On a Possible Epicurrean Garden for Philosophy: Philosophy and the City in the Thought of Leo Strauss

An evolving interpretative context has pitted interpretations of
Strauss as a furtive Nietzschean nihilist on the one hand against
an understanding that he was primarily a Jewish thinker on the
other. I will argue that he was neither. Strauss was attempting to
recover what he categorized as the original idea of philosophy as
theoretical and contemplative. But given the novel late modern
situation of philosophy, that required that theory be
reconceptualized. Further, following his own understanding of
Nietzsche, he wished to separate future philosophy from the city,
sending it off to a newfound detachment in a postmodern epicurean
garden. Far from aiming at unleashing a new band of
philosopher kings, Strauss aimed at epicureanizing philosophy by
separating future philosophy from the constructivist interventionist
stance it adopted during the modern epoch. That separation
required, however, that the political be given a newfound
autonomy, beyond the possibility of the End of History.

I

Naturally, we have heard the accusation that has arisen recently
that Leo Strauss was really a furtive Nietzschean nihilist and
atheist operating under the esoteric cover of discussions of Natural
Right and Revelation.¹ Surprisingly, we also have an expanding
literature on Strauss as a “”Jewish thinker.””² My position is that
Strauss was neither a Nietzschean nihilist nor a Jewish thinker. He
was primarily trying to rethink the nature of philosophy and what it
could be in the future. This rethinking took on a “”political”” element
because Strauss saw philosophy in its origins as born out of a
confrontation between philosophy and the city. And in its present
situation, Strauss saw philosophy as endangered by the modern
longing for the End of History and the abolition of the political this
implied. Strauss’s reflections on day to day political matters were not
his primary focus; those reflections were derivative from his primary
concerns regarding the nature and future of philosophy.

But to say that for Strauss philosophy was the central concern
does not immediately solve all problems. For did Strauss see philosophy
primarily as a form of activism (perhaps along the lines of a
Nietzschean voluntarism) or as a form of contemplation? Assuming
as I do that the answer is ultimately the latter, did Strauss understand
contemplation as the detached theoretical reflection upon unchanging
metaphysical and ontological realities—””Nature”” or “”Being””—
or was contemplation understood differently? Once again, my conclusion
is that the second possibility is where Strauss comes to take
his stand.

Strauss complicates matters by arguing that the point of departure
for philosophy is always “”phenomenological,”” in the sense of
grounded in the “”everyday”” articulation of things. Almost always this
understanding is deflected by Strauss in the direction of an allegedly
Socratic, dialectical position. This leads in a direction wherein
philosophy would appear to be incapable of being a simply theoretical
activity unless it can leave its point of departure behind completely.
But Strauss also presents philosophy as a theoretical contemplation
of unchanging “”fundamental questions.”” And he presents
philosophy as an activity that always has to defend itself against the
city. So understood, that which is defended would appear to have to
be a detached theoretical activity. When all is said and done, these
various indications may not be mutually consistent or capable of
being synthesized.

II

It is curious that debates about Strauss in recent years have been
transformed into a confrontation between Strauss as Nietzschean
atheist versus Strauss as religious thinker given that a prior generation
of commentators posed the issue in such a significantly different
fashion. For them, the issue was whether Strauss was a defender of
liberal, Lockean modernity, especially in its American liberal capitalist
permutation, or an antidemocratic, anti-liberal, absolutist
“”ancient.””

We should recall that in the American academy, Strauss was one
of the leading generals in the battle against social science positivism
and the ascendancy of the fact-value dichotomy. (See Storing,
Rothman and Cropsey) By arguing that modern, social science
positivism was relativist in a way that would inevitably lead to
historicism, Strauss emerged, by a hasty dualistic process of elimination,
as an antiquarian and absolutist. (See Gunnell 1978) In response,
Strauss argued that most of his allegedly objectivist, positivist
opponents were in reality just closet liberals who furtively
brought their liberal “”values”” in the back door. (See “”Epilogue”” in
Storing) No doubt this confrontation helps explain why in his
opponent’s eyes Strauss was a conservative, and in the minds of
some, thereby necessarily anti-democratic—i.e. primarily a political
thinker.

Strauss’s scholarly explorations of classical political thought and
the Natural Right tradition, along with his criticism of the philosophic
foundations of historicism—which he saw as implicit in
proto-liberalism—also brought forth the accusation of absolutism
and anti-democratic sympathies. It was argued that at the heart of
liberalism lay voluntarism, toleration and diversity. Any attempt to
suggest that there was a natural fabric to human existence or a
natural hierarchy of human types of life would jeopardize the
toleration needed to foster competing and diverse voluntarily chosen
lifestyles.

In one defense of liberalism it was argued that relativism,
academically referred to as “”anti-foundationalism,”” was the prerequisite
for legitimizing the necessary, democratic, voluntarist act of
pure choice. Strauss threatened this commitment and thereby became
an anti-democratic, backward-looking conservative in the eyes
of his detractors. On the other hand, many self-proclaimed supporters
saw in the possibility of a recovery of a classical Natural Right
position the means to overcoming what they saw as a deepening
moral and political crisis—either of modernity or of Western civilization
more generally. They looked on favorably at the possibility of
recovering absolute standards. (See Jaffa 1982)

Hence it is all the odder that the contemporary orthodoxy among
detractors makes Strauss a Nietzschean nihilist and atheist. (Drury,
Holmes, Rosen, Ferry) All of Strauss’s discussions of Natural Right,
Athens and Jerusalem, the limitations of positivism and historicism—
in short, all of the things that previously got him labeled an
absolutist—are now seen as no more than an exoteric surface
constructed for the sake of misdirection. The point of this misdirection,
however, is still held to be the pursuit of a conservative, antidemocratic
political agenda. Again, Strauss is reduced to being
primarily a political thinker.

The newer Strauss allegedly believes that philosophy is the only
intrinsically valuable life. But since philosophy rests on no natural or
trans-historical foundation—and hence has nothing unchanging to
theoretically contemplate—all it can do is engage in Nietzschean
acts of will that stand in mid air and impose a world of “”values”” on
the non-philosophic many. Philosophy is reduced to a form of
voluntarist activism on the part of a new breed of philosopher-kings
who must dictate to non-philosophers how they should live.

Along the previous battle lines, it was Strauss’s liberal opponents
who were the Nietzschean voluntarists; now it is Strauss. A curious
reversal. But the outcome is the same. In each case Strauss becomes
an anti-democratic conservative, political thinker. Either he is an
absolutist who undermines self-defining democratic individualism
or he is an elitist voluntarist who sees no alternative to the imposition
of a groundless order on the unwashed many by the wise few—a few,
it is feared, made up entirely of a secret order of “”Straussians.””

This position has evoked an emerging counter-orthodoxy among
a number of Strauss’s supporters which by comparison with the
views of earlier supporters, inflates the importance of Strauss’s
discussion of “”Athens and Jerusalem.””³ Many now conclude that in
the “”tension”” between Athens and Jerusalem, Strauss chose Jerusalem
and hence some now see Strauss as primarily a “”Jewish thinker.””
In short, the new debate between Strauss’s supporters and detractors
seems to be focusing on the issue of Strauss’s belief in God and
Revelation rather than his commitment to unchanging Nature as a
standard for absolutist political norms.

It is fascinating that Strauss has elicited so many widely divergent
interpretations. I want to argue that they are all made possible
by the central core of Strauss’s thought which, following Strauss, I
will designate “”Platonist.””⁴ But Strauss’s Platonism is of a kind that
could only be possible after the tradition shattering thought of the
last 150 years. The only vague recognition of this influence is by those
who attribute Nietzscheanism to Strauss. But they have failed to pay
proper attention to Strauss’s own interpretation of Nietzsche. Strauss’s
Nietzsche is not a voluntarist but rather a Platonist. Central to
Strauss’s Nietzsche is an attempt to recover “”Nature.”” His Nietzsche
focuses on the possibility of a future breed of philosophers who—
unlike the modern philosophers—would again adopt a detached
theoretical stance rather than public activism—i.e., a new form of
epicureanism. Finally, while Strauss’s Nietzsche focuses on the
future status of religion in the aftermath of the collapse of modern
rationalism, he clearly sides with philosophy.⁵

Strauss was not a Nietzschean in the conventional sense his
detractors propose, nor an historicist in his own sense of the word.
And as I have argued elsewhere, the alleged tension between Athens
and Jerusalem rather quickly dissolves on a theoretical level—
Strauss’s depictions of Reason and Revelation make both Platonic.⁶
Strauss, like his Nietzsche—and his Heidegger—understood that
the present situation of philosophy was unique and precarious. It is
this understanding that conditions all of Strauss’s efforts.

III

In his one, late, extended interpretation of a Nietzschean text,
Strauss asserts that for Nietzsche Nature was a problem but it was
nonetheless a concept he could not do without. (Strauss 1983, pp.
174-191) I believe the same is true for Strauss. Paradoxically, the
issue of Nature is framed theoretically by Strauss using a philosophical
problematic he took from the author he asserted was the
quintessential historicist, Heidegger. While on some rhetorical
occasions Nietzsche was for Strauss an historicist, his “”late”” presentation
of Nietzsche stresses the importance of “”reintegrating man
and Nature.”” Heidegger, on the other hand, was for Strauss, in
several public pronouncements, the author who had completely
expelled Nature, and thereby eternity, making philosophy as a
theoretical activity impossible. It is most assuredly in opposition to
radical historicism that Strauss undertook all his mature explorations
of Socrates, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plato in an
attempt to recover the “”natural experience”” of reality. “”Nature”” had
to be recovered if “”contemplation”” were to be the end of philosophy.

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Yet Strauss makes it clear as well that even though philosophy
grew out of what he presents as a “”natural consciousness”” or “”natural
understanding,”” it was initially conditioned by a specific historical
situation which included a distinctive tradition of authority in
opposition to which philosophy emerged. Hence even if we conceptualize
“”natural consciousness”” as in some fashion “”universal,”” there
appears to be both universal and particular factors conditioning at
least the origins of philosophy.

Strauss uses terms such as natural consciousness, natural awareness,
natural world, pre-scientific understanding, pre-theoretical
understanding, interchangeably. While these terms are used to
explain the situation or understanding from which philosophy
allegedly emerged, they are all decidedly non-Greek. They would
never have been used by Plato or Aristotle, let alone the pre-
Socratics. Indeed, these terms have a pedigree, and it is straightforwardly
late-modern. To put the matter succinctly, these terms
emerge in a discourse conditioned by the late-modern situation we
occupy, not that at the origins of the tradition of philosophy.

For example, the idea of a “”natural consciousness”” plays an
important role in Hegel’s Phenomenology.⁷ Hegel uses the term to
designate the early consciousness of man where experience is
allegedly unmediated by conceptuality. It exists on the level of
“”immediacy.””⁸ Immediate consciousness is dominated by the senses
and results in a naïve realism that takes external objects as totally selfsubsistent
and independent of man’s thinking. Hegel’s Phenomenology
is an attempt to show why this immediate consciousness points
beyond itself toward higher, more comprehensive forms of consciousness
because immediate consciousness can never arrive at a
consistent understanding. Once we rise to a realization that the
constituting principles of our experience of reality are in us, in
thought, we transcend once and for all the naïveté of this natural
consciousness—not that significant numbers of individuals might
not always remain mired in its narrowness.

Terms like pre-scientific and pre-theoretical, which Strauss uses
interchangeably with terms like natural consciousness and natural
experience, have a later origin in the varied and ambiguous intellectual
tradition known as Phenomenology.⁹ For present purposes the
two most important exemplars of Phenomenology for Strauss were
Husserl and Heidegger. Strauss took courses from both and refers
to both in his published writings. Both Husserl and Heidegger
argued that science arose out of and always carried along with it
presuppositions taken from “”pre-scientific”” awareness, an awareness
which, in Hegelian terms would nonetheless exist at a temporal
point well beyond the “”natural consciousness.”” Husserl was led to
the precipice of concluding that modern science grew out of a
particular practical situation, and by carrying with it the presuppositions
of that origin, could never be “”objective.”” If so, no “”methodology””
could ever remove the hegemony of these presuppositions.
But Husserl drew back from the precipice in a desperate last minute
attempt to generate a “”rigorous science.”” Nietzsche took a similar
thought and carried it to the more logical conclusion that modern
science was just one interpretation among many and of no greater
dignity than others. Nietzsche in fact went so far as to assert that the
understanding of modern science rested on a slavish and plebeian
“”spirit of revenge.””

Still hoping to ground science or philosophy as a “”rigorous””
theoretical science, Husserl’s ultimate, objective foundation remained,
in Cartesian fashion, a transcendental ego. Despite all his
talk about “”lived experience”” and the “”life world”” the pre-scientific
awareness for Husserl was a theoretical awareness. It was Heidegger
who argued for the absolute epistemic priority of the practical
revelation of reality. Hence for Heidegger, pre-scientific awareness
was simultaneously “”pre-theoretical.”” Strauss repeatedly pointed to
Heidegger’s greater depth in realizing that the initial, practical
revelation of things is not as mere objects theoretically grasped, but
as pragmata, the things we deal with actively in our doing and
making.(Strauss 1989, p. 29 and 1983, p. 29-37)¹⁰

For Heidegger, there is always an a priori, foundational, practical,
lived, “”everyday”” experience of reality. All detached theoretical
staring contemplates objects already revealed within a practical
world that is a whole and is constituted prior to theoretical detachment.
For Heidegger, this practical revelation of reality is conditioned
by the distinctive shared Worlds of unique historical groups
of individuals. Hence, pre-theoretical reality is not fixed once and for
all times. The various peoples and their Worlds come and go
unpredictably even if they leave residues which are passed on to
others.

For Heidegger, everything that comes out into the open and
becomes “”visible”” and has a shared appearance is dependent upon
that which does not appear, the “”World.”” The difficulty arises when
a World has become moribund and a new one has not mysteriously
come to pass and enclosed a charmed group of individuals within it.
In fact, the more sobering danger in Heidegger’s eyes was the
possible loss of worldliness per se in the impending hegemony of the
monolithic revelation of reality lurking in the increasing autonomy
of a global technological civilization.¹¹

For Heidegger, the very possibility of things coming forward
into presence for us is always determined by something which is
absent. As absent, “”It”” can never be self-consciously mastered or
projected. No autonomous willing by “”legislators,”” philosopherkings
or overmen can ever be efficacious for they always come along
too late and are determined by a prior revelation even if it is decaying
or moribund. Even though Heidegger recognized the likelihood of
an impending global, technological civilization, he hoped worldliness
itself might still be regenerated as a determinative category of
our humanity, or our humanity would be lost. But on the basis of his
philosophy that could never be more than a hope despite all his efforts
as midwife. Hence for Heidegger, “”only a god can save us now.””

By making terms such as natural consciousness and pre-theoretical
awareness co-terminus in the way he does, Strauss has
effected one of many of his syntheses. Specifically, he has synthesized
Hegel and Heidegger. Strauss’s entire mature undertaking to
explore the pre-philosophic origins out of which philosophy grew,
makes sense only if it is possible to recover a pre-theoretical relation
to the world that is not determined mysteriously and idiosyncratically
by Heideggerian Worlds. For Strauss, natural experience must
be pre-theoretical in Heidegger’s sense, but “”natural”” in something
like Hegel’s sense. There must be a relation to the world, which is
recoverable at least by thought, if not simply repeatable in practice.
That relation to the world also has to have a foundational status. In
some fashion it must be a “”natural”” given.¹² “”We are natural beings
who live and think under unnatural conditions—we must recall our
natural being in order to remove the unnatural conditions of
thought.”” (Strauss 1988, p. 184)¹³

The unavoidable issue that emerges is one specifically raised by
Hegel. Would not the natural, pre-philosophic consciousness so
partake of contradiction and confusion that it would inevitably point
beyond itself? For Strauss the answer is yes. Inherent in natural
consciousness as he presents it is precisely an intrinsic contradictoriness.
As Strauss poses the matter, reflecting on the things visible to
all citizens in pre-theoretical awareness, especially as articulated in
publicly shared opinions and speeches, points toward philosophical
reflection precisely because of the contradictoriness. Unlike Hegel,
for Strauss it is necessary to recover the only “”natural”” origin
repeatedly. Perhaps this is because, among other things, philosophy
needs the dialectical experience of confronting and culling the
contradictoriness of the pre-theoretical presentation of things. It is
that “”natural”” self-showing that conditions the possibility of philosophy.
Otherwise we are thrust into a groundless modern constructivism.
Another way of putting this is that philosophy needs the experience
of contradictoriness, tension and perhaps even strife as much for
Strauss as for Nietzsche and Heidegger.

My point so far is that Strauss’s undertaking makes sense only on
the basis of a philosophic problematic that rests on premises drawn
from late-modern philosophy and not primarily from ancient, medieval
or proto-modern philosophy. It should also be clear that such a
problematic makes no sense whatsoever on the basis of a Scriptural
dispensation, although if the holy is intrinsically part of natural
experience—as I would argue both Strauss and Heidegger believe—
philosophy can never eradicate or replace religion.

IV

Armed with this philosophic problematic for the recovery of the
natural, we can move to Strauss’s reflections on the origins of the
philosophic tradition out of natural experience.¹⁴ Despite having
posited a pre-theoretical “”natural”” articulation of reality, Strauss
begins by stating unequivocally that the discovery of the idea of
Nature is the work of philosophy. There is, in short, no experience
of the idea of Nature in “”natural experience,”” just as there is no
acceptance of the naturalness of natural experience among those
who discovered the “”idea of Nature.””¹⁵ For the philosophers natural
experience was “”conventional”” (nomos vs. physis). Nonetheless,
natural consciousness and natural experience—or “”common sense,””
another equivalent term Strauss introduces, which specifically points
toward a shared worldliness—point toward the concept or “”idea of
nature.””¹⁶ It is only in this fashion that they are linked

In explaining how the idea of Nature was discovered, Strauss
points to such common sense experiences as the priority that will
“”naturally”” be given to evidence one has seen with one’s own eyes as
opposed to that which originates from second hand accounts or
hearsay. To this Strauss adds that since the arts have been known
from the beginning of human existence, the distinction between the
man-made and that which is not man-made is “”natural”” for the
natural consciousness. Indeed, the things not made by man are
designated “”natural”” by natural experience. Nature, so understood,
refers to the things that emerge into presence for us on their own,
without human intervention, thereby pointing to the existence of an
origin or cause other than man. Hence for natural experience, to be
is to be self-caused, or at least to proceed from a mysterious cause
that is not man.¹⁷ Finally, Strauss points out that natural experience
was eventually confronted with the existence of different laws in
different places together with the realization that fire burns in the
same way everywhere.

Properly combined, these “”natural”” perceptions yield the idea of
Nature. In its essence philosophy comes into view as a contemplative
theoretical grasping by the mind directed toward a/the first cause.
Since it appears to the mind not the senses this cause has the status
of an “”intelligible.””¹⁸ To the extent the first cause is not man-made or
conventional, it can seem to point in the direction of an unchanging
first cause. Consequently, in the initial manifestation of philosophy,
“”to be is to be eternal,”” and simultaneously “”to be is to be intelligible.””
While eternality and intelligibility are conditioned by the
situation of philosophy’s Greek origin, they remain, in various
permutations, re-appropriated throughout the tradition of philosophy
in different ways. Strauss attempts to re-appropriate them anew.

Common sense or natural experience never put two and two
together in the way initial philosophy did, hence it never discovered
the idea of Nature. It is only a detached theoretical attitude that
could do this. Why it took so long for this stance to emerge is
anybody’s guess—i.e., why the theoretical attitude took so long to
emerge and then emerged precisely where it did. But it is only the
theoretical attitude that raises the question of whether or not there
exists something that is true everywhere, that is its own cause and can
be grasped by an individual with the “”mind’s eye,”” such that the idea
of Nature came forth initially as the self-caused eternal archê that is
graspable by thought. With the discovery of the idea of Nature came
the idea of philosophy as the theoretical search for Nature or Being
understood as cause. Strauss frequently acts as if this represents the
eternal paradigm for philosophy. But by his own deeds he shows that
this conclusion is incorrect.

For the Greeks, and perhaps for pre-philosophic experience
everywhere, the good came forth as determined by a combination of
what is old and what is one’s own, i.e., as ancestral or traditional. But
deferring to our predecessors in this fashion only makes sense if
those who came before were higher or better than we are. That is
possible only if our predecessors were in direct contact with the gods
or were gods themselves. Hence natural experience traces the good
back to a cause that is not human in origin, indeed is supra-human.
Initial philosophy, further conditioned by this “”natural”” origin, does
something similar by moving back in time in search of its first cause
as the basis of the good. Hence, the good and the true are associated
with what is simply first, from which everything else derives.¹⁹

But if we follow the logic of Strauss’s argument, everything
changes with the “”Socratic turn.”” The Socratic/Platonic conception
of philosophy departs from the idea of philosophy. Pre-Socratic
philosophy wished to theoretically grasp the first things directly, in
pure thought in abstraction from the senses. Socratic/Platonic philosophy,
as Strauss presents it, concludes that this approach leads to
“”blindness”” or “”madness.”” It may be a divine madness, but it is
madness just the same. Consequently, Socratic/Platonic philosophy
develops not only a new conception of philosophy but a new
conception of Nature, cause and truth as well.²⁰

In the Socratic/Platonic approach, as presented by Strauss, one
begins by interrogating the data of the senses especially as the visible
world is informed by the publicly shared opinions about things.
Public speech takes foundational priority. Hence Strauss presents
the Socratic/Platonic approach as “”phenomenological.”” Using this
point of departure, the Socratic/Platonic approach implies that there
is no such thing as an unmediated natural consciousness as Hegel
presents the matter. There is an admission that there is always an
element of thought that co-mingles with the senses through the
element of shared opinions. Those shared opinions are intimately
linked with the becoming visible of things. Platonic/Socratic philosophy
begins with the way things are publicly present for all, or what
is “”first for us”” and not by pursing “”what is first per se.””

When interrogated theoretically, pre-theoretical awareness presents
itself as a world composed of a multiplicity of discrete things.
“”To be is to be a thing.”” And things first come to sight as the pragmata
of our doing and making. The world presents itself as a heterogeneity
of things that sort themselves out into discrete groups or tribes of
things. These tribes of things, or visible eidê, are elicited by the
Socratic “”what is”” questions. According to this new approach, the
whole is a whole made of parts. In the process, the ultimate cause of
the whole becomes inaccessible or at least is no longer the primary
object of reflection. But the question regarding the ultimate ordering
or articulation of the parts points toward what lies beyond them
as their cause. Hence, over time there will be various speculations
about the articulation of the whole or its cause, but Socratic/Platonic
philosophy can get no further than asserting that it knows what it
cannot know—i.e., the first cause per se cannot be known even
though we cannot help poetically speculating about it.

By starting from what is first for us we appear to preclude
definitively getting to what is first simply. To the extent that what is
first simply is unavailable, theoretical contemplation is called into
question since according to the idea of philosophy it requires an
object qua first cause. Either theory must be abandoned or reconceptualized.
Aristotle tried to return to a conception of pure
theory, contemplating the first cause. So did much of the philosophic
tradition. When that notion of theory collapsed authors like
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and especially Heidegger, according to
Strauss, dropped theory in favor of praxis.²¹ My argument is that
Strauss tries to rethink the possibilities of an autonomous theory
using phenomenological premises. And it is precisely his post-
Heideggerian conceptualization of the Socratic turn that allows him
to do this.

In Strauss’s version of the Platonic/Socratic approach, we get a
philosophy that understands the extent to which theory is dependent
on a prior practical articulation of reality that comes forth in
shared, everyday experience. This leads to the following conclusion:
If we associate the term Being with that which is first simply, and it
is unavailable, “”to be is to be always mysterious.”” Socratic/Platonic
philosophy, as presented by Strauss, concurs with both Scriptural
Revelation and Heidegger, the first things are mysterious. So conceived,
Platonic/Socratic philosophy is an eternal affront to the idea
of philosophy which presumes to grasp Being as the first cause, a
cause graspable in thought. It is precisely this understanding of
theory that Aristotle re-enthrones with his radical separation of
theory from practice and theoretical wisdom from practical wisdom.
²² This latter view of autonomous theory conditions the philosophic
tradition, apparently having short-circuited Strauss’s version
of the Platonic-Socratic move almost immediately.

Strauss’s version of Socratic/Platonic philosophy concludes that
the cause or the Being of things is associated with the “”what”” or
“”essence”” of the individual tribes of things. Hence by concluding
that “”to be is to be a thing”” we are shielded from the theoretical
blindness or madness threatened by the formula “”to be is to be
eternal and intelligible.”” But this shielding is simultaneously the
destruction of the idea of philosophy. To the extent that the idea of
Nature or Being is transferred from the first cause to the multiplicity
of the essences of the various tribes, the first cause per se in principle
has the status of Not-Being or Nothing. Everything that “”is”” is caused
or surrounded by Nothing. The resonance of Heidegger is again
unmistakable. But the resonance of the Plato of the Republic where
the idea of the good is beyond Being is also clear. Again, in principle
at the core of reality is a mystery, which brings Platonic/Socratic
philosophy into the vicinity of religion, if not completely “”going over””
to the side of religion, an accusation Strauss hurled at Heidegger. We
are saved from contemplating the Nothing only by theoretically
moving the locus of Being to the multiplicity of whats or essences.
This may be no more than a theoretical sleight of hand.

Following Heidegger, Strauss’s depiction of Socratic/Platonic
philosophy posits the epistemic priority of the practical revelation of
reality and hence the dependence of philosophy upon something
that is not “”intelligible.”” Strauss’s Socratic/Platonic understanding of
philosophy, while directing us away from the idea of philosophy,
nonetheless tries to salvage the idea of Nature by transforming it into
an ensemble or heterogeneity of natures. But the matter becomes
more complicated when we reflect on the ramifications of Strauss’s
equation of the doctrine of the eidê (i.e. Being qua the ensemble and
heterogeneity of “”whats””) with his famous, if seemingly paradoxical,
assertion that the doctrine of ideas reduces to the eternal ensemble
of “”fundamental questions.””

Strauss argues that in the history of philosophy what inevitably
emerges is a set of “”fundamental”” theoretical positions each of which
elicits sects devoted to them as the last word. (Strauss 1963/1991 p.
194-96)²³ This sectarianism undermines the Socratic/Platonic approach
to philosophy, which, it turns out, not only phenomenologically
articulates the heterogeneity of eidê that are publicly displayed
but also contemplates various fundamental metaphysical positions
and practical alternatives.²⁴ It is precisely these fundamental issues
that become the object of theory and not the potentially blinding
attempt to directly grasp the first things, the whole, the first cause or
the allegedly ultimate question Quid Sit Deus.²⁵ In short, Strauss’s
conception of theory does not have Being or Nature qua cause as its
object. It has the spectacle of recurrent human doings as it object.
Such contemplation is ontological only to the extent that one
transforms ontology in the way a Hegel does into the study of the
history of thought and deed.²⁶ But the thoughts and deeds are, in
Nietzschean fashion, recurrent rather than sequential.

For now let us keep in mind two things. First, much of what I
have presented so far of Strauss’s attempted recovery of the origins
of philosophy not only is conditioned by Heidegger’s problematic
regarding the priority of the pre-theoretical but it represents an
ongoing dialogue with Heidegger regarding the true origins of the
philosophic tradition whereby Strauss attributes to the pre-Socratics
and Aristotle much of what Heidegger attributes to Plato. In the
process there is the positing of the pre-theoretical as “”natural”” even
though in philosophic terms it is “”conventional.”” Second, we should
notice the variety of different usages of “”nature”” that we have already
confronted. My argument is that Strauss attempts to craft a novel
usage that can line up with a novel understanding of future philosophy,
an idea, I will argue, that Strauss gets from his Nietzsche—e.g.
Nietzsche’s idea that only in the future can humanity become natural
for the first time.²⁷

#page#

It seems to be Strauss’s position that each conception of Nature
is determined by its situation. In other words, reality presents itself
in a certain way consistent with different situations. Each selfpresentation
contains a possible conception of Nature. One might
expect therefore that the present self-presentation of reality would
also present a conception of Nature if it were not obliterated by the
theoretical perspective of historicism that has become conventional
wisdom. As a theoretical perspective, historicism, like all theoretical
perspectives, is derivative from a practical revelation of reality—and
Strauss argues specifically that the origin of the historical consciousness
per se comes from the conservative attempts to defend practice
against the effects of the French Revolution. In other words, historicism
is contingent. Emancipated from historicism’s hegemony, we
might perhaps re-discover a concept of Nature. I believe this is
precisely what Strauss attempts, not the recovery of some previous
permutation. Strauss’s Nietzsche also presents us with a similar
attempt to find our “”naturalness”” in the future.

V

Strauss’s Nietzsche is, from the perspective of conventional scholarship,
as iconoclastic as his view of Platonism. But it is precisely by
comparing Strauss’s late interpretation (in Strauss 1983) with the
conventional view of Nietzsche as a voluntarist nihilist,²⁸ that we see
what is distinctive. (I develop this more fully in G. Smith, 1999)
When we do so we are struck by the extent to which Strauss’s
Nietzsche is not a voluntarist nihilist who thinks philosophers should
will “”values”” ex nihilo, but is rather engaged in an attempt to recover
Nature. By contrast, the voluntarist tradition wishes precisely to
emancipate man from Nature. Central to Strauss’s treatment of
Nietzsche is also the uncharacteristic centrality of religion. Strauss’s
Nietzsche looks forward to an unavoidable increase of religiosity in
the future. Yet perhaps precisely because of this, Strauss’s Nietzsche
also looks forward to the need for a new form of future philosophy
that is categorically different than past manifestations of philosophy.
What is really distinctive is that for Strauss, as for his Nietzsche, that
future form of philosophy will in fact be a detached theoretical
activity. Finally, Strauss’s Nietzsche is a Platonist.²⁹
Strauss argues that for Nietzsche the central philosophic issue
was a concern that in the future philosophy needed to rule over
religion rather than vice versa. Strauss says that this contrasts with
the situation at the origins of the philosophic tradition where the
central issue was to assure the rule of philosophy over the city.
Initially, religion was subsumed under the city and its laws. Only
later, due to the Scriptural tradition, did religion gain autonomy and
pose an independent problem for philosophy, a problem confronted
by medieval thought and presumed to have been transcended by
modern thought. By comparison with his Nietzsche, Strauss says
that Heidegger simply went over to the side of what amounts to the
religion of the poets leaving no place for philosophy qua theory.
Strauss sided with his Nietzsche.

For Strauss, as for his Nietzsche, the prediction that the future
would include a newly robust and assertive religiosity seems to
follow from the collapse of modern rationalism. With the decline in
faith in reason, nothing would stand in the way of a newly assertive,
if nonetheless post-scriptural, religiosity. This is especially true if
one has concluded that the natural consciousness always includes an
element of the holy. This future religiosity would build upon the
autonomy religion gained through the separation of religion from
politics that emerged in the modern era, to assert not just its
autonomy but hegemony once its other—reason—declined. This
hegemony might well be aided by a decline, if not abolition, of the
political toward which global modern technological civilization
points.

Strauss’s Nietzsche argues that if future philosophy is in fact to
rule over a uniquely assertive religiosity it would need to be radically
transformed. None of the past permutations of philosophy could
have performed the task—albeit Strauss’s Maimonides, as the
spokesman for the “”natural”” understanding of rationalism, might in
Strauss’s mind give some clues to how this might be accomplished.
(Strauss 1935/1987, p. 3) But in the end, most of the needed clues
are more clearly deployed in Nietzsche.

Strauss and his Nietzsche see a recurring, perhaps eternal,
tension between religion and philosophy. This tension is designated
by Strauss as the theological-political problem, or the tension
between Reason and Revelation, Athens and Jerusalem. It may be
more eternal than the tension between philosophy and the city that
seems so central to Strauss’s teaching. Only if one took one’s bearings
by the origins of the philosophical tradition could one see the
tension between philosophy and the city as forever primary. Contrary
to Alexander Kojeve, who saw the abolition of the political not
only as the end toward which History aimed, but as good, Strauss saw
its possibility as a threat to our very humanity. But that it was bad did
not prove it was entirely impossible. By predicting the possible
hegemony of a newly robust, autonomous religiosity in the future,
Strauss and Nietzsche point to the possibility of the decline in
importance of the political, or put another way, the End of History.

If the political declines, only philosophy could limit a potentially
autonomous religion. But philosophy could only do so once it was
emancipated from the “”prejudices”” of all past philosophy. According
to Strauss’s Nietzsche, the entirety of the past tradition of philosophy
was narrow and prejudiced, incapable of seeing its errors and
limitations. But contemporary “”Free Spirits,”” among whom Nietzsche
clearly places himself, have gained the strength, self-consciousness
and clarity to put off past prejudices and see the world as it is.

Strauss makes much of Nietzsche’s use of the term “”philosophers
of the future.”” According to Strauss’s Nietzsche, these future
philosophers will be religious in a way no past philosophers have
been—not just adopting the public stance of religious exegete like
Medieval philosophers—but actually being religious. But as postscriptural
“”philosophers,”” they will believe in a this-worldly circular
god conceived of as the Will to Power which eternally recurs as
appearance. It is clear that these “”philosophers”” will be incapable of
the high self-consciousness and free-spiritedness of present philosophers
like Nietzsche. But behind, outside, or “”above”” the “”philosophers
of the future”” will remain the Free Spirits of the future in a
high theoretical solitude emancipated from any but rare public
functions or tasks. They will be anything but activist philosopherkings.
Perhaps for the first time, philosophy could be emancipated
from the city to pursue a purely contemplative vocation, to pursue
the idea of Nature and the idea of Philosophy, but only if the Free
Spirits subtly and indirectly rule through the philosophers of the
future and their future religiosity. Strauss himself is moving in the
same direction as his Nietzsche, the recovery of Nature and the
emancipation of philosophy to a future contemplative solitude—
although as I have suggested, theory must be re-conceptualized in
a non-cosmological and non-metaphysical fashion.

We should consider two other examples from Nietzsche which
are not explicitly Strauss’s but nonetheless line up with Strauss’s own
teaching. In his Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,
Nietzsche argues that there is an untranscendable tension between
the requirements of everyday life and the needs and desires of freespirited
philosophy. In Strauss’s terms an untranscendable tension
between philosophy and the city exists. Again, this is a tenet central
to what Strauss meant by Platonism. Strauss’s Nietzsche proposes as
a solution to insulate everyday life and self-conscious thought
through the intermediacy of the priestly philosophers of the future.
Strauss is moving in the same direction.

Through his argument about the unavoidable tension between
Reason and Revelation or Philosophy and the City, Strauss makes a
move reminiscent of one Nietzsche made in The Birth of Tragedy.
For Nietzsche, the central tension in Greek civilization was presented
as that between Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies.
Tellingly, Nietzsche observed that the Greeks gave both tendencies
to themselves, in other words invented them, in the height of their
strength. We must note that far from making a choice for either
Reason or Revelation, Strauss publicly asserts the life-giving energy
that Western Civilization has drawn from the irresolvable tension
between Reason and Revelation. Strauss argues that Western Civilization
need not come to an end as long as that tension exists. It is
all too obvious, however, that in proposing this tension Strauss
theoretically stands outside either of its components at some third
point.

If we put together the idea of necessary tensions—Philosophy
and the City, Reason and Revelation—with the idea of a hierarchy
of human ends and types of human beings³⁰—and the resultant need
for esoteric speech—we arrive, figuratively speaking, at half of what
Strauss meant by Platonism which overlaps with what Strauss meant
by Natural Right.³¹ The other “”half”” is to be found in Strauss’s
distinctive presentation of the epistemic nature of the Socratic turn,
which I have argued is a synthesis of elements drawn from both the
classical Greeks and the modern Germans. To the extent that
“”Platonism”” so understood rests on a synthesis of elements drawn
from across the philosophic tradition, it is a novel synthesis and in no
fashion a “”return.”” As such, Strauss’s Platonism, like the understanding
of his Nietzsche, points forward to a novel, fully “”awake,””
permutation of philosophy to become manifest in the future.³² There
is ample evidence that Strauss looks forward to a novel future
manifestation of philosophy. But in his case it is a postmodern
“”rationalism”” born of a post-Heideggerian synthesis. This rationalism
would not be a return to Classical, Medieval or Modern
rationalism. It would be a rationalism that is contemplative in a new
sense such that the future philosopher will in no way be, or long to
be, a king.³³

Finally, Strauss’s Nietzsche—far from being the voluntarist
nihilist who qua philosopher-king wills moral and political dispensations
ex nihilo—longs for a “”re-integration of man into nature.”” But
the re- is misleading. Strauss emphasizes that his Nietzsche thinks
that only in the future can man be natural for the first time. For
Nietzsche, only at the end, freed from the accident of our animal
past, can we have a truly human end, thereby becoming natural for
the first time. Yet Nietzsche argues that in the past there was a close
cousin of “”nature”” to be found in instinct. But instinct does not
propel us toward human ends. In the present, Nietzsche sees us as
totally “”de-natured”” because Christianity and modern philosophy
were both moved by an anti-nature animus which robbed us of our
instincts. At present we have neither instinct nor a truly human end.
We are totally de-natured. For Strauss’s Nietzsche there is a past
showing of Nature and a future showing of Nature. Nature has more
than one possible historical showing of itself. I have already argued
that we find the same thing in Strauss. There is a pre-philosophic
showing of Nature; a pre-Socratic showing; a Socratic showing; a
post-Heideggerian showing; etc.

Contemporary humanity, however, is totally alienated from the
idea of Nature and hence in need of historical studies to recover it.
But this is a propaedeutic to a new deployment or showing of
Nature. Since Strauss asserts that Natural Right requires the idea of
philosophy which in turn requires the idea of Nature, the future
recovery of Nature opens the possibility of the future return of
Natural Right which in its initial permutations was eventually
betrayed.

VI

To this point I have largely abstracted from the issue that Strauss is
probably most associated with, his argument regarding the origin
and nature of political philosophy. Strauss links the Socratic turn
with the origins of political philosophy. Socratic/Platonic philosophy
came to self-conscious clarity about the ways in which philosophy
intrinsically threatened the city and was in turn threatened. With the
origins of Socratic/Platonic philosophy came a higher reflexivity and
“”awakeness”” than anything prior. Thought turned to thinking itself
and its conditions. Strauss clearly attributes to Socratic/Platonic
philosophy a higher degree of self-consciousness than would Hegel.
The level of reflexivity Strauss attributes to Socrates/Plato occurred
much later in Hegel’s understanding, in fact with the advent of
modern philosophy. Perhaps Strauss consciously projected backwards
unto Socrates/Plato a degree of reflexivity that is questionable.

Be that as it may, Strauss argues that the higher reflexivity of
Socratic/Platonic philosophy is what made it concern itself far more
with rhetoric than had pre-Socratic thought. Hence it explicitly
addressed the need to speak in the language of the city. We arrive at
Strauss’s characteristic argument that the newly emergent political
philosophy represents the politic defense of the philosophers before
the political community. This seems to leave matters at the fact that
the moral and political prescriptions made by political philosophy
are largely self-interested. To that extent its principles are in the
service of a good outside the moral and political arena. That would
make it look as if in reality there is no rational basis for any actual
moral and political prescriptions. They are based on misdirection
and myth in the service of the good of the philosophers.

This appearance is what gives ammunition to those who argue
that Strauss’sNatural Right teaching reduces to nothing more than
philosophers manipulating life for their own benefit with total
disregard for the moral and political good. It also opens a path to the
charge that Strauss’s teaching has no real foundation and is no more
than prudent esoteric rhetoric.³⁴ Pushing this line of attack further,
it is asserted that according to Strauss the good life is the pleasant life
and only the life of philosophy is a pleasant life. Hence justice is not
only a lie projected in the service of the philosopher’s pleasure but
there is a complete disconnect between the naturally good, which is
allegedly pleasure, and justice—with justice and morality being seen
as intrinsically unpleasant. So the story goes. Hence the political has
no other point than to be manipulated for the pleasure of the few.

But if Strauss is a Nietzschean nihilist in the conventional sense,
then he believes that there is nothing unchanging, no “”Nature,”” no
real object of thought, hence no such thing as the idea of philosophy.
Consequently, fully awake philosophy can only consist of awareness
of the abyss conjoined with the personal desire for pleasure. This
awareness seems far more consistent with the anguish and anxiety
associated with the teachings of Nietzsche and Heidegger than the
pleasure of philosophy pointed to by Strauss’s detractors. It would be
a rare human being indeed who could make abysmal anguish the
basis of pleasure. But unlike Heidegger who specifically argues that
the origin of contemporary thinking is anxiety, not the wonder of
classical thought,³⁵ Strauss never wavers from placing the origin of
philosophy in wonder. Finally, what is the point of putting all of one’s
efforts in the service of defending philosophy if in fact it has no
object? Under those circumstance all a fully awake person could do
is choose another life.

Beyond these and other inconsistencies into which the position
that has Strauss as merely an esoteric nihilist is driven, I believe that
view is also called into question by several substantive facts. The first
is Strauss’s grounding of the philosophic enterprise in the
epistemically prior, practical revelation of reality—which for Strauss
means the moral, political and religious revelation of reality. The
second is the extent to which Strauss’s detractors miss the subtlety
of Strauss’s presentation of the issue of Nature and the Natural Right
tradition. Strauss’s depiction of Natural Right shows that it has
multiple permutations conditioned by multiple starting points.
Finally, Strauss differentiates between Natural Right and Natural
Law and he positively did not long for the return of the Natural Law
tradition. It is that tradition and not Strauss’s understanding of
Natural Right that is absolutist.³⁶

Strauss asserts that the common observable given from which
some Natural Right positions begin is the heterogeneity of the
human kind. Modern philosophy attempts to transcend this pretheoretical
given through a constructivism that posits an equally
shared abstract individuality that stands in the place of the observable
heterogeneity. Natural Right, like philosophy itself, must be
grounded in a pre-given autonomous reality, in this case human
nature as it is displayed in everyday understanding.³⁷

But some past Natural Right teachings also began by abstracting
from natural difference, beginning instead from what is common to
the heterogeneity of humanity. Hence there were actually two
strains of Natural Right, one that while acknowledging heterogeneity
looked for the commonality beneath it and one that accentuated
what is distinctive to different types of human beings rather than
what is shared. Strauss attempted to show that different Natural
Right teachings descended from each point of departure. Starting
from human commonality points toward taking human sociality and
man’s political nature as central. Proceeding from the distinctiveness
and heterogeneity of human beings led to ranking the individual
types of lives hierarchically with the most complete or perfect at the
top. It is this latter approach that Strauss’s detractors take as paradigmatic
of his own position. While Strauss at times seems to lean in this
latter direction—a position he attributes to his Nietzsche, Natural
Right and History is in fact surprisingly neutral toward the various
starting points and the various permutations of Natural Right.

After the Natural Right tradition developed, the two pure
starting points were transformed. Starting from the ideal of man’s
perfection pointed toward philosophy as man’s highest excellence.
Starting from the notion of what is shared commonly pointed toward
man’s political and social nature and eventually toward the perfection
of justice. This latter move eventually spun off the Natural Law
tradition which Strauss argues inevitably tried to generate a law
universally applicable to all in a world polis that could only be ruled
by God. This led toward the possibility of bringing together Natural
Law and Divine Law. But in this direction also lay the secular world
state of modernity and the End of History. It is at this point that
Strauss’s neutrality ceases. According to Strauss, one way or the other
the Natural Law tradition inevitably led toward moral and political
rigidity and some version of cosmopolitanism.³⁸ Both the rigidity and
the cosmopolitanism were betrayals of the Natural Right tradition.

While the Natural Law tradition descended from that branch of
Natural Right that begins from the commonality of man as a social
and political being, it seems to point toward the abolition of the
political. Perhaps this is why Strauss vastly prefers the Natural Right
tradition in any of its permutations to the Natural Law tradition. But
what he really hopes will ensue from his historical efforts is that in
the future we will plumb possibilities that were never developed
because they were closed off and abandoned by the Natural Law
tradition. This has about it an element of a “”second beginning.””

Strauss discusses one further maneuver of the past Natural
Right tradition. This permutation of the classical Natural Right
tradition blended or mixed the two original paths. The perfection of
individuals and the commonality of humanity when taken together
pointed toward mixing elements of both. The “”mixed regime””
wherein both philosophy and justice could prosper but only by
toning down the demand for perfect justice grew out of this move.
Strauss seems best disposed to this move among the prior Natural
Right positions. The mixed regime as the best regime can never be
perfectly just and doesn’t take its bearings by perfect justice as does
the Natural Law tradition. But neither does it put moral and political
life in the service of a trans-political end—philosophy—as many of
Strauss’s detractors claim he does. For the mixed regime to exist, one
must balance the competing claims of justice and pure theory. This
balancing effort seems to point, therefore, toward the hegemony of
practical wisdom as the faculty that does this balancing. That in turn
would undermine the higher dignity of contemplation by in effect
making practical wisdom prior and higher, as some of Strauss’s
commentators have claimed.

But the possible hegemony of practical wisdom only follows
from taking the “”mixed regime”” approach as Strauss’s last word. But
rather than siding with any past permutation of Natural Right
Strauss is primarily interested in recovering the idea of Nature as the
basis for a future Natural Right position. That position need not be
a replay of the past. As an historian Strauss’s neutrality only seems to
flag when it comes to the Natural Law tradition to which he is not
friendly. My argument is that Strauss points toward a postmodern
deployment of Natural Right that is consistent with a postmodern
deployment of Nature, an idea he got from his reading of Nietzsche.
As regards the possibility of Natural Right in any deployment,
Strauss asserts unequivocally that “”Natural Right presupposes philosophy
in its full and original meaning.””(Strauss 1950, p. 31) The
idea of philosophy makes it a contemplative pursuit. Its object is
Nature understood as in some fashion eternal and intelligible if not
primarily as first cause.³⁹ Hence the direction Strauss is heading
requires a new manifestation of the idea of Philosophy.

We should keep in mind that for Strauss, the idea of philosophy
rests on a theoretical directedness toward the idea of Nature. My
argument is that this is Strauss’s highest end, a new, postmodern
basis for theory and contemplation. How does this relate to Natural
Right? Just as Heidegger set himself the task of thinking Being in the
hopes that its recovery from oblivion would have unpredictable yet
sanguine practical ramifications, Strauss wished to recover Nature.
He sees that as the propaedeutic to recovering Natural Right. I do
not believe he thought the latter out in anything resembling concrete
terms. What might follow was for others to work out. His primary
concern was the future of philosophy

VII

If we limit ourselves to general outlines and paint with a broad brush,
we can sketch a picture of what may well have been Strauss’s
understanding of the history of philosophy. Pre-Socratic philosophy
grew out of a specific historical situation. It co-opted, extended,
synthesized and extrapolated from elements drawn out of the
everyday, common sense experience of the world in which it
existed—albeit it did not do this with full self-conscious clarity. Why
this philosophical culling of common experience originated when
and where it did is simply a mystery. It was a unique undertaking that
was done with almost no self-consciousness or reflexivity. There was
an element of madness in this initial manifestation of philosophy in
its attempt to grasp the first things directly. The Socratic/Platonic
transformation of philosophy attempted to defend philosophy against
this madness and the public opprobrium it occasioned. But the
Platonic/Socratic transformation of philosophy was almost immediately
betrayed by Aristotle who contrary to Strauss’s Plato enthroned
an autonomous theory that directly tried to think Being, and was
thereby forced to posit an autonomous practical wisdom and political
science. Given Strauss’s phenomenological understanding, such
a separation should not be possible.

#page#

Throughout the classical period various attempts were made to
generate a Natural Right position, permutations of which we have
discussed, none of which were entirely successful. This undertaking
was conditioned by the fact that law and justice were problematic
issues in the classical period. This Natural Right tradition, by the
time of Rome, generated the first manifestations of the Natural Law
tradition. At about the same time began the epochal confrontation of
philosophy with the Scriptural tradition. In this tradition, especially
in Judaism and Islam, the law was no longer problematic. Hence the
philosophers could draw the distinction between prophet and
philosopher, leaving the prophet to deal with law and justice and
leaving themselves to pursue theoretical contemplation. What this
amounts to is philosophy returning to the idea of philosophy as pure
theory together with a novel permutation of Aristotle’s division
between theory and practice and theoretical and practical wisdom.

The confrontation between philosophy and Christianity yielded
a different outcome. Within Christianity the day to day law remained
problematic, since Christians are called to accept articles of faith but
not specific legal institutions. Finding its roots in the Roman Empire,
Christianity had ready to hand an embryonic Natural Law
tradition that it embraced and expanded. A millennium later this led
to a rigid absolutism that strangled both practice and theory. In other
words, neither could come forth in anything resembling their
“”natural”” manifestations. The resultant reaction launched modernity.

Modernity launched two initially separate reactions against the
tradition it inherited, reactions which rather quickly merged. The
first reaction attempted to emancipate political practice from its
theoretical/theological stranglehold and launched modern political
philosophy via Machiavelli. Modern theory in turn tried to emancipate
itself from theological determination and hence tried to return
autonomy to theory but in the process launched modern technological
science instead, which was just a new form of practice masquerading
as theory.

Various other novelties emerged that would require a diversion
into Strauss’s reading of modernity, a diversion which is not consistent
with our primary purpose at the moment. For example, despite
his attempts to return autonomy to practice, Machiavelli did not
simply recover natural praxis which presupposes human heterogeneity.
By building on the common element shared by human
beings—understood now as consisting of fear, greed and ambition
rather than natural sociality—Machiavelli and later moderns “”lowered
the sights.”” At the origins of modernity, therefore, is not so
much a theoretical change of perspective as a moral one.

In its own attempt at autonomy, modern theory quickly put itself
in the service of modern practice—modern science always had as its
end the emancipation of humanity from physical need and want,
seeing that as the primary means to the human good. In the process,
modern theory projected what would count as reality, casting off into
indifference the pursu