Actualité de Leo Strauss

1 Thierry Ménissier, « Leo Strauss, filiation néoconservatrice ou conservatisme philosophique ? », Revue française de science politique, 2009/5 (Vol. 59). Pages 873-893. Voir précisément le paragraphe 33.

2 Klaus Stichweh « Présentation », Cités 4/2001 (no 8), p. 173-227.

3 Heinrich Meier : Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, the Hidden Dialogue, USA, University of Chicago Press, 1995 (2006), p. 111.

4 Polish journal : Krakowskie Tudia Miedzynarodowe, no. 2 (VI), Krakow 2009, ed. Andrze Bryk, in honor of Harvey Mansfield, entitled : Leo Strauss : Fascist, Authoritarian, Imperialist ?

5 « The line in the letter that has provoked the most outrage is Strauss’s admonition to Loewith, following his recognition that they will all necessarily become exiles : “The fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. On the contrary : only from the principles of the right, that is, from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination.” » (Ibid.).

6 Essais sur le politique, Paris, Le Seuil, 1986, p. 9.

7 République, III, 415a-416a, trad. R. Baccou, Paris, GF-Flammarion, 1966, p. 167.

8 Catherine et Michael Zuckert, Introduction, p. 8-20, dans The Truth about Leo Strauss, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Michael Zuckert, Straussians, p. 263 sq. in The Cambridge Compagnion to Leo Strauss ed. by Steven B. Smith, Cambridge University Press 2009. Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss, An introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 131, no 2. Francis Fukuyama, D’où viennent les néo-conservateurs ? Paris, éditions Grasset, 2006, p. 21 sq. Pierre Manent, Le Regard politique, Paris, éditions Flammarion, 2010, p. 56-64.

9 Leo Strauss, Liberalism ancient & modern Chicago, The University of Chicago Press edition, 1995 (1ère éd. 1968), p. 21 : « The existing aristocraties proved to be oligarchies, rather than aristocraties. In other words, it became increasingly easy to argue from the premise that natural inequality has very little to do with social inequality ».

10 République III, 412a-413a.

11 Ibid., 415a-416a.

12 « A hundred pages – no, ten pages – of Herodotus introduce us immeasurably better into the mysterious unity of oneness and variety in human things than many volumes written in the spirit predominant in our age. […] we cannot forget the obvious fact that giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence » (Leo Strauss, Liberalism ancient & modern, p. 23 et p. 24).

13 « […] The primeval identification of the good with the ancestral is replaced by the fundamental distinctions between the good and the ancestral ; the quest for the right way or for the first things is the quest for the good as distinguished from the ancestral [note 7 : Plato Republic 538 d 3-4 and e 5-6 ; Statesman 296 e 8-9 ; Laws 702 c 5-8 ; Xenophon Cyropaedia ii.2.26 ; Aristotle Politics 1269 a 3-8, 1271 b 23-24). It will prove to be the quest for what is good by nature as distinguished from what is good merely by convention. » in Natural right and history, p. 86 (p. 88, pour la version française, Droit naturel et histoire, Paris, éditions Champs-Flammarion, 1986).

14 « […] culture is always the culture of nature. This expression means, primarily, that culture develops the natural predispositions ; it is the careful nurture of nature – whether of the soil or of the human spirit makes no difference ; it thus obeys the orders that nature itself gives. […] Whether culture is understood as the nurture of nature or as a fight with nature depends on how nature is understood : as exemplary order or as disorder to be eliminated. But however culture is understood, “culture” is certainly the culture of nature. […] One can therefore say : the foundation of culture is the status naturalis » (Leo Strauss, Notes on the concept of the political (1932) in Heinrich Meier : Car Schmitt and Leo Strauss, the Hidden Dialogue, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 97-98).

15 Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ch. 1 : « Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy », p. 29.

16 « Thus the question arises as to which code is the right code and which account of the first things is the true account. » (Natural right and history, p. 86 ; ibid. pour la version française).

17 Ibid., p. 87 ; ibid. pour la version française.

18 « In brief, then, it can be said that the discovery of nature is identical with the actualization of a human possibility which, at least according to its own interpretation, is trans-historical, trans-social, trans-moral, and trans-religious » ibid., p. 89. Et p. 90 pour la version française.

19 « Philosophy as distinguished from myth came into being when nature was discovered, or the first philosopher was the first man who discovered nature. […]. The purport of the discovery of nature cannot be grasped if one understands by nature “the totality of phenomena”. For the discovery of nature consists precisely in the splitting-up of that totality into phenomena which are natural and phenomena which are not natural : “nature” is a term of distinction. » Leo Strauss, Natural right and history, III, « Origin of the idea of natural right », p. 82.

20 Leo Strauss, Liberalism ancient & modern, in Liberal Education and Responsability, p. 20-21 : « But what was to be done to moral education ? The identification of the end of the nongentlemen meant that the understanding of virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake gave way to an instrumental understanding of virtue : honety is nothing but the best policy, the policy most conducive to commodious living or comfortable self-preservation. Virtue took on a narrow meaning, with the final result that the word “virtue” fell into desuetude […]. With the increasing abundance it became increasingly possible to see and to admit the element of hypocrisy which had entered into the traditional notion of aristocraty ; the existing aristocraties proved to be oligarchies, rather than aristocracies […] ».

21 « […] the term “liberal” is still used in its premodern sense, especially in the expression “liberal education”. Liberal education is not the opposite of conservative education, but of illiberal education. To be liberal in the original senses means to practice the virtue of liberality. If it is true that all virtues in their perfection are inseparable from one another, the genuinely liberal man is identical with the genuinely virtuous man […] ». Leo Strauss, Liberalism ancient & modern, « Liberality : “the Trait of being Generous in Behavior and Temperament” » (Thesaurus).

22 « Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart. Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocraty within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” », Ibid., ch. 1, « What Is Liberal Education ? », p. 5.

23 Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, op. cit.

24 Contribution à la généalogie de la morale, (1887), Première dissertation (XVII), Paris, éditions 10/18 (trad. Angèle Kremer Marietti), 1974, p. 161

25 « Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil », in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 8, p. 174-191.

26 Jerusalem and Athens, Some Preliminary Reflections, Ibid., p. 147.

27 « La connaissance de soi en effet n’est pas la connaissance du moi, ou du je, la connaissance de sa particularité individuelle, incommunicable ou incomparable. La connaissance de soi consiste à discerner comment, dans notre propre âme, se disposent les motifs humains, les motifs communs à tous les êtres humains. […] » in Le Regard politique (seconde partie, « Raymond Aron et Leo Strauss », Paris, Flammarion, 2010, p. 80.

28 « L’Humanité en général, c’est par essence l’être-homme dans des humanités liées par la génération et la socialité, et si l’homme est un être raisonnable (animal rationale) il ne l’est que dans la mesure où toute son humanité est une humanité raisonnable –qu’elle soit dirigée de façon latente vers la raison, ou dirigée publiquement vers son Entéléchie parvenue à soi-même, devenue manifeste pour soi-même et dirigeant désormais de façon consciente et par une nécessité essentielle le devenir des hommes. Philosophie, science, seraient d’après cela le mouvement historique de manifestation de la “raison” universelle, “innée” dans l’humanité comme telle. […] » in La Crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale (1935-1936), Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 21.

29 Edmund Husserl, L’arche-originaire Terre ne se meut pas (1934), revue Philosophie, No1, 1984.

30 « The traditional philosophies were at the same time Welttanschauungsphilosophien and scientific philosophies since the objectives of wisdom on the one hand and of rigorous science on the other had not yet been clearly separated from one another. But fort the modern consciousness the separation of the ideas of wisdom and of rigorous science has become a fact and they remain henceforth separated for all eternity. The idea of Weltanschauung differs from epoch to epoch while the idea of science is supra-temporal. One might think that the realizations of the two ideas would approach each other asymptotically in the infinite. Yet “we cannot wait” ; we need “exaltation and consolation” now ; we need some kind of system to live by ; only Weltanschauung or Weltanschauungsphilosophie can satisfy these justified demands [note 9 : Sects. 13, 67, 75-79, 81, 82, 90, 91 in Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, translation by Lauer, Harper Torch Books, p. 71-147]. Surely philosophy as rigorous science cannot satisfy them : it has barely begun, it will need centuries, if not millennia, until it “renders possible in regard to ethics and religion a life regulated by pure rational norms,” if it is not at all times essentially incomplete and in need of radical revisions. Hence the temptation to forsake it in favor of Weltanschauunggsphilosophie is very great. From Husserl’s point of view one would have to say that Heidegger proved unable to resist that temptation. The reflection on the relation of the two kinds of philosophy obviously belongs to the sphere of philosophy as rigorous science […] » (L. Strauss, Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 36 ; nous soulignons).

31 Heidegger, Être et Temps, (1927), Paris, traduction Emmanuel Martineau, éditions Authentica, 1985, Introduction, L’exposition de la question du sens de l’ Être, [5] § 2 « La structure formelle de la question de l’être », p. 28.

32 Philosophy and Law, New York, State University of New York Press, 1995.

33 « In a phrase of Hermann Cohen, Maimonide is the “classic of rationalism” in Judaism. This phrase appears to us to be correct in a striter sense than Cohen may have intended : Maimonides’ rationalism is the true natural model, the strandard to be carefully protected from any distorsion, and thus the stumbling-block on which modern rationalism falls » (Ibid., Introduction, p. 21).

34 « Crudely but not misleading one may restate Cohen’s view as follows. The truh is the synthesis of the teaching of Plato and that of the prophets. What we owe to Plat ois the insight that the truh is the first place the truh of science but that science must be supplemented, overarched by the idea of the good which to Cohen means, not God, but rational, scientific ethics. The ethical truth must not only be compatible with the scientific truth ; the ethical truth even needs the scientific truth. […] Catastrophes and horrors of a magnitude hitherto unknown, which we have seen and through which we have lived, were better provided for, or made intelligible, by both Plato and the prophets than by the modern belief in progress. […] In other words, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns seems to us to be more fundamental than either the quarrel between Plato and Aristotle or that between Kant and Hegel. » (Jerusalem and Athens (7) Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, II « On Socrates and the Prophets », p. 167-168).

35 « Not Rousseau but Kant drew the decisive conclusion from Rousseau’s epochmaking innovations : the Ought cannot be derived from the Is, from human nature ; the moral law is not a natural law or derivative from a natural law ; the criterion of the moral law is its form alone, the form of rationality, i.e. of universality ; just as according to Rousseau the particular will becomes the unblameable positive law being generalized, according to Kant the maxims of action prove to be moral if they pass the test of being universalized, i.e. of being possible principles of universal legislation. – At about the same time that Kant, sympathizing with the French Revolution, radicalized the most radical form of modern natural rigt and thus transformed natural rigt and natural law into a law and a right which is rational but no longer natural, Burke, opposing the French Revolution an dits theoretical basis, which is a certain version of modern natural right, retourned to pre-modern natural law. in doing so, he made thematic the conservatism which was implicit to some extent in pre-modern natural law. Therewith he profoundly modified the pre-modern teaching and prepared decisively the transition from the natural “rights of man” to the prescriptive “rights of Englishmen” from natural law to “historical school” » (Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 145-146).

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. vii : « A year or so before his death, Professor Leo Strauss requested that the writings contained in this book be gathered together and published in their present order and under the title that nows appears at their head. »

38 Joseph Cropsey relate par exemple que Strauss voulait écrire un Gorgias (disponible cependant en cours enregistrés, mais non mis en forme encore) placé à la suite de son Euthydemus.

39 Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy (chap. 1), par exemple, p. 35 : « […] Hence an adequate theory of knowledge must be based on scientific knowledge of the consciousness as such, for wich nature and being are correlates or intended objects that constitute themselves in and through consciousness alone, in pure “immanence” ; “nature” or “being” must be made “completely intelligible”. Such a radical clarification of every possible object of consciousness can be the task only of a phenomenology of the consciousness in contradistinction to the naturalistic science of psychic phenomena. […] » (Ibid.). Olivier Sedeyn a traduit ce texte, paru en 1971 dans Interpretation, vol II, no 1, p. 1-9, il est disponible dans La Philosophie politique et l’histoire, Paris, éditions Le Livre de Poche, 2008, chap. vii.

40 La Crise des sciences européennes…, op. cit., III, 73, « La philosophie comme auto-méditation de l’humanité, auto-effectuation de la Raison », p. 299.

41 La Cité et l’Homme (1964), Paris, éditions Le livre de poche, 2005, chapitre 2, Sur la « République » de Platon, p. 185.

42 La Crise des sciences européennes…, III, 73, p. 304-305 : « […] il s’agit, comme je l’ai dit, d’une humanité qui se comprend elle-même rationnellement, comprenant qu’elle est rationnelle dans le vouloir-être-rationnel, que cela indique et veut dire une infinité de la vie et de la tension vers la raison, que Raison justement signifie ce que l’homme en tant qu’homme désire dans son plus intime, ce qui seul peut le satisfaire, le rendre “heureux”, que la Raison n’admet aucune séparation en raison “pratique”, “théorique”, “esthétique”et je ne sais quoi encore, qu’être-homme c’est être téleogiquement et c’est devoir-être et que cette téleologie règne dans tout ce que nous faisons et tout ce que nous avons en vue égologiquement, qu’elle peut y reconnaître toujours, par la compréhension de soi, le télos apodictique, et que cette reconnaissance de l’ultime compréhension de soi n’a pas d’autre forme que la compréhension de soi d’après des principes a priori, la compréhension de soi dans la forme de la philosophie ».

43 Alain Berthoz et Jean-Luc Petit, Phénoménologie et physiologie de l’action, Paris, éditions Odile Jacob, 2006, cf. par exemple les chapitres iv et v.

44 L. Oulahbib, La Philosophie cannibale, Paris, La Table Ronde, 2006, p. 157-159.

45 « Le point décisif chez Husserl est la critique de la science moderne à la lumière de la science authentique, c’est-à-dire la [science] platonico-aristotélicienne. On ne peut comprendre son œuvre qu’à la lumière des énormes difficultés auxquelles a abouti la science platonico-aristotélicienne [à savoir], le problème du nous. Compte tenu des énormes difficulutés de compréhension du De Anima III, 5 sq., la fondation égologique husserlienne des ontologies est du moins excusables. […] » in L. Strauss – E. Voegelin, Correspondance 1934-1964, Foi et philosophie politique, Paris, Vrin, 2004, Lettre 11, p. 64.

46 « From all this we are in a better position to understand why Strauss sometimes identified “the unchangeable ideas” with “the fundamental and permanent problems” » (What is political philosophy ? (1959) in Introduction by Thomas L. Pangle in Leo Strauss, studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Chicago, The university of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 5). Cf. aussi p. 39 : « […] We may also say he [Socrates] viewed man in the light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental problems ».

47 Liberalism ancient and modern, Chicago (1968), The University of Chicago Press, 1989, chap. 2, « Liberal Education and Responsability », p. 24 : « We must not expect that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and the privilege of a minority. »

48 Ibid., p. 11.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid. : « The foutains of that education are the poets ».

53 Ibid. : « Throwing of spears ».

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., p. 11.