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.
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.
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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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226307039 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 218 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
LEO STRAUSS AND THE REDISCOVERY OF MAIMONIDES
By Kenneth Hart Green
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30701-5
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Unanticipated Maimonides
LEO STRAUSS'S MODERN EXPLORATION OF THE DISTANT domain of Moses Maimonides' medieval Jewish philosophic thought, almost entirely lapsed from modern consciousness, was akin to embarking on a voyage of discovery. For however much the name of Maimonides may still have been revered by some, it is undoubtedly the case that the realm of thought in which this thinker dwelled was—in contemporary philosophy as well as in contemporary Jewish thought—an almost-forgotten, lost, neglected, or unknown domain: Strauss had to be immoderately daring from the start just to assert its contemporary relevance. What was Strauss searching for? In the greater scheme of things, Strauss seems from his youth to have been driven to embark on his travels in search of nothing other than "enlightenment." Or rather, we might say that what this search was moved by was the same thing asked about by Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn in a famous 8th-century contest of essays: What is "enlightenment"? They both assumed, as did Strauss, that this is the highest concern of the rational mind, but such concern must also be set in the context of human life comprehensively encompassed. Each believed that, in addressing this question, it was possible for him to truly know the essential answer, which Strauss also wanted to know but which with regard to the available arguments he was not fully persuaded by. In the wake of two previous but unsatisfying efforts (focused on Benedict Spinoza and Hermann Cohen), for several reasons Strauss turned to Maimonides for help in answering this question, as improbable as that choice may have been to most contemporary scholars and thinkers. To be sure, prior to Strauss's setting sail on his own, he prepared for his journey by training in the skills needed to navigate the lands and the waters he would traverse, however unwitting he may have been of the challenges he would need to confront in his journey. Hence, he assumed the modest guise of a modern historical scholar and used only such humble tools of art as a modern critical student conventionally employs to penetrate the unknown and unpredictable country of the past. Though not yet a captain directing his own ship with the bold insight and wise expedition he would subsequently distinguish himself by, even so he already employed the tools of his science for plotting a course of travel with a peculiar verve. Thus, his works even as an apprentice scholarly navigator are, almost from the beginning, characterized by their rigorous historical exactness and their honed philosophic incisiveness. Yet originally he aimed at the advancement of knowledge about Maimonides only in a limited sphere. At his point of departure, Strauss wished to test the claims made about Maimonides by his philosophic critics (such as Spinoza), asking whether they instead created prospective modern prejudices. And likewise Strauss wished to test the claims made about Maimonides by his philosophic defenders (such as Cohen), asking whether they instead created retrospective medieval legends. But in so doing, like some unwitting Christopher Columbus, Strauss courageously rediscovered a veritable lost continent of thought. Thus, to adapt to Strauss himself the suggestive language which he utilized to characterize an unanticipated "spiritual" possibility contained in the modern study of the thought of the past: he embarked on a journey whose end was completely hidden from him, and he returned to the shores of the present another man from the one who had originally departed from them.
The unplanned result of his lifelong search for the "real" Maimonides, which he conducted both as a scholar of Jewish thought and as a student of Western philosophy, was the uncovering of an entirely different history of Western thought, and the further uncovering of an entirely different Maimonides. This is the veritable lost continent of thought that Strauss rediscovered. The idealized defense of Maimonides proffered by Cohen, and the distorted criticism of Maimonides promulgated by Spinoza, both proved defective, forced, and unsatisfactory: they did not do justice either to the subtle thought of Maimonides or to his complex soul, and hence to his obvious contradictions. And greater than their scholarly deficiencies, neither Cohen nor Spinoza seemed equipped, as philosophic thinkers, to deal adequately with the crises of the present. Paradoxically, or just peculiarly to some, Strauss discovered in Maimonides a philosophic thinker who—although Strauss never embraced the purely "medieval" aspects of the thought of Maimonides—seemed better able to help him think through, and so to resolve, the most difficult of our modern dilemmas. This is surely a paradox and a peculiarity, one that must utterly astound us as a claim, stranger than any other, made by Strauss about Maimonides! How can it be? But to begin with the simplest, and yet somehow also the deepest point, Maimonides had not made the most common error of the moderns, from Machiavelli to Heidegger, while he also anticipated several of the key critical thoughts in which modernity was rooted. By the most common error, I mean to say that Maimonides—although as unyieldingly committed to the power of human reason as were any of the moderns—never attempted to get around, by clever devices of the mind, the fundamental Western conflict. This is the conflict, according to Strauss, between what he characterized as "Jerusalem and Athens," framed also as the critical dialogue between the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy, or what others, like Matthew Arnold and Isaac Husik, preferred to call "Hebraism and Hellenism." It is fundamental because it is a conflict about the one eternal truth, or "the one thing needful." For once Strauss examined the great modern thinkers, he concluded that this is perhaps their most common or repeated error, which leads to almost a theological-political determinism concealed in modern thought: the several cognitive attempts to settle or force the theological issue, which required simplifying it, and hence distorting it—besides the often regrettable, or at least ambiguous, political impact and moral repercussions made by such attempts. Strauss seems to have discovered the unavoidable and even irreducible character of the tension between "Jerusalem and Athens" for modern Western philosophy in Nietzsche's notion of the "superman": at the high point of Nietzsche's philosophy, his supreme goal for man in the future unites or even synthesizes Jerusalem and Athens ("the body of Caesar" with "the soul of Christ"), i.e., he who is the harshest analyst and the most ferocious critic of the biblical legacy consciously cannot and will not fully renounce its legacy, even if Strauss thinks he did not resolve the tension adequately.
What is the almost theological-political determinism of modern thought, according to Strauss, repeats itself in almost generation in different forms. It may be walked through in the following series of steps. Modern thought arose from a horror both at the spiritual illnesses with which biblical religion, or rather Christianity, was beset (and with which, as a result, Europe was afflicted) and at the fierceness with which it resisted honest rational diagnosis and cure by its own wisest doctors of the soul. By those spiritual illnesses, I refer to bloody wars and unending political grabs for power papered over by didactic debates about theological dogma; hostility to reason and critical thought as threats to religious faith; messianic pretensions and utopian claims that cannot be sustained or achieved in this world; gratuitous cruelty toward other human beings, often manifested in the persecution of "heretics" or Jews, under the cover of a high-minded devoutness about and a sincere fidelity to the true faith (what Machiavelli dubbed "pious cruelty"); a single-minded stress on the otherworldly, which monomania allowed the theologians and the believers to make little of all that is wrong with this world, i.e., of the remediable defects in the human situation, dismissed as the merely transitory present life. Whatever its flaws in intention or execution, the power and greatness of modern thought (which Strauss certainly appreciated) lay in its being seemingly the first noble effort to seriously confront and correct the remediable defects of the present life as they, in a certain measure, originated in the political conceptions of biblical religion and the theological virtues associated with those conceptions. Modern thought, rooted in and shaped by a revamped conception of philosophy and science, attempted to offer a solution to the severe problems in premodern Western political life caused by biblical religion: it devised the bold strategy of attempting to bury the fundamental conflict by repressing it, and so pretending that it had been resolved, with the hope that this would cause "Jerusalem" as a difficulty to wither away, containing the wild beast by training it to keep itself in the bonds of secular politics and natural morality. This containment policy usually involved disposing of "Jerusalem," either by claiming to "refute" it, and so to relegate it to the past, or by claiming to contain it in versions of rational moralism, which made it safe and unthreatening but often missed its unique and most forceful truth claims or suppressed its deepest theological and moral impulses.
Modern thought made a promise to use human reason in order to reshape the human soul and to remold human nature, constructing political conditions which will direct human energy to productive channels and counteract harmful impulses. It also pledged to conquer nature, or the threatening forces in the world in which human beings dwell, for the sake of the relief of man's estate, i.e., to make his life better in matters of essential human well-being. And it was likewise concerned to account for everything that happens by laws of fixed necessity; at the very least, this had as its purpose to prove the sufficiency of reason, and thus to render revealed religion superfluous. The essential strategy of modern thought—radical in intention, though often moderate in execution—was to tame biblical theology: captured like a wild lion of the jungle, it would be put in the cage designed by science, and it would be domesticated through the focus on morality. In other words, the original answers offered by biblical theology, in response to deep questions which agitated the human soul, were to be submerged and repressed rather than refuted, and as a result—such was the hope of modern thought—laid to rest. But as we have been taught by modern thought in a different context, the repressed returns in all sorts of unacknowledged ways, shapes, and forms. Curiously, Maimonides already seems to have anticipated the difficulties with the modern strategy. To be sure, he too focused on the needs of human nature and the human soul which had not been adequately addressed by traditional religion, and which he likewise regarded as mostly rational. Yet in his medieval "philosophic" version of this modern strategy he refused to ignore, and never attempted to set aside, those aspects of human nature and the human soul that had been judiciously addressed and wisely met by biblical theology. Instead, Maimonides insisted on a direct confrontation with the key issues in the higher conflict between reason and revelation; he resolved the conflict through a judicious wisdom, attempting to imitate and advance the biblical model, as he comprehended it. In other words, Maimonides was not unsympathetic to most of those modern criticisms and defenses of reason, but he must have been convinced in advance that this "method" of repression would not work: the human soul is more complex or contradictory, and simultaneously less directable or malleable, than modern thought was wont to claim. Thus, though not in any sense opposed in principle to everything the modern thinkers dreamed of accomplishing or to everything they hoped to improve or had actually improved of the human situation, especially as the medieval era knew it, this was very often not as well ordered as rational minds knew that it can be. Besides, Strauss respected what has been genuinely discovered by the boldness and originality of modern science, even if it was frequently discovered to be deficient in its comprehension of the human dimension, or what was once known as the "soul." Rather, Strauss was impressed with Maimonides for his not lacking any of the enthusiasm of the moderns for human reason, and for his certainty about our need to embrace it for the sake of human dignity and human perfection in the fulfillment of our nature. But he also grasped, as they mostly did not, the frailty of reason as a substitute for religion in political life, never mind what its absence from morality and psychology yields as an access to the human soul.
Likewise Strauss was impressed with how Maimonides seemed to comprehend in anticipation the defectiveness of the modern strategy for the human individual. Even though the dignity of man in his individuality is claimed as one of the special virtues of the modern turn, Maimonides recognized that this would leave him stripped bare of the spiritual protections, the moral advancements, and the educational preparedness which are the special products of biblical religion. These are its special gifts to the human individual, if the legacy of biblical religion is judiciously appropriated. The defectiveness of the modern strategy as it surfaced through history lay in its aim—pursued by diverse "methods" of art, and developed at different stages in modern thought (which superficially might seem to resemble those of its medieval "philosophic" predecessors)—to settle the issue of religion finally and forever by "quieting" the human need for God as the eternal source. For to "resolve" the challenge of religion—especially biblical religion—and thus to settle it in favor of science and rational morality, is merely to put it to sleep by attempting to theologically repress or deny the deeper conflict in the soul of each human being, even in those of higher human type, i.e., the most "spirited," and most "erotic," human beings. For man's deepest desire, his desire for eternity, cannot be resolved by denying that desire, or by repressing the traditional answers provided to the great question which this desire arouses, i.e., how to make contact with eternity, how to appropriate it, or even how to "achieve" it. Instead, Maimonides perceived that the "religious" needs of the higher type must be directly addressed, and reconciled with the needs, both higher and lower, of this type as a human being among human beings. In other words, if the deeper questions in each soul were not confronted and answered, then the religious needs of man as an individual, and especially the higher types, would just reappear in another form, for they must have satisfaction. As "autonomous" higher desires, they can neither be purged in the sense of eradicated or neutralized nor satisfied by being diverted to the lower urges from which they are believed to have originally emerged, according to most streams of modern thought. There might be such reappearances perhaps through collective delusions unwittingly embraced, and probably in guises designed by those clever enough to manipulate human need, even those needs of the purer sorts—of the high-minded, and even of the philosophically disposed.
Thus, Maimonides begins with an analysis of the soul, of what its proper character and contours are, and of what deeper needs it has. His analysis presupposes a correlated synoptic diagnosis of the temptations to which the human soul is prone and the regimen which prevents it from succumbing to those temptations, as these are graphically but often deceptively generated by the misdirected desires of the soul, i.e., the ever-powerful imagination. For Maimonides set the problem of the imagination in the very heart of the human situation, since its power raises the question about what man most essentially is. Strauss encountered in Maimonides, with his seriousness and balance about the imaginative capacity and about the deeper needs of man, a thinker who seemed better equipped (with sounder views about the essence of human beings in actual life) to deal with man in full than the modern thinkers. For the modern thinkers tended either to underestimate (like Descartes), or to overestimate (like Heidegger), the power of the imagination in the human soul, and in so doing to devise visions of what man is and can be which do not accord with his true nature. Maimonides dealt with the deepest human desire, i.e., for eternity, by directing it toward the truth, which he wished to identify with God, though not so as to diminish man's desire as needfully achieved, or rather served, through a permanent, irremovable, and ever-deepening search during the length of a human life, which is why it is best grounded in God. Truth, like God, is to be loved, although it is known ultimately by the cognitive faculty while aided by the imaginative faculty; it is thus facilitated mainly by what is conceived as science; and yet it is both prepared and completed by scripture and its poetry. This last element helps to keep man from succumbing to the highest mind-numbing delusion, which tempts him to believe that his ascending thought has issued in a simple attainment of the truth. Truth is also like God in that, to remain truth, it must be constantly desired and yet loved from a distance. This is because the love of truth, as blended with or in the end not even distinguishable from the love of God, is a force that man is never able to fully satisfy if he is to remain man. Man desires the infinite, but to be infinite is only for the divine. What man can do is to make progress toward truth (satisfying in and of itself) as an itinerary toward God. Thus, Strauss discovered in Maimonides a thinker who knew that perhaps the fundamental problem for the ancients, the medievals, and the moderns is the question of the human soul, which at the deepest level proves itself unchangeable: what defines it, what it truly wants, and what it can be or do. This medieval thinker showed a keen if skeptical awareness of history (which, along with science, is the pride of the moderns), but he recognized that this dramatic and powerful human unfolding in events and actions—which changes some of the highest things and which shows man malleable in some key aspects of his nature—itself demonstrates man's malleability as subordinated to and limited by a deeper human need which is unchangeable, i.e., for the eternal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LEO STRAUSS AND THE REDISCOVERY OF MAIMONIDES by Kenneth Hart Green. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
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