Leo Strauss, Philosopher by Antonio Lastra Josep Monserrat-Molas

Author:Antonio Lastra,Josep Monserrat-Molas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

5. CONCLUSIONS

There is no continuous path from life in the cave to philosophy. Philosophy requires a turning around, a conversion, something similar to the breaking of chains. According to Strauss’s interpretation, in the Republic we can find two fundamentally different sources of virtue: political virtue and philosophical virtue.20 Philosophers are virtuous because their souls are in full harmony, and their reason is nourished by insight and truth. All the other citizens, and especially the warriors, are virtuous in a different sense; that is, because they have been imbued with correct moral opinions.21

The exoteric message of the Republic, according to Strauss, is phrased in the style most appropriate to the warrior class, the thymoeidetic class inclined to idealism and loyalty. The warrior class will not find fault in the noble lie because it actually fits with the natural proclivity that spiritedness has towards dividing the world between friends and enemies. Yet insofar as politics turns around this kind of division, philosophy and politics remain at odds with each other.

The superficial message of the Republic is that one ought to do what reason commands. According to Strauss’s reconstruction, however, the superficial message is modeled on spiritedness. (Hence from a dramatic perspective it is important to notice the fundamental role played by the spirited Glaucon.)22 Doing what spiritedness commands means misunderstanding the analogy between city and man, and abstracting from some very important things that make human beings what they are. It means treating philosophical eros almost as an afterthought.23

For Strauss the Republic is an aporetic dialogue, one whose focus is not on the realization of absolute justice, but rather on the reasons why absolute justice is ultimately impossible even in the best city.

The book that Strauss dedicated to Plato’s Republic is itself an exercise in Platonic dialectic. Stylistically it exhibits a peculiar mixture of daring and restraint. Consider, for example, the title: The City and Man. The utopian plan of Plato’s Republic is based on the analogy between the individual man and the city: Socrates initially claims that the city is like a man writ large. However, at one point one term of the analogy is silently replaced. Socrates begins with city and man, but continues with city and soul. The city, which was originally created to respond to the needs of the body, becomes analogous to the soul and its parts. The body and its needs slowly but surely drop out of focus and the Republic becomes a big exercise in asceticism.

By calling his book The City and Man, Strauss invites his readers to consider that the city and soul analogy of Plato’s Republic is the result of an abstraction. In the course of the book he argues that Plato was well aware that in the analogy something was missing, and he wanted his readers to ask why Socrates, in this particular discussion, appeared to be so hostile to the body. The part of the soul that is most hostile to the body and its needs is not reason, but spiritedness,

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