3202 Oxford Ave., N.Y. 63

August 15,1946

Dear Lowith,

Many thanks for your remarks on my Wild review. Your kindness has been very beneficial for me, as I have once again suffered shipwreck, that is, I see that it is necessary for me to begin once again from the beginning. The less serious side is a radical dissatisfaction with myself — you see, I am not entirely untrue to philosophy, in that I describe that sort of thing as less serious — , and then your kind letter came at the right time.

You object to the sentence: “It is safe to predict that the movement which Wild’s book may be said to launch in this country, will become increasingly influential and weighty as the years go by.” But assume I knew of two or three people, who are striving for the restoration of classical philosophy and whose works will appear and distinguish themselves in the course of the next ten years, and who understand something about the matter. Then however the thesis represented publicly in America for the first time, accidentally by Wild, would gain greater influence and greater weight than it has at the moment. For I do not prophesy a fashion. In short, you underestimate my irony.

On the querelle des anciens et des modernes: I do not deny, but assert, that modern philosophy has much that is essential in common with Christian medieval philosophy; but that means that the attack of the moderns is directed decisively against ancient philosophy. By the way, in the minds of those concerned, Scholasticism was already disposed of in the sixteenth century, for one turned back from medieval philosophy to its sources, Plato-Aristotle and the Bible; the new in the seventeenth century is the repudiation of everything earlier (of that there is hardly anything in the sixteenth century — Bodin is an exception; Machiavelli disguised his radical critique precisely in the cloak of a return to Rome or Livy).

Further: the greatest exponents of the ancients’ side in the querelle, that is, Swift and Lessing, knew that the real theme of the quarrel is antiquity and Christianity. (Do not come to me with the completely exoteric Eriziehung des Menschengeschlechts or with Dilthey’s platitudes; read the work against Klotz — Antiquarische Briefe —,Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, Laokoon [the suffering of Philoctetes as opposed to the suffering of Jesus], Hamburgische Dramaturgie….)These men did not doubt that antiquity, that is, genuine philosophy, is an eternal possibility.

Condorcet and even Comte do not want to replace Christianity: they want to replace nonsense with a reasonable order. But already Descartes and Hobbes wanted that. Only when the quarrel had been basically decided were religion and Christianity brought in, and this subsequent interpretation of the modern movement dominated the credulous and insufferably sentimental nineteenth century. —

You object to my sentence, the “insistence on the fundamental difference between philosophy and history — a difference by which philosophy stands or falls — may very well, in the present situation, be misleading.” You say you don’t get this sentence. S assume for a moment that because of an accidental handicap (that is, the modern barbarization), we must first learn again the elements of philosophy; this possibility of pure learning does not exist in our world in so-called philosophy, while what the modern historian really intends can only succeed if he is entirely receptive, wanting to understand. I mean not any more — at any rate for all practical purposes.

You cannot however deny that today, above all in Anglosaxony, one finds a few more philosophical minds in the historical faculties than in “pure philosophy.” This want could be a virtue, or at least lead to virtue: if that “pure philosophy” is either empty or fundamentally false.

We agree that today we need historical reflection — only I assert that it is neither a progress nor a fate to submit to with resignation, but is an unavoidable means for the overcoming of modernity. One cannot overcome modernity with modern means, but only insofar as we also are still natural beings with natural understanding; but the way of thought of natural understanding has been lost to us, and simple people such as myself and those like me are not able to regain it through their own resources: we attempt to learn from the ancients.

What then is the point of the talk about “existential” study of history, if it does not lead one to conduct oneself towards the teaching of those who came before in a way that is not know-it-all-contemplative, but leaning, questioning, practical?

The conception I sketch has nothing at all to do with Heidegger, as Heidegger gives merely a refined interpretation of modern historicism, “anchors” it “ontologically.” For with Heidegger, “historicity” has made nature disappear completely, which however has the merit of consistency and compels one to reflect. It’s too bad you don’t pursue to the end the way which you took in your confrontation of Hegel and Goethe. For that, one would to be sure have to understand Goethe’s natural science with the help of Lessing’s “dialectic.”

I really believe, although to you this apparently appears fantastic, that the perfect political order, as Plato and Aristotle have sketched it, is the perfect political order. Or do you believe in the world-state? If it is true that genuine unity is only possible through knowledge of the truth or through search for the truth, then there is a genuine unity of all men on the basis of the popularized final teaching of philosophy (and naturally this does not exist) or if all men are philosophers (not Ph.D.s, etc.) — which likewise is not the case. Therefore, there can only be closed societies, that is, states. But if that is so, then one can show from political consideration that the small city-state is in principle superior to the large state or to the territorial-feudal state. I know very well that today it cannot be restored (But we live precisely in the extremely unfavorable situation; the situation between Alexander the Great and the Italian poleiw of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries was considerably more favorable); but the famous atomic bombs — not to mention at all cities with a million inhabitants, gadgets, funeral homes, “ideologies” — show that the contemporary solution, that is, the completely modern solution, is contra naturam. Whoever concedes that Horace did not speak nonsense when he said “Naturam furca expelles, tamen usque recurret,” concedes thereby precisely the legitimacy in principle of Platonic-Aristotelian politics. Details can be disputed, although I myself might actually agree with everything that Plato and Aristotle demand (but that I tell only you).

There is only one objection against Plato-Aristotle: and that is the factum brutum of revelation, or of the “personal” God. I say: factum brutum — for there is no argument whatsoever, theoretical, practical, existential…, not even the argument of paradox (a paradox as such, after all, can be called for by reason, as Kierkegaard shows all too well) from the agnoia yeou, which characterizes the genuine philosopher, to belief (Husserl once said to me when I questioned him about theology: “If there is a datum God, we shall describe it.” That was <most delightful?>. The difficulty is that those who believe they know something about God contest that he is a describable datum).

That brings me to “Jerusalem and Athens.” I do not know when my lecture is — in November, but Hula has to fix the day. I would very much like you to be present.

If I may come back once more to my article, I wrote it really for students. I wanted to show them with an exemplary case what sort of rubbish is praised by idiots in The New York Times, Tribune, etc., in order to make them a little bit more wary. The only thing I did not write only for students is the interpretation of the, in a certain sense decisive, passage of the Seventh Letter.

Let me hear from you soon.

Should Frank come to see you, then go ahead and show him my article. But otherwise to no one.

                Most cordially yours,

                                                  Leo Strauss

I will not send the article to Wild; but it will be sent automatically to the Harvard Press. To whom should I send it, directly or through you? Please let me know.

August 18, 1946

Dear Strauss,

Many thanks for your detailed letter. To begin with what for me happens to be the most obvious thing: there can be no doubt at all the Comte, etc. did not wish simply to replace “nonsense” with reasonable order, but his progress consists of a conscious reshaping of the “Catholic system,” that is, Christianity in the social-political sense. Why do you say that religion and Christianity were only subsequently (in the nineteenth century) brought in? And whatever one might say against progressive models of history, I do agree however with them inasmuch as I also find that Christianity fundamentally modified ancient “naturalness.” With a cat or a dog “nature” does indeed always come out again, but history is too deeply anchored in man for Rousseau or Nietzsche or your future hero of natural being and understanding to succeed in restoring something which already died out in late antiquity. The “simplest” touchstone would be — as Nietzsche saw quite correctly — the restoration of the ancient relation to sexuality as something natural and at the same time divine. Even Goethe’s “nature” is no longer that of antiquity. And I can imagine even less a natural social order. The world-state is certainly nonsense and contra naturam, but the polis is also contra naturam, like all historical institutions created by man. Only when you are able to convince me that stars, heaven, sea and earth, generation, birth and death give you, the “simple” man!, natural answers to your unnatural questions, will I be able to agree to your thesis. And with regard to suffering, perhaps indeed Prometheus is more intelligible to so-called natural understanding than Christ, but the Prometheus myth is also not really simple and natural. To what extent our denaturalization traces back to Christianity is hard to say, but certainly it is not only historical consciousness which has changed, but our historical being. That it is not necessary, like Heidegger, to make nature disappear, you can see from the fact that Schelling had a philosophy of spirit which opened up for his a new access to the understanding of nature as well. He understood revealed religion and mythology.

You say, one cannot overcome modernity with modern means. That sounds plausible but seems to me only correct with qualifications, for even patient pure “learning” never escapes its own presuppositions. After all, the discontent of modernity with itself exists only on the basis of historical consciousness, of the knowledge of the other and “better” times; and where this consciousness is lost — as with the generation born after 1910 in Russia and the one born after 1930 in Germany, modernity is also not even perceived any longer as something to be overcome — on the contrary.

The atomic bomb teaches me nothing at all that I would not have known already without it; and it makes indeed a big, but not however an absolute, difference whether one describes the unholy in human nature as sin or mortality, and thereby distinguishes between the Christian God and the heathen gods. “The mortals” sounds again more natural and more understandable than “the sinners,” but I do not believe (as you know) that with the expression “the mortals” nothing further was meant than the natural end of life common to all living beings. Where do you draw here the line between natural and unnatural? For the Greeks it was — I commend them for this — completely natural to consort with women, youths and animals. The bourgeois marriage is just as unnatural as pederasty, and Japanese geishas (By the way: the most artificial creatures that I have even seen) are just as natural for the man as O. Wilde’s friend was for him. — The creation of a perfect order — be it social and political or in private morals — is always afflicted with the unnatural — simply qua order.

You should send your Wild article to A. Lovejoy, von Fritz (Columbia), Kuhn, P. Friedlander, Jager, Green, J.Randall, and to Chicago professors — these Riezler will be better able to indicate to you. By the way, there is a nice chapter by Gregorovius on Athens and Jerusalem (unphilosophical). Could you find out in which issue of Antike a paraphrase of Aristotle’s “great-souled man” appeared? I would like to know.

Cordial greetings and thanks,

                                 Yours,

                                      Karl Lowith

3202 Oxford Ave., N.Y. 63

August 20, 1946

Dear Lowith,

Many thanks for your interesting letter of he 18^th of this month, which just arrived. As I am just now occupied with the theme of Jerusalem and Athens, it comes at the right time.

It is astounding that we (although up to a certain point we understand one another very well) above and beyond that understand one another so little — it is astounding considering the importance of the points at which we do understand one another. Where do our ways part? I really think that you on the decisive point are not simple, simple-minded enough, while I believe that I am. You do not take the simple sense of philosophy literally enough: philosophy is the attempt to replace opinions about the whole with genuine knowledge of the whole. For you, philosophy is nothing but the self-understanding or self-interpretation of man, and, that means, naturally of historically conditioned man, if not of the individual. That is, speaking Platonically, you reduce philosophy to description of the interior decoration of the receptive cave, of the cave (= historical existence), which then can no longer be seen as a cave. You remain bogged down in idealism-historicism. And you interpret the history of philosophy in such a way that it confirms the unavoidability of historical relativity, or the rule of prejudices, asserted by you. You identify philosophy as such with “Weltanschauung”; you therefore make philosophy radically dependent on the respective “culture.” For example, there can be no doubt that our usual way of feeling is conditioned by the biblical tradition; but that does not rule out our being able to make clear to ourselves the problematic of Providence, upon which this feeling rests (the belief in creation by the loving God), and through self-education being able to correct our feeling. I know from my experience how incomprehensible and foreign Aristotle’s concept of megalofuxia was to me originally, and now I not only theoretically, but also practically, approve of it. A man like Churchill proves that the possibility of megalofuxia exists today exactly as it did in the fifth century, B.C.

On the question of modern philosophy and progress] Modern philosophy (or science) is originally the attempt to replace the allegedly or really inadequate classical (and that means, at the same time, medieval) philosophy (or science) by the correct philosophy. The “inadequacy” was this: the achieved science of antiquity (Plato and Aristotle) was not capable of giving an account of certain natural phenomena (of the “external” world) which on its own terms it had to give an account of. The idea arose that the “materialistic” physics, displaced by classical philosophy, that is, above all by the Aristotelian physics, offered an unheard of expansion of the possibilities of knowledge. But: one had learned from Plato-Aristotle that a materialistic physics cannot understand itself, the possibility of knowledge (noein). Thus the task: first to secure the possibility of knowledge, in order then to be able to proceed with mechanistic physics, and so to be able to understand the universe. That is the meaning of Descartes’ Meditations, of the fundamental book of modern philosophy. Biblical-Scholastic motive only contributed: modern science, that is, modern philosophy, is fundamentally to be understood <physically?> and humanly. That holds likewise for practical-political philosophy, as I demonstrated in somewhat more detail last year in my General Seminar paper on natural right. Now, around 1750 the structure of mechanistic physics and the politics resting on it is completed: the consciousness of its problematic comes into the foreground, Hume and above all Rousseau. One sees that the promise of enlightened politics (Hobbes, Encyclopedia) to create the just order through the propagation of mechanistic physics and anthropology cannot be kept; one sees it (one — that is, Rousseau) because one learns to see again from Plato the problem “science-politics” (it had never been entirely forgotten: Spinoza, also Leibniz); society needs “religion.” A generation after Rousseau one sees that one cannot “make” religion, as Robespierre wanted t therefore Christianity or something like Christianity. From this reaction to the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment itself is interpreted as Christianity motivated, and this succeeds because the Enlightenment had always accommodated itself, for political reasons, to Christianity. The thus created fable convenue is the basis of the view ruling today.

Return to the natural view] You confuse the Greek man-in-the-street, and as far as I am concerned also the Greek poet, with the Greek philosopher. (It does not make things better that Nietzsche often, not always (On the Genealogy of Morals, “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”), make the mistake.) Plato and Aristotle never believed that “stars, heaven, sea, earth, generation, birth and death give” them “natural answers to their unnatural questions” (I quote your letter). Plato “flees,” as is well known, from these “things” (pragmata) into the logoi, because the pragmata give no answer directly, but are mute riddles. With respect to sexuality in particular, it is, like every thing natural, a mystery worthy of wonder (only the moderns are so crazy to believe that the “creation” of a “work of art” is more worthy of wonder and more mysterious than the reproduction of a dog: just look at a mother dog with her puppies; and the force, by means of which Shakespeare conceived, felt and wrote Henry Ⅳ, is not Shakespeare’s work, but greater than any work of any man ) — a mystery worthy of wonder, higher in the rank than everything men have made: “morality” does not mean more for philosophers. For classical philosophy at least, sexuality is less “divine” than understanding (nouw). The practical position on sexuality of these philosophers derives from this. (Take an extreme: the logicians, cf. Diogenes Laertius, cf. Antisthenes — Antisthenes was a blockhead, but he knew something more about what a Greek philosopher is than we readily do.)

When you say that the polis is contra naturam like all human institutions, you only repeat a Greek political thesis, the thesis of the so-called “sophists,” but also of philosophers such as Democritus, Archelaus, etc. — therefore a thesis to be taken seriously. I believe that one cannot answer without qualification the question whether the poliw is fusei or para fusin. In any case, the fact that it is institutional is still no proof that it is contra naturam: some institutions assist natural tendencies. In any case, I assert that the poliw — as it has been interpreted by Plato and Aristotle, a surveyable, urban, morally serious (spoudaia) society, based on an agricultural economy, in which the gentry rule — is morally-politically the most reasonable and most pleasing: which still does not mean at all that I would want to live in such a poliw (one must not judge everything according to one’s private wishes) — do not forget that Plato and Aristotle preferred democratic Athens as a place of residence to the eunomoumenai poleiw: for philosophers moral-political considerations are necessarily secondary.

Christ and Prometheus] “Perhaps Prometheus is more intelligible to so called natural understanding than Christ, but the Prometheus myth is also not really simple and natural. ” Not to mention anything else: the Prometheus myth is a myth, that is, an untrue story, but Christianity stands or falls with the supposed fact that Jesus has risen. The raising of a dead man is a miracle, contra naturam; that men tell each other untrue stories, which nevertheless have a “meaning,” is secundum naturam. The Prometheus story presupposes jealous gods — philosophy denies their existence, indeed their possibility — it denies thereby the possibility of the Prometheus story. You again confuse the philosophers with the Greeks. (But most of the Greeks were however only Greek Babbitts or Homaises or….)

“Certainly it is not only historical consciousness which has changed, but our historical being”] Of course! But if this change rests on erroneous presuppositions, then we cannot sit idly by, but must do our best to undo it — not socially or politically, but privatissime.

“The discontent of modernity with itself exists only on the basis of historical consciousness”] The other way around: historical consciousness is a result of the discontent of modernity with itself. Cf. Savigny, Beruf.

That the younger generations in Germany and Russia no longer perceive modernity as something to be overcome obviously makes no difference at all — as little difference as what the Andaman Islanders (of Riezler in the article on “Man’s Science of Man” in Social Research) think about tin cans.

Pederasty, etc.] Please do read the Platonic Laws on this subject. — Do not forget the natural connection between sexual organs and generation. — Monogamy is another matter, although I myself have something to say for it. The philosophers had a very cynical and healthy argument for monogamy.

Thank you for the names. Who is the Green to whom I should send the Wild article (and where)?

Antike, Ⅶ,1931 — Jaeger’s translation of Aristotle’s analysis of magnanimity.

Most cordially yours,

                                                  Leo Strauss

Have you by the way read my review of Olschki’s Machiavelli book (Social Research, March 1946)? I would like you to read it.

注：这组德文通信发表于Independent Journal of Philosophy（Vol.Ⅳ, 1983）第105-114页，英译Susanne Klein和George Elliott Tucker。原文中的众多斜体强调可能无法显示；可能有误植字，引用请核对原文。Wild Review指施特劳斯1946年发表于Social Research（13，No.3，September，pp.326-67）上对John Wild Plato’s Theory of Man (1946) 一书的书评（“On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy”）。贺拉斯的诗句意为“用干草叉逐走自然，它却总是回来。”见贺拉斯Epistulae，I，x，24，施特劳斯在《自然正当与历史》201-202页（据原作第七版）引用了同一诗句。Seventh Letter指柏拉图书信中最长的第七封。亚里士多德的megalopfxia 概念可见《尼各马科伦理学》卷四节三，1123b1-1125a31，及卷二节七，1107b17-1107b25。Review of Olschk’s Machiavelli book指施特劳斯发表于Social Research（13，No.1，pp.121-124）上对Leonardo Olschki Machiavelli the Scientist一书的书评，后收入《什么是政治哲学？》（1959），见第286-290页。