Considering that many of the scholars that blog here are, to one degree or another, Straussians, I found this blog over at Spengler…well, informative.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/spengler/2010/10/22/leo-strauss-destroyer-of-judaism/
Because I’ve not read Strauss and what I know of him I’ve picked up here, I was wondering if any of our learned PoMoCon bloggers or ‘commentors’ might care to respond? Pick up the gauntlet as it were.
Spengler, it should be noted, is a brilliant gentleman and scholar and not in the habit of disparaging Jews.
November 16th, 2010 | 10:04 am
Now in my opinion Strauss was also brilliant and a gentleman and not out to ruin the Jews. If there’s anything questionable in his stunning interpretation of M,. it might be that he was a bit naive about how innovative and destructive it would seem to the most sophisticated parts of the orthodox rabbinical tradition. Lots of work needs to be done comparing Thomas Aquinas and M. on particular providence and all that. Many Straussians–maybe more than Strauss himself–are too sure M. is right. What’s disappointing about the FT thread is that nobody is defending Strauss against Spengler’s venom. It’s above my pay grade to do it, without, at least, more thought than I can devote to the matter for now.
November 16th, 2010 | 10:19 am
Thanks for the comment Peter. I agree that it is ‘disappointing’ that, so far, you’re the only Straussian to defend Strauss.
November 16th, 2010 | 10:19 am
Yeah, I don’t know Spengler so well, but it seemed like an unusual amount of venom from him, and yeah, a sadly typical parade in the comments of instant Strauss experts/denouncers.
I’d like to know what someone like Leon Kass makes of Spengler’s post.
November 16th, 2010 | 11:43 am
So I’m not so disappointed that nobody is defending Strauss on the other FT thing, but that all of the attacks are mean, ignorant, and stupid (as Carl says). I’m all for criticizing Strauss, of course, remembering, of course, how much Strauss really did know about the Bible. And remembering how much Strauss influenced Kass’ discovery of the truth of GENESIS.
November 17th, 2010 | 1:15 pm
There is much to think about in the letters Klingenstein has published. Spengler’s post deserves to be ignored. The letters do not. Does anyone know of other discussions of the letters?
November 17th, 2010 | 1:17 pm
TLC is right. I would like to know of other discussions too.
November 21st, 2010 | 8:45 pm
Spengler, while too vituperative here, is correct. Strauss (often) misunderstood Judaism.
Now before the howling begins let me state that although I mean to defend Spengler and am an orthodox Spenglerian on (most) economic and political matters, I am by no means an enemy of Strauss, nor a “theologian annoyed by a philosopher.” Strauss’ interpretations of classical and modern writers are always provocative and usually brilliant, and I agree with Strauss’ self-assessment (as reported by S. Rosen) that his achievement was somewhere near that of Lessing.
All that said, in matters pertaining to Judaism Strauss sometimes let his natural (German) anti-theological ire interfere with his cultivated (Victorian) scholarly principle of “granting things their due,” or, on the level of interpretation, “attempting to understand a writer just as he understood himself.” I imagine this is true of Strauss’ view on some Catholic figures as well, but I’m not qualified to judge this. (Also: Strauss did not devote too much time to the interpretation of Catholic thinkers. He seemed concerned with them mostly insofar as such works were part of the “Christian world” to which Machiavelli and Hobbes responded. Unless I am mistaken, there is no single Straussian work on a canonical Christian thinker).
Strauss’ descriptions of Judaism are general, abstract, and precisely for this reason reductive. Judaism, Strauss tell us, is humble faithfulness (perhaps any religion will do here?) loving devotion to God, or, most distinctly, unstinting (almost blind) devotion to the Law. This latter point especially has been adopted and propagated by very smart commentators like Pierre Manent, who themselves seem to know very little about Judaism and obscure the issue even more.
In its own way, this is still putting a Victorian spin on things. Unstinting devotion to a good law would seem to be rather a good thing.
But Strauss, who seemed to take very seriously what he called the ‘critique in Plato’s Laws of the concept of Law as such,’ would have to say that ‘unstinting devotion to the Law’ may be better than nothing but at the end of the day merely a remedial patchwork for those who cannot think for themselves.
But does Judaism, or the great Jewish legislators like Maimonides, propagate unstinting or dumb devotion to the Law? No one would deny that Judaism has a legalistic character. But describing it in this way, Judaism as a principle of abstract spiritual or legalistic devotion, Strauss seems to ignore that Jewish writers other than Maimonides had hardly succumbed to blind devotion. Strauss knows this, at the end of the day (he was too smart not to see that Abraham Ibn Ezra was hardly a prominent of blind devotion to anything) but does he know, and here I reach the crux of the issue, that the whole idea of ‘blind devotion to the Law’ is inaccurate in the context of Judaism, and dare I say metaphysically incoherent?
On the first point. Judaism is not and never was a Law but a jumble of laws, ordinances and practices. Their meaning are not evident absent reflection, and while there are surely truths by which Judaism stands or falls, a principle which gives the laws coherence, it is misleading to speak of Jewish Law with a capital L.
As for blind devotion to the law, fon’t all laws, more or less, depend on one’s idiosyncratic conception of the object the law proposes to identify? An easy example. Could we know that all men are created equal to be true (if it is true) unless we have some idea in our head of what equality is? Couldn’t a good law sharpen our view of the thing, just as a bad law might obscure it?
I’ve run out of steam, but let me just say that in expounding and interpreting laws the greatest of the Jewish thinkers were not promoting blind adherence nor ‘traditionalism’ understood as ‘anti-thought’ but rather greater understanding of the world.
I’ll try to offer something more, later.
November 22nd, 2010 | 9:05 am
SBK, Yours is respectful criticism I can believe in. Your last substantive paragraph is surely right, and so the “Straussian” dualism of “blind obedience” and “autonomous thought” has never grabbed me either as true or as what Strauss actually thought.
November 22nd, 2010 | 4:50 pm
SKB, this is a delightful critique of Spengler, however, his primary point seems to be:
“Strauss knew, of course, that “to pull Maimonides out of Judaism is to pull out its foundation,” but his recent insights into Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed had led him to the “determination that Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew” because he was a philosopher”
It doesn’t appear to me that Spengler is arguing that Strauss was concerned with the idea of a “blind devotion to the Law” rather he is saying that Stauss purposefullly acted to sever the tension/movement between reason and revelation in Judaism. But, perhaps I am not understanding the arguement?
November 23rd, 2010 | 11:25 am
Does not the problem boil down to here as how one takes and deal with ‘doxa’ and its interaction with logos/logoi?
For doxa in mysticism/revelation is treated differently and understood differently than doxa from the POV of philosophia… in the former the doxa arises out of the logos/logoi that is revealed by the theos or his/her/its agent of disclosure. And the effort to regulate that doxa in a given koinoinia is known as ortho(correct)-doxa, which echoes the role of nomos in the koinoina.
For the philosopher the doxa–regardless of how they are delivered are simply statements of logos/logoi that are to be tested for truth or falsehood. Thus for the philosopher truth is more an instrument than a goal, whereas the goal is wisdom/sophia.
I take it that given that Strauss is distrustful of priviliding doxa as truth simply, this seems to put him at odds with those who equate oh nomos/the Law with the true as revealed. The anger with Strauss on the part of a number of overly pious types (either be they hard core jews, christians, or platonists) is Strauss sides with doubt over faith on the question of doxa.
But the whole issue of how Strauss understands faith is a big one. Leora Batnitzky has suggest that piety for Strauss is less about belief than about doing/action… and as such this reflects certain traditions within Jewish theology that action and doing what the law requires is more important in strength of belief or even believing.
But perhaps I bable….
December 1st, 2010 | 9:36 am
Strauss consistently argued for the mutual irreducibility of a theology open to the challenge of philosophy and of a philosophy open to the challenge of theology.
To say that there is an “incompatibility in principle” between (Biblical) Revelation and Philosophy is to say that they do not stand on the identical principle: Revelation stands on Divine Authority, whereas Philosophy stands on human reason. Between the two there is a practically insurmountable ditch–one that Strauss had not found anyone to have overcome absolutely, once and for all (hence, e.g., the need for medieval Christian theologians to keep studying and appealing to “the Philosopher”; for, indeed, even God’s Incarnation did not exonerate Christians from questioning their own understanding of the nature or truth about God–de veritate Dei).
Philosophy’s own “principle” is DOUBT (skepsis), whereas Revelation begins from GRACE (given answers irreducible to doubt). Philosophy’s principle is “negative”; that of Revelation is “positive.” Naturally the two are in tension with each other, and naturally both include traces of their respective counterpart with themselves.
When Strauss questioned any historical synthesis of philosophy and revelation, he excited the animosity of literati who were (or are) convinced to have solved the tension between doubt and certainty once and for all within their consciences, via the replacement of “old” pre-philosophical Religion with a new spiritual Religion that has finally absorbed all questions within its positivity.
One important predecessor of Strauss was G.E. Lessing. It would help those interested in understanding real pertinent issues to heed Lessing’s “On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power,” available online as PDF excerpt from Cambridge UP’s edition of Lessing’s _Philosophical and Theological Writings_.
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