What is ‘First Philosophy’? Comments on Richard Velkley's Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy

In a noteworthy new study, Richard Velkley brings together Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss as part of a reexamination of the foundations and nature of philosophical questioning. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (hereafter Premises) (Chicago, IL, 2011), 4. All parenthetical references in the main article are to page numbers in the book under review. All translations are my own.2 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago, IL, 2000), 196.3 On ‘the current situation’ and ‘our future’ as the starting point of Strauss's thinking, which results in his rejection of historicism, see Leo Strauss to Karl Löwith, 2 February 1933, in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Heinrich Meier, 6 vols (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1996–2001), III, 620.4 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Brief über den Humanismus’, in Wegmarken, second edition (Frankfurt, 1978), 153. For any understanding of the role of freedom in modernity, Velkley's own investigations of Rousseau and Kant are required reading; see Richard L. Velkley, Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (Chicago, IL, 2002); Richard L. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant's Philosophy (Chicago, IL, 1989).5 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago, IL, 1952), xv.6 Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 406, 415.7 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL, 1965), 34.8 See Velkley, Premises, 135; Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago, IL, 1989), 161–62.9 See Velkley, Premises, 18, 140–41, 155. Compare Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 318.10 Leo Strauss, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, Interpretation, 22 (1995), 321–38 (325).11 Strauss, Natural Right, 10–12.12 See Strauss to Karl Löwith, 12 March 1970, in Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 696. Compare with Strauss, On Tyranny, 212 where he mentions two basic philosophical ‘presuppositions’: the ancient one of an eternal order unaffected by history and the historical one according to which there is no such order, since Being ‘creates itself in the course of history’. He leaves both at the level of equal plausibility. Velkley raises the possibility that Strauss accepts at least part of the historicist thesis, with respect to the solutions to philosophical problems; see Velkley, Premises, 129–30. All such solutions are ‘prudential negotiations of the basic tensions’, neither definitive nor eternal; see Velkley, Premises, 143.13 Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 598–99. Compare with this statement: ‘Heidegger is the most powerful spirit alive today (der stärkste heute lebende Geist)’, who has ‘irrevocably refuted all that was and is in our century’; see Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 674.14 Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein, ‘A Giving of Accounts’, in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by Kenneth Hart Green (New York, NY, 1997), 457–466 (462).15 ‘By uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, he made it possible for the first time after many centuries – one hesitates to say how many – to see the roots of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know what so many others merely believe, that those roots are the only natural and healthy roots’; see Strauss, Jewish Philosophy, 450.16 The nihilistic consequences of Heidegger's thought are not, Velkley avers, Strauss's primary concern. Nihilism was regarded by Strauss as a ‘sub-philosophical’ phenomenon; see Velkley, Premises, 170 Footnotenote 25.17 Strauss, Natural Right, 89.18 Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 598–99. Compare with this statement: ‘Sein cannot be explained by Seienden, as causality cannot be explained causally’; see Strauss, Rebirth, 44.19 Strauss, Rebirth, 38.20 Strauss, Jewish Philosophy, 320.21 Leo Strauss, ‘Existentialism’, Interpretation, 22 (1995), 303–20 (312). Compare Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, 2006), 8–9.22 This Strauss regarded as an ‘Absurdität’; see Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 677.23 Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 684–85. This point is not entirely convincing. If the divine is nous, or mind, in Aristotle's sense, then the relation between that mind and a human intellection which can partake of its divine life up to a point is non-accidental. Human intellect is subordinate, yes; but this is not the same as degradation.24 Specifically, he wonders whether Strauss's whole project was affected by his realisation that a philosophy today cannot ignore the insight of Nietzschean historical consciousness that ‘There is no Without’, i.e. there cannot be objectivity without a subject; see Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 686; Velkley, Premises, 57.25 Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, III, 688.26 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 7, 1141a21–22.27 See Leo Strauss, ‘Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion’, in Jewish Philosophy, 137–177 (172).28 ‘At the heart of Strauss's reconsideration of Socratic philosophy is the inquiry into whether the question of the Good can be accorded due centrality [...] while acknowledging the metaphysical or cosmological problem uncovered by Heidegger. Can the question of the Good be regarded as the opening to Being or the whole, without implying a merely “humanistic” or “anthropocentric” account [...]?’; see Velkley, Premises, 70.29 ‘In its original form political philosophy broadly understood is the core of philosophy or rather “the first philosophy”’; see Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago, IL, 1978), 20.30 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Book V, iv, 10–11.31 Plato, Apology, in Plato Opera, edited by John Burnet, 5 vols (Oxford, 1900–1907, reprinted 1961), I, 19c5–e1.32 Strauss, Natural Right, 121–22. Compare Strauss, Rebirth, 132.33 Strauss, Rebirth, 132.34 Strauss, Natural Right, 32.35 The city highlights the inescapable duality in the human good, the ‘essential difference between the common good and the private or sectional good’; see Strauss, Rebirth, 132.36 ‘Without cities, no philosophers. They are the conditions’; see Strauss, Jewish Philosophy, 465.37 Strauss, Rebirth, 164.38 Plato, Phaedo, in Plato Opera, I, 97b4–98c2.39 Socrates, 77–78.40 Strauss, Rebirth, 133.41 ‘That to which the question “What is?” points is the eidos of the thing [...] the “idea” of a thing’; see Strauss, Natural Right, 122–23.42 Strauss, Rebirth, 142. Compare Strauss, Natural Right, 122. Compare also: ‘Philosophy is older than political philosophy’; see Strauss, Natural Right, 82.43 Though this is clearly a topic for a different forum, the logoi in which Socrates ‘takes refuge’ in his search of the ‘being and truth’ of things are not simply identical to conventional opinions or speeches; see Plato, Phaedo, in Plato Opera, I, 99e5–6. Logos is famously multivalent in Greek, and can mean ‘intelligible ratio’ as well as ‘linguistic utterance’ or ‘speech’. Socrates can be said to be looking for the way in which ratio is visible through speech.44 Strauss, Natural Right, 124.45 See Plato, Phaedo, in Plato Opera, I, 97b6–7, 100a3–4, 100d3–4.46 See Velkley, Premises, 88. Echoing Aristotle's statement about the question ‘What is Being?’, Alexandre Kojève called the relation of scientific truth to time, the question which ‘has been asked as long as philosophy has existed’; see Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Alan Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols, Jr (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 100.47 Strauss, Natural Right, 35.48 Nor, as Velkley notes, and contrary to what seems to be the case among some of Strauss's students and critics, is ‘reflection on politics the whole substance of philosophic thought’; see Velkley, Premises, 12.49 Plato, Symposium, in Plato Opera, II, 221e4–5.50 See the discussion of the ‘Idea of the Good’ in Plato, Republic, in Plato Opera, IV, 505a2–506a2.51 Socrates does not deny the link between good (to agathon) and beneficial (to ophelimon); see Plato, Meno, in Plato Opera, III, 87e–88a; Plato, Charmides, in Plato Opera, III, 164a1.52 Strauss, City and Man, 119. Compare the wonderful aperçu in On Plato's Symposium, where Strauss asks whether if there is an Idea for every noun or adjective which is not a proper name like “Socrates”, is there also an Idea of the “third undersecretary of the Garment Workers’ Union”?; see Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium (Chicago, IL, 2003), 199.53 ‘Gradually the breadth of the revolution of thought which Heidegger was preparing dawned upon me and my generation. We saw with our own eyes that there had been no such phenomenon in the world since Hegel’; see Strauss, Rebirth, 28. Compare Strauss, Rebirth, 115–16; Velkley, Premises, 20 note 67.54 Strauss, Rebirth, 258.55 Strauss, Rebirth, 259.56 Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Westport, CT, 1959), 11.57 If Hegel's system fails, however, it is a failure of philosophical mania. Compare Strauss's remark that the tension between the city and philosophy is encapsulated by the observation that ‘the virtue of the philosopher's thought is a certain kind of mania [...]’; see Strauss, Jewish Philosophy, 463.58 Velkley, Premises, 66, 161.59 Strauss, Natural Right, 176. As Velkley notes, Heidegger is clearly the unnamed target here; see Velkley, Premises, 132.60 Plato, Phaedrus, in Plato Opera, II, 247c3–248b5.61 Plato, Phaedrus, in Plato Opera, II, 247c3–248b5

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