Strauss, Jonas, and Heidegger's Nazism

As I have indicated in my posts on Will Altman's German Stranger, I see his claim that Leo Strauss was a Jewish Nazi as wildly implausible.  And yet, Altman does point out the strange and disturbing refusal of Strauss to be clear and emphatic in his rejection of those like Martin Heidegger who embraced Nazism.  Strauss could have followed the example of his friend Hans Jonas, who joined the British army in World War Two to fight the Nazis, and who publicly expressed after the war his disgust with Heidegger's support of Nazism and his refusal to recant his Nazism for the rest of his life.  Strauss chose not to do this.  Why?

This contrast between Strauss and Jonas can be seen by comparing Strauss's "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," Jonas's "Heidegger and Theology," and Jonas's "Taking Leave of Heidegger" (chapter 11 of his Memoirs).  Both Strauss and Jonas were Jewish students in Germany who came under Heidegger's influence.  Both left Germany in 1933 and ended up teaching in the United States.  Both had to decide how to respond to Heidegger's joining of the Nazi Party in 1933 and what this meant for the relationship between philosophy and Nazi tyranny.

Strauss was remarkably hesitant about saying much about this in public.  His fullest account of Heidegger was in a lecture ("Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism") that was never published in his lifetime.  It was first published in 1989 in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, as edited by Thomas Pangle.  Pangle reports that the lecture seemed to have been delivered sometime in the 1950s, and that the text found in Strauss's papers was a transcript of a tape recording done by students, with some hand-written corrections by Strauss.  Altman suggests that Strauss intentionally refused to publish this during his lifetime for fear that it would reveal too much about his affinity for Heidegger's thought.

Strauss observes:

"All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger."

"The only question of importance, of course is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not.  But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence--of who is competent to judge.  Perhaps only great thinkers are really competent to judge the thought of great thinkers.  Heidegger made a distinction between philosophers and those for whom philosophy is identical with the history of philosophy.  He made a distinction, in other words, between the thinker and the scholar.  I know that I am only a scholar.  But I know also that most people who call themselves philosophers are mostly, at best, scholars. . . ."

 ". . . A famous psychologist I saw in Europe, an old man, told me that in his view it is not yet possible to form a judgment about the significance as well as the truth of Heidegger's work.  This work changed so radically in its intellectual orientation that a long time will be needed in order to understand with even tolerable adequacy what this work means.  The more I understand what Heidegger is aiming at, the more I see how much escapes me.  The most stupid thing I could do would be to close my eyes or to reject his work."

 "There is a not altogether unrespectable justification for doing so.  Heidegger became a Nazi in 1933.  This was not due to a mere error of judgment on the part of a man who lived on great heights high above the low land of politics.  Everyone who had read his first great book and did not overlook the wood for the trees could see the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis.  What was the practical, that is to say, serious meaning of the contempt for reasonableness and the praise of resoluteness except to encourage that extremist movement?  When Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he delivered an official speech in which he identified himself with the movement which then swept Germany.  Heidegger had not yet dared to mention that speech in the otherwise complete lists of his writings which appear from time to time on the book jackets of his recent publications.  In 1953 he published a book, Introduction to Metaphysics, consisting of lectures given in 1935, in which he spoke of the greatness and dignity of the National Socialist movement.  In the preface written in 1953 he said that all mistakes had been corrected. . . ." (29-31)

In his use of the first person singular pronoun--"I"--Strauss is emphatic in declaring that he cannot cling to the rational liberal philosophic position since it has been shown to be inadequate.  Only a great thinker could develop a defense of liberalism, but "the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger," who is a Nazi.  While Strauss confesses that as a mere scholar--and not a true philosopher--he might not fully understand Heidegger, it would be stupid for him to reject Heidegger's work.

Moreover, in contrast to many scholars who claimed that Heidegger's Nazism was a mistake in his political judgment that had no connection to his philosophizing, Strauss insists that anyone who read Being and Time carefully could see "the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis."  Strauss thus implies that he saw that kinship from the beginning, and that the philosophizing of the "only great thinker of our time" supports Nazism.  Strauss also notes that even with the changes in Heidegger's thinking after World War Two, Heidegger saw no reason to change his mind about the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.

Jonas agreed with Strauss's assessment of Heidegger as "the most profound thinker of our time" and "the most important, original philosophical thinker of my era."  But in contrast to Strauss, Jonas stated his deep disappointment that Heidegger's philosophizing did not save him from being taken in by the Nazis:

"Given Heidegger's influence on me, his behavior was a cruel and bitter disappointment, not only in him as a person but also in the power of philosophy to arm people against such folly.  In the originality of his thought, Heidegger remains a powerful figure in intellectual history, a pathbreaker who opened up new territory.  That the most profound thinker of our time fell in with the goose-stepping brown-shirted battalions struck me as a catastrophic failure on the part of philosophy, as a disgraceful moment in world history, as the bankrupting of philosophical thought.  At the time I cherished the notion that philosophy could preserve us from such things, could fortify our minds.  I was even convinced that dealing with the most lofty and important matters ennobled human beings and improved their souls.  And now I realized that philosophy had failed to do this, hadn't protected this mind from the error of paying tribute to Hitler. . . . The behavior of all the fellow travelers, the turncoats, the quislings could be blamed on stupidity, blindness, weakness, cowardice, but that the most important, original philosophical thinker of my era fell into line was an unbelievable blow to me--personally and professionally." (Memoirs, 187)

Why did Strauss refuse to write a statement like that?

In contrast to Strauss who saw an intellectual defense of Nazism in Heidegger's Being and Time,  Jonas says he was surprised when some of his friends told him that he should have seen the early signs of Nazism in Heidegger's philosophical writing.  But once Heidegger identified himself as a Nazi, Jonas says that he broke with Heidegger's philosophy, and he refused to meet with Heidegger, until there was a brief meeting in 1969.

Jonas's public break with Heidegger came dramatically in 1964.  An international conference on hermeneutics at Drew University was organized to study the influence of Heidegger's philosophizing on the language of Protestant theology.  Heidegger himself was to give the keynote address, but when he had to withdraw because of illness, the conference organizers invited Jonas to take Heidegger's place, with the expectation that Jonas would speak for Heidegger.

Jonas's lecture--"Heidegger and Theology"--caused an uproar at the conference and around the world, because Jonas warned that these Christian theologians were making a big mistake in not recognizing that although Heidegger's language echoed the language of the Bible, Heidegger's thought was pagan in denying divine transcendence of the world and secularizing Christian language.

Jonas also warned that Heidegger's Nazism was necessarily anti-Christian:

"But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Fuhrer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger's thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls--linguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.  But to the believer, ever suspicious of this world, depth may mean the abyss, and force, the prince of this world.  As if the devil were not part of the voice of being!  Heidegger's own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten." (Phenomenon of Life, 247)

In the footnote to this passage, Jonas quoted from one of Heidegger's speeches as rector at the University of Freiburg: "Not doctrines and 'ideas' be the rules of your being.  The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law.  Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!"

Jonas also warned about the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian implications of Heidegger's claim that man is "the shepherd of being."  "Apart from the blasphemous ring which this use of the hallowed title must have to Jewish and Christian ears: it is hard to hear man hailed as the shepherd of being when he has just so dismally failed to be his brother's keeper" (Phenomenon of Life, 258). 

Jonas's lecture was the subject of a front-page article in the New York Times, which described the international controversy that Jonas had provoked among Christian theologians who wanted to appropriate Heidegger's philosophizing.  Such publicity brought invitations from German universities for Jonas to speak about this.  So he went on a lecture tour around Germany, and Heidegger told his friends that Jonas had betrayed him.

I first heard about this controversy in 1973, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.  I audited a course in the Divinity School on Being and Time taught by a Lutheran theologian, who spent most the semester criticizing Jonas's lecture and trying to persuade us that Heidegger's philosophizing should be adopted by Christian theologians.

Strauss could have done something like this.  He could have given public lectures warning people against Heidegger's mistakes.  But he chose not to do this.

Although Jonas offered no assessment of Strauss's response to Heidegger's Nazism, Jonas did claim in his Memoirs that "Strauss had been an early supporter of Mussolini, before he turned anti-Semitic" (161). 

In 1969, Jonas decided that, with Heidegger approaching his 80th birthday, he needed to finally have a personal encounter with Heidegger to try to achieve some reconciliation.  They met for a brief conversation in Zurich.

"Actually our meeting consisted for the most part of a brief exchange of memories from our time in Marburg, while the matters that were of decisive significance to me weren't mentioned.  If I'd hoped that anything would be said about the events after 1933, about the fate of the Jews in Germany, about my mother's death, I was bitterly disappointed again.  With this meeting I put to rest my inner struggle over my relationship to Heidegger, but any clarification on his part, let alone a world of regret, was not to be.  What had come between us for good would remain shrouded in silence." (Memoirs, 193)

Later, George Anastaplo told the story of trying to arrange a meeting between Jonas and Strauss in Annapolis, Maryland, sometime after 1969.  He reported that Strauss refused to meet with Jonas because he had met with Heidegger.  Anastaplo often told this story to indicate how adamant Strauss was that no one should have any contact with Heidegger because of his Nazism.  But it seems to me that Jonas's repudiation of Heidegger's Nazism was much clearer and emphatic than Strauss's.

Moreover, unlike Strauss, in turning away from Heidegger's existentialism as a Gnostic dualism and nihilism, Jonas turned toward an alternative--an evolutionary biological naturalism in which an understanding of the psychophysical unity of human biological nature constituted a middle ground between materialism and idealism.  Jonas elaborated his philosophical biology in The Phenomenon of Life, which included his "Heidegger and Theology" essay.  In the Foreword to that book, he explained the main theme of his biological naturalism:

"Accordingly, the following investigations seek to break through the anthropocentric confines of idealist and existentialist philosophy as well as through the materialist confines of natural science.  In the mystery of the living body both poles are in fact integrated.  The great contradictions which man discovers in himself--freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and morality--have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life, each precariously balanced between being and not-being, and each already endowed with an internal horizon of 'transcendence.'  We shall pursue this underlying theme of all life in its development through the ascending order of organic powers and functions: metabolism, moving and desiring, sensing and perceiving, imagination, art, and mind--a progressive scale of freedom and peril, culminating in man, who may understand his uniqueness anew when he no longer sees himself in metaphysical isolation." (ix)

According to Jonas, "Heidegger never brings this question about Being--how it is, namely, that Being contains and maintains the human and what it thereby reveals about itself--into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution" (Mortality and Morality, 48).

Jonas's evolutionary biological naturalism has stimulated much of my thinking as expressed in the last paragraph of Darwinian Natural Right:  

"The idea of Darwinian natural right offers us one way of understanding our human place in nature.  We are neither mindless machines nor disembodied spirits.  We are animals.  As animals, we display the animate powers of nature for movement, desire, and awareness.  We move to satisfy our desires in the light of our awareness of the world.  We are a unique species of animal, but our distinctively human traits--such as symbolic speech, practical habituation, and conceptual thought--are elaborations of powers shared in some form with other animals.  Our powers for habituation and learning allow us to alter our natural environments, but even these powers are extensions of the behavioral flexibility shown by other animals.  So even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it.  We have not been thrown into nature from some place far away.  We come from nature.  It is our home." (275)

Strauss comes close to this thought in this sentence from "What is Political Philosophy?":  "By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith of the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind" (54).

The New York Times articles on Jonas and Heidegger can be found here and here.

Some of my previous posts on Strauss and Jonas can be found here, here, and here.

Posts on Heidegger's Nazism can be found here and here.

Nazi Philosophers: Plato, Fichte, Nietzsche, Heidegger

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor. In April, the new Nazi government began dismissing Jewish professors from their university positions, including at least twenty German philosophy professors. On May 1, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in a public ceremony.

On May 4, Heidegger at Freiburg University began his first lecture for his course on "The Basic Problems of Philosophy." He said that German students had a new purpose:

"It is determined to find discipline and education, to make itself ready and strong for a political and spiritual leadership conferred on it in behalf of coming generations. The question is whether or not we want to create a spiritual world. If we cannot do so, some kind of savagery or other will come over us and we will reach an end as a historical people."

On May 27, Heidegger was inaugurated as rector of Freiburg University in a ceremony with Nazi flags and many Nazi authorities in attendance. In his inaugural rectoral address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," Heidegger spoke of the need for philosophy to exercise "spiritual leadership" in the present world-historical crisis, so that Germany could fulfil its historical mission as grounded in a new order of being. He concluded by quoting from Plato's Republic.

After his speech, the students pledged their loyalty to Hitler as the leader of the nation. All those present sang the "Horst-Wessel Lied," the anthem of the Nazi Party, as they raised their arms in the Nazi salute, and then they concluded with repeated shouts of "Seig Heil!"

Heidegger never renounced his Nazism or apologized for his active support of the Nazi Party. Even after the war, he continued to affirm the "inner truth and greatness of the movement." That such a prominent philosopher--perhaps even the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century--was a Nazi has created an emotional debate over what this might mean. Recently, a new book by Emmanuel Faye has renewed this debate, because he argues that Heidegger's philosophic ideas continue to promote Nazi-like thinking today. An recent article favorable to the book in The Chronicle of Higher Education stirred anger from Heidegger's philosophic defenders.

There are some big questions here about the relationship between philosophy and politics. Does the support of Nazism by German philosophers show the dangerous tendency of philosophers to support tyranny? If so, what traditions of philosophy are most prone to such mistakes?

Critics of Darwinian science often put the blame for Nazism on the influence of Social Darwinism. But this support for the Nazis among the German philosophers suggests that explaining Nazism as Social Darwinism can't be the whole story. Most of these Nazi philosophers were actually opponents of Darwinian science, because they feared that it promoted a morally corrupting scientific materialism. Against the materialism of modern science, they argued for a metaphysical idealism, which is evident in their interpretations of Nazi ideology.

Hermann Schwarz declared: "The German people have become what the Greeks once were, the human nation to whom the meaning of the universe is linked." Nicolai Hartmann said that Plato was right that "all value is eternal and all meaning eternal meaning." Bruno Bauch agreed with Plato's attack on sophistic relativism and affirmation of "objective values" as set by the eternal Idea of the Good.

For me, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

It's hard to see this, however, if one concentrates just on Heidegger, and fails to see how Heidegger was part of a larger philosophical movement in German history. The controversy over Heidegger's Nazism and the possibility that Nazi ideology was particularly rooted in Heidegger's ideas is misconceived insofar as it ignores the historical circumstances of German philosophy that shaped Heidegger. That broader intellectual history is well studied in Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Sluga shows that most of the prominent German philosophers who stayed in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power publicly supported Hitler and Nazi ideology. 30 German philosophers joined the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1940, almost half of Germany's academic philosophers were Nazis. But since we have forgotten that history, we give too much significance to Heidegger's Nazism as if it were an isolated case. Sluga's history shows that in fact the many German philosophers who became Nazis manifested a wide range of often conflicting philosophical positions. The common assumption that the major philosophical position supporting Nazism was some kind of moral relativism (such as Nietzschean subjective value relativism) is not correct. Many, if not most, of the Nazi philosophers--for example, Nicolai Hartmann, Bruno Bauch, Hans Heyse, Hermann Schwarz and many others in the German Philosophical Society--were Kantian idealists who assumed a metaphysical order of objective eternal values, and who argued that it was the destiny of the German nation to be rooted in that eternal order of value.

This Kantian philosophical idealism of German nationalism as appealing to eternal values goes back to the founding statement of German nationalism--Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation of 1807. Fichte saw Napoleon's conquest of Germany as creating a world-historical crisis in which the metaphysical destiny of Germany to save humanity could be fulfilled only through extraordinary spiritual leadership that ground German life in an eternal order of values. He developed these four themes--crisis, nation, leadership, and order--in the context of his Kantian idealism. Sluga shows that Heidegger's Rectoral Address and all of the other writing of the Nazi philosophers turn on these same four themes.

The alliance of the German philosophers with Nazism manifests the danger in philosophers becoming corrupted by political power, a danger that goes back to Plato and his Republic in his attempt to ground political order in a metaphysical order of cosmic morality. In asserting the need for philosophers to assume "spiritual leadership" in Nazi Germany, Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers explicitly invoked the teaching of Plato's Republic. Sluga observes: "For the Nazi philosophers, Plato became the most authoritative political thinker and the Republic the most widely read work on political theory" (175).

Heidegger told Karl Jaspers that he wanted to "lead the Leader." He even requested a meeting with Hitler himself. But Hitler was not interested, and they never met.

In Heidegger's writing, all four of the Fichtean concepts--crisis, nation, leadership, and order--assume a transcendental metaphysics, because he sees a "spiritual" meaning in the crisis, in the mission of Germany, in the leadership required, and in the fundamental order that is needed. By speaking of his "spiritual leadership" (geistige Fuhrung), Heidegger appealed to the German idealist tradition for which "spirit" (Geist) was a central theme. So although Heidegger's existential ontology was counter to the German idealist tradition, his metaphysical German nationalism evoked the idealist ideas going back to Fichte.

In the lectures of 1935 that were later published as his Introduction to Metaphysics (Doubleday Anchor, 1961), Heidegger identified Germany as "the most metaphysical of nations" that must move itself and the whole history of the West "into the primordial realm of the powers of being" (31-32) by asking "the fundamental question of metaphysics" as to the meaning of Being (35). In this way, Germany would become the most spiritual of all nations: "For all true power and beauty of the body, all sureness and boldness in combat, all authenticity and inventiveness of the understanding, are grounded in the spirit and rise or fall only through the power or impotence of the spirit. The spirit is the sustaining, dominating principle, the first and the last" (39).

According to Fichte's transcendental rationalism, the history of humanity was the history of reason. In that rational history, Germany was destined to promote true philosophy that would grasp "the eternal archetype of all spiritual life" and thus secure "the education of the perfect man" in the "perfect state." Germany would thus educate its students in the "moral world order." Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers saw Nazism as fulfilling this Fichtean vision of the metaphysical destiny of Germany.

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche continued the metaphysical nationalism of Fichte. The Nazis often cited this book. In his later writings, however, Nietzsche turned against the transcendental metaphysics of Fichte and Kant. But even so, I would say, the later Nietzsche followed the argument of F. A. Lange's History of Materialism in striving to overcome the degrading effects of scientific materialism through "the standpoint of the ideal" by leading Europe towards a new redemptive religion of Dionysus. He thus turned away from the anti-metaphysical Darwinism of his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first four books of The Gay Science--to return in his later writings to the religious longings and metaphysical redemption that he had sought in his youth.

So, despite the conflicts among the Nazi philosophers--between the conservative philosophy of Kantian idealism and the radical philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger--they all took for granted the metaphysical German nationalism of Fichte, which they saw as traceable back to the Greek philosophers, and particularly the political metaphysics of Plato's Republic.

The mistake of the Nazi philosophers was Plato's mistake--the mistake of thinking that political order can be grounded in an eternal metaphysical order as discovered by philosophers who then exercise spiritual leadership in politics.

To avoid this mistake, philosophers need to see that philosophy is primarily an exercise in questioning the order of nature and human existence with no hope of finding any absolute metaphysical answers, and therefore the moral and political order of human life must be grounded in ordinary human experience--human desires and needs--rather than any eternal cosmic order. The Socratic life itself--the life of continual questioning--suggests that Socrates was a philosophic skeptic rather than a Platonic idealist.

Nietzsche embraced this Socratic skepticism in his middle writings by denying any claim to metaphysical knowledge and embracing Darwinian evolution as a science of "humble truths." In this Darwinian period of Nietzsche's writing, he saw the philosopher as a "free spirit" or "free thinker" who devotes himself to ceaseless questioning and lives content with tentative answers. This led him to warn against transcendental longings and tyrannical power sanctioned by delusional appeals to metaphysical order. He endorsed liberal democracy as the best regime for such a free spirited philosopher and scientist, because such a regime would leave such people free to think and question.

Oddly enough, this conception of philosophy as perpetual questioning was apparently embraced by Heidegger, but then he tried to argue that the order of primordial questioning of Being could become the metaphysical ground of German political order. He didn't see that philosophy as questioning would throw into doubt any political claim to metaphysical order.

Understanding philosophy as skeptical questioning should have led Heidegger back to the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, which would have led him away from the illusory metaphysical certainty of German nationalism, and which would have led him to see that Socratic philosophy is most secure in a liberal democratic regime. Instead, Heidegger asserted that Germany was the metaphysical center of Europe, with America at one end and Russia at the other, and "from a metaphysical point of view," American democracy and Russian Marxism were the same.

We might see here that Leo Strauss corrected Heidegger in seeing the danger of tyranny in Platonic political metaphysics, affirming Socratic philosophy as perpetual questioning without metaphysical certainty, and seeing that liberal democracy might provide the best conditions for such Socratic philosophizing.

But as far as I know, Strauss never recognized how this line of thought leads back to Nietzsche's middle writings as shaped by Nietzsche's insight into how a Darwinian science of evolutionary history supports Socratic philosophic skepticism.

Some of these points about Plato, Nietzsche, and Darwin have been elaborated in previous posts found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, and here.

Millerman, Heidegger, and Philosophic Nazism

I have written about Michael Millerman's philosophic promotion of the right-wing illiberalism of Heidegger, Dugin, and Putin in the pages of First Things.  Now the April 2023 issue of First Things has published a short letter from me about Millerman's article and Millerman's response.

In my letter, I quote from the last paragraph of Millerman's article and then add this comment:

"If Dugin's 'ideologically coherent alternative to Western political modernity' is 'compatible with Putininism,' how is that 'not reducible' to 'intellectual legitimation for a fascist, kleptocratic thug who wishes to recreate the Russian empire'?"

"Has First Things been reduced to this--endorsing illiberal ideologies that are compatible with Putinism, Nazism, and fascist thugs?  Is there any reason to believe that Richard John Neuhaus would have endorsed this?"

Here is Millerman's response:

"Leo Strauss once wrote:  'It would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy--even if they are enemies of democracy--provided they are thinking men (and especially great thinkers) and not blustering fools."

"My article argued that Dugin is a thinking man whose political philosophy, whatever its other virtues and vices, has the great merit of helping us understand something about Martin Heidegger, the greatest thinker.  Larry Arnhart invokes the predictable rhetoric of fascist thuggery and the like.  Does such a response, and the attitude it typifies, reflect what is 'worthy of us as thinking beings' when it comes to the basic questions of political philosophy?"

The fundamental question at issue between us is whether Millerman is right in agreeing with Strauss that Heidegger was "the greatest thinker," and that he was philosophically correct in attacking liberal modernity and defending Nazi tyranny.

I have written a series of posts on Heidegger's metaphysical German nationalism as supporting his philosophic Nazism.  I have argued that Friedrich Nietzsche (particularly in Human, All Too Human) identified the philosophical mistake that leads philosophers like Heidegger to support evil tyranny like that of the Nazis.  Nietzsche's adoption of Darwinian evolutionary science allowed him to see that philosophical mistake.

Nietzsche saw that social order arises best as a largely spontaneous order of human cultural evolution that does not require any intelligently designed metaphysical order enforced by state coercion.  This led Nietzsche to embrace the liberal separation of culture and the state, so that the purpose of the state is only to protect individuals from one another, and then secure cultural life as a realm for freedom of thought and action, which allowed the Socratic "free spirits" to live the philosophic life of skeptical questioning.

By contrast, Nietzsche saw, philosophers like Plato and Heidegger who want the state to execute their "spiritual leadership" in enforcing their vision of metaphysical order become "tyrants of the spirit," and consequently they are easily seduced by tyrants like Hitler.  (See Human, All Too Human, 1-9, 235, 261, 438-41, 465, 472, 474.) 

Will Altman's German Trilogy and Leo Strauss's Third Wave of Modernity

At the end of the summer, the American Political Science Association will be meeting in Chicago.  For that meeting, I have proposed a panel on William Altman's book The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (2011), which makes the provocative argument that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism. 

Last year, I wrote a series of posts on Altman's book on Strauss.  I argued that Altman does not prove his strongest claim--that Strauss was "remarkably successful" in his project "to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself" (516).  But I also conceded that Altman does show a disturbing refusal of Strauss to clearly and emphatically state his defense of liberal democracy against the anti-liberal position of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt.  By contrast, Strauss's friend Hans Jonas was very clear and emphatic in his criticism of Heidegger for failing to apologize for his endorsement of Nazism.

If my panel proposal is approved, my contribution will be to indicate how Altman's book on Strauss needs to be read in conjunction with the other three books that Altman has published in the last three years (all published by Lexington Books): Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (2012), Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration (2012), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (2013).  (To have published four books in three years that show impressive scholarship and intellectual depth would be a great achievement for any university professor, and so it's remarkable that Altman is a public high school teacher!)

In the Preface to his Nietzsche book, Altman indicates that this book along with his books on Heidegger and Strauss can be seen as a "German trilogy," following a tripartite structure suggested by Strauss in his "Three Waves of Modernity."  According to Strauss, the First Wave of modernity came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the Second Wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the Third Wave came with Nietzsche and Heidegger.  But if each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave?  Surely, Altman suggests, it must be Strauss.  And if the Third Wave leads to fascism, as Strauss indicated, then this would point to Strauss as the thinker who most fully worked out the theory of fascism or Nazism as the anti-liberal solution to the crisis of liberal democracy.

Consequently, Altman's books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss can be understood as a "German trilogy" that works through the three stages of the Third Wave of modernity as the consummation of the crisis of liberalism and the emergence of an anti-liberal alternative.

If Strauss was completing what Nietzsche had started, then we should see all the elements of Strauss's critique of liberalism in Nietzsche's writings.  And, in fact, Altman claims, we see in Nietzsche the five components of National Socialism as Strauss understood it:

"(1) a radical anti-Christianity that explains even Nietzsche's rejection of Christian anti-Judaism, (2) a crystal clear sense of the Jewish origins of Christianity, (3) an interest in the use of exotericism, (4) a rejection of racialist anti-Semitism, and (5) the valorization of Israel's kings as opposed to her prophets." (xiv-xv)

Most fundamental for all of these components of National Socialism is a monistic metaphysics of secularization that rejects the dualistic metaphysics of Plato as expressed in Judaism and Christianity as a Jewish religion.  For this reason, Altman's book on Plato is connected to his "German trilogy" of books, because Altman defends Plato as the proponent of a metaphysical dualism that supports the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and liberal democracy.  Thus does Altman defend a transcendentalist dualism that is Platonic, Jewish, Christian, and liberal against a materialist monism that is anti-Platonic, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, and anti-liberal.

Altman suggests that Pope Benedict XVII agrees with his interpretation of National Socialism.  He quotes from the Pope's remarks in 2006 during a visit to the Auschwitz Camp:

"By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they [sc. the Nazis] ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."

Yes, Altman argues, that's exactly what Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss wanted to do.

I will have more to say about Altman's account of Nietzsche in my next post.  As you might expect from my previous posts on Nietzsche, I will defend the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period as morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the early and late writings of Nietzsche, and thus I will disagree with Altman in his playing down the distinctiveness of Nietzsche's Darwinian middle period.

My previous posts on Altman can be found here, here, and here.  My previous posts on Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity" can be found here and here.

Hitler's Philosophers: Reductio ad Hitlerum?

In his book on Leo Strauss, Will Altman points out that Strauss coined the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum.  In Natural Right and History, Strauss remarked: "we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum.  A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler" (42-43).

We might wonder, as Altman suggests, why Strauss didn't identify this fallacy as a noble fallacy.  Surely, it's good that our disgust with Hitler and the Nazis is so deep that we think a view is refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.

But when we do this, we have to identify those views that were most directly responsible for the evils of Hitler's regime, and we have to understand the history of those views and their adoption by Hitler.  A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been professed in a perversely distorted form by Hitler.

I thought about that while reading Yvonne Sherratt's new book Hitler's Philosophers (Yale University Press).  She sets out to tell "the story of Hitler's philosophers," and thus "the story of how philosophy was implicated in genocide" (xvi-xvii).  Contrary to what she asserts, she is not the first person to tell this story, as should be clear by the many citations in her notes to other books on the history of philosophers connected to Hitler.  But she is the first person to tell this story as a "docudrama" in a "narrative style," which doesn't work for her, because she has little skill for narrative writing.

She claims that this is "a work of non-fiction, carefully  researched, based upon archival material, letters, photographs, paintings, verbal reports and descriptions, which have all been meticulously referenced" (xx).  In fact, her research is remarkably sloppy.  For example, she repeatedly claims that Hitler "came to regard himself as the 'philosopher Fuhrer'" or "philosopher leader" (xviii, 16, 31, 35, 63, 127).  If Hitler actually called himself the "philosopher Fuhrer," as she implies, that would be something worth knowing.  But if you look for a citation for this claim, you will find only one reference (16, 267, n. 41) to Ian Kershaw's Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, page 250.  If you then check Kershaw's book, you won't see any indication that Hitler ever called himself the "philosopher Fuhrer," although Kershaw does quote Hitler as saying: "the combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth; this combination makes the great man" (252). 

Here Kershaw is quoting from Mein Kampf (trans. Ralph Manheim, 1943, pp. 580-81).  In Mein Kampf, Hitler identifies the "theoretician" as the man who grasps the "ideas" that constitute the "worldview" (Weltanschauung) necessary for a political party like National Socialism that will bring a total cultural transformation (pp. 452-62).  As an example of such leadership in cultural transformation, he mentions the triumph of Christianity over paganism as "the first spiritual terror," and he suggests that National Socialism will overturn that Christian terror with a new spiritual terror to create a new cultural regime (pp. 454-55).  He also mentions Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and Richard Wagner as examples of "great reformers" of culture (p. 213).

Sherratt claims that Martin Heidegger was identified as "Hitler's Superman" (104-107).  But she never provides any citation with evidence that Heidegger or anyone else identified him as "Hitler's Superman."  It is true, however, that Heidegger in his Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg did speak of his "spiritual/intellectual leadership" (geistige Fuhrung) over Germany.  And he told Karl Jaspers that he wanted to "lead the Leader."  In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the need for geistige Fuhrung (p. 457); and so Heidegger could have picked up this phrase from Hitler's book.

Despite the sloppiness of her research, Sherratt does provide a comprehensive history of the connections between Hitler and German philosophy.  First, she surveys Hitler's references to German philosophers like Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.  Then she claims to find in those philosophers evidence that Hitler's reading of them was valid, because one can see in them many of the elements of Hitler's Nazism--anti-Semitism, German nationalism, militarism, racism, and eugenics.  She then surveys the history of those many philosophers in Germany who collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis--Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and many others. 

She also provides a history of Hitler's philosophical opponents who were forced to leave Germany--particularly, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt.  And she tells the remarkable story of Kurt Huber and the White Rose resistance movement.  As a professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, Huber became the only academic philosopher in Germany to resist Nazism.  He joined with a group of his students at the University--led by Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans Scholl--who wrote and distributed a series of leaflets in 1942-1943 calling for nonviolent resistance to the Nazi regime.  They were arrested and convicted of treason.  Some of them--including Huber--were executed by beheading.  (The texts of their leaflets can be found online.)

Finally, Sherratt surveys the history of how most of the Nazi philosophers managed to avoid any severe punishment after the war and to even resume their academic careers in Germany.  Heidegger was especially despicable in lying about his active support of the Nazis, and even claiming that he supported the White Rose resistance, so that he could return to the University of Freiburg and eventually regain his high position, even to the point of being praised by some academic philosophers as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.

This history is helpful to anyone who wants to make an intellectual assessment of the connection between philosophy and the evils of Nazism.  But Sherratt's own intellectual assessment of the issues raised by this history is shallow and confused.  For example, she points to Kant's anti-Semitism as showing that Hitler was correct to identify him as a forerunner to Nazism (36-41).  But then she notes that Huber read Kant very differently from how Hitler read him: "Kant, in fact, was one of Huber's main weapons in his intellectual resistance to Nazism, and Huber lectured on him as often as he could" (215).  She makes no attempt to decide whether Huber's reading of Kant was better than Hitler's.

Moreover, she never tries to identify clearly the philosophical mistake that leads philosophers like Heidegger to support evil tyranny like that of the Nazis.  She might have done this if she had carefully read Nietzsche.  As is usually the case for scholars looking at the connection between Nietzsche and Nazism, she skims over some ideas in Nietzsche's early and late writings, while giving his middle period only one sentence: "Nietzsche explored many ideas throughout his life including, in his middle period, rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy" (48).

If she had actually read Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, Sherratt might have noticed that Nietzsche identified there the philosophical mistake that can lead philosophers to support tyranny.  She might also have noticed that it was Nietzsche's adoption of Darwinian evolutionary science that allowed him to see that philosophical mistake.

Evolutionary science allowed Nietzsche to see that social order arises best as a largely spontaneous order of human cultural evolution that does not require any intelligently designed metaphysical order enforced by state coercion.  This leads Nietzsche to embrace the liberal separation of culture and the state, so that the purpose of the state is only to protect individuals from one another, and then cultural life is a realm for freedom of thought and action. 

By contrast, Nietzsche saw, philosophers like Plato and Heidegger who want the state to execute their "spiritual leadership" in enforcing their vision of metaphysical order become "tyrants of the spirit," and consequently they are easily seduced by tyrants like Hitler.  (See Human, All Too Human, 1-9, 235, 261, 438-41, 465, 472, 474.)

Unfortunately, Nietzsche moved away from the Darwinian aristocratic liberalism of his middle period to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.  And it was the latter that inspired Hitler and the Nazis.

Some of these points are elaborated in other posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Smith and Strauss on Bourgeois Liberalism and the Philosophic Life

Steven Smith's Modernity and Its Discontents elaborates the argument of Leo Strauss and the Straussians for the "crisis of liberalism" as showing "the problem of the bourgeois."  The basic idea for Smith's book comes from Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity"--the idea that the first wave of liberal modernity is theoretically flawed in ways that provoke two waves of illiberal attacks on modernity. This suggests the question of whether Strauss and the Straussians are proposing some illiberal alternative to the bourgeois liberal order. 

Smith's answer is no, because while Strauss was a critic of liberal democracy, he was a friendly critic who saw liberal democracy (like that of the United States) as the best practicable regime for the modern world, despite its weaknesses.  And, therefore, Smith says, Strauss was actually "a classical liberal who believed that present-day liberalism requires the support of certain premodern sources of authority if it is to be sustainable" (292).   Smith is relying on what Will Altman has called the "Golden Sentence" of Straussian apologetics: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy."  (Altman points out that Strauss is careful here to use the word "we" rather than "I," and that Strauss says that Maimonides uses the word "we" to distinguish a popular opinion from what he himself believes.)

It's not clear how Smith's claim that Strauss was a friend of liberalism is consistent with Smith's observation that in his lecture on "German Nihilism," Strauss implicitly included himself among those young German nihilists who preferred a "closed morality" that was "based on such old-fashioned virtues as loyalty, duty, honor, and self-sacrifice" as showing a higher level of humanity than an "open morality" that was "divorced from the particularities of nation, race, or class" (250). Smith is silent about Strauss's assertion in "German Nihilism" that National Socialism was "a return to a pre-modern ideal."

We must wonder whether Smith's reading of Strauss as a classical liberal is persuasive.  In particular, given what Strauss said about the supremacy of the philosophic life and about the conflict between philosophy and society, we must wonder whether a bourgeois liberal regime can allow for such a philosophic life.  And if the open society of a liberal regime can be open to philosophy, does that refute Strauss's claim that every stable society must be a closed society that cannot tolerate the skeptical questioning of philosophers?

In order to separate Strauss from the illiberal critics of the Enlightenment, and thus protect Strauss from Will Altman's charge of being a Jewish Nazi, Smith distinguishes between the radical Counter-Enlightenment of those like Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Martin Heidegger, and the moderate Counter-Enlightenment of those like Strauss, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Isaiah Berlin (348-49).

Smith's distinction here between two forms of Counter-Enlightenment is strange for at least two reasons.  First, to put Strauss on the side of Berlin rather than Heidegger ignores Strauss's severe criticism of Berlin as failing in his attempted defense of liberalism and Strauss's fervent endorsement of Heidegger as the one great thinker of our time who has refuted liberalism.  Strauss writes: "All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate. I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger" ("Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," 29).  Remarkably, Smith is silent about this claim by Strauss that Heidegger has refuted any argument for rational liberalism.

The second reason why Smith's distinction is strange is that in assigning Nietzsche to the radical Counter-Enlightenment, Smith is silent about Nietzsche's defense of the Enlightenment and liberalism in Human, All Too Human and other writings from his middle period.  As I have argued in some previous posts, Nietzsche lays out in his middle writings a vigorous defense of Darwinian aristocratic liberalism as superior to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.

Smith does not see that in order to push Strauss towards Berlin and away from Heidegger, he has to implicitly reinterpret Strauss as a Platonic or Aristotelian liberal who embraces Berlin's advocacy of both liberal pluralism and negative liberty, so that the individual liberty secured by a liberal regime allows a few people to choose the philosophic life as the highest end, while most others choose different lives with a different ranking of ends.  In other words, Smith has to interpret Strauss as being what Michael and Catherine Zuckert have identified as a Midwest Straussian, who believed that bourgeois liberty allowed for the expression of the bourgeois virtues, which could include the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life.

Another way of putting this is to say that Smith has to read Strauss's classical liberalism as based on a liberal interpretation of both Plato and Aristotle.

Strauss is best known for his illiberal interpretation of Plato as arguing that the philosophic life is the only naturally good way of life, and that this philosophic life is necessarily in irreconcilable conflict with society.  As Smith puts it, this can be expressed as a syllogism:

"Major Premise: Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion, including opinions about political things, by knowledge.

"Minor Premise: Opinion is the medium of society.

"Conclusion: Philosophy is necessarily at odds with society." (304)

If this is true, then Strauss would seem to be saying that a liberal open society is either impossible or a foolish mistake, because no stable society can be open to philosophical questioning.  No society can safely tolerate the philosophic life.  Therefore, philosophers must employ esoteric writing to hide what they are thinking, and thus protect philosophy from social persecution, while also protecting society from subversion by philosophical questioning.  Plato's metaphor of the cave in The Republic shows that society must always be ruled by illusory opinions rather than philosophic enlightenment.  And Plato's Apology of Socrates shows that society must persecute Socratic philosophers who corrupt the young and deny the gods of the city.

But as Smith indicates, Strauss also offers a liberal interpretation of Plato.  While Book 8 of The Republic contains the "severest indictment" of democracy, according to Strauss, it also presents democracy as a "multicolored coat" in which every way of life, including the philosophic life, can be lived.  And, after all, Socrates lived his philosophic life in Athens until the age of seventy, and he could not have lived this life in Sparta (298).  Thus, as Will Altman has argued, Plato might endorse liberal democracy as the regime most open to the philosophic life, because "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live" (Republic, 562c). 

This suggests the possibility that a liberal open society could overcome the conflict between society and philosophy by creating a free market of ideas, so that philosophers would no longer need to practice esoteric writing.  In fact, Arthur Melzer has pointed to that in his Philosophy between the Lines.  Since about 1800, he observes, the art of secret writing has largely disappeared, because in modern open societies, we no longer see the need for hiding dangerous philosophic ideas.  That's why Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing was so novel--and controversial--because he was rediscovering an art of esoteric writing that was common before 1800, but that had been rendered unnecessary by the triumph of the liberal open society over the past two centuries.  Smith suggests the same point when he writes: "It is certainly far from evident that a strategy adopted by Halevi, Al-Farabi, and Maimonides, writing in times of considerable hostility to philosophy, remains applicable in a modern democratic age where the demands for intellectual probity and 'transparency' have become not just private but also public virtues" (308).

Notice the startling implication here.  What often seems to be Strauss's signature idea--the irresolvable conflict between society and philosophy and the necessity for esoteric writing as dictated by that conflict--has been refuted by the success of bourgeois liberalism in creating an open society where the philosophic life can be openly lived in the free market of ideas.  Does that follow from Strauss's liberal interpretation of Plato?

Smith also suggests a Straussian liberal interpretation of Aristotle, although he is not as explicit about this as he is with Plato.  Strauss often asserted the supremacy of the philosophic life as the only naturally good life, in contrast to which the merely moral person appears as "a mutilated human being" (Natural Right and History, 151).  Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics can be read as supporting this idea of the philosophic life as a purely solitary contemplative life that is superior to the moral life.  From this view, as Smith says, "morality is at most instrumental to the attainment of a kind of contemplative autonomy," in which the philosopher does not need morality or any engagement with other human beings (309).  Here there seems to be no common ground between the moral life of society and the philosophic life of the solitary thinker.  Here Aristotle seems to affirm a dominant end conception of the good life as directed to one end--philosophic contemplation.

But in the books on friendship (Books 8 and 9) of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of the political association (koinonia) as an association of associations in which people pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life in association with others who share their ethical ends, and this includes those who pursue the philosophic life in association with their philosophic friends (NE, 1160a9-31, 1170a13-1170b19).  This conforms to what Smith identifies as Strauss's understanding of philosophy as a way of life, in which the aim is "to create spiritual communities in which the individual members could seek to live freely and in friendship with others who had chosen a similar way of life" (293).  In democratic Athens, philosophical schools could form voluntary private associations (like the Academy and the Lyceum) in which philosophic friends could gather with others who shared their devotion to the philosophic life.  In this understanding of Athens as an association of associations, Aristotle seems to affirm an inclusive end conception of the good as a multiplicity of moral and intellectual goods, with different ways of life organized by different rankings of those multiple goods.

This suggests the possibility, which Smith never considers, that modern liberalism is the expansion of ancient Athenian liberalism.  After all, even Strauss admitted that "the city of Athens was rather liberal" ("The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy," 47).  This would cast doubt on the sharp Straussian dichotomy of ancients and moderns.

Aristotle's inclusive end conception of the human good as supporting a free society in which individuals pursue their diverse ends in association with others of like mind looks a lot like Berlin's understanding of liberal pluralism and negative liberty, in which the negative liberty of an open society allows for the fullest expression of value pluralism in the diverse associations that people form to pursue their differing conceptions of the good life.  We might think that Strauss could not have endorsed this, because he criticized Berlin's value pluralism as a relativism that created the crisis of liberalism by denying any absolutist affirmation of liberalism as conforming to the human good of human nature. 

But as Smith indicates, Berlin denied that his value pluralism was value relativism (277-86).  While Berlin believed that there were many different good ends for human life, and that these good ends were not perfectly harmonious, yet he believed that these good ends were not "infinitely many," because they were all within the "human horizon."  Berlin affirmed both "a common human nature" and "a wide variety of cultural experience" (The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 11).  The pluralism of human nature--that human beings have different natural ends or desires--is an objective truth about human nature, and therefore this pluralism is not relativism.  By virtue of our shared human nature, we all share in the generic goods of human life--such as, for example, self-preservation, family life, friendship, social status, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding.  (These generic goods correspond to what I have called the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature.)  But how we rank these generic goods will vary across cultures and across individuals.  A liberal open society secures the negative liberty that allows for individuals live different ways of life in association with others in their families and associations, and these different ways of life will manifest different rankings of those generic goods.  Those with the temperament and talents of a Socrates will live a philosophic life that ranks intellectual understanding as higher than the other generic goods.  Others will live different kinds of life with different rankings of the generic goods.

This seems to be what John Locke meant by a free society that would secure the pursuit of happiness for diverse individuals with diverse conceptions of the good life rooted in human nature.  The summum bonum is not by nature the same for all human beings, but all human beings by nature "are both concerned and fitted to search out their summum bonum" (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.12.11).  Locke's point seems to be that there is a summum bonum--a highest good--for each person that constitutes the natural standard of happiness for each person.  But there is no single highest good for all people, because different people will rank the generic goods of life in different ways.

Human nature sets the standard for the human good.  By nature the generic goods characterize the human species.  By nature the individualized goods characterize human individuals.

A bourgeois liberal society conforms best to this human nature, because a liberal open society will secure both natural liberty and natural virtue--the liberty of individuals to develop those moral and intellectual virtues that express that ranking of the generic goods of human nature that constitutes the best life for those individuals.  In such a free society, someone like Strauss, who "fulfills the office of philosopher to the highest degree," will be free to live the philosophic life in friendship with other philosophers; and the rest of us will be free to live other kinds of life that best conform to our individual propensities and talents.

Smith concludes his book by declaring that "the narrative of progress is no longer sustainable" (352).  He believes this is true because antibourgeois intellectuals have said that it is true.  He never reflects on the fact that this contradicts the reality of the life that most of us live today in bourgeois liberal societies.  Because of market freedom, cultural pluralism, and the bourgeois virtues, our life today is generally more peaceful, more just, and richer in both material and spiritual goods than has ever been the case for human beings at any previous time in history.  Does Smith really believe that that is not progress?

Anastaplo on Strauss, Aquinas, and Heidegger

On April 21, some graduate students and faculty in political theory gathered at my home for a discussion--led by George Anastaplo--of Chapter 4 ("Classic Natural Right") of Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History.  Many of us there were in the spring graduate seminar at NIU on Strauss, and so this discussion continued some of our discussions in that seminar.

Mr. Anastaplo chose to concentrate his remarks on the two pages where Strauss comments on Thomas Aquinas (pp. 163-64).  Mr. Anastaplo has now posted the written text of his remarks on his website.

This was a good choice of topics, because most of the students in my Strauss seminar had also been in my fall seminar on Aquinas.

At least two of the points that Mr. Anastaplo makes here are related to topics that I have taken up in various posts.

The first is Mr. Anastaplo's suggestion that Aquinas might have been a secret writer:

"The remarkable astuteness of Thomas Aquinas, in dealing competently with one subject after another across decades, might even make one wonder what he 'really believed.'  I myself somehow gathered that Leo Strauss, in his last years, came to suspect that the remarkably intelligent and learned Thomas Aquinas he had come to know must have had more reservations about the religious orthodoxy of his day than he considered it responsible to make explicit.  This would permit us to question, among other things, the story that has Thomas eventually repudiating his massive intellectual accomplishments as mere 'straw,' an assessment that might even call into serious question any Faith that may have seemed to require such an apparent absurdity."

Mr. Anastaplo's thought here is remarkably similar to the argument of Tom West that Aquinas was a secret writer who had to be cautious in expressing his doubts about Christian doctrines.  Last summer, I wrote a series of posts on West's reasoning.

If Aquinas can be read as suggesting the possibility of a natural law based purely on natural experience, without any need for appealing to Biblical revelation, that natural law might have been grounded on an Aristotelian biology of human nature.  I have developed this thought in various posts--for example, here, here, and here.

The second point that catches my attention in Mr. Anastaplo's statement is his comment about Strauss, moral virtue, and Heidegger:

"Mr. Strauss observes (p. 164) that 'intellectual perfection or wisdom, as unassisted human reason knows it, does not require moral virtue.'  I have chanced to question this assumption, particularly in my identification of Martin Heidegger as 'the Macbeth of philosophy.'  That is, I ahve been moved to wonder about the ultimate reliability of any serious thinking about critical philosophical questions by anyone as morally flawed (that is, as unable to see critical moral realities) as Heidegger was revealed to have been (a presumptuousness on my part which may even seem to question therefore the Straussian lifelong commendation of Heidegger as a remarkable Thinker, indeed as perhaps the greatest in the Twentieth Century, however dreadfully flawed he turned out to have been morally)."

In our discussion at my home, some of us pointed to the troubling passage in Natural Right and History (151) where Strauss says that "the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated human being."  This has become one of the fundamental teachings of Straussianism--that the philosophic life is the only good life by nature, and that moral life is not good in itself, because it has only instrumental value in serving the philosophic life.  In our discussion, Mr. Anastaplo defended Strauss on this point.  But here in this statement, Mr. Anastaplo suggests that Strauss is open to criticism on this point, and the case of Heidegger illustrates the problem--someone who cannot see moral reality cannot be a serious thinker.

Moreover, as I have indicated in previous posts, I am disturbed by the dogmatic way in which Strauss and the Straussians assert the superiority of the philosophic life over the moral life with very little supporting argumentation.  Notice the way Strauss speaks in the passage quoted by Anastaplo: "intellectual perfection or wisdom, as unassisted human reason knows it, does not require moral virtue."

This does not go beyond mere assertion--"as unassisted human reason knows it"!  I have elaborated my thought about this in various posts--for example, here and here.

Mr. Anastaplo has come up in some previous posts here, here, here, and here.

Altman's Nine Theses on Strauss as the German Stranger

The argument of Will Altman's The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism can be summarized in nine theses:

1. Biblical dualism
2. Biblical liberalism
3. Platonic dualism
4. Platonic liberalism
5. Straussian anti-dualism
6. Straussian anti-liberalism
7. Nazi anti-dualism
8. Nazi anti-liberalism
9. Straussian Nazism

In my comments on these nine theses, there will be some repetition from my previous post on Altman's book.

Altman identifies himself as a Jew, a Christian, a Platonist, and a liberal.  These religious, philosophic, and political commitments support one another, he argues, because the Bible and Plato teach a dualism that provides the metaphysical ground for political liberalism.  Strauss rejects the dualism and the liberalism of the Bible and Plato.  In doing so, Altman concludes, Strauss agrees with the intellectual core of National Socialism--in its nihilistic denial of dualism and liberalism--and thus he became the German Stranger in the United States, seeking to destroy the American enemy of German Nazism.

Altman thus sets a big task for himself.  It's hard to imagine that anyone could provide sufficient evidence and argumentation for all of these claims in one book.  And, indeed, he leaves some of these claims as assertions without much support.

Biblical dualism is one of Altman's less controversial claims.  Given the existence of a transcendent God, reality is divided into "two worlds"--the real world of divinity and the apparent world of ordinary human experience.  This dualistic metaphysics is shared by Judaism and Christianity, because Christianity is originally a Jewish religion.  Here Altman apparently agrees with Nietzsche about the "two worlds" tradition of the Western Biblical culture.

Biblical liberalism is a much more controversial claim.  To support it, he cites only two Biblical verses--1 Samuel 8:7 (on the conflict between the rule of kings and the rule of God) and John 18:36 ("My kingdom is not of this world") (27).  Altman believes that the true solution to the "theological-political problem" is the liberal solution--the separation of religion and politics through religious toleration (527).  It's easier to find this in the New Testament than in the Old Testament, which is why it was easier for Locke to find support for religious toleration in the New Testament than in the Old Testament.  Christian proponents of toleration like Roger Williams contrasted the theocracy of the Jewish polity with the New Testament teaching that Christians were not to expect a legal enforcement of their religion.

In defending Platonic dualism, Altman accepts the traditional interpretation of Plato as teaching "the absolute existence of transcendent Being and the problematic existential status of everything else" (14).  The transcendent peak of Platonic philosophy is the ascent to the Idea of the Good.  This puts Plato in opposition to Aristotle's naturalism.    Plato really is a Platonist, and Aristotle really is an Aristotelian.  Altman elaborates this in his new book on Plato--Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (2012). 

Altman argues that Plato's dualism is found most clearly in the Symposium, the Republic, and the Phaedo.   In the other dialogues, Plato's teaching is challenged in various ways.

In contrast to the true Plato, Altman argues, "Strauss's Plato" (or "Farabi's Plato") is actually the Athenian Stranger of the Laws, which is an anti-Platonic book, with no Idea of the Good and with a political theology that is invented by the Stranger for his political ends.  Strauss distorts the Republic by reading it through the lens of the Laws.  Actually, Altman suggests, the Athenian Stranger is Plato's prediction of Strauss, the German Stranger.

For the student of Plato, Altman's reading of the Republic as Platonic in contrast to the Laws as anti-Platonic is perhaps his most intriguing idea.

Like Clement of Alexandria and Augustine (522), Altman sees Plato's dualism as prefiguring Christianity and the transcendent God of Israel who identifies Himself as "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14).

So, again, Altman agrees with Nietzsche--Christianity is "Platonism for the common people" (19).

Altman's affirmation of Platonic liberalism is one of his most controversial claims.  Traditionally, Plato has been read as a fervent critic of democracy, and generally modern liberalism is assumed to be fundamentally contrary to Plato's political thought.

Oddly enough, one of Strauss's insights supports Altman's reasoning for Plato's liberalism.  Strauss points out that when Plato gives his history of regimes in Book 8 of the Republic, his sequence of five regimes corresponds to Hesiod's history of the five races of men (CM, 130-33; LAM, 35).  Consequently, democracy as the fourth of five corresponds to Hesiod's divine race of heroes.  So, although Plato presents democracy as a bad regime, he also suggests that it comes closer to the golden age than any other bad regime.  The end of democracy is not virtue but freedom--the freedom of each to live as he pleases by choosing from among all the possible human lives.  This freedom of choice makes democracy the only bad regime in which some people can choose the philosophic life.  Indeed, the conversation of the Republic, in which people are free to philosophize about all the various regimes is possible only in a democracy like Athens.  Even if Socrates is a critic of democracy, he shows his preference for democracy by his action in living in Athens, fighting in its wars, and living by its laws.  So while democracy does not aim at excellence or virtue as such, democracy does secure a freedom of choice that allows people the freedom to choose excellence or virtue, including the excellence of the philosophic life.  If one believes that philosophy is the highest life, as Strauss does, then the openness of democracy to philosophy might lead one to regard democracy as at least the best of the bad regimes.

In his book on Plato, Altman elaborates this Straussian insight into democracy as the best of the bad regimes, and this constitutes his argument for Platonic liberalism.  But then in his book on Strauss, Altman never seriously considers the possibility that such reasoning could have supported Strauss's qualified embrace of liberal democracy.

In his book on Plato, Altman comments on "Plato's characteristically serious joke: despite appearances, Democracy--fourth on Plato's list as the Age of Heroes is fourth in Hesiod--is philosophy's golden age; i.e., the golden age tout court" (349).  The democratic freedom to choose one's own way of life is the precondition for Glaucon's choosing justice and the precondition for the philosophic discussion in the Republic--democracy is the only regime where the philosophic life can be freely chosen.

Altman suggests that those like Karl Popper who see the Republic as a defense of totalitarianism fail to see this Platonic endorsement of democratic freedom, and they also fail to see that the totalitarianism of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws is meant to be a challenge to Plato's teaching.

Altman recognizes that the depiction of democracy in Book 8 of the Republic does offer a comically exaggerated image of democracy's aimless freedom and formless equality.  But he suggests that this very comic exaggeration is part of Plato's pedagogy:

"Attacking 'the democratic man' as a lazy, scatter-brained, selfish, shape-shifter, incapable of any sustained and consistent dedication to fixed principle, should be recognized for what it is: effective pedagogy.  Certainly no effective teacher of adolescent males is unfamiliar with Plato's technique.  Through Socrates, Plato is challenging the freedom-loving reader to prove him wrong by overcoming the typical democrat's directionless drift, a drift that leads to Tyranny.  Encouraged by neither the state nor the prevailing temper of the times, any student capable of shame may yet, under the influence of a good teacher, seek other influences--the influence of Greek philosophy, for example--and practice an internal politics quite different from what prevails.  And there is always the fear of what may follow Democracy: of what may happen if no heroes arise." (354)

Was there something like this in the pedagogy of Strauss--attacking "democratic man" so that his freedom-loving students and readers would be challenged to prove him wrong?  After all, Altman praises Arlene Saxonhouse for recognizing the Platonic argument for democracy, but he does not identify her as a scholar influenced by Strauss (350, n. 142).

Altman might respond by arguing that the Straussians can't appreciate Plato's liberalism because they can't appreciate the dualism in which it is grounded.  But this contradicts what Altman notices about the purely naturalistic grounding of democracy in Book 8 of the Republic.  According to Altman, Socrates states "the single most important truth about democracy" (353) when he says: "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live" (562c).  If democracy is rooted in natural freedom, it's not clear that this requires any appeal to a supernatural dualism.  Altman writes:

"This is not to say, of course, that Democracy values the Idea of the Good: none of the defective cities do this.  But unlike the false forms of the merely apparent good sought after in Timocracy (honor), Oligarchy (wealth) and Tyranny (absolute power), Democracy's good is merely an indefinite plurality: freedom (cf. 562b10-c2).  Of course, Plato does not regard freedom per se as the Good.  In fact, it is worth repeating the central Idea of Platonism as often as necessary: Plato regards only the Idea of the Good as the Good.  But because the citizens of a democracy (unlike other cities) can agree on no one thing that is absolutely good--other than the freedom to seek after their good--only here is the door left open to philosophy, as 'the bazaar of constitutions' passage indicates." (Plato, 353-54)

Democratic freedom allows for human beings to pursue their natural desires, which includes the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and a few human beings will be inclined by this natural desire to live a life of philosophic inquiry, which might include questioning whether there is an Idea of the Good.  But regardless of what we might think about the Idea of the Good, we can recognize the natural goods of human life as constituted by the natural human desires.   Liberal democracy is naturally good in so far as it secures the freedom that is the condition for the possibility of the expression of those natural human desires.

My point here is that while Altman is surely right about Straussian anti-dualism--the tendency of Strauss and the Straussians to dismiss the metaphysical dualism of Platonism as not truly Plato's teaching--it's not clear that this must lead to Straussian anti-liberalism.

Moreover, I am not convinced by Altman's thesis about Nazi anti-dualism, because as I have argued in another post, many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantian dualists who appealed to eternal values grounded in some transcendent realm of absolute good.

Clearly, Strauss was a critic of liberal democracy.  But the question in dispute is whether Strauss was a friendly or unfriendly critic.  Against Altman's claim that Strauss was an unfriendly critic of liberal democracy, Strauss's defenders can quote what appears to be a clear statement from Strauss: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy" (LAM, 24).

Altman identifies this as the "'Golden Sentence' of Straussian apologetics," because it is so frequently quoted to show that Strauss was a friend of democracy (GS, 356).  Altman's commentary on this sentence illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of his argumentation. 

The strength of his argument here is in pointing out Strauss's use of the word "we" in the Golden Sentence, in contrast to his multiple uses of "I," "me," and "my" in the first paragraph of the essay in which the Golden Sentence appears ("Liberal Education and Responsibiliy").  This is significant if one considers what Strauss says about how Maimonides uses the word "we" to distinguish a popular opinion from what he himself believes.

Strauss could have said: "I am not permitted to be a flatterer of democracy precisely because I am a friend and ally of democracy."  I agree that we should criticize Strauss for not speaking in such an emphatic way so that all his readers could recognize him as a friendly critic of liberal democracy.

Nevertheless, the weakness of Altman's commentary is that he fails to note that the immediate context of the Golden Sentence suggests a rather clear but qualified embrace of liberal democracy.  Strauss writes:

"What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy?  What are the prospects for the liberally educated to become again a power in democracy?  We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy.  While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence.  No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone. . . . As matters stand, we can expect more immediate help from the humanities rightly understood than from the sciences, form the spirit of perceptivity and delicacy than from the spirit of geometry.  If I am not mistaken, this is the reason why liberal education is now becoming almost synonymous with the reading in common of the Great Books.  No better beginning could have been made." (LAM, 24)

Notice that Strauss evokes the same Platonic argument for democracy that Altman adopts: "by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence."  Moreover, many of those influenced by Strauss--Martin Diamond and William Galston, for example--have developed this idea as supporting the conclusion that liberal democracy can cultivate human excellence by cultivating the "liberal virtues."

Moreover, the conviction that a liberal education through the Great Books can promote excellence, at least among those few open to such an education, underlies much of Strauss's influence in promoting the study of the classic texts of political philosophy as well as the Great Books generally. 

My criticism of Altman here is that in his determination to demonize Strauss as anti-liberal, he fails to acknowledge that he and Strauss ultimately agree in their friendly criticism or qualified embrace of liberal democracy as--in James Madison's words--"the least imperfect" form of government.  In his Plato book, Altman writes: "Indeed, the highest praise Plato has for Democracy is indirect.  Why wouldn't that be?  Everyone who has ever fought for Democracy with intellectual weapons knows that it is the worst form of government except for all the rest of them" (354-55).

One example of this "least imperfect" character of liberal democracy is the liberal distinction between state and society.  To demonstrate "Strauss's ineradicable hatred for Liberal Democracy," Altman quotes this "extraordinary passage":

"To realize that the Jewish problem is insoluble means never to forget the truth proclaimed by Zionism regarding the limitations of liberalism.  Liberalism stands or falls by the distinction between the state and society or by the recognition of the private sphere, protected by the law but impervious to the law, with the understanding that, above all, religion as particular religion belongs to the private sphere.  As certainly as the liberal state will not 'discriminate' against its Jewish citizens, as certainly is it constitutionally unable and even unwilling to prevent 'discrimination' against Jews on the part of individuals or groups. To recognize a private sphere in the sense indicated means to permit private 'discrimination,' to protect it, and thus in fact to foster it.  The liberal state cannot provide a solution to the Jewish problem, for such a solution would require the legal prohibition against every kind of 'discrimination,' i.e., the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between state and society, the destruction of the liberal state." (Altman, GS, 517-18, quoting LAM, 230)

Altman complains that in affirming this as a "truth" in 1962, Strauss had chosen to blind himself to the truth of his experience in the United States where he had been free to live and work as a Jew without persecution.  What Strauss affirms here as a "truth" was actually something that he had learned in Weimar Germany, and he would not allow his American experience to show the falsity of this truth.  But to reach this conclusion, Altman has to pass over in silence Strauss's explanation that he accepts the "uneasy solution" to this problem offered by liberal democracy.  "There is nothing better than the uneasy solution offered by liberal society, which means legal equality plus private 'discrimination'" (JPCM, 317; LAM, 231). 

Strauss's willingness to accept the "uneasy solutions" of liberal democracy and his failure to endorse any anti-liberal alternative as providing superior solutions refute Altman's thesis of Straussian Nazism.

In fact, Altman implicitly concedes the weaknesses in this thesis.  He recognizes that Strauss regarded Hitler as a fool (GS, 323-26, 451-52, 515-16).  He also recognizes that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society.

And yet, Altman insists that Strauss was "remarkably successful" in his project "to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself" (516).  Where's the evidence for this?  Is there any evidence that Strauss and his students have in fact destroyed liberal democracy's faith in itself?  Clearly, many of those under Strauss's influence have actually defended liberal democracy--Jaffa, Diamond, Galston, Anastaplo, and many more.  Would Altman say that all of these people failed to get the secret message from Strauss?  If so, who did get the secret message that Strauss wanted to destroy liberal democracy's faith in itself?

In his section on "My Personal Encounter with Straussianism," Altman begins with this startling claim: "As is now the case with every American, I came under the influence of Leo Strauss long before I'd ever heard his name" (393).  Really?  Every American has been under Strauss's influence without knowing it?  And consequently, every American has been losing faith in liberal democracy?  Wild claims like this weaken Altman's argumentation.

Still, I am persuaded that Altman has shown that Strauss is open to the criticism that he was not emphatic enough in defending liberal democracy against the ideas of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger.  Strauss never really offered a thorough refutation of these ideas, and instead he showed some attraction to them--most clearly in his lectures on "German Nihilism" and the "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism."  Significantly, these lectures were not published in Strauss's lifetime.

In "German Nihilism," Strauss seemed to admire the "young German nihilists."  Many of the ideas he attributed to them were recurrent themes of Strauss's writing.  For example:

"It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is at it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with teh basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral; the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness." (GN, 358)

In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," Strauss left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberal democracy:

"All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot  bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger." (RCPR, 29)

George Anastaplo has told the story of trying to arrange a meeting between Strauss and Strauss's old friend Hans Jonas.  Anastaplo reports that Strauss refused to meet with Jonas because Jonas had met with Heidegger once in the late 1960s.  For Anastaplo, this showed Strauss's hatred of Heidegger for his support of the Nazis. 

I am not persuaded, however, that this story shows that Strauss exercised better judgment in his handling of Heidegger than did Jonas. Jonas had publicly criticized Heidegger's ideas.  In fact, his 1964 lecture on "Heidegger and Theology" provoked an international controversy because of the vehemence of Jonas's criticisms, and there was even a front page story in the New York Times about the controversy.  This led to lecture invitations for Jonas from around the world to explain his disagreements with Heidegger.  Jonas wrote to Heidegger demanding that he renounce his Nazism and confess his mistakes.  Jonas was disappointed when Heidegger refused to answer.  Strauss did nothing like this.  Instead, Strauss praised Heidegger--just after Heidegger had reaffirmed his support for Nazism in 1953--as "the only greater thinker in our time."  Anyone who wants to defend Strauss against Altman's charges must explain Strauss's behavior.