Abstract
The rather complex private correspondence between Leo Strauss (1899–1973) and Gerhard Krüger (1902–72) runs from late 1929 through 1935. (In GS-3 377–454, Heinrich Meier has made these letters available through painstaking editorial work, and in his introduction has brought intelligent learning to bear in framing their context (esp. GS-3 xxviii–xxx). Unless otherwise noted, all page references will be to this edition; italics in quotations from Strauss and Krüger are in the original.) Readers will presumably be acquainted with Strauss, but a few words are required to introduce Krüger, whose fulfillment of his great promise was severely hindered by the oppression of National Socialism and then, in his early 50s, was cut short by strokes that left him mentally incapacitated. (For a fuller account of Krüger’s career, see esp. the obituary by Krüger’s lifelong friend Hans-Georg Gadamer in Archives de Philosophie 47 (1984): 353–63.)
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Notes
- 1.
In GS-3 377–454, Heinrich Meier has made these letters available through painstaking editorial work, and in his introduction has brought intelligent learning to bear in framing their context (esp. GS-3 xxviii–xxx). Unless otherwise noted, all page references will be to this edition; italics in quotations from Strauss and Krüger are in the original.
- 2.
For a fuller account of Krüger’s career, see esp. the obituary by Krüger’s lifelong friend Hans-Georg Gadamer in Archives de Philosophie 47 (1984): 353–63.
- 3.
Philosophie und Morale in der Kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931; 2nd ed. 1967).
- 4.
Einsicht und Leidenschaft: Das Wesen des platonischen Denkens (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1939; 2nd ed. 1948; 3rd ed. 1961).
- 5.
In Deutsche Literaturzeitung 51 (December 20, 1931): 2407–12. An English translation, by Donald J. Maletz, was published in the Independent Journal of Philosophy, vol. 5/6 (1988): 173–75. Quotation is from the latter.
- 6.
Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft: Untersuchingen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1930; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981); republished in GS-1 1–362; English translation by Elsa Sinclair published as Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1965). All references here will be to pages of the latter, abbreviated as SCR, sometimes with equation marks in parentheses indicating page numbers of the German original (printed in the margins of GS-1).
- 7.
When Strauss agreed to have an English translation of his Spinoza book executed and published, his revision profited from Krüger’s critical suggestion, at the close of his review (175), that “the specific divisions provided by the table of contents would very much facilitate the reading if they were still more detailed and indicated in the text by more than dashes.”
- 8.
Franz Rosenzweig , Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann Verlag, 1921), 119–42, subtitled “Über die Möglichkeit, das Wunder zu erleben” [On the Possibility, of Experiencing the Miracle]; trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 93–111, or Barbara Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 101–21.
- 9.
This is not ruled out by what Strauss says when he goes on to express in very personal terms the distinctive way in which he shares in the “will ” and the “conviction” [Gesinnung] that he sees animating modern atheism : “I must justify myself [mich rechtfertigen] before the forum of the Jewish tradition”: and “truly, without any philosophy-of-history reflection,” but “simply because I hold it to be not defensible [nicht vertretbar] that I abandon out of thoughtless lightness and indolent comfort a cause, for the sake of which my ancestors took upon themselves everything conceivable.” It is this Jewish moral passion, for self-justification before the tribunal of his ancestors, that Strauss indicates he understands to be driving his relentless quest for the truth about the most momentous question.
- 10.
See esp. SCR Chap. 5, sec. C, 144–46 (= 126–28), “The Premises and the Limitation of the Critique of Orthodoxy”; also 123, 179; and Chap. 7, sec. A, 193–200 (= 182–90), “Calvin’s Position as Immune to [unerreichbar für] Spinoza’s Critique” as well as sec. B., 200–4 (= 190–94), “The Illusion of the Critique.” See also Krüger’s review, 175: “The general discussion about the difference between modern and ancient thought receives here for once an ‘existential’ sharpness: Strauss shows in concreto how much the modern ‘disposition of method, of culture’ (p. 44; 71) is a historical antithesis, that is, an unprovable negative life-decision opposed to that past which believed in revelation .”
- 11.
See Strauss’s highly paradoxical formulation in Philosophy and Law’s first chapter, which Heinrich Meier informs us (GS-2 xvi n11; trans. as n11 of Chap. 1 in the present volume, above) was originally completed in September 1933: “It is in the Laws that Plato undoubtedly stands closest to the world of revealed law , since it is there that, in accordance with a kind of interpretation anticipating the philosophic interpretation of the revealed law among the medieval thinkers, Plato transforms the ‘divine laws ’ of Greek antiquity into truly divine laws , or recognizes them as truly divine laws . In this approximation to the revelation without the guidance of the revelation we grasp at its origin the unbelieving, philosophic foundation of the belief in revelation .”—PLA 76.
- 12.
Krüger’s leading student, Klaus Oehler , reports that in 1951 “Krüger asked me, ‘Do you know who Leo Strauss is?’—to which I had to reply at that time that I did not. Then he said to me: ‘If Leo Strauss had not been compelled by the German political situation to depart, philosophy in Germany would have taken a different direction.’” Klaus Oehler , Blicke aus dem Philosophenturm: Eine Rückschau (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007), 185; see also 179.
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Pangle, T.L. (2018). The Light Shed on the Crucial Development of Strauss’s Thought by His Correspondence with Gerhard Krüger. In: Shell, S. (eds) The Strauss-Krüger Correspondence. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74201-4_3
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