Jewish Culture between Canon and Heresy by David Biale

Author:David Biale
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

WEIMAR ANTINOMIANS

CHAPTER 10

Leo Strauss

The Philosopher as Weimar Jew

AT THE END OF THE introduction to Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss suggests that the philosopher at all times, and not just in the Greek city, is in grave danger. He writes: “The understanding of this danger and of the various forms which it has taken, and which it may take, is the foremost task, and indeed the sole task, of the sociology of philosophy.”1 He seeks to show that philosophers, insofar as they teach the truth, always face the same danger as Socrates and therefore can protect themselves only by what he calls esoteric writing. Strauss’s whole project in Persecution and the Art of Writing should be more properly termed the sociology of philosophy than philosophy itself. What he means by this term is something like Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge,2 namely an understanding of the ideological function of ideas in a given social setting; only by understanding this function can one ferret out the true position of the philosopher beneath the explicit text.

Strauss claims that the status of philosophy in the medieval Islamic and especially the medieval Jewish world was fundamentally different from that of philosophy in the Christian sphere. While in Christianity philosophy in the form of theology was an official institutionalized discourse that fell under ecclesiastical supervision, Islamic and Jewish philosophy remained private endeavors, devoid of official status. In this respect, Islamic and Jewish philosophy was much closer to philosophy in ancient Greece than was medieval Christian scholasticism. According to Strauss, the private character of Greek philosophy, the fact that it did not enjoy governmental sponsorship, was what gave it the potential to be heretical with respect to conventional opinion and made it a dangerous occupation; this function, which Strauss holds is the true task of philosophy, was taken over by some of the Islamic and Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, and we must therefore turn to these philosophers if we are to discover what is, for Strauss, true philosophy in its medieval form.3

The purpose of my remarks here will be to apply Strauss’s sociology of philosophy to Strauss himself and attempt to understand his thought in terms of its ideological function within its historical context. One of Strauss’s favorite methodological statements, as is well known, is that we must understand a particular philosopher as he understood himself (a method he took from Spinoza’s demand that we read the Bible according to the Bible).4 Now, Strauss devoted much of his career to denouncing historicism, the attempt to understand the past within its own context. For Strauss, this “contextualizing” robbed the thought of great thinkers of its eternal truthfulness by making it “merely” the product of a particular set of historical circumstances. Yet the way Strauss understood himself gives us an opening to place his own thought in its historical setting. In the 1962 preface to the English-language edition of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss writes: “This study on Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise was written during the years 1925–28 in Germany.

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