Leo Strauss Quotes

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.

The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch.

But what is the core of the political? Men killing men on the largest scale in broad daylight and with the greatest serenity.

For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

Nihilism is the rejection of the principles of civilisation as such . . . I said civilisation, and not: culture. For I have noticed that many nihilists are great lovers of culture, as distinguished from, and opposed to, civilisation. Besides, the term culture leaves it undetermined what the thing is which is to be cultivated (blood and soil or the mind), whereas the term civilisation designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian.

Just as the banqueteers are drunk from wine, the citizens are drunk from fears, hopes, desires, and aversions and are therefore in need of being ruled by a man who is sober.

Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger.

At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity? Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?). [. . . And Why I'm Most Certainly Not! -- The Wall Street Journal, Commentary Column. May 5, 2005]

A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

Life is the joyless quest for joy.

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli's teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself. ...the most important consideration concerns that which transcends the city or which is higher than the city; it does not concern things which are simply subordinate to the city.

Aristotle doesn’t exist for Nietzsche.

The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer.

Political atheism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. No premodern atheist doubted that social life required belief in, and worship of, God or gods.

[H]e (Socrates) thus implies that there is a parallelism between the city and the human individual or, more precisely, between the city and the soul of the human individual. This means that the parallelism between the city and the human individual is based upon a certain abstraction from the human body.

It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.

Spinoza was I think a cool, not to say cold, man. His posture toward revealed religion—in particular, Judaism—was simple contempt for the confused ideas underlying revealed religion [which he regarded as] nonsense. His posture I believe is [more] that of the cocksure unbelieving scientist than that of any man of an inner tragedy.

So what Nietzsche says here is this: the better among the contemporary atheists, with whom Nietzsche is to some extent in agreement, will come to know what they are doing. They do not know it now. Now they are perfectly self–satisfied and think that they are free thinkers. They will come to realize that there is something infinitely more terrible, depressing, and degrading than religion or theism. [...] You have no idea what you are letting yourselves in for. The utter senselessness, the irrelevance of man which is implied in that atheism and you fools don’t see it.

Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man’s end—had become that center or origin.”   ~ Leo Strauss

But dogmatism—or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking"—is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

Passionately yes, passionately no” is the worst of all tastes. And now after one has overcome that, after one has followed this natural inclination, one must learn to put some art into one’s feelings and rather make an experiment with the artificial as distinguished from and opposed to the natural. That is what the true artists of life do. They do not follow the natural impulses, but experiment with the artificial.

The Prussian state is, for Hegel, the model most akin to the rational state because it represents, thanks both to the Protestant religion and the authority of the monarchy, a synthesis between the revolutionary exigencies of principles and the traditional exigencies of organization.

In 1951, the political philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum to describe the often misleading comparison of an opponent’s views or behavior to those of Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. The reductio ad Hitlerum, applied to Nasser, became a trope of British and French political language in the summer of 1956.

This is Nietzsche’s fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.

the complacency engendered by the tranquil possession of a God-given truth.

Nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable.

Nietzsche’s atheism is characterized by an element of gratitude; it is not simply a rebellion.

The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.

By virtue of being an -ism, pluralism is a monism.

Liberalism is belief in progress toward a goal which is itself progressive and therefore undefineable.

Nietzsche is never boring. He is always interesting, exciting, thrilling, glittering, breathtaking. He possesses a kind of brilliance and tempo which I believe was unknown in former times.

It thus becomes intelligible that modern Europe, once it had started out—in order to avoid the quarrel over the right faith—in search of a neutral ground as such, finally arrived at faith in technology.

It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it. Dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision.

The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right.

But I must say, if you could vulgarize what Nietzsche says you [would] arrive at what is going on all the time in the social sciences: the destruction of the whole, of every possibility of distinguishing responsibly between high and low, good and bad.

But there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality that are imposed even by the most liberal version of natural right, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. They chose the latter. Once this step was taken, tolerance appeared as one value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite. In other words, intolerance appeared as a value equal in dignity to tolerance. But it is practically impossible to leave it at the equality of all preferences or choices. If the unequal rank of choices cannot be traced to the unequal rank of their objectives, it must be traced to the unequal rank of the acts of choosing; and this means eventually that genuine choice, as distinguished from spurious or despicable choice, is nothing but resolute or deadly serious decision. Such a decision, however, is akin to intolerance rather than to tolerance. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.

[T]hough in all practical matters it is indispensable, either always or mostly, to follow custom, to do what is generally done, in theoretical matters it is simply untrue. In practical matters there is a right of the first occupant: what is established must be respected. In theoretical matters this cannot be. Differently stated: The rule of practice is 'let sleeping dogs lie,' do not disturb the established. In theoretical matters the rule is 'do not let sleeping dogs lie.' Therefore, we cannot defer to precedent . . . .

So I believe then that the primary motive, the most intelligible motive of the doctrine of eternal return in Nietzsche is to make intelligible nature as humanly willed and not given. And the whole difficulty in Nietzsche’s philosophy, I believe, is concentrated in this point.

The grand style of the Old Testament shows forth the greatness not of God, but of man, of what man once was. The holy God no less than the holy man are creatures of the human will to power. So that is a strange vindication of God, and we must read much deeper before we can understand it.

Rule of law is inferior to the rule of living intelligence because laws, owing to their generality, cannot determine wisely what is right and proper in all circumstances given the infinite variety of circumstances: only the wise man on the spot could correctly decide what is right and proper in the circumstances. [...] All laws, written or unwritten, are poor substitutes but indispensable substitutes for the individual rulings by wise men. They are crude rules of thumb which are sufficient for the large majority of cases: they treat human beings as if they were members of a herd.

So the knower whom Nietzsche has in mind has not, like Kant, the stark heaven above himself and to that one could say [also] the moral law within him, because he is beyond good and evil. But precisely because he is a knower in this sense he has a very exacting morality, a morality indeed beyond good and evil.

In a sense, all political use of Nietzsche is a perversion of his teaching. Nevertheless, what he said was read by political men and inspired them. He is as little responsible for fascism as Rousseau is responsible for Jacobinism. This means, however, that he is as much responsible for fascism as Rousseau was for Jacobinism.

The open society, it is asserted, is actually impossible. Its possibility is not proved at all by what is called the progress toward the open society. For that progress is largely fictitious or merely verbal. Certain basic facts of human nature which have been honestly recognized by earlier generations who used to call a spade a spade, are at the present time verbally denied, superficially covered over by fictions legal and others, e.g., by the belief that one can abolish war by pacts not backed by military forces punishing him who breaks the pact, or by calling ministries of war ministries of defense or by calling punishment sanctions, or by calling capital punishment das höchste Strafmaß. The open society is morally inferior to the closed society also because the former is based on hypocrisy.

Generally speaking, in pre-modern times you had an idealistic tradition, which was political, and a hedonisic tradition, which was non-political. Now in the 17th century a merger of these two traditions takes place, a political hedonism. And that is one of the greatest changes which has ever happened, and of course up to the present day this determines, with many modifications, that would lead us too far.

The Athenian cannot refute the atheists before he has stated their assertions. It appears that they assert that body is prior to soul or mind, or that soul or mind is derivative from body and, consequently, that nothing is by nature just or unjust, or that all right originates in convention. The refutation of them consists in the proof that soul is prior to body, which proof implies that there is natural right.

Moral life, it is asserted, means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness—the flag and the oath to the flag—are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall [the serious case, a central Schmittian concept], the serious moment, M-day, war. Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human: the sublime is unknown to the open society. The societies of the West which claim to aspire toward the open society, actually are closed societies in a state of disintegration: their moral value, their respectability, depends entirely on their still being closed societies.

[T]he more one reads Thucydides, the less one feels that Athens’s suffering was fitting or deserved. And, more generally, our first response to the book as a whole is not satisfaction at justice having been done, but is far more likely to be a feeling of sadness. This sadness arises, in large measure at least, from a growing sense that the defeat of Athens is not the victory of justice, but that justice itself is among the chief victims of the war.

Strauss expressly refers to the “Notes.” He continues: “If ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are the facts that transcend ‘culture’ or, to speak more exactly, are the original facts, then the radical critique of the concept of ‘culture’ is possible only in the form of a ‘theological-political treatise,’ which must, however, if it is not to lead again to the foundation of ‘culture,’ have the very opposite tendency to that of seventeenth-century theological-political treatises, especially those of Hobbes and Spinoza.

Hobbes's natural philosophy is of the type classically represented by Democritean-Epicurean physics. Yet he regarded, not Epicurus or Democritus, but Plato, as "the best of the ancient philosophers." What he learned from Plato's natural philosophy was not that the universe cannot be understood if it is not ruled by divine intelligence. Whatever may have been Hobbes's private thoughts, his natural philosophy is as atheistic as Epicurean physics. What he learned from Plato's natural philosophy was that mathematics is "the mother of all natural science." By being both mathematical and materialistic-mechanistic, Hobbes's natural philosophy is a combination of Platonic physics and Epicurean physics. From his point of view, premodern philosophy or science as a whole was "rather a dream than science" precisely because it did not think of that combination. His philosophy as a whole may be said to be the classic example of the typically modern combination of political idealism with a materialistic and atheistic view of the whole.

This abstraction shows itself most strikingly in two facts: when Socrates mentions the fundamental needs which give rise to human society, he is silent about the need for procreation, and when he describes the tyrant, Injustice incarnate, he presents him as Eros incarnate. In the thematic discussion of the respective rank of spiritedness and desire, he is silent about eros. It seems that there is a tension between eros and the city and hence between eros and justice: only through the depreciation of eros can the city come into its own.

There was a criticism written millennia ago but it is usually not considered, and that is in Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women, where they tried to establish a fully egalitarian society. And the women do that,and for this purpose: the women must rule. So this kind of inequality of the two sexes must prevail, just as the women’s lib movement would also lead in practice to gynecocracy, not to equality. All right, then we have this beautiful situation: everyone is equal and the women are the mothers who feed their children, the males. And a part of this, the feeding, is of course also sexual gratification. And here there comes in the difference between women who are attractive and women who are not attractive. A natural inequality. Therefore the legislator has to make a special law in order to equalize that inequality. So that (if I may be so crude, but since Aristophanes has done it before me I have some excuse) if a young man cannot sleep with a young girl before he has slept with an ugly one, there is a privilege given to the inferior to equalize people. That is the problem.

Socrates then turns to the communism regarding women and children and shows that it is desirable because it will make the city more “one,” and hence more perfect, than a city consisting of separate families would be: the city should be as similar as possible to a single human being or to a single living body, i.e., to a natural being. At this point we understand somewhat better why Socrates started his discussion of justice by assuming an important parallelism between the city and the individual: he was thinking ahead of the greatest possible unity of the city.

Through the discovery of nature the radical difference between these two kinds of “ways” or “customs” came to the center of attention. The discovery of nature led to the splitting up of “way” or “custom” into “nature” (physis) on the one hand and “convention” or “law” (nomos) on the other. [...] The distinction implies that the natural is prior to the conventional. The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right.

Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. But to grant that revelation is possible means to grant that the philosophic life is not necessarily, not evidently, the right life. Philosophy, the life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as man, would rest on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision. This would merely confirm the thesis of faith, that there is no possibility of consistency, of a consistent and thoroughly sincere life, without belief in revelation. The mere fact that philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy by revelation.

Nietzsche thought it impossible to find a purely political solution to the problem. This would mean, for example, an institutional solution. The political problem is for him a moral problem, and one can perhaps say—with a misuse of the term which is today fashionable, although not altogether misleading—[with] a religious solution, in spite of his atheism. In Nietzsche’s opinion, a society is not possible without a culture of its own. A culture requires ultimately some commitment, which we may loosely call a religion. This is Nietzsche’s chief concern: a regeneration of man. What this would mean in terms of institutions, etc., is of no concern to him.

It is true that “spiritedness” includes a large variety of phenomena ranging from the most noble indignation about injustice, turpitude, and meanness down to the anger of a spoiled child who resents being deprived of anything that he desires, however bad. But the same is also true of “desire”: one kind of desire is eros, which ranges in its healthy forms from the longing for immortality via offspring through the longing for immortality via immortal fame to the longing for immortality via participation by knowledge in the things which are unchangeable in every respect. The assertion that spiritedness is higher in rank than desire as such is then questionable.

[It is as] if they (followers of subculture) said in former times, [such as] in the 14th century or whenever, that in America everyone can do what he wants [and] everyone can pursue happiness in his own fashion. But every Sunday you see all of them using a certain type of car to go to certain kind of places to eat a certain kind of dinner and so on and so on. So while you have the extreme individualism as principle, in practice we have an amazing conformity. Now this is how Europeans looked at it, but I think if a European (if I can still imagine how a European thinks) would see the younger generation of American subculture, he would say they are exactly the children of their parents. They have a new conformism.

Nietzsche attacks violently the ideas of 1789: liberty, equality, fraternity, and that meant of course liberalism, and democracy, and socialism, and communism, and anarchism. [...] [B]ut Nietzsche also rejects the conservatives, and this is only a defensive position which, because it is only defensive, is being eroded and has no future. What remained on the political plane? What remained? Superman. But what is the political meaning of superman? So whatever one may say against Marx, [against] the way from Marx to practical Marxist politics (including Lenin), is very simple. But there is no clear way leading from Nietzsche, who touches all political hot irons with the greatest gaiety, one could almost say [that] this did not lead anywhere.

The tradition has been shaken at its roots by Nietzsche. It has altogether forfeited its self-evidence. We stand in the world completely without authority, completely without orientation. Only now has the question [of the right way of life] regained its full sharpness. We can again pose it. We have the possibility of posing it in full seriousness. We can no longer read Plato’s dialogues superficially, in order to notice admiringly that old Plato already knew this and that; we can no longer polemicize against him superficially. And the same with the Bible: we no longer think without evidence that the prophets were in the right; we ask ourselves seriously whether it was not the kings who were in the right. We really must begin entirely from the beginning.

Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things. It presupposes then that there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History. It presupposes in other words that any "realm of freedom" is not more than a dependent province within the "the realm of necessity." It presupposes, in the words of Kojeve, that "Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself." This presupposition is not self-evident. Kojeve rejects it in favor of view that "Being creates itself in the course of History," or that the highest being is Society and History, or that eternity is nothing but the totality of historical, i.e. finite time.

La rhétorique socratique a voulu être un instrument indispensable à la philosophie. Son but est de conduire à la philosophie les philosophes virtuels, à la fois en les exerçant et en les libérant des charmes qui font obstacle à l'effort philosophique et aussi en interdisant l'accès de la philosophie à ceux qui n'ont aucune disposition pour elle. La rhétorique socratique est juste au sens fort; elle est animée par un esprit de responsabilité sociale; elle se fonde sur la prémisse qu'il y a disproportion entre la recherche intransigeante de la vérité et les exigences de la société ou encore que toutes les vérités ne sont pas toujours inoffensives. La société tentera toujours de tyranniser la pensée. La rhétorique socratique est le moyen classique de déjouer continuellement ces tentatives.

One can state Descartes’s view by saying: nature may be bad, reason cannot be bad. Not nature but reason supplies the standard. Only such knowledge as is purely rational is certainly and evidently true. We possess purely rational knowledge— not of nature, because our knowledge of nature depends on sense perception. Nor do we possess purely rational knowledge of the soul, because what we know of the soul depends very much on internal perception, on what Locke and other men called reflection, and looking back at you. Purely rational knowledge, knowledge depending in no way on events or any other experience, we have only of the moral law, which is to say the law of freedom in opposition to the law of nature. This is the Kantian view: reason takes the place of nature for supplying standards.

For the Christian, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law (talmud or fiqh). The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has, to say the least, much less in common with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense. It is ultimately for this reason that the status of philosophy was, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in Judaism and in Islam than in Christianity: in Christianity philosophy became an integral part of the officially recognized and even required training of the student of the sacred doctrine. This difference explains partly the eventual collapse of philosophic inquiry in the Islamic and in the Jewish world, a collapse which has no parallel in the Western Christian world.

It is most important, both for the understanding of the Republic and generally, that we do not behave toward Thrasymachos as Thrasymachos behaves, i.e., angrily, fanatically, or savagely. If we look then at Thrasymachos’ indignation without indignation, we must admit that his violent reaction is to some extent a revolt of common sense. Since the city as city is a society which from time to time must wage war, and war is inseparable from harming innocent people, the unqualified condemnation of harming human beings would be tantamount to the condemnation of even the justest city. [...] Thrasymachos contends that justice is the advantage of the stronger. Still, this thesis proves to be only the consequence of an opinion which is not only not manifestly savage but is even highly respectable. According to that opinion, the just is the same as the lawful or legal, i.e., what the customs or laws of the city prescribe.

[E]very reader must be struck by the contrast between the outspokenness of these speeches and Thucydides’ own reticence. [...] Now this silence does not mean that he is indifferent, or that he no longer responds to men and events, as he encourages us to do, with approval and disapproval. It shows, rather, that he is a skillful political educator. For the moral seriousness that he fosters in us remains immature, it does not sufficiently help us to promote the well-being of our communities, which it necessarily wants to promote, unless it is guided by or culminates in political wisdom. And since political wisdom is primarily good judgment about unprecedented, particular situations, it is not so much a subject matter to be taught as a skill to be developed through practice. Accordingly, instead of telling us whether or not he approves of a given policy, Thucydides asks us to make our own judgments, and then to subject them to the testing that the war provides.

What Fārābī indicates in regard to the procedure of the true philosophers, is confirmed by a number of remarks about the philosophic distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric teaching which occur in the writings of his successors. Fārābī’s Plato informs us about the most obvious and the crudest reason why this antiquated and forgotten distinction was needed. Philosophy and the philosophers were “in grave danger.” Society did not recognize philosophy or the right of philosophizing. There was no harmony between philosophy and society. The philosophers were very far from being exponents of society or of parties. They defended the interests of philosophy and of nothing else. In doing this, they believed indeed that they were defending the highest interests of mankind. The esoteric teaching was needed for protecting philosophy. It was the armor in which philosophy had to appear. It was needed for political reasons. It was the form in which philosophy became visible to the political community. It was the political aspect of philosophy. It was “political” philosophy.

More precisely, in its earlier, healthier form the herd morality implied already that the sole standard of goodness is a utility for the herd—that is to say, for the common good. Independence, superiority, inequality are esteemed and recognized to the extent to which they were thought to be subservient to the common good or indispensable for it and not for their own sake. The common good was understood of course as a good of a particular society or tribe, and it demanded therefore hostility to the tribe’s external and internal enemies and in particular to criminals. This was part of the original herd morality. But this has completely changed in contemporary Europe. When the herd morality draws its ultimate consequences, as it does now, it takes the sides of the very criminals and becomes afraid of inflicting punishment. It is satisfied with making the criminal harmless, which is something very different from disarming the criminal [and] from inflicting punishment. By abolishing even the fear of the criminal, this is all justified by the identification of goodness with compassion.

The Cretan and Spartan laws were found to be faulty because they did not permit their subjects to taste the greatest pleasures. [...] The pleasures of banquets are drinking and singing. In order to justify banquets one must therefore discuss also singing, music, and hence education as a whole: the music pleasures are the greatest pleasures which people can enjoy in public and which they must learn to control by being exposed to them. The Spartan and Cretan laws suffer then from the great defect that they do not at all, or at least not sufficiently, expose their subjects to the music pleasures. The reason for this is that these two societies are not towns but armed camps, a kind of herd: in Sparta and Crete even those youths who are by nature fit to be educated as individuals by private teachers are brought up merely as members of a herd. In other words, the Spartans and Cretans know only how to sing in choruses: they do not know the most beautiful song, the most noble music. In the Republic the city of the armed camp, a greatly improved Sparta, was transcended by the City of Beauty, the city in which philosophy, the highest Muse, is duly honored. In the Laws, where the best possible regime is presented, this transcending does not take place. The city of the Laws is, however, not a city of the armed camp in any sense. Yet it has certain features in common with the city of the armed camp of the Republic. Just as in the Republic, music education proves to be education toward moderation, and such education proves to require the supervision of musicians and poets by the true statesman or legislator. Yet while in the Republic education to moderation proves to culminate in the love of the beautiful, in the Laws moderation rather takes on the colors of sense of shame or of reverence. Education is surely education to virtue, to the virtue of the citizen or to the virtue of man.

[I]t is perhaps more important to realize that the regime most difficult to change is oligarchy, the regime which occupies the central place in the order of regimes presented in the Republic. Surely, the city to be founded must not be tyrannically ruled. The best regime is that in which a god or demon rules as in the age of Kronos, the golden age. The nearest imitation of divine rule is the rule of laws. But the laws in their turn depend on the man or men who can lay down and enforce the laws, i.e., the regime (monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocracy, democracy). In the case of each of these regimes a section of the city rules the rest, and therefore it rules the city with a view to a sectional interest, not to the common interest. We know already the solution to this difficulty: the regime must be mixed as it was in a way in Sparta and Crete, and it must adopt a code framed by a wise legislator. The wise legislator will not limit himself to giving simple commands accompanied by sanctions, i.e., threats of punishment. This is the way for guiding slaves, not free men. He will preface the laws with preambles or preludes setting forth the reasons of the laws. Yet different kinds of reasons are needed for persuading different kinds of men, and the multiplicity of reasons may be confusing and thus endanger the simplicity of obedience. The legislator must then possess the art of saying simultaneously different things to different kinds of citizens in such a way that the legislator’s speech will effect in all cases the same simple result: obedience to his laws. In acquiring this art he will be greatly helped by the poets. Laws must be twofold; they must consist of the “unmixed law,” the bald statement of what ought to be done or forborne “or else,” i.e., the “tyrannical prescription,” and the prelude to the law which gently persuades by appealing to reason. The proper mixture of coercion and persuasion, of “tyranny” and “democracy,” of wisdom and consent, proves everywhere to be the character of wise political arrangements.

Todo ser humano y toda sociedad es lo que es en virtud de su máxima aspiración. La ciudad, si es sana, aspira no a las leyes que puede deshacer del mismo modo en que las hizo, sino a las leyes no escritas, la ley divina, los dioses de la ciudad. La ciudad debe trascenderse a sí misma. ...El factor más importante concierne a lo que trasciende la ciudad o que es más grande que la ciudad; no concierne a cosas que están simplemente subordinadas a la ciudad.

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the “subjective certainty” of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.

We are in need of a second education in order to accustom our eyes to the noble reserve and the quiet grandeur of the classics.

Owing to the position which “the science of kalām” acquired in Islam, the status of philosophy in Islam was intermediate between its status in Christianity and in Judaism. To turn therefore to the status of philosophy within Judaism, it is obvious that while no one can be learned in the sacred doctrine of Christianity without having had considerable philosophic training, one can be a perfectly competent talmudist without having had any philosophic training. Jews of the philosophic competence of Halevi and Maimonides took it for granted that being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive. At first glance, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed is the Jewish counterpart of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica; but the Guide never acquired within Judaism even a part of the authority which the Summa enjoyed within Christianity; not Maimonides’ Guide, but his Mishnah Torah, i.e., his codification of Jewish law, could be described as the Jewish counterpart to the Summa. Nothing is more revealing than the difference between the beginnings of the Guide and the Summa. The first article of the Summa deals with the question as to whether the sacred doctrine is required besides the philosophic disciplines: Thomas as it were justifies the sacred doctrine before the tribunal of philosophy. One cannot even imagine Maimonides opening the Guide, or any other work, with a discussion of the question as to whether the Halakha (the sacred Law) is required besides the philosophic disciplines.

Art presupposes nature, whereas nature doesn't presuppose art. Man's creative abilities, which are more admirable than any of his products, are not themselves produced my man: the genius of Shakespeare was not the work of Shakespeare. Nature supplies not only the materials but also the models for all arts;

The decline of reverence for old age found its most telling expression in Hitler's shameless reference to the imminent death of the aged President Hindenburg.

Modern man is a blind giant. The doubt of progress led to a crisis of Western civilization as a whole, because in the course of the nineteenth century, the old distinction between good and bad, or good and evil, had been progressively replaced by the distinction between progressive and reactionary. No simple, inflexible, eternal distinction between good and bad could give assurance to those who had learned to take their bearings only by the distinction between progressive and reactionary, as soon as these people had become doubtful of progress.

Logos without nous: that is in a way what modern science wants to be. Nous without logos is mysticism.

The whole galaxy of political philosophers from Plato to Hegel…assumed that the fundamental political problem is susceptible of a final solution. This assumption ultimately rested on the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live.

Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds.

...a wish is not a fact. Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true. Utility and truth are two entirely different things.

To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life—that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion—or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate. If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger et al.] adopted the second alternative.

When Thrasymachus begins to speak, he behaves according to Socrates’ lively description like a raving beast; by the end of the first book he has become completely tame. He has been tamed by Socrates: the action of the first book consists in a marvelous victory of Socrates. As we have seen, that action is also a disgraceful defeat of Socrates as the defender of justice. It almost goes without saying that Thrasymachus has in no way become convinced by Socrates of the goodness of justice. This goes far toward explaining Thrasymachus’ taming: while his reasoning proves to be poor, his principle remains victorious. He must have found no small comfort in the observation that Socrates’ reasoning was on the whole not superior to his, although he must have been impressed both by the cleverness with which Socrates argued badly on purpose and the superior frankness with which he admitted at the end the weakness of his proof.

Nietzsche wishes to emphasize the fact that apart from being a precursor of the philosophers of the future, he belongs to the scholars and not, for instance, to the poets or the homines religiosi. The emancipation of the scholars or scientists from philosophy is according to him only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. The things which we have observed in the 20th century regarding the sciences of man confirm Nietzsche's diagnosis. The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.

The Greek gods, these beautiful figures, of more than human perfection, but still of human shape. This means that for the Greeks, only the perfected man is divine. Or, to use a Biblical expression, only the perfected man is in the image of God, not man as man. And this is decisive for the later development. In other words, what we would call the non-democratic character of the Greeks, even of Greek democracy, that is implied in that. Only men of a certain perfection are truly human beings, not man as such. And therefore, this leads to the fact, which Hegel points out, that the famous anthropomorphism of Greek religion is imperfect because it abstracts from the ugly, the imperfect, suffering, pain, death. And this is according to Hegel, the superiority of Christianity, because God has become a man, a suffering man, and died. [For the Greeks…] God appears in products of the human imagination and not in the flesh. That is the limitation of Greek anthropomorphism.

Every student of the history of philosophy assumes, tacitly or expressly, rightly or wrongly, that he knows what philosophy is or what a philosopher is. In attempting to transform the necessarily confused notion with which one starts one’s investigations, into a clear notion of philosophy, one is confronted sooner or later with what appears to be the most serious implication of the question 'what a philosopher is,' viz., the relation of philosophy to social or political life. This relation is adumbrated by the term 'Natural Law,' a term which is as indispensable as it is open to grave objections.

[Nietzsche] refers to two great events which in modern times were made to prevent a radical deepening of human thought: Jesuitism in the 17th century and the democratic enlightenment in the 18th and 19th. But there are two men (in each case one man) who opposed these reactionary things. In the case of Jesuitism, it was Pascal; in the case of the democratic enlightenment, it is Nietzsche.

The fact that the command to sacrifice Isaac contradicted the prohibition against the shedding of innocent blood must be understood in the light of the difference between human justice and divine justice: God alone is unqualifiedly, if un-fathomably, just. [...] The apparent contradiction between the command to sacrifice Isaac and the divine promise to the descendants of Isaac is disposed of by the consideration that nothing is too wondrous for the Lord.

For almost all purposes the word of God as revealed to His prophets and especially to Moses became the source of knowledge of good and evil, the true tree of knowledge which is at the same time the tree of life.

[T]hese men composed their books; their songs or speeches are books. The Bible, on the other hand, is not a book. The most one could say is that it is a collection of books. The author of a book, in the strict sense of the term, excludes everything that is not necessary, that does not fulfill a function necessary to the purpose his book is meant to fulfill. The compilers of the Bible as a whole and of the Torah in particular seem to have followed an entirely different rule. Confronted with a variety of preexisting holy speeches, which as such had to be treated with the utmost respect, they excluded only what could not by any stretch of the imagination be rendered compatible with the fundamental and authoritative teaching; their very piety, aroused and fostered by the pre-existing holy speeches, led them to make such changes in those holy speeches as they did make. Their work may then abound in contradictions and repetitions that no one ever intended as such, whereas in a book in the strict sense there is nothing that is not intended by the author.

Through the Muses there are singers on earth, just as through Zeus there are kings. While kingship and song may go together, there is a profound difference between the two—a difference that, guided by Hesiod, one may compare to that between the hawk and the nightingale. Surely Metis (Wisdom), while being Zeus’s first spouse and having become inseparable from him, is not identical with him; the relation of Zeus and Metis may remind one of the relation of God and wisdom in the Bible.