Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn by Leo Strauss

Author:Leo Strauss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

APPENDIX 3

From Mendelssohn’s “Epistle to Mr. Lessing in Leipzig” (Passage cited in Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 275, n. 41)1

. . . The state of nature [for Rousseau] is as it were the childish age of our race. The powers are weak, the capabilities limited, and man’s entire nature is only a small step removed from the nature of beasts. Hence our duties are thereby enclosed within very narrow limits. But how so? Is the age of manhood supposed to prescribe no other obligations, no other duties to the human race than those with which it has been laden in its childhood years? How could this philosopher2 have forgotten his own conclusions so easily?

If scholars have recognized at all times that it is necessary to consider man in his natural state in order to be able to build a right of nature on secure grounds, then they must have taken it quite otherwise [than Rousseau has], or else° asserted a manifest absurdity. I suppose the former. They will have taken man as he is now, with all the powers with which he is equipped and at the level of perfection to which he has raised himself after long labor. Had they robbed him of his capabilities, then they would have placed him down with the cattle, and the right of nature that would have been built on such grounds would be suitable for animals rather than for their masters. But they have torn man from society, that is, they have abstracted from all obligations that men willingly undergo for what is best for society. They have wanted to consider only what is legitimate in and for itself and without the consent of all peoples. Here is where they have grounded the right of nature, which can therefore be nothing else but the laws of justice that flow from our essential condition and cannot be changed even if all the nations of the earth were united against them.3

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