Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides

Kenneth Hart Green

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226307039
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green explores the critical role played by Maimonides in shaping Leo Strauss's thought. In uncovering the esoteric tradition employed in Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, Strauss made the radical realization that other ancient and medieval philosophers might be concealing their true thoughts through literary artifice. Maimonides and al-Farabi, he saw, allowed their message to be altered by dogmatic considerations only to the extent required by moral and political imperatives and were in fact avid advocates for enlightenment. Strauss also revealed Maimonides's potential relevance to contemporary concerns, especially his paradoxical conviction that one must confront the conflict between reason and revelation rather than resolve it.            
An invaluable companion to Green's comprehensive collection of Strauss's writings on Maimonides, this volume shows how Strauss confronted the commonly accepted approaches to the medieval philosopher, resulting in both a new understanding of Maimonides and a new depth and direction for his own thought. It will be welcomed by anyone engaged with the work of either philosopher.  

NOTES

EPIGRAPHS

Philo Judaeus, The Special Laws, trans. F. H. Colson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), II, 44, 46–47, pp. 334–37. Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. A. I. Davidson, trans. M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 265–76. Cf. also Maimonides, Guide, 3.51, pp. 623–24, 627–28.

Abu Nasr al-Farabi, “Philosophy and Religion,” chap. 17 of The Perfect State, ed. and trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 280–83. Its original title is The Book of the Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City (Kitab mabadi’ ara’ ahl al-madina al-fadila).

Maimonides, Guide 1. Introduction, pp. 16–17.

Nietzsche, “Preface,” in Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), pp. 2–3.

Strauss to Jacob Klein, 20 January 1938, in Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften—Briefe, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Schriften, p. 545. His actual German words were “Maimonides . . . war ein wirklich freier Geist.” For an effort to trace the phases of discovery in Strauss’s thought, focused on the figure of Maimonides, as unfolded by and reflected in his letters to Jacob Klein, see Laurence Lampert, “Leo Strauss’s Recovery of Esotericism,” in Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, pp. 63–92.

CHAPTER ONE

1. For two unusually bold statements, see app. 4A in On Maimonides; and Philosophy and Law, p. 21. Cf. also “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, pp. 221–32, especially p. 230.

2. See “Introduction” to Philosophy and Law, pp. 21–39, as well as 102–3. See also Steven Lenzner, “Leo Strauss and the Problem of Freedom of Thought: The Rediscovery of the Philosophic Arts of Reading and Writing” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University). Cf. Guide 1.31–35, pp. 65–81.

3. See “Review of Julius Ebbighaus, On the Progress of Metaphysics,” in Early Writings, p. 215. See also Philosophie und Gesetz: Frühe Schriften, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften, p. 438.

4. For a curious transitional work by Strauss which as a lecture was never finalized in essay form, see “Cohen and Maimonides,” chap. 3 in On Maimonides. Heinrich Meier dates the lecture to 1931, based on Strauss’s designation on the manuscript; he also detects evidence that this comprises smaller sections of what was originally designed to be a larger work.

5. See Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” ed. and trans. George Elliot Tucker, Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5–12, and especially p. 6. In this dialogue with Gadamer, Strauss specifically mentions his recent “experience” of interpretation, i.e., with Maimonides. As Strauss asserts, Maimonides himself in authoring a new book based on his reading of an old book thoroughly “reflected on his hermeneutic situation.” See also “How to Study Medieval Philosophy,” chap. 1 in On Maimonides; and Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13, no. 3 (September 1946): 326–67, and especially p. 331.

6. See “Cohen’s Analysis of Spinoza’s Bible Science” and “On the Bible Science of Spinoza and His Precursors,” in Early Writings, pp. 139–72, 173–200; “Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science,” “Introduction to Maimonides’ Guide,” and “How To Begin,” chaps. 9, 10, and 11 in On Maimonides. Cf. Guide 3.51, pp. 618–20. Consider Albo, in Ikkarim (Roots), vol. 1, chap. 24, pp. 191–93; Ralph Lerner, Maimonides’ Empire of Light, p. 20; and Kalman Bland, “Moses and the Law according to Maimonides,” in Mystics, Philosophers, and Politicians: Essays in Jewish Intellectual History in Honor of Alexander Altmann, ed. J. Reinharz and D. Swetschinski (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), pp. 49–66.

7. For Strauss’s “Maimonidean” critiques of Spinoza and of Cohen, see Kenneth Hart Green, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 9–15, and 17–25.

8. See Michael Nutkiewicz, “Maimonides on the Ptolemaic System: The Limits of Our Knowledge,” Comitatus 9 (1978): 63–72; and David Blumenthal, “A Lesson from the Arcane World of the Heavenly Spheres according to Maimonides,” Hebrew Annual Review 9 (1985): 79–89. Cf. “Letter on Astrology,” pp. 179–80, with Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), bk. II, chap. 2, pp. 131–32. See also Steven Lenzner, “Author as Educator: Strauss’s Twofold Treatment of Maimonides and Machiavelli,” Claremont Institute, www.claremont.org. Also Lenzner, “A Literary Exercise in Self-Knowledge: Strauss’s Twofold Interpretation of Maimonides,” Perspectives on Political Science 31, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 225–34. For Maimonides on “necessary” versus “true” beliefs, see Guide 3.28, pp. 513–14; and Guide 1.71, pp. 178–79, for how to determine correct opinions. See also Shlomo Pines, “Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Maimonides, and Kant,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 20 (1968): 3–54; Warren Zev Harvey, “A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 151–72; Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially pp. 87, 94, 110–11, 173; C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006). Cf. Guide 3.32, pp. 525–31. With regard to Maimonides’ “modernity,” he refused to embrace or conceal any “superstitions” in religion, even if he often only subverted them with his use of irony, or also with what Strauss in a letter dubs “parody”: see Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften—Briefe, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Schriften, p. 553. Strauss prefers to stress Maimonides’ subtle use of parody in referring to the stench of animal sacrifices in the Temple (as had to be perfumed away), which humor supports his view of them as pagan relics. Curiously the great historian of Hebrew literature Israel Davidson obliquely traces the venerable medieval Jewish tradition of literary parody to Maimonides through one of his 13th–14th-century Hebrew translators, Judah al-Ḥarizi: see Parody in Jewish Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), pp. 5–7. Is it possible that this is another sign of the multifarious impact made by Maimonides?

9. See “Progress or Return?” and “Jerusalem and Athens,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 104–7, 377–405. Cf. Daniel Tanguay, “The Conflict between Jerusalem and Athens,” in Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 144–92. Consider Matthew Arnold, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” and “Porro Unum Est Necessarium,” chaps. 4 and 5 in Culture and Anarchy, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 126–52. See Isaac Husik, “Hellenism and Judaism,” in Philosophical Essays: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern, ed. Leo Strauss and Milton C. Nahm (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), pp. 3–14; Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966); original Russian version: Afiny i Ierusalim (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951); Louis Feldman, “Hebraism and Hellenism Reconsidered,” Judaism 43, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 115–26; David R. Lachterman, “Torah and Logos,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 17, no. 1–2 (1994): 3–27; Sergei Averintsev, “Ancient Greek ‘Literature’ and Near Eastern ‘Writings’: The Opposition and Encounter of Two Creative Principles,” trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, in Arion 7, no. 1 (1999): 1–39; and 7, no. 2 (1999): 1–26. Strauss’s assessment of Husik appears in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, pp. 235–66, especially pp. 246–58.

10. To reiterate, the “most common error” in modern thought for Strauss is the claim of modern philosophers to lay to rest the biblical challenge by attempting to ground themselves in the mere assumption that this challenge has been adequately dealt with, whether by their attempts to swallow it, to encompass it, to synthesize it, or to refute it. But in none of these attempts have they ever actually been able to achieve completely their goal, their multiple claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet even if it is needful to speak of “error,” it is also not to be read one-dimensionally. This is because it is vital to notice in Strauss’s thought that he speaks—occasionally, but most significantly—of “fruitful errors,” a notion which is intended to express something highly dialectical and even Platonic. The phrase “fruitful error” seems to derive from Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, ed. Arthur Livingston, trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston, 4 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), even if his notion seems not quite the same as Strauss’s. For what Strauss recognized about Nietzsche, see Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 379; Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 178–81.

11. Strauss refers most directly to the presence of Maimonidean thought among the Christian scholastics in his review of J. O. Riedl’s 1944 translation of the treatise of Giles of Rome, Errores philosophorum: the twelfth chapter in Giles’s book consists of a “refutation” of Maimonides. See Church History 15, no. 1 (March 1946): 62–63. See also Isaac Husik, History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1916); Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955); Lenn E. Goodman, “Maimonides and Leibniz,” Journal of Jewish Studies 31 (1980): 214–24 (with a translation of Leibniz’s “observations” in Latin on the Guide: pp. 225–36); Friedrich Niewöhner, Maimonides: Aufklärung und Toleranz in Mittelalter (Wolfenbüttel: Lessing-Akademie, 1988); Niewöhner, Veritas sive varietas: Lessings Toleranzparabel und das Buch “Von den drei Betrügern” (Wolfenbüttel: Lessing-Akademie, 1988).

12. See “Progress or Return?,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, p. 99; Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 357–58, 392–93. Compare with his “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 95–98, 135–41. See also Kenneth Hart Green, “Religion, Philosophy, and Morality: How Leo Strauss Read Judah Halevi’s Kuzari,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 225–73.

13. See Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing, 1980), pp. 35–81, and editor’s “Introduction,” pp. xiii–xxix; and see Richard Kennington, “Bacon’s Humanitarian Revision of Machiavelli,” in On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pamela Kraus and Frank Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), pp. 57–77, especially pp. 65–68.

14. For “the return of the repressed” as Freud fitted the theme to the history of religion, see Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), and especially pp. 158–76. Contrast the surprise that the continued vitality of religion provokes in much of the journalistic and academic world, which prefers to deal with it as “the sacred,” and whose opinion of it conforms with Allan Bloom’s image: “Our old atheists had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something, and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless, old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.” See The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 216. The farther-reaching lesson of this parable, perhaps beyond what Bloom would seem to imply by it, is that a lion can suddenly come to life again and maul its complacent host fatally. Thus, even a man who keeps a “toothless, old circus lion” around the house had better go to the trouble of comprehending lions and what they are capable of doing.

15. For the priority of the rational in human nature, see Guide 1.1–2, pp. 21–26; and Mishneh Torah, vol. 1: Sefer ha-Madda, “Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah,” 4.8–9. But this fact is no guarantee that it can be actualized by most human beings: see Guide 1.34, pp. 72–79. If the movements of the heavens are “the greatest proof through which one can know the existence of the deity,” human rationality is no guarantee that this is genuinely knowable by man: Guide 1.70, p. 175; 1.71, p. 183; 2.18, p. 302; 2.25, p. 327. For Spinoza’s faulting of Maimonides for precisely these things, as they appear in Guide 2.25, pp. 327–28, see Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Martin D. Yaffe (Newburyport, MA.: Focus, 2004), chap. 7, pp. 97–100. For Strauss’s contrasting of Machiavelli with Maimonides, compare Thoughts on Machiavelli, pp. 294–95, with On Tyranny, p. 184. Cf. “How to Study Medieval Philosophy” and “Note on Maimonides’ Letter on Astrology,” chaps. 1 and 14 in On Maimonides. See also “How To Begin.” For the passage from Maimonides to which Strauss refer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One. The Unanticipated Maimonides
• Two. Strauss and Irony: Bypassing the Maimonidean Scholars
• Three. Maimonides and the Free Mind
• Four. Untying the Literary Knots: Maimonides the Poet
• Five. Why the Moderns Need the Medievals
• Six. Absorbing and Surpassing the Alternatives
• Seven. The Maimonidean Revolution: Western Tradition as Reason and Revelation
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index