Abstract
In the second half of this essay (begun in Sophia 50:141–158), we continue our reading of Leo Strauss’ important later essay on Maimonides, ‘How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed’. Our method is to try, as best as we are able, to read this essay as Strauss directs us to read esoteric texts in Persecution and the Art of Writing. As a means of testing and attempting to confirm our reading of this difficult later essay on Maimonides, we will close by situating our reading of ‘How to Begin to Study’ and Strauss’ partly concealed positions there on philosophy, prophecy and the Torah alongside the claims of his earlier, much less esoteric, but also rarely studied 1930s essay: ‘Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi’. Because of the widely recognised foundational importance of Maimonides in understanding Leo Strauss’ own lasting positions, this work aims at making a contribution to the continuing, and presently highly contentious, task of trying to understand Strauss’ thoughts on Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, the city and man.
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Notes
Leo Strauss, ‘Farabi’s Plato’ Louis Ginsberg Jubilee Volume (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1935), pp. 357-393, esp. p. 391 [35]: ‘He [Farabi] does not explain what the divine things are. I am inclined to believe that they are identical with the science of the beings and the right way of life’. Compare p. 369 [13] and p. 371 [15]; compare Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. p. 85, with pp. 93, 94-95, 101-102.
Again, we seem to be being prompted to consider intellection as containing a masculine and feminine element, with the products of the intellect as its children. But it is impossible to say anything more about this with certainty, except that Strauss evidently felt some need or wish to suggest this possibility, or raise these heterodox matters in ‘How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed’.
Cf. note 49 above.
Cf. also Fradkin, ‘A Word Fitly Spoken: The Interpretation of Maimonides and the Legacy of Levi Strauss’, pp. 73-77.
Fradkin, ‘A Word Fitly Spoken …’, pp. 75-76.
Fox, Interpreting Maimonides, p.59.
For Strauss’ wider, repeated philosophical position concerning the limits of law versus wisdom, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 140, p. 158, p. 161; ‘Plato’ in History of Political Philosophy, third edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 76; ‘The Problem of Socrates’, in Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism edited with an introduction by Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 146, p. 147; & esp. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200), pp. 72-77.
Cf. Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, pp. 21-24; and Conclusion below.
Strauss also says this much, again casting doubt on any superiority of the Mosaic versus later or other theologies: ‘Maimonides recognised that this verse [Exodus 6:3] asserts or establishes the superiority of Moses’ prophecy to that of the patriarchs (II.35), but he does not explain that verse: he does not explain, at least not clearly, which theological verities other than the thirteen attributes were revealed to Moses, but were unknown to the patriarchs’.
Menachem Kellner, of Marvin Fox, in Menachem Kellner, ‘Reading Rambam: Approaches to the Interpretation of Maimonides’, Jewish History, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1981: pp. 73-92, at p. 86.
Cf. Guide I. 73, tenth premise, inc. ‘A Call upon the Reader’s Attention’.
Cf. again loc cit.
On King Solomon and Maimonides, see also ‘Literary Character’, p. 50. On Maimonides’ seeing talk of God’s anger as merely politic, see for one instance Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 181; and our Conclusion below.
Of course, as in the title of Strauss’ last published essay collection, Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.
This might make some sense of Strauss’ cryptic insistence on the Guide I.22, its 22nd chapter [on the Hebrew verb ‘to come’ (bo’)] and cognates in his own 27th paragraph. This culminates in the deliberately mystifying sentences: ‘The second subsection surpasses the first subsection in regularity, especially if I.22 is properly understood. From all this we are led to regard it as possible that I.22 somehow holds the key to the mystery of the second subsection’ (#27/159).
See above i. concerning Maimonides and the tree of life.
To cite Kellner’s important observations here in full: ‘The ethics of Maimonides, Fox insists over and over, is noncognitivist. That is, ethical judgments are like aesthetic judgments; in the final analysis, they are matters of taste alone. Moral distinctions cannot be known by the intellect, and while moral dictates may be reasonable or unreasonable, they cannot be rational or irrational. ‘Reason tells us nothing about good and bad’ (p. 189); it provides no grounds for moral principles. ‘Since moral rules are noncognitive, they cannot be true or false and therefore cannot be the concern of the intellect’ (p. 190). There is a lot riding on Fox's insistence on this distinction. If ethics (and, by extension, Halakhah) are noncognitive, then Fox can present Maimonides as being a halakhic positivist. Halakhah is thus freed from any possible confrontation with any outside system, be it ethics, history, science, or philosophy’; at Menachem Kellner, ‘Reading Rambam’, p. 86. As Kellner notes, this position is disputed as a correct reading of Maimonides’ views on morality, notably by neoKantians in the lineage of Hermann Cohen, including Steven Schwarzchild. It also stands opposed to the closing lines from III.54 of the Guide, a fact which Straussians could claim cannot bear final weight, according to their hermeneutics principles concerning esotericism.
cf. Guide I.32.
Strauss Persecution and the Art of Writing, p.13. In ‘Plato’s Farabi’, Strauss cites the view that any belief in other-worldly happiness is based on ‘ravings and old women’s tales’ as Farabi’s, at p. 372 [16]. Consider finally Strauss’ equally provocative comment in his piece on Halevi in Persecution and the Art of Writing: ‘It does seem that the religion of the philosophers is identical with, or at least partly consists of, the exoteric teaching of the philosophers.’ At loc cit. , p. 121.
Leo Strauss speaks in his letters to Jacob Klein between 1938 and 1941 enthusiastically of the ‘infinite refinement and irony’ he sees in Maimonides’ treatment of religion in the Guide. Indeed, Strauss goes so far as to assert that ‘what [Nietzsche] had in mind with his Zarathustra, namely a parody of the Bible, succeeds in the Guide in far greater measure’; summing that ‘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’. These citations come from Lawrence Lampert, ‘Strauss’ Recovery of Esotericism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss ed. Steven B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), at p. 62 and 63 (italics ours).
Zank, ‘Arousing Suspicion Against a Prejudice’, p. 24. Zank in particular draws our attention to pages 58, 90-91, and 91 n. 156 to support this political reading of Strauss’ Maimonides in ‘The Literary Character’. These passages are those wherein Strauss contends that Maimonides identified prophets with political statesmen, that to interpret the Guide one would need, like Maimonides, to be as a Platonic philosopher King (‘a man who not only has attained the greatest knowledge, indeed, a degree of knowledge which is not attained by mere philosophers, but who is able also to perform the highest political functions’ (Strauss, ‘Literary Character’, pp. 90f.), which indeed implies ‘an unbearable degree of presumption on the part of the would-be interpreter’ (Strauss, ‘Literary Character’, p. 58). We are about to show that Strauss’ opinions on these matters were established as early as 1936.
With that said, he was clearly aware of this, and draws our attention to it in 1936, Strauss ‘Some Remarks’, p. 11; and he also speaks of an esoteric medieval enlightenment in 1935, in Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, translated with an Introduction by Eve Adler (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), at p. 102.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 12; cf. Philosophy and Law, esp. p. 122; and pp. 122-127.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 8.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 11.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 7.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 9.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 10.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 12.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, pp. 12-13. That said, Strauss is compelled by the text to raise and dismiss a structural concern, that in the Guide prophecy is in fact dealt with in the heart of Book II, long before the text (from III.8 onwards) turns to practical or political matters. Cf. Strauss, ‘The Place of the Doctrine of Providence’ pp. 537-541.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 15.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 14; cf. Zank, p. 15.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 21.
Loc cit.
Loc cit.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 11.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 23, p. 22.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 23 (italics ours).
Cf. Zank, at p. 6: ‘Strauss may have remained quite true to his origins in the study of the Enlightenment critique of religion. Far from leaving modernity and the Enlightenment critique of religion behind, as some Straussians may hope to achieve perhaps more confidently than Strauss may have done himself, we may be dealing with the attempt of implementing the pia fraus that, according to its critics, was the hallmark of traditional religion. The Enlightenment critics of religion claimed that the priests of the religious communities deliberately misled the public. This claim entailed the assumption that revelation was the founding of the infamous three impostors, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, whose followers merely maintained appearances in order, by misleading the masses, to retain their political power. This staple assumption of the modern critique of religion, i.e., the assumption of the unacknowledged atheism of the priests who guide the masses by means of claims to truths they know to be untrue, may thus return in the work of Strauss and the Straussians in what they perceive as the essence of the writings of political philosophers, foremost among them the philosophical authors labouring under the authority of a revealed religion.
Strauss, ‘Some Remarks’, p. 18.
Cf. note 29 above.
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We turn now to the fifth of the seven theses we are attributing to Strauss in ‘How to Begin to Study The Guide for the Perplexed.’
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Sharpe, M.J. ‘In the Court of a Great King’: Some Remarks on Leo Strauss’ Introduction to the Guide of the Perplexed . SOPHIA 50, 413–427 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0233-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0233-9