Between 1928 through the mid-1930s, Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger carried on a philosophically intense exchange, until the war and related events cut that correspondence short. A series of debilitating strokes in the early 1950s prematurely ended Krüger’s intellectual career, foreclosing the possibility of further serious engagement after the war. By that time, however, their respective intellectual paths, which had once closely coincided, had diverged. Still, a series of late exchanges concerning Krüger’s 1969 Festschrift, to which Strauss contributed, testifies to their enduring mutual attachment.
Of the two, Strauss is by far the better known, having gone on to a distinguished academic career in the United States, where he wrote many important works in political philosophy, as well as founded an influential philosophic “school.” Although relatively obscure today, Krüger was, at the time of their major correspondence, certainly the more professionally successful and personally fortunate of the two.
Krüger was born in Berlin in 1902 into a comfortable Protestant family. He briefly attended the University of Jena before moving to Tübingen, and then Marburg, where he studied religion with Rudolf Bultmann, and philosophy under Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Heidegger, completing a dissertation on Kant under Hartmann in 1925. From 1929 until 1933, Krüger taught at the University of Marburg, and then at Göttingen and Frankfurt. Krüger’s public opposition to Nazism retarded his academic advancement and led to his mandatory enlistment in the German army from 1939 to 1940, and from 1943 to 1944, during which time he briefly served as an interpreter in occupied Paris. Krüger was called to a chair at the University of Münster in 1940, and was professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen from 1946 to 1950, where he came under the powerful influence of the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini. In 1950 Krüger converted to Catholicism. Prior to his 1953 stroke, he held a chair at the University of Frankfurt.
From the beginning, Krüger, who was widely regarded as perhaps Heidegger’s most gifted student, pursued an independent path. Like Strauss, Krüger found himself in more or less open revolt against the academic neo-Kantianism then fashionable. For Krüger no less than Strauss, Heidegger’s “destruction” of the philosophic tradition opened up the prospect of a genuine recovery of ancient thought. Krüger’s own bent might be accurately described as Christian neo-Platonist. His dissertation on Kant established the direction of his early thought: namely, to recover the Platonic foundations of Kant’s thought by detaching them from his entanglement in the distorting presuppositions of modern natural science.
Like the young Strauss, Krüger turned to Plato for the sake of inquiring into “the right order of human things.” Deeply dissatisfied with positivism and relativism, as well as the neo-Kantianism still academically fashionable, Krüger saw in Plato an anticipation of the insight that only the “knowing faith” of Augustine (and Thomas) could adequately express. Krüger explored these and related themes in books on Kant and Plato, as well as a long essay on Descartes that Strauss would especially praise. Like Strauss, Krüger was interested in uncovering the origins of modernity, which he specifically linked to a modern “self-consciousness” founded in an explicit revolt against the commanding presence of the Christian God, and ultimately dependent upon revelation. As such, modern thought was founded in disobedience, and hence in an unacknowledged religious awareness that had been unavailable to Plato. In this theological sense, at least, Krüger’s thought remained “historical”; Christ’s “factual dominance over the spirit of post-ancient humanity” made a full recovery of the ancient approach neither desirable nor possible, as Krüger saw it, Strauss’s objections to the contrary.
Still, during the years spanning the period of Strauss’s own “reorientation,” and during which he was making some of his own most decisive discoveries, Krüger offered Strauss both invaluable professional and practical support, and a unique sort of intellectual friendship in common pursuit of the “right order of human life.”
There are several factors that make the correspondence between Strauss and Krüger especially timely.
First, like members of the generation that came of age in the waning days of Weimar, we live in a time in which the reigning liberal assumptions find themselves under intense and increasing pressure. Although we may not seem to face what Strauss called in 1933 the “whole modern world…cracking at the seams” it is hard to avoid the suspicion that for us as well the “‘structure of [liberal democratic] knowledge’ in which we live” is “brittle and full of gaps.” That it is at just such times, according to Strauss, that “questioning begins” [Strauss to Krüger, 22 July 1933, unsent], and there is the hope of an exemplary path of insight into and beyond the current period of liberal self-doubt. Questioning, as Strauss here opines, is a perennially available human possibility that is especially facilitated by such moments of political and moral disarray and decay, in which the prevailing norms that shape one’s primary experience of the world lose their apparent self-evidence. Strauss sees in the “cracking” walls of the modern world a partial repetition of the sophistical disruption of the ancient polis and its ways that provoked Plato’s “second sailing.”
The questioning that initiates the project of modernity, which Strauss here especially associates with Hobbes’s attempt to establish natural right on an “indefeasible” basis, is less than radical because it takes the “rightness” of the theoretical life for granted. For Socrates-Plato, on the other hand, the “essence of virtue” is problematic, that is, remains a primary subject of inquiry. It is in this deepest sense that all subsequent modern thought is “progressive,” moving forward from an assumed base that Nietzsche’s own questioning of the traditional Socrates, in the name of courage or andreia, finally brought to light. [Strauss, 27 December 1932 (definitive version)]The original fact is a given law, as even psychoanalysis involuntarily confirms; a law that need not be sought in the first place. Somewhere on earth, at some point in time, human beings saw themselves deprived of such a law and therefore inquired about a law, i.e. about the natural law that would be valid for human beings as such. Since then philosophy has been in existence, for the loss [Wegfall] of the given law and the search for the law seems to me to mark philosophy. Socratic-Platonic philosophy inquired about order, it even inquired about “the laws.” Until proven wrong I would maintain that it is the philosophy for this reason, and that all other philosophies can only be understood as leading to it or as originating from it. For every other philosophy presupposes in one way or another that the βιος θεωρητικος is the right βιος--for Socrates-Plato, however, it is precisely this presupposition that is problematic. [Strauss to Krüger, 27 December 1932 (second draft; unsent)]
Modernity represents, in Strauss’s account in the pages of this correspondence, an attempted recovery of the original freedom to philosophize on the natural basis preceding the emergence of Christianity:
“Historical consciousness,” as Strauss here presents it, is the non-self-transparent version of an attempt whose “primordial form” [Urform] consists in the “battle against prejudices”—a battle specifically directed against the predominating ethos of Christianity, and which neither the Greeks nor the Platonizing Muslim and Jewish philosophers had to confront. Christianity, so conceived, represents a “distraction” that must be overcome if philosophizing on a “naïve” or “natural” basis is to be possible once again.Since the seventeenth century, the real point [Sinne] of the struggle with tradition was to recover the Greek freedom of philosophizing. It was really a Renaissance movement. In all “foundations” [Grundlegungen], in all psychology and all historicism there is this striving: to find, to find again, an original, natural basis. [Strauss to Krüger, 17 November 1932]
We may ourselves be so shaped by “historical consciousness,” so mired in the shallow eddies of post-modernism or, alternatively, a complacently resistant moralism, that we no longer speak of “historical consciousness” at all, a term that still contains the memory of another form of “consciousness,” one which was not thoroughly conditioned and contingent and in which knowledge of “natural right” could still seem possible, as it seemed, say, to Hobbes. Strauss’s and Krüger’s shared quest for “the right ordering of human things”—a quest revealed here with a singularly fresh urgency—remind us of that possibility with the peculiar force of ongoing mutual discovery, albeit along what prove to be increasingly divergent paths.
This brings us to the second reason for the timeliness of the correspondence: Krüger’s alternative appreciation of the importance of Christianity, which represents, on his account, a new dispensation for human understanding that fundamentally alters the philosophic horizon by making “science,” as the Greeks understood it, newly problematic. From this alternative point of view, the battle against “prejudices” is both deeper and more fundamental than the struggle against “doxa” or opinion as Plato understood it. Hence Krüger’s basic “reservation” against Strauss’s description of modernity as a “second cave.” To be sure, he had earlier acceded to Strauss’s metaphorical description of the peculiar cul de sac into which modern thought, and historicism in particular, has led us. Still, as he now adds, from such detour, if it is one, there is no simple egress:
Krüger’s basic disagreement with Strauss emerges with particular clarity in his essay on Descartes, which he completed in 1933 and published in 1934. The new horizon opened up by Christianity is the introspective self-awareness that becomes possible only in the presence of the Christian God, whether or not one deems oneself a “believer.” Self-consciousness in corum deo or before the searcher of hearts necessarily gives rise to new doubt as to the adequacy of human reason in pursuing the “good” in Plato’s sense; whether it issues in philosophic humility or outright rebellion (as with Descartes) that insight, unavailable to Plato, cannot now be disregarded or otherwise ignored. Our own “lived experience,” unlike that available to Plato, opens up the possibility of a “hopeful knowledge” that is deeper than “science” in either the modern or the original Platonic sense, and by which our reception of nature as a “binding” order oriented toward the good must now take its bearings. Though Plato asked the right questions, his answers necessarily remained defective, deprived as they were of reflective depth.If one understands why we are sitting in the second cave, then it is impossible to understand this “prison” as a floor of the Platonic prison. Looking back from here it is rather the Platonic position that becomes in need of revision. The problem of “prejudice” is, after all, more radical than that of the δόξα (to use your words). The concept of “naturalness” and of “being human” must therefore be determined starting from here. The unity of the concepts “science” and “philosophy” is not as directly graspable (by taking antiquity as the standard [in der Messung an der Antike]) as you suppose. I certainly understand your motive of combatting historicism, but in my opinion one cannot shake it off by defiantly ignoring it (and you do not really [im Grunde] do this), but by reducing it to its substantive [sachliche] and historical core: Christ’s factual dominion [Herrschaft] over the spirit of post-ancient humanity. However, this dominion has become indirect in modernity; yet it is you who take it to be factually unbroken by claiming that the “situation” of modern thought is essentially determined by opposition to revealed religion. Now, the denaturing of the Christian “bondage” of humans in historicism is undoubtedly a special kind of imprisonment: there can be philosophical liberation from this cave. But when you define the second cave as the original ground of historicism, then there is no Socrates for this just as there is no Newton for a blade of grass. [Krüger to Strauss, 4 December 1932]
For Krüger, the true measure [Maßstab] takes the form of a binding law our inadequacy to which revelation makes newly and undeniably evident. It is no longer possible to philosophize “naively” or to simply follow the logos where it leads us.Philosophically, the matter seems to be such that we must repeat the ancient and genuine philosophical questions, but in the insurmountable factual [faktische] situation that philosophizing is no longer as self-evident [selbstverständlich] as it was then. This new thing, this newly arisen problem for philosophy, can only be posed within a philosophy of world history, but that means in the analysis of the ground of “reflection” that is originally discovered in the face of revelation. Now, one can experience this as a “hateful fatality” or as a glimmer of hope in the night of our perplexity – that is simply a matter of our “worldview” and our personal ability of doing anything in this condition. But if one wanted to claim to find the true and nonarbitrarily authoritative [das Wahre und unwillkürlich Maßgebende] somewhere else, we would have to understand ourselves worse than we two do [sich schlechter verstehen als wir zwei es tun]. [Krüger to Strauss, 29 December 1932]
To this, Strauss replies that depth and radicality are not the same. The order that we experience as a “command” does not have “the character of a law in the actual sense.” “More originary than bindingness is what is binding” and takes on the character of bindingness only “for us humans”:
Strauss distinguishes, accordingly, between the “practical knowledge” that originally motivated philosophy and set it on the right track” and “the original theme of philosophy”:Platonic philosophy is concerned with the knowledge of this ‘What’ that does not itself have the character of a law in the proper sense, and Kant takes account of this radical problem by recognizing the “holy will” (if only in a sense that is limited from the outset by the theological tradition). The question of the law first comes up in the context of the question of applying the measure to human beings. And it is only with respect to human beings that the difference between a knowledge that is commanded and a “merely” true knowledge makes any sense. [Strauss to Krüger, 18 August 1934]
Krüger, following Kant, privileges the practical over the theoretical, rather than treating the former as merely leading toward the latter; the philosophy called forth by the law, on Strauss’s alternate account, does not inquire about the law but the correct order of human life, and thus forthwith about the principle of order as such. In short: the original motive that sets philosophy on the right track is not its ultimate subject of inquiry.Philosophy that is called upon [aufgerufene] through the law does not inquire about the law, but about the right order of human life and thus about the principle of order. But this question cannot turn into the natural-theological one if one does not want to become embroiled in the difficulties involved in a grounding of knowledge in belief; rather, it must be asked and answered in the manner of Plato’s critical philosophy. [Ibid.]
Krüger, however, stands by what he regards as the “lived experience” of the present moment: Strauss, too, as Krüger pointedly notes, responds to a demand for a return to naivete whose realizability is itself a matter of belief or faith. Might the “opinion” in favor of atheism by which Strauss claims to take his bearings itself “take[s] its measure from [messen Sie…an]” a “modern idea of knowledge”? Might not Plato’s “critical philosophy,” as Strauss here archly describes his own approach, be uncritically dogmatic in its outright rejection of the possibility of what Krüger calls “hopeful knowledge”? [Krüger to Strauss, 2 June 1935] In short: by beginning with his own unbelief, does Strauss not set the problem up “one step too late”? For the ultimate point is, as Krüger insists, the truth, not whether or not one is personally up to meeting its demands.
In sum: the correspondence presents Strauss’s most direct early confrontation with the challenge of Christian revelation in particular, or of what he here pointedly refers to as the combination of a nomos tradition and a tradition of questioning, which precisely as a tradition is no longer genuine questioning.
With this exchange, late in 1935, the philosophic conversation between Strauss and Krüger comes to an effectual close, before the more dramatic rupture of the war years brings all communication to an end. Krüger will become increasingly preoccupied with questions of rational theology, that is, with that combination of a “nomos-tradition” and a “tradition of questioning” that Strauss had held to be ultimately responsible for the current spiritual crisis. Strauss, for his part, will deepen his study of the Islamic/Jewish medieval alternative: that is, of a nomos tradition that naturally gives rise to philosophic questioning, without being tempted by the peculiar “sublations” offered by Christianity. At the same time, with the advent of the war years, and his own growing personal distress, not to mention that of German Jews more generally, Strauss will come to have a greater...