Opposing Political Philosophy and Litera

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Opposing Political Philosophy

and Literature
Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger and the
Fate of the ‘Quarrel between
Philosophy and Poetry’
Paul O’Mahoney
Abstract: Strauss’s critique of Heidegger’s philosophy aims at a recov-

ery of political philosophy, which he saw as threatened by Heidegger’s
radical historicism; for Strauss, philosophy as a whole could not sur-
vive without political philosophy, and his return to the classical tradi-
tion of political philosophy, while inspired by the work of Heidegger,
was directed against what he saw as the nihilism that was its conse-
quence. Here I wish to examine a dimension of Strauss’s critique
which, though hinted at, remains neglected or unexplored by Strauss:
that is, how the critique of Heideggarian historicism should naturally
link with Strauss’s frequent attention to the issue of the ancient ‘quar-
rel between philosophy and poetry’. It has often been observed by
other commentators that through Heidegger’s work, philosophy
appears liable to be supplanted by contemporary literature, whether
poetry or philosophy. As some of Strauss’s explicit statements extend
his definition of what falls under the category of ‘poetry’ in the mod-
ern age to contemporary novels and poetry, this aspect of Heidegger
should have commanded more of his attention. Endurance of the
quarrel between philosophy and poetry becomes through the prism of
Strauss’s work the confrontation of political philosophy with litera-
ture, particularly the novel form. It was not so much the rise of mod-
ern, non-teleological natural science that threatened the endurance
and dignity of philosophy, then, but the rise of modern literature; the
critique of historicism, when viewed in the light of the enduring
‘quarrel’, should lead one to a consideration of a crucial issue which
remained oddly neglected, or was only hinted at, by Strauss.
Keywords: Heidegger; historicism; poetry; political philosophy;
Strauss.
Theoria, March 2011 doi:10.3167/th.2011.5712604

74 Paul O’Mahoney
That Heidegger is the dominant figure in continental philosophy in

the twentieth century is an assertion that could be denied today only
with difficulty. For some, this is perfectly natural: the power and dar-
ing of his thought, combined with a certain seductive charm, entitles
it to its elevated status. For others, of course, this state of affairs is to
be lamented; for some of his harshest critics, the charm of his lan-
guage masks an ultimate lack of substance. One of the most powerful
critiques of Heidegger elaborated by a contemporary is that of Leo
Strauss – who has latterly, for a variety of reasons, attained a notori-
ety comparable to Heidegger’s. Here I wish to discuss one aspect of
that critique, a dimension that, though present, remains somewhat
suppressed by Strauss, and consequently neglected by subsequent
scholars. One point, which we will expand on below, should be stated
right at the outset: for Strauss, Heidegger was a dangerous thinker.
The natural outcome of his thought was a thoroughgoing nihilism,
which destroyed the basis of philosophy. What I wish to suggest is
that Strauss partly recognised – but apparently did no more than ges-
ture toward this recognition – that imperilling the traditional ground
of philosophy as Heidegger had done led to a natural consequence or
tendency: the supplanting of philosophical enquiry, or its traditional
place and purpose, by literature.
Strauss’s critique of Heidegger is directed against historicism, and
is undertaken in the interests of recovering political philosophy, and
the idea of natural right. That his critique has had a measure of suc-
cess is evidenced by Pierre Manent’s judgement that ‘political philos-
ophy as originally understood owes its bare survival – fittingly
unobtrusive to the point of secretiveness – to Leo Strauss’ sole and
unaided efforts. Without him, the philosophy of history, or historicism
of any stripe, would have swallowed political philosophy completely’
(2007). The state of the question of natural right being ‘a mixture of
oblivion and fitful restoration’ (Kennington 1981: 57) by the time of
Strauss’s study Natural Right and History is a reflection of the obliv-
ion of political philosophy – and this is a direct consequence of the
rise of what Strauss calls the two ‘reigning relativisms’ – positivism
and historicism (Strauss 1965a: vii; 2000b: 1-3).
Positivism departs from political philosophy proper in its insis-
tence on ‘value-free’ social science. A ‘value-free’ political philoso-
phy or political science is impossible. [1] Therefore positivism is
destructive of political philosophy, and scornful of its allegedly
‘unscientific’ character: it denies that there can be a political science.
[2] But positivism is ultimately incoherent, and fails in its aims. It
Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 75
does not represent a threat that political philosophy cannot withstand

and weather. We might say regarding Strauss’s critique of positivism,
elaborated primarily in the opening chapters of Natural Right and
History, that the positivist ignores at his peril Nietzsche’s characteri-
sation of man as the valuing animal. In fact, despite Weber’s
admirable dedication and seriousness, positivism for Strauss is ulti-
mately intellectually weak. [3] The true threat to the tenability and
coherence of political philosophy is historicism. Positivism if pur-
sued sufficiently naturally turns into historicism; thus, historicism in
a sense contains within itself and goes beyond positivism (or, posi-
tivism which is coherent and understands itself properly naturally
turns into historicism) (Strauss 1957: 354). This is most emphatically
the case with radical historicism – which means, historicism in its
highest, its Heideggarian, form. [4] Positivism is initially destructive
of political philosophy, but historicism leads to its oblivion. [5] The
true target of the ostensible critique of Weberian positivism in Natural
Right and History is Heideggarian historicism. That the name of Hei-
degger does not occur in the work is only a measure of the shadow he
casts over it, once one understands such a ‘Straussian’ silence (Strauss
1978a: 30 with 138; compare 2000a: 64, 84, 117 n. 65, 118 n. 78).
When Strauss alludes to the distinction between esse and entia when
speaking of the transition from ‘early (theoretical) to radical (“exis-
tentialist”) historicism’, it is clear that Heidegger is the main propo-
nent of the latter. [6]
Every political philosophy, if it is worth the name, is connected
intimately with ethics, that is, every political philosophy commits
one, explicitly or implicitly, to an ethics. Where ethics no longer has
any ground, one cannot forge a political philosophy properly speak-
ing. Heideggarian historicism threatens the ground of ethics. On this
point in respect of Heidegger’s philosophy Strauss is emphatic; com-
menting on Hermann Cohen’s development of a system in which
ethics was central, he notes that Cohen’s follower Ernst Cassirer trans-
formed that work ‘into a new system of philosophy in which ethics
had completely disappeared: it had been silently dropped: he had not
faced the problem’; however, ‘Heidegger did face the problem. He
declared that ethics is impossible and his whole being was permeated
by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss’ (Strauss 1995a: 304;
compare 311). We are entitled to dissent from this conclusion or to
moderate it on this basis: Heidegger himself would never have said
that he denied the possibility of ethics. Heidegger was canny enough
to avoid this conclusion by intimating that ethics as traditionally
76 Paul O’Mahoney
understood was not yet possible, in the absence of a comprehensive

understanding or recovery of the meaning of Being. This is quite a
different matter from a categorical foreclosure of its possibility. The
categorical denial of ethics on behalf of Heidegger’s philosophy
requires an interpretation such as Strauss gives it, which asserts that
it leads directly and inevitably to nihilism. In a letter to Jean Beaufret
Heidegger spoke of the accusation that his thought was nihilism as the
greatest misunderstanding in contemporary philosophy – though his
assertion that it is the opposite of nihilism is, like his treatment of
ethics by attempting a recovery of a more primordial meaning of
‘ethos’, one that requires acceptance of his philosophical position as
a whole to maintain. [7] Despite the denials of Heidegger, what we are
interested in is a dimension or a problematic lying beyond Strauss’s
allegation of nihilism; as it is the Straussian critique that is our pri-
mary concern, we must provisionally accept his interpretation, even if
that means Heidegger does not get to speak from the dock. For Hei-
degger, political philosophy is not yet possible, absent the under-
standing of Dasein; but it is not yet impossible either. It is true that
Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’ gives no definite hint as to how
it could become the basis of a political ontology or inform a political
anthropology on which one could base a vision of the best regime (in
spite of its emphasising ‘existentials’ such as Mitsein and Sein-bei).
Strauss has remarked: ‘There is no room for political philosophy in
Heidegger’s work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room
in question is occupied by god or the gods’ (1985: 30). Strauss could
not have known what has become Heidegger’s most famous state-
ment regarding god or gods: the resigned judgement ‘Nur noch ein
Gott kann uns retten’, of the famous Der Spiegel interview (in accor-
dance with Heidegger’s directive that it only be published posthu-
mously, it appeared five days after his death, three years after
Strauss’s). [8] We might propose, then, that the judgement ‘only a
god can still save us’ is the outcome of a position in which the gods
have replaced the political, or the natural consequence of abandon-
ment of due considerations of the political.
A phrase such as ‘only a god can save us’, particularly deliv-
ered, as it is in the Spiegel interview, as if it summarised a general
position arrived at in the twilight of a life of thought, would seem to
suggest that, in terms of the distinction of which so much is made in
Strauss’s work, that between reason and revelation or ‘Jerusalem and
Athens’, Heidegger could at least tentatively or provisionally be
placed on the side of revelation. That elements of Heidegger’s philos-
ophy have some grounding in religious thought is not the important

matter; rather it is that Heidegger, in marginalising ethics, calls into
question any ranking of human ends or objectives. Thus, he restores
the place of faith. As Strauss writes apropos of this problem, in the
course of a critique of historicism, ‘the mere fact that philosophy and
revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of
philosophy by revelation’ (1965a: 75). [9]
This ‘refutation’ consists in the fact that philosophy, to be on firm
ground, must demonstrate its self-evident choiceworthiness – the pur-
suit of philosophy must be shown to be self-evidently valuable, or
choosing that pursuit appears as a matter of faith. In this case, even
the decision for reason over faith rests on a form of faith; thus, the
grounds for philosophy are imperilled. This is a direct consequence of
the elimination of the ranking of objectives in determining the rank-
ing of choices: there is no longer any coherent comparison of lives,
such as was undertaken by Aristotle in demonstrating the superiority
of the contemplative to the political life (Nicomachean Ethics X.7-8;
Politics VII.2-3). When the possibility of ethics has been denied
outright or at the very least has become questionable, political phi-
losophy broadly construed disappears. Heidegger’s rejection, or mar-
ginalisation, of ethics, and the rejection of the ranking of objectives
(whether implicit in the logic of a philosophical position or explicitly
stated) results in nihilism – which has a corrosive effect on political
philosophy because it subverts the fundamental alternative that
defines a political philosophy, progress or return. Nihilism is the
rejection of the process of civilisation – or what we might call the
political art – as such (Strauss 1999: 362-6).
When Heidegger purports to offer a purely descriptive ontology
evacuated of an ethical or prescriptive element, he is challenging the
conception of what philosophy can or should aim for. We may say that
he is also trying to have his cake and eat it too: the question of
‘authenticity’ is the prescriptive element in Heidegger’s early philos-
ophy, despite his denials. [10] But, that is beside the case: what mat-
ters is more Heidegger’s stated aim than his achievement or failure in
respect of that aim. And in prioritising the descriptive (or elementar-
ily ‘phenomenological’) aspect of his philosophy, Heidegger prepares
the ground, almost inevitably, for the usurpation of the place of phi-
losophy by literature.
In speaking admiringly of the effect of Heidegger on the genera-
tion of students to which he belonged, Strauss remarks that Heideg-
ger’s critique, which uprooted rather than rejected the philosophical
78 Paul O’Mahoney
tradition, allowed ‘the roots of the tradition’ to be seen anew, and in a

way to which none of his contemporaries were accustomed. He thus
opened the possibility of ‘a genuine return to classical philosophy’: he
had, however, opened this possibility ‘without intending it’ (Strauss
1978c: 2). In a similar way, we can say that the Straussian critique of
Heidegger opens the way to apprehension of a problem posed by his
philosophy which Strauss approached only obliquely and perhaps did
not fully recognise. Other critics, as we shall see, declared the pri-
macy of the literary as a consequence of Heidegger’s philosophy with-
out reservation, as if it were obvious to anyone, to borrow Strauss’s
phrase ‘who had ears to hear’ (ibid.). This problem becomes more
interesting, however, in the light of Strauss’s enduring concern with
the problem of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Thus
in taking up these two concerns – the Straussian critique of Heideg-
garian historicism coupled with his treatments of the quarrel between
philosophy and poetry – we can radicalise that initial critique, not so
as to reinforce it, but to highlight an aspect or potential consequence
of Heidegger’s thought that is insufficiently treated by Strauss, though
intimately related to another of his abiding concerns.
The question of how a descriptive philosophy can be distinguished
from (or can possibly be equal to) literary description has always been
raised in respect of phenomenology. Surely, it might be supposed, the
literary – at least accomplished serious literature – will surpass the
philosophical. But, it did not take the popularisation of the phenome-
nological method for this question to be formulated. Socrates in the
final book of Plato’s Republic famously mentions a longstanding
quarrel between philosophy and poetry (Rep. 607b). In his lectures on
Plato’s Symposium, in discussing Aristophanes in the context of the
ancient quarrel, Strauss made a brief remark: ‘A contemporary nov-
elist with a reasonable degree of competence tells us much more
about modern society than volumes of social science analysis. I don’t
question that social science analyses are very important, but if you
want to get a broad view and a deep view you read a novel rather than
social science’ (Strauss 2000b: 7). He declined to draw the obvious
conclusion: the future historian who wished to understand that soci-
ety would be better advised to look to its novels than to its volumes of
social science or, by implication in an era when philosophy was being
swallowed by social science, philosophy.
To be sure, Strauss speaks here of (predominantly positivistic)
social science, and not of Heideggarian historicism. But, as men-
tioned, historicism is the outcome of positivism which properly
understands its principles and thinks them through. This could not be
the case if it did not already share with historicism some fundamen-
tal principles. If historicism does not restore philosophy, but rather
threatens it, and positivistic social science ranks below accomplished
literature, Strauss’s remarks would seem to imply that beyond the
horizon of historicism lies the ascent of literature over philosophy.
The basis of Aristophanes ‘informal charge’ against Socrates,
which preceded the formal charge of the poet Meletus, is interpreted
as follows by Strauss:
Philosophy, Aristophanes suggests, in contradistinction to poetry, is

unable to persuade or to charm the multitude. Philosophy transcends the
ephemeral, the mundane, the political. However, it cannot find its way
back to it. The philosopher as such is blind to the context within which
philosophy exists, namely political life. He does not reflect on his own
doing, he lacks self-knowledge – he lacks prudence in the wide Platonic
sense of the word, because he does not understand political things. This is
connected with the fact – again I follow Aristophanes’ indication – that
philosophy is unerotic and a-music, unpoetic. Philosophy is blind to the
human things as experienced in life, in the acts of living. These acts of liv-
ing are precisely the theme of poetry. Poetry integrates purely theoretical
wisdom into a human context. It completes the completely theoretical
wisdom by self-knowledge (2000b: 6-7; compare 1996b: 157-8, 164).
The substance of the charge is that the unerotic, unpoetic wisdom of

Socrates ignores the context in which philosophy is possible, pre-
cisely the political context (compare Strauss 1996a: 49, 173). Poetry
shows the lived context of wisdom, the ‘acts of living’ which cannot
be abstracted from if a true picture of human life as lived is to emerge.
Of course, one should not exaggerate the enmity of philosophy and
poetry: a contest with regard to wisdom, a traditional agon between
the two, does not amount to hostility. Not only does Plato represent in
his Symposium a meeting of Socrates and Aristophanes that is without
confrontation or controversy; for Nietzsche, nothing so summed up
the ‘sphinx-like’ enigma of Plato the man as that ‘petit fait’ that has
come down to us from antiquity, reporting that the sage of Athens
died with a volume of Aristophanes under his pillow (2008: 32-3).
Many writers have been at pains to point out that Plato, as the author
of philosophical dialogues, is himself a species of poet (Rosen 1988:
1-2; Sidney [1595]1971: 97; compare Shelley [1840]2004: 947:
‘Plato was essentially a poet’). The writing of dialogues, poetry of a
kind (Aristotle includes the Socratic dialogue as a subgenre in itself of
80 Paul O’Mahoney
poetic writing), in showing the lived acts of Socrates, shows him as a

poetic and erotic man (in Phaedo, we see him having spent the night
before his final day composing poetic variations on Aesop). It was the
task of the Socratic followers to defend Socrates against the charge of
political irresponsibility, which Aristophanes indicated was based on
a lack of political understanding. Thus, Strauss continues (2000b: 7):
Plato and Xenophon defend Socrates against this charge as follows:

Socrates is so far from being blind to the political that he is truly the dis-
coverer of the political in its own kind. Precisely Socrates understood the
political as such, namely, the fact that the political is characterized by a
certain recalcitrance to philosophy ... Socrates’ philosophy is one act of
obedience to the Delphic injunction ‘know thyself.’ His whole philosophy
is self-knowledge or prudence. And Socrates, far from being an unerotic
man, is the erotician. It is not true that poetry is the capstone of philoso-
phy. On the contrary, philosophy is the capstone of poetry. This means not
merely ... that philosophy defeats poetry in the contest for supremacy
regarding wisdom, it means also that the right kind of philosophy is more
truly poetic than poetry in the common sense of the term.
It is implied here that the charge of Aristophanes had to be answered:

in other words, the political element of Socratic wisdom had to be
demonstrated. It is at least implicit therefore that simple discounting
of the political is not an option for philosophy if it is to raise a claim
to its superiority vis-à-vis poetry. One can immediately recognise the
consequences, in this light, of a philosophy essentially evacuated of
the political achieving prominence, even pre-eminence, in a particu-
lar epoch: Strauss must recognise that, as far as the ‘quarrel between
philosophy and poetry’ goes, Heidegger’s philosophy prepares the
ground for the triumph of poetry.
In a large part this is owed to Heidegger’s attempts to recover the
‘primordial’ meaning of truth as Unverborgenheit or alētheia. Truth
as uncoveredness or unconcealment is truth ‘exemplified’, ‘instanti-
ated’ or ‘shown’, rather than explained or asserted. It is disclosed in
lived acts or in the accurate imitation of lived acts – in poetry – rather
than in theoretical wisdom (philosophy). That Heidegger attempted
not only to explore truth as primordially ‘unconcealment’ but to
restore that conception of alētheia to contemporary philosophy, effec-
tively gave literature potential access to philosophical ‘truth’ that was
paradoxically closed to philosophy. This must also extend to ethics:
one of the most common complaints regarding theories of ethics
(whether deontological, utilitarian, virtue-based or anything else) is
that their consistent application is inevitably thwarted by the com-

plexities of actually lived situations and what we can loosely call the
‘context’ supplied for ethical decisions by circumstance. In contrast to
this failure, one easily recognises the superiority of the exemplifica-
tion of ethical dilemmas in literature, which may not claim to be
object lessons in ethical behaviour, but capture something of the com-
plexities of the human situation – or, put simply, they pull off the
happy trick of capturing the universal in attention to the particular.
Over the abyss opened up by the philosophical recognition of the
impossibility of ethics, literature builds its rope-bridges.
A crucial point to note here is, of course, that ‘poetry’ as meant in
the quarrel of which Plato speaks is closer, as a rival to philosophy, to
the theological than to what we would call the literary. The inferior-
ity of poetry to philosophy is based on the fact that it must, for Plato,
be made subordinate to or directed by philosophy. ‘Poetry’ is close to
rhetoric, and concerns not truths but ‘noble delusions’; thus its object
is the many rather than the wise or the philosophically inclined (see
especially Strauss 1996b: 157-8, 184-5, 195ff; also 2000a: 275;
1978a: 296, 345 n. 219). Elaborating on his comments on novels as
potentially more informative than social science, however, Strauss
admits of a broader modern conception of poetry: ‘[I]f scientific
social science is not quite sufficient, then we need some supplement.
This supplement is generally supplied by novels today. In other words
by utterances which are not scientific, not rational, which are subjec-
tive. This implies that there is a possible conflict between poetry,
which includes novels, and philosophy. Perhaps philosophy can do
the job that poetry claims to do and to some extent does’ (2000b: 17).
This is an important remark for the following reason: no one could
properly contest the idea that the modern novel belongs, fundamen-
tally, to an atheological age, or at least that it does not serve a theo-
logical purpose. Thus, Strauss implies that this aspect of ‘poetry’ may
be lost or dismissed without changing the fact that a quarrel remains.
In a sense, then, the problem of the novel towards which Strauss
points us seems to bring together the problems associated with two
fundamental oppositions in his thought: the opposition between rea-
son and revelation, and the distinction between ancients and mod-
erns. Here, we may say that the novel form, though an inheritor of the
tradition represented by ‘poetry’ in the Platonic formula, is nonethe-
less a radically altered and distinctly nontheological practice. As a
competitor for claims to wisdom, it absorbs or surpasses the theolog-
ical in modernity.
82 Paul O’Mahoney
If we accept that literature may restore ethics where philosophy

begins to lose sight of its possibility, the ancient quarrel between phi-
losophy and poetry of which Plato speaks might appear settled in
favour of poetry, broadly construed. Heidegger had decisively laid
the ground for this in what is probably his most famous piece of writ-
ing after Being and Time. In the ‘Letter on Humanism’, he opined that
Sophocles’ tragedies preserved the ēthos in what they say more orig-
inally than do Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics’ (Heidegger 1993: 256).
This is particularly the case following the rise of the novel form – the
point at which ‘poetry’ moves decisively into the province of philos-
ophy. It is with particular reference to the novel that the common
adage that good writers ‘show’, while bad writers ‘tell’, carries force.
Philosophy, naturally, is a matter of ‘telling’: it lacks many of the
available weapons of literature – above all, the power to ‘show’, to
‘instantiate’ truth. [11] And while of course this adage is limited (wit-
ness Lolita, for example, a brilliant narrative with very little ‘shown’
that is not overlaid by its narrator’s ‘telling’), its intent is well under-
stood. Writing of Flaubert’s wish to hide himself as author entirely, to
show rather than tell, in composing Madame Bovary, Terence Cave
claims: ‘What Flaubert calls style – the aesthetic point of view – guar-
antees the moral autonomy of the novel’ (1981: x). Such ‘moral
autonomy’ applies at once to individual characters’ independence
from the author and that of the ‘universe’ of the novel from the norms
of its author’s society. This aspect of the novel has been put eloquently
and forcefully by Milan Kundera, who proposes a definition for the
novel as ‘a realm where moral judgment is suspended’:
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its

morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit
of judging, instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in
the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wis-
dom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the
most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judg-
ment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like,
you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse
Rastignac – that’s your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it
(Kundera 1995: 7).
Novelistic characters, he continues, are those ‘conceived not as a func-

tion of some pre-existent truth, not as examples of good or evil, or as
representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous
beings grounded in their own morality’ (ibid., 7-8). [12] These are well
enough rehearsed ideas; no one with a modicum of understanding can

be insensitive to the potential advantages of literature in ‘showing’ or
exemplifying a problem (obviously this is not the case with tenden-
tious literature in which a character is merely a representative of some
particular vice or nothing but the mouthpiece of an idea). What is
important with respect to Heidegger is that he prepares the ground for
the ascent of ‘poetry’ over philosophy from within philosophy.
Once again, this turns on ethics; Heidegger gives up on or indefi-
nitely forestalls the ethical. He hints at the inability of philosophical
theory to grasp or formulate an ethics. He hints that it is to the ex-
emplification of the ēthos in literature we must look if we are to
understand ‘ethics’. Without an ethics, we are left with the merely
descriptive (as Heidegger wished), or, to align it with that for which
Weber wished, with ‘value-free’ analysis. The following passage, again
directed explicitly against Weber but part of a critique aimed primar-
ily at Heidegger, gives an idea of the problems posed by such analysis:
The prohibition against value-judgments in social science would lead to

the consequence that we are permitted to give a strictly factual description
of the overt acts that can be observed in concentration camps and perhaps
an equally factual analysis of the motivation of the actors concerned: we
would not be permitted to speak of cruelty. Every reader of such a
description who is not completely stupid would, of course, see that the
actions described are cruel. The factual description would, in truth, be a
bitter satire. What claimed to be a straightforward report would be an
unusually circumlocutionary report. The writer would deliberately sup-
press his better knowledge, or, to use Weber’s favorite term, he would
commit an act of intellectual dishonesty. Or, not to waste any moral
ammunition on things that are not worthy of it, the whole procedure
reminds one of a childish game in which you lose if you pronounce cer-
tain words, to the use of which you are constantly incited by your play-
mates (Strauss 1965: 52).
One can sense Strauss’s reluctance to make recourse to this extreme

example. The Nazi camp system and the destruction of the European
Jewry function in the popular mind and the popular media as the par-
adigmatic cases of cruelty and barbarism, so much so that Žižek has
felt compelled to point out that their elevation as such a case can on
occasion be an act of cynical manipulation (2002: 66-8). Strauss him-
self complained of the sophistic fallacy he termed the reductio ad
Hitlerum, pointing out: ‘A view is not refuted by the fact that it hap-
pens to have been shared by Hitler’ (1965: 42-3). Treating a view as
84 Paul O’Mahoney
refutable by the fact of its being shared by a disreputable individual is

a formally more sophisticated, but perhaps for that very reason more
odious, form of the ad hominem fallacy. Strauss’s example however is
useful for our purposes, and the following comparison: consider in
respect of Strauss’s passage Czesław Miłosz’s reflections on Tadeusz
Borowski’s infamous concentration camp stories (the writer is dis-
cussed as ‘Beta’, the ‘disappointed lover’ in The Captive Mind):
I have read many books about concentration camps, but not one of them
is as terrifying as his stories because he never moralizes, he relates...Beta
is a nihilist in his stories, but by that I do not mean that he is amoral. On
the contrary, his nihilism results from an ethical passion, from disap-
pointed love of the world and of humanity. He wants to go to the limit in
describing what he saw; he wants to depict with complete accuracy a
world in which there is no longer any place for indignation. The human
species is naked in his stories, stripped of those tendencies toward good
which last only so long as the habit of civilization lasts (Miłosz 2001:
115,122). [13]
The refusal to moralise constitutes the morality of the novel – and of

genuine literature generally, as it defines the moral stance of
Borowski’s stories. To ‘moralise’ here must of course be taken not in
the narrow and pejorative sense generally given the word, but in the
sense of the formulation of an ethical position, or at the least an analy-
sis of human life that informs or implies a certain attitude vis-à-vis
the ethical. The latter is present in Strauss’s attempted recovery of
classical natural right: but Strauss certainly does not ‘moralise’ in the
pejorative sense – particularly given that, following Aristotle, for
Strauss the intellectual virtues are not only higher than moral virtue
but independent of or indifferent to it. [14] Naturally, if not com-
pletely stupid or bestialised ourselves, we recognise the actions in
Borowski’s stories as cruel, the actors as degraded and barbarised. But
it is the privilege of the literary account to refrain from explicit indi-
cation of their cruelty, or attendant condemnation. They are simply
presented as phenomena, detached from or not yet integrated into any
recognisable system of moral judgement. But this ‘allowing a thing to
be seen’, in itself and for itself, as pure phenomenon – in Heideggar-
ian language, this allowing truth qua alētheia to occur – is not possi-
ble for philosophy. There are ‘value-free’ philosophical enquiries –
into the nature of language, for example; but there can be no ‘value-
free’ ontological enquiry or philosophical anthropology. An ontology
that did not inform or point towards an ethical position would be per-
verse and abortive (if Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’ of Being

and Time is not, that is in part because, as discussed above, it does, in
spite of itself, point toward an ethic). In a large part, Heidegger’s
philosophical stance amounts to a kind of poetic disposition toward
the world – his admiration for Hölderlin and Rilke are not incidental
indicators of his personal tastes, but clues to the core of his thought.
[15] (Heidegger’s ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’ reminds one of
nothing so much as, and as a principle could have been adopted from,
the famous opening of Hölderlin’s Patmos). Indeed, some critics have
argued that it was part of Heidegger’s legacy to make philosophy lit-
erary, or that his own philosophy was only the philosophical presen-
tation of more properly literary motifs. Kaufmann is emphatic in his
claim that Heidegger’s ‘treatment of death, no less than much of his
contrast of authenticity and inauthenticity, came straight out of Tol-
stoy’s great story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch”’. The footnote in Being
and Time which mentions the story, says Kaufmann, ‘does not begin
to give any idea of Heidegger’s indebtedness’. In fact, it significantly
downplays any debt, just as, for Kaufmann, Heidegger will fail to
acknowledge fully the influence of Nietzsche on the later rethinking
of his philosophical position. Echoing the remark on Tolstoy’s story:
‘Heidegger’s later conception of the history of philosophy...came
straight out of Nietzsche’. (Kaufmann 1992: 212-16; for Heidegger’s
reference to Tolstoy, Heidegger 2005: 495 n. xii /1967: 254 n. 1).
Kaufmann also suggests (1992: 209) that Heidegger’s whole teaching
in Being and Time is a secularised version of the Christian teaching of
original sin – something also considered by Sloterdijk (2001: 208).
Rorty describes the composition of Being and Time as Heidegger hav-
ing: ‘found a way to package Nietzsche and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and
Dostoyevsky into an academically respectable philosophical system.
He reshaped what had been thought of as merely literary matter into
a doctrine of the nature of human life. His Being and Time changed
the course of European philosophy by breaking down barriers
between genres, barriers no one else had been able to surmount’
(Rorty 1998).
The problem here – and Strauss was at least partly attuned to this
problem – is that philosophy does not have the resources or advan-
tages afforded literature in this respect. A ‘scientific’ view of human
behaviour or a ‘science of man’ that does not value is not only con-
trived but a travesty. A novel may create its own moral universe, a
realm where moral judgement is suspended, but philosophy cannot do
this in quite the same way and remain philosophy. Specifically, even
86 Paul O’Mahoney
if one accepts after Strauss the effective independence of the intellec-

tual and moral virtues – it is not only a question of ethics, but as
always, of style – philosophy cannot ‘instantiate’ truth or derive its
charm and power precisely from the fact that it does not present an
argument. To arrogate the literary for philosophical purposes has the
practical consequence of subordinating philosophy to literature. Part
of the reason Strauss occupied himself with the ancient quarrel of
which Plato speaks is that he recognised its endurance, and the seri-
ousness of the challenge of ‘poetry’ or literature to philosophy, the
seriousness of its claim to a superior kind of wisdom (cf. 1996b: 178,
205ff.). Given that in speaking of that enduring quarrel in the modern
age, Strauss explicitly expands ‘poetry’ to include the novel form,
one is entitled to follow the thread of his own thought and see in the
full ‘radicalisation’ of historicism as represented by Heidegger the
concern that the novel might displace philosophy.
It must be emphasised that, if Heidegger’s philosophical approach
is value-free or if it rejects ethics, this is not because he shares the
Weberian aspiration for value-free social science, which would align
its procedures and results as far as possible with those of the empiri-
cal sciences. Both Strauss and Heidegger are acutely aware of the
implications that the rise of modern, non-teleological natural science,
based on the ‘conquest of nature’, has had for philosophy (Strauss
1965a: 23, 174-5, 201, 250; 1965b: 2, 88-92; 1978b: 2-3; in Schmitt
2007: 104; ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’ in Hei-
degger 1993: 267-306). Certainly philosophy has ceded much of its
traditional ground to modern science – to what until the nineteenth
century was still called ‘natural philosophy’. Indeed in the twentieth
century a philosophical movement explicitly aimed to reduce philos-
ophy, the former ‘queen of the sciences’, to the mere handmaid of the
modern empirical sciences, a discipline the task of which was to clear
up language and evacuate it of the traces of confusing metaphysics.
Logical positivism, which owed much to Russell and Moore, and
developed particularly via Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle to its
consummation and summary expression in Ayer’s Language, Truth
and Logic, unsurprisingly shared the desire for ‘value-free’ enquiry
and sought to banish ethics from philosophical enquiry proper. So it
espoused ethical ‘emotivism’, claiming ethical propositions to be
either disguised imperatives or emotive statements (Ayer 1982: 139-
50). The success of the modern empirical sciences raised the prospect,
welcomed by Comte and later positivists, that the human things could
ultimately be explained scientifically: that a ‘science of man’ would
cap the science of nature. Social science would therefore supplant

philosophy. Strauss and Heidegger recognised the threat this posed to
the endurance of philosophy, but did not see it as an insurmountable
threat: the human things still require explanation in other terms than
those of the natural sciences. The prejudice toward the empirical sci-
ences reflects in part the idea that their conclusions are verifiable and
more fundamental – they amount to objective and incontrovertible
truth. Yes, biology can be explained by chemistry, and all chemistry
by the equations of quantum electrodynamics; but the ‘fundamentals’
of the human experience remain outside the enquiries of empirical
science. To quote an example used by Hilary Putnam [16]: a statement
such as ‘There are many difficult passages in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason’ expresses an incontestable truth. How would this be
expressed using Feynman diagrams or the equations of quantum
mechanics? In short, it is not translatable into the equations of
physics, at least not in a way that has explanatory power. It is only the
blindest scientism that seeks to reduce philosophy’s task to a process
of self-correction via the revision of its history.
The true threat to the endurance of philosophy – which for Strauss
could not survive in any traditional form without political philosophy
– was historicism in its Heideggarian form; one can recognise in this
threat, when coupled with others of Strauss’s arguments or concerns,
the prospect of the displacement or usurpation of traditional philoso-
phy by literature. Beyond the horizon of historicism lies the return of
poetry, in a modified and modernised form, as the competitor of phi-
losophy. Indeed, Strauss not only saw ‘poetry’ as the permanent rival
of philosophy, but worried that popular modern literature, which he
called ‘brutal and sentimental’, would blind readers to the ‘noble
reserve and quiet grandeur of the classics’. [17] It is another philo-
sophical movement inaugurated partly in response to Frege – not that
of Russell and Moore, but rather Husserlian phenomenology and par-
ticularly the impetus it receives from Heidegger – that constitutes the
true threat to philosophy: not by making it a secretary to the empiri-
cal sciences, but by subordinating it to literature.
As with the agonistic relation of revelation and philosophy, we
may suppose that for Strauss there is no truly coherent synthesis or
reconciliation of philosophy and poetry (not even the Platonic dia-
logue). [18] Something of the kind was attempted by Richard Rorty,
who treated philosophers, novelists and poets indifferently under the
category of ‘ironists’, sometimes defining them by the figure of the
‘strong poet’ borrowed from Harold Bloom (see especially Rorty
88 Paul O’Mahoney
1999: 24 n. 1). Thus Proust, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nabokov, Freud,

the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit and even Galileo can be
considered ‘poets’ (ibid., 1999: 12). This is possible however only by
a pointed reorientation of philosophy or redefinition of its goals,
which amounts to a radical rejection of its traditional goals and self-
image (the quest for wisdom). Rorty explicitly recommends that, in
the absence of any true and unique ‘final vocabulary’ through which
we might understand the human experience or the extra-linguistic
world, one of the primary goals of philosophy is edification (Rorty
1980: 357 ff.; 1999: 92). This is in explicit and pointed opposition to
the famous stricture of Hegel himself, who cautioned that philosophy
should beware of trying to be edifying (Hegel 1977: Preface § 10), a
caution endorsed by Strauss (1989b: 319). The idea of treating the
utterances of metaphysicians as a species of ‘poetry’ had already been
criticised by Ayer (1982: 60), and the criticism would stand for both
Ayer and Strauss even where the ‘ironist’ is explicitly distinguished
from the metaphysician, as in Rorty (1999: xv, 74-8, 90-99, 112-13).
Thus, we may understand poetry, and particularly the novel, as the
primary rival to political philosophy in the competition to explain
‘the human things’. In this fashion the ancient quarrel endures. When
Pierre Manent sets out to provide a history of liberalism via short
studies of the major theorists of modern political philosophy, he jus-
tifies the approach by saying: ‘It is, in my view, the history of politi-
cal philosophy that sheds the most light on the unfolding of our
history and on the nature of our political regimes’ (Manent 1995: xv).
Manent’s approach, as one might gauge from the earlier quote regard-
ing Strauss’s legacy, is considerably marked by Strauss’s various stud-
ies (he frames the history of modern political thought in terms of the
‘theologico-political problem’, and his readings of Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau and especially Machiavelli owe much to Strauss). Modern
political philosophy explains modern Europe’s development and abid-
ing tensions. The central idea of liberalism is the individual, and it is
primarily with the problem of conceptualising and according rights to
the individual that modern political philosophers grappled (Manent
1995: xvi, 25-8, 40, 69). The challenge of poetry to that claim would
be summed up in Kundera’s reflection:
Western society habitually presents itself as the society of the rights of

man; but before a man could have rights, he had to constitute himself as
an individual, to consider himself such and to be considered such; that
could not have happened without the long experience of the European arts
and particularly of the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curi-
ous about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own.
In this sense E.M. Cioran is right to call European society ‘the society of
the novel’ and to speak of Europeans as ‘the children of the novel’ (Kun-
dera 1995: 8).
The rise of the novel (that is, its true popularisation rather than its
appearance; such a ‘rise’ belongs more to the age of Flaubert than of
Cervantes) considerably post-dates the great texts of even modern
political philosophy. But its challenge is powerful enough potentially
to force a revision of the European self-definition, which might even
be cast in the futur antérieur: if political philosophy (and therewith
philosophy) fails or falls into oblivion, the history of Europe will have
become the history of the novel. Kundera again:
...the novelist doesn’t set up as a scholar, a doctor, a sociologist, a histo-

rian, he analyzes human situations that are not part of some scientific
field but are simply part of life. This is how Broch and Musil saw the his-
torical task for the novel after the era of psychological realism: if Euro-
pean philosophy could not think out man’s life, think out his ‘concrete
metaphysics,’ then it is the novel that is fated finally to take over this
vacant terrain where nothing could ever replace it (existential philosophy
has confirmed this by a negative proof; for the analysis of existence can-
not become a system; existence cannot be systematized, and Heidegger, a
poetry lover, was wrong to disregard the history of the novel, for it con-
tains the greatest treasury of existential wisdom) (Kundera 1995: 163).
It is for this reason – and I have argued that this is something Strauss
partly realised, or at least gestured towards – that the quarrel between
philosophy and poetry represents the true alternatives for the investi-
gation and expression of the human things. Strauss also must have
recognised, as did so many others (though he either paid it insufficient
attention or suppressed his reflections on the matter), that Heidegger’s
philosophy potentially opened the way for the triumph of poetry. Both
alternatives must base their respective claims for superiority on their
success in this investigation – for this investigation provides the nec-
essary completion of the empirical sciences, or the ‘capstone’ of
human wisdom. This is quite necessary; for example, the material or
metaphysical enquiry into the nature of cause inevitably transforms
into the politico-ethical enquiry into the problem of responsibility – as
is recognised by the final occurrence of aitia in Phaedo, that dia-
logue which more than any other presents the vita philosophica, and
which begins with a hymn-composing Socrates doubting his vocation.
90 Paul O’Mahoney
Strauss’s project reflected his conviction that without a recovery of

genuine political philosophy, philosophy as a whole would collapse:
the quarrel would be settled, and in the contest of wisdom, it is
Agathon and not Socrates whom Alcibiades would crown.
PAUL O’MAHONEY completed a PhD in University College Dublin in

2006, focused primarily on the work of Jean Baudrillard and the idea
of postmodernity. He teaches modern philosophy in the Marino Insti-
tute, Dublin, and has previously taught at University College Dublin.
His recent or forthcoming publications include articles on Bau-
drillard, James Joyce and Plato’s Menexenus and Symposium.
Notes
1. Strauss (1957: 343-5, 350-51; 1996b: 131). Any judgment as to the desirability
or correctness of a particular course of political action is necessarily a valuation,
or a ‘value-judgment’. The most basic alternatives in political action, with refer-
ence to a particular political order, are preservation or change. Change takes two
forms, progress or return, depending on whether one wishes to press forward to
an unattained goal or to restore a previous state of affairs superior to the present.
On the latter alternative cf. Strauss (1981: 17-45);
2. Strauss (1957: 346); also the remarks on modern positivism’s deviation from
Hume in (1961: 148-9), and in (1996b: 135-6).
3. We can gauge as much from his characterisation of a lecture by Popper as
‘washed-out, lifeless positivism’ in a letter to Eric Voegelin of 10 April 1950
(Emberley and Cooper (eds) 2004: 66-7). For the contrasting honesty and
earnestness of Weber see Strauss (1995a: 304).
4. Compare the remarks on Weber with those on Heidegger in Strauss (1957) and
the explicit comparison between the two along with numerous remarks on Hei-
degger in Strauss (1995a). The affinity between the outcome of Heidegger’s his-
toricism and Weber’s positivism is emphasised in Rosen (1969: xiv, 44). But for
Strauss, this outward resemblance goes only so far: Heidegger goes much farther
than does Weber.
5. On the danger of history to political philosophy see ‘Thucydides: The Meaning
of Political History’ (Strauss 1989a: 75)
6. Strauss (1965a: 32). For Strauss, Heidegger is the only truly important existen-
tialist, and to his work alone the movement owes its dignity and coherence.
(1995a: 304; and ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy’
1985: 29-37). In an address delivered in 1970 Strauss refers to ‘present-day phi-
losophy in its highest form, in its Heideggerian form’ (Strauss and Hart Green
1997: 464). Heidegger is clearly the person meant by the phrase ‘the most radi-
cal historicist’ (Strauss 1957: 355). In a letter to Kojève of 26 June 1950, dis-
cussing the preparation of the Natural Right and History lectures, Strauss calls
Heidegger ‘the only radical historicist’ (2000a: 251). ‘Radical’ should here be
taken to mean characteristic of an enquiry taken to its natural conclusion. Com-
pare Schwab’s note in Schmitt (2005: 42 n. 11); also cf. Strauss (1995b: 325). On
Heidegger as the source of the claim that philosophy traditionally equated ‘to be’
in the most elevated sense with ‘to be always’, a claim identified with radical his-
toricism (1965a: 30-31), Strauss (1995a: 312; 1995b: 328).
7. The letter, sent from Freiburg on 23 November 1945, is appended by Miles Groth
to his translation of the ‘Letter on Humanism’, which he has placed online. See
bibliography.
8. The interview is available as ‘Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview
(1966)’ (Sheehan (ed.) 1981: 45-67) and ‘Der Spiegel Interview’ (Neske and
Kettering (eds) 1990: 41-66).
9. For further considerations of Strauss’s critique of Heideggarian historicism, its
implicit reduction of the ranking of choices in terms of ends to the ‘resoluteness’
of a particular choice, and its resulting nihilism, see Strauss (1965: 5-6, 42, 44-
5, 66; all critiqued elements of Weber’s social science that are obviously intended
to evoke Heidegger); also Smith (1997); Pangle (2006), Chapter 1; Velkley
(2008).
10. No one can fail to detect the element of censure in discussions of the ‘inauthen-
tic’ modes of Being. Anything that recommends a certain attitude or course of
action as superior to another constitutes at least the beginning of an ethics, and
the whole account of Eigentlichkeit in Being and Time does precisely this, Hei-
degger’s explicit protests to the contrary notwithstanding. A brief look at the
legacy and the archaeology of the authenticity/inauthenticity distinction con-
firms as much. On the one hand, from it, Sartre derived his central opposition of
bonne foi/mauvaise foi (and one cannot call this a misrepresentation or misap-
propriation of Heidegger: one would have to admit it at least as a misprision or
‘retrieval’). On the other hand, the term Eigentlichkeit partly evolves in Heideg-
ger’s Aristotle lectures, as Theodore Kisiel points out, as part of Heidegger’s
interpretative rendering and working out of aretē (Kisiel 1995: 242, 304).
11. In fact the first nod toward this acknowledgement we might consider as being
provided by Aristotle himself. In one of the most quoted passages in his Poetics,
he claims that tragedy is greater and more philosophical than history, as history
deals with what has happened, while tragedy deals with what may happen
according to necessity or probability: it aims at the universal rather than the par-
ticular. (Poetics I.9). It is clear from the prior reference to Herodotus that histo-
ria here means ‘history’, and that it has the sense, in fact, which it acquired
owing to Herodotus’ work. Herodotus’ historiae were in fact ‘enquiries’, and his-
toria in the sense of enquiry is sometimes applied by Aristotle to his own varied
investigations. A reader who simply keeps the broader (and prior) meaning in
mind might well be led to consider whether the same assertion would be valid in
regard to Aristotle’s work.
12. Compare on this point Kundera’s castigation of Adorno, who speaks of Stravin-
sky as being on the side of barbarism: ‘I have always, deeply, violently, detested
those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a
work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp
92 Paul O’Mahoney
this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give bar-
baric rites a grand form. We were not able to imagine them musically. Which
means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the
barbaric would remain incomprehensible...Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a
form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of
the Sacre [du Printemps], the “Danse Sacrale”: it does not dodge the horror. It is
there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced – stripped of its
beauty, shown in its hideousness – it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece
of “propaganda.” It is because it is beautiful that the girl’s murder is so horrible’
(Kundera 2005: 89-90).
13. Borowski was naturally accused of nihilism when his stories appeared. See Jan
Kott’s introduction to Borowski 1976: 19
14. In the course of his ‘Giving of Accounts’ address conducted with Jacob Klein,
Strauss even ventures a definition of ‘moralism’ as ‘the view that morality or
moral virtue is the highest’, on which basis he is ‘doubtful if [such a view]
occurs in antiquity at all’. He even distinguishes himself from Klein by reference
to their differing views as to ‘the status of morality’, which ‘in [Klein’s] scheme
of things has a higher place than in my scheme’. (Strauss and Hart Green 1997:
463. Compare the anecdote recorded in Benardete 2002: 82-3). Joseph Femia’s
detection of a ‘naïve moralism’ in Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli suggests he
has only read the opening salvos of the book (2004: 10, 116).
15. Macquarrie’s and Robinson’s choice of ‘authenticity’ to translate Heidegger’s
Eigentlichkeit has the advantage of preserving by its etymology some idea of this
poetic attitude towards existence, of the authorship of one’s own existence and
actions (‘poetic’ in the broader and root sense of poiēsis). Stambaugh’s transla-
tion as ‘appropriateness’ on the other hand preserves, with propre, the relation to
one’s eigenst, or ‘ownmost’ potentialities for being.
16. In an unpublished keynote address at the ‘Putnam at 80’ conference, University
College Dublin, March 2007
17. See the remarks on Dostoievski (Strauss’s spelling) against Jane Austen at 2000a:
185; cf. 1996b: 165; Bloom 1974: 390; this characterisation of ‘the classics’
quotes Winckelmann’s judgement on Xenophon (Strauss 1998: 83-4). Compare
further on this point – the implied superiority of the philosopher to the novelist,
particularly vis-à-vis the pursuit of truth – both Strauss/Gadamer (1978: 6-7) and
the following from Isaiah Berlin:
I am reading a quantity of French Lebensphilosophie which is sometimes
shallow and brilliant, sometimes deep, difficult, and eventually profound.
Rarely both together, i.e. brilliant and profound. All the brilliant people, the
Maurras, the Bendas, the Maritains, refuse to hamper their even flow of
entrancing ideas with too deep research; they prefer, like novelists, to shape
the materials to the theory, not the theory to the materials. With the result that
they are interesting, fascinating, and without any basis of reality. It is the ‘Jew
Süss’ school of philosophy. Just as the historical novel is usually more pic-
turesque and interesting to the average mind, like mine, than dry and precise
documents of contemporary chronicles and subsequent scholars, so this type
of imaginary philosophy is more fascinating than the heavier speculations of
those who treat truth as our and their mistress not their material, as opposed to
those who talk about historical truth and artistic truth as separate things, not
to be identified. All this I have written obscurely, but I hope that you under-
stand. Anyhow it is all very obvious.
Undated letter to Ida Sumanov (early 1930s), at: http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/
published_works/f/l1supp.pdf (December 2010). We may also note the interest-
ing echo of Strauss’s sentiments in Kundera (1985), commenting on the fact that
his dramatic ‘variation’ on Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste arose out of an origi-
nal invitation, seemingly offered in sympathy as a way for the blackballed Kun-
dera to earn some money, to adapt Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot for the stage: ‘So I
reread The Idiot and realized that even if I were starving, I could not do the job.
Dostoyevsky’s universe of overblown gestures, murky depths and aggressive
sentimentality repelled me...What irritated me about Dostoyevsky was the cli-
mate of his novels: a universe where everything turns into feeling; in other
words, where feelings are promoted to the rank of value and of truth.’
18. Notwithstanding the strange assertion in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (which
drew particular scorn from Wilamowitz) that Plato in his dialogues bequeathed
to posterity the pattern for the novel form (Nietzsche 1999: 69). The poetic and
erotic Socrates which Strauss claims is advanced against the Aristophanic picture
in Plato somewhat resembles Socrates as the ‘true eroticist’ envisioned by Niet-
zsche in the same work (ibid., 67). Some influence of the text on Strauss’s pic-
ture of Socrates can be discerned in the language with which he contrasts
Aeschylus and Euripides in the Symposium lectures (compare Strauss 2000b: 26,
149 with Nietzsche 1999: 64-5). This is also in spite of Strauss’s reflection that:
‘Perhaps it was only Plato who decided the contest between poetry and philoso-
phy in favor of philosophy through the Platonic dialogue, the greatest of all
works of art’ (1996b: 165). A single observation suffices to sever the novel form
from the Platonic dialogue: though some admirers of Platonic style might hope
to disagree, there is really neither dramatic tension nor any particularly accom-
plished polyphony in Plato. Or as Nietzsche infamously quipped, Plato is boring –
which, if one understands the remark, is not to deny that he can make for stimu-
lating reading. As for the relationship between ‘poetry’ in the Platonic sense,
-particularly as interpreted by Strauss, and the modern novel, we may simply
repeat the truism that the modern novel lacks the theological dimension of such
poetry – and remark that only the most contrived and stupid idea of the contem-
porary ‘role’ of the novel could assign to it the communication of ‘noble delu-
sions’. The novel, as Kundera might recognise, has always had about it an
element not only of the atheological but of the ironic and ungodly: consider not
only Rabelais and Cervantes, but the form’s truer classical predecessors such as
Petronius or Apuleius.
94 Paul O’Mahoney
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Opposing Political Philosophy and Litera

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04-Mahoney:Layout 1 1/26/11 1:06 PM Page 73

Opposing Political Philosophy

Abstract: Strauss’s critique of Heidegger’s philosophy aims at a recov-

Theoria, March 2011 doi:10.3167/th.2011.5712604

That Heidegger is the dominant figure in continental philosophy in

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 75

does not represent a threat that political philosophy cannot withstand

understood was not yet possible, in the absence of a comprehensive

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 77

ophy have some grounding in religious thought is not the important

tradition, allowed ‘the roots of the tradition’ to be seen anew, and in a

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 79

Philosophy, Aristophanes suggests, in contradistinction to poetry, is

The substance of the charge is that the unerotic, unpoetic wisdom of

poetic writing), in showing the lived acts of Socrates, shows him as a

Plato and Xenophon defend Socrates against this charge as follows:

It is implied here that the charge of Aristophanes had to be answered:

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 81

that their consistent application is inevitably thwarted by the com-

If we accept that literature may restore ethics where philosophy

Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its

Novelistic characters, he continues, are those ‘conceived not as a func-

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 83

enough rehearsed ideas; no one with a modicum of understanding can

The prohibition against value-judgments in social science would lead to

One can sense Strauss’s reluctance to make recourse to this extreme

refutable by the fact of its being shared by a disreputable individual is

The refusal to moralise constitutes the morality of the novel – and of

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 85

verse and abortive (if Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’ of Being

if one accepts after Strauss the effective independence of the intellec-

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 87

cap the science of nature. Social science would therefore supplant

1999: 24 n. 1). Thus Proust, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nabokov, Freud,

Western society habitually presents itself as the society of the rights of

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 89

...the novelist doesn’t set up as a scholar, a doctor, a sociologist, a histo-

Strauss’s project reflected his conviction that without a recovery of

PAUL O’MAHONEY completed a PhD in University College Dublin in

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 91

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 93

Opposing Political Philosophy and Litrature 95

_____ 1978c ‘An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s’

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