetoric of the dialogues too literally: the dialogues, Strauss sees, intimate that Socrates continued, if with the greatest discretion, to study the things aloft and the things under the earth, the totality of the beings. This Socrates, the philosopher of nature, of cosmology, is the Socrates discreetly present in Strauss’s mature commentaries on Plato and Xenophon.

More than two months pass before Strauss again mentions his work in his letters, but the letter in which he does (February 16, 1939) is the most explosive of them all. He announces first an intention to write the essay on Xenophon that appeared nine months later as The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon:¹⁶ I plan to prove in it that his apparent praise of Sparta is in truth a satire on Sparta and on Athenian Laconism. "Xenophon is my special Liebling, he says, because he had the courage to clothe himself as an idiot and go through the millennia that way—he’s the greatest con man I know. The clothing, the con that so endears Xenophon to Strauss, leads him to conclude that what Xenophon does, his teacher did: I believe that he does in his writings exactly what Socrates did in his life. Socrates was a great con man who taught his best students to be con men. About what? Strauss here elaborates the most radical, one could even say shocking, aspect of his recovery of exotericism, and he revels in it: In any case with [Xenophon] too morality is purely exoteric, and just about every second word has a double meaning." Socrates and his circle stand beyond good and evil. Strauss gives two examples of words with double meanings: kalokagathia, the word for gentlemanship that joins beautiful (or noble) to good in order to name the model of aspiration for young Greek males; and sôphrosunê, the word that gathers the total of Greek virtue into thought-guided sound-mindedness or wise self-control. Together, these two words name the pride of the Greek gentleman, that pillar of civic rectitude and public-spirited generosity who made the polis both possible and great—the gentleman for whom Xenophon is customarily taken to be the tedious spokesman, the Colonel Blimp, the idiot for whom he wanted to be mistaken. Strauss supplies the esoteric meaning of the two words: "Kalokagathia was, in the Socratic circle, a swear word, something like ‘philistine’ or ‘bourgeois’ in the nineteenth century. And sôphrosunê is essentially self-control in the expression of opinions." Socrates’s sôphrosunê is his exotericism, his self-control in hiding what he meant in words of praise for what he judged socially necessary. Morality was merely a means for an immoralist who understood society’s need to believe in morality.

Strauss adds a final clause: "—in short, there’s a whole system of secret words here exactly as in Maimonides, therefore a found feast [Fressen] for me. Strauss’s recovery one year earlier of the exotericism of Maimonides put him in a position to recover—feast on—the exotericism of Maimonides’s great Greek teachers: what Maimonides did, Socrates had done. The secret" words are no hocus pocus; they’re the most honored words of everyday use supplied by artful speakers like Socrates or Xenophon or Maimonides with a meaning very different from their everyday sense, turning them ironic. There’s more than an artful practice here. If Maimonides carried into his setting of the one true revealed religion the ironic or exoteric practices that Socrates generated in the different context of Athens, then the differences between Athens and Jerusalem with respect to religion are not essential differences. Socrates/Xenophon/Plato stood beyond morality and gained insight not only into morality but into religion’s support of morality. To move from the exotericism of Maimonides back to the exotericism of the Socratic circle is to see that they gained insight into the nature of the revealed religions or the monotheisms without direct experience of them. The Maimonides bomb thus leads to another, still more deadly bomb about Socratic philosophy as a whole, the moral teaching that came to be foundational for a whole civilization.

Xenophon may be Strauss’s Liebling, but Plato is the massive presence offering him the greatest challenge and greatest reward. In this same letter he reports to Klein that the first book of the Laws contains a hidden reference to the closing scene of Phaedo, in which Phaedo narrates that Socrates covered himself as the effect of the poison moved up his body. Treating Plato’s corpus as a unified whole again offers insight, because to explain this event in Phaedo Strauss refers to Laws 1.648d5–e5 together with 647e. The whole passage that Strauss refers to is relevant, but the decisive words are fear of the defeat inflicted on all men by the wine cup¹⁷—the fear drink, Strauss says, is of course death! Therefore, Strauss can conclude that "even Socrates fails in the face of death, all humans suffer defeat in the face of death." Turning to the Laws to understand Socrates’s desire in Phaedo to cover his face as death approaches allows Strauss to see Plato’s artfulness in making Phaedo a narrated dialogue and to voice a truly capital gain in studying Plato’s dialogues: "it characterizes Phaedo as narrator that he didn’t notice this and for that reason also accepted the proofs of immortality." Plato dared to assign the memory of Socrates’s last day to a devotee incapable of fully understanding what he devoutly memorized and loved to recite—Phaedo is Plato’s record of Socrates’s last day transmitted through a literalist disciple. And that narrator is the fit narrator because of what he did not notice. Almost every hearer and reader of his narration will not notice; he transmits Socrates’s speeches and deeds to a posterity that will resemble him in the essential respect. But there will be rare auditors and readers capable of measuring the validity of the proofs of immortality and capable of doing what Strauss is doing, reassembling what Plato so artfully scattered between Phaedo and the Laws. Strauss can conclude with every confidence that Socrates’s proofs of immortality were exoteric: sufficient to persuade Phaedo and almost all readers but logically deficient. Socrates’s fear of death required that he cover his face in the presence of those he had encouraged, made courageous, by his arguments for immortality. Strauss ends his report on the Laws: "The Laws are now, I believe, clear to me (the theology of the 10th book is part of penal law!)." That exclamation mark is well deserved: theology is part of politics, the part that concerns itself with the laws administering punishment; punitive gods guarantee obedience to mere laws. Belief in immortality with different fates for good and wicked, secured by the mortal Socrates on his dying day, is an especially effective part of penal law.

If the Laws is now clear to him, "the Republic is beginning to become clear to me. This growing clarity yields results: My suspicion from last year that its actual theme is the relation between the bios polit. and the bios philos. and that it is dedicated to a radical critique and rejection of the political life has been fully confirmed." That allows Strauss to add a third indispensable word with a double meaning for Socrates’s circle, dikaiosunê, justice; again he gives its esoteric meaning:

And [my suspicion] has gained precision in this, that it is dedicated to a critique of dikaiosunê: the Republic is an ironic justification precisely of the adikia [unjust], for philosophy is adikia—that comes out beautifully in the Thrasymachus discussion—dikaiosunê loses the trial, it wins it only through the myth at the end, that is, through a kalon pseudos [beautiful lie], that is, through a deed that is strictly speaking adikon.

The whole of the Republic from book 1 through the final myth lies open to Strauss: it is an exoteric defense of justice with the aim of sheltering philosophy, philosophy by its very nature being unjust, the judge and critic of justice that, with Socrates, learns to speak well of practical life and the justice it requires.¹⁸

Strauss isn’t finished: in beginning to come clear to him, the Republic offers another primary insight with a fourth primary word, thumos, the spirit or heart that is the key word for the Republic’s new teaching on the soul: "And thumos too is purely ironic! The distinction between epithumia [desire] and thumos is permissible only exoterically, and with that ‘Glaucon’s’ kallipolis breaks apart." It’s Glaucon’s beautiful city, not Socrates’s; Socrates built it in speech for Glaucon and his thumotic like, built it to control their thumos through a new belief about the nature of their thumotic, Homer-formed souls. Here are whole slabs of Strauss’s mature interpretation of the Republic published in less explicit language in The City and Man and the Plato chapter of the History of Political Philosophy. After these stunning sentences, Strauss collects himself: But now back to so-called life.

Two weeks later (February 28), under the stress of his wife’s sickness, money woes, the fate of his father in 1939 Germany, and the need to finish his Xenophon essay in two weeks, Strauss can report that "there’s no question anymore that Xenophon’s Socrates is identical to the Platonic—only Xenophon shows Socrates still more disguised, still more as he visibly was than Plato. And besides, he’s far more aristocratic (= more obscene) than Plato. His discoveries allow him to add, The philologists are indescribable idiots!"

Six months later Strauss and his wife were in Wiccopee near Fishkill, New York, where they were spending their vacation. On July 25, Strauss reported to Klein that his temporary employment at the New School had ended and that his itinerary for the coming academic year, 1939/40, would take him to five colleges, six weeks each at Hamilton, Middlebury, and Union, three weeks at Wesleyan University, and the rest of the year at Amherst. Then he reports on his work. He has withdrawn his Xenophon essay to rewrite it, and he is Socratically defiant about it: "As far as Xenophon is concerned, I have not, by Hera, exaggerated: he’s a very great man, not inferior to Thucydides and even Herodotus. The so-called deficiencies of his histories are in the end the result of his sovereign contempt for the laughable erga [deeds] of the kaloikagathoi. And he adds about Xenophon’s exoteric writing: Furthermore, he says all of that when one takes the trouble to open one’s eyes, or as he calls it, when one is not satisfied with hearing but is also willing to see. Strauss adds to a judgment he has already expressed, The identity of the Xenophonian and Platonic Socrates is beyond doubt, it’s the same Socrates-Odysseus in both, the teaching too. He elaborates his claim by stating that the problem of the Memorabilia is identical to that of the Republic: the problematic relation between justice and truth, or between the practical and theoretical life." Moreover,

The technique of Plato and Xenophon is largely identical: neither writes in his own name; the author of the Memor. likewise of the Anabasis is not Xenophon but an anonymous ego; in the Memor. Xenophon is the single associate whom Socrates labels Wretch. As for ne kuna [by the dog], Xenophon treats it this way: he lets Socrates tell a fable in which a dog swears by Zeus! This example shows most clearly what a dog Xenophon is. In short, he’s completely wonderful and from now on my undisputed Liebling.

We’ve got three dogs here, Strauss says in his next sentence to open his next paragraph.

Two week later (August 7), Strauss reports that he has begun to make notes on the Memorabilia, and he states the greatest problem he’s finding with it: in what sense the principle that Socrates concerned himself only with the ethical things—in what sense this thoroughly false principle is nevertheless also correct. Strauss’s reading of exoteric texts thus requires that the false be in some sense true, true from a perspective different from that of the typical reader. Most readers will be pleased to read that Socrates concerned himself only with the ethical; but some few will want to learn in what way this esoterically false statement can be true. Strauss uses Greek words to say that the general answer is clear: "anthropos—logos—on (human—speech—being). And adds: Of special significance is the problem of philia, insofar as the understanding of what philia is destroys the theology of mythos: the higher can not be ‘friend’ to the lower; ergo: denial of providence. This is, I believe, the central thought of the Memor. The truth in the false claim that Socrates concerned himself only with the ethical resides in the ontological/theological implications one can draw from that claim. Strauss can therefore end saying, I believe I’ve essentially understood Xenophon’s Socratic writings, also Anabasis, Hellenica, Cyropädie, and some of the shorter writings."

Strauss is spending his vacation moving ever more deeply into Xenophon. On August 18, he reports that despite the heat that keeps him from his "Xenophonstatistik," his counting words like dialegesthai and philoi, "I have in the meantime understood the Memor. completely, if to completely understand with such books is identical with understanding the plan. The agreements with Plato are simply astounding, at times so astounding that one asks oneself astounded: are Xenophon and Plato at all different people? He draws a conclusion about Socrates: The relatedness is doubtless connected with the fact that a considerable part of the teaching as also of the tricks goes back to Socrates himself. This teacher-trickster Socrates is not the moralist of the Socratic dialogues or the Memorabilia but a Socrates immeasurably more radical, strategic, and great than all but the fewest have imagined. Strauss does not exclude the possibility of mutual influence between Xenophon and Plato within the Socratic circle, and the most fabulous aspect of that is that Xenophon (in Symposium) comments on Plato! If you can call something like that ‘comment.’" Strauss finds Plato and Xenophon caricatured in Xenophon’s Symposium as the Syracusan and Philippos. When Philippos defends Socrates against the accusations of the Syracusan, Socrates says to Philippos (Xenophon) about the Syracusan (Plato): You would abuse him if you would claim to be better than him in any respect. Strauss: If this is not the most sublime praise ever written, I don’t know what would be.¹⁹

Strauss opens his next letter (from Hamilton College, October 10) with a poetic phrase anticipating what’s coming in the letter, for it reports that he has traced Greek exotericism back to the founding poets of Greece, the last great advance in the recovery of exotericism that these letters record.²⁰ Strauss