Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-qxsvm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-06T08:39:00.974Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

On a Forgotten Kind of Grounding: Strauss, Jacobi, and the Phenomenological Critique of Modern Rationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2014

Abstract

In opposing foundationalism to antifoundationalism, recent political theory betrays its blindness to a third alternative. As suggested by the most influential critics of Kant, the ground of meaning and normativity is neither the human mind—or autonomous constructions of reason—nor historically given forms of life, but the interaction between them, that is, the human openness to the intelligibility granted us by “the things themselves.” This paper articulates that ground in its historical genesis, as it arises in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's defense of a classical conception of reason against modern rationalism, and further developed by Edmund Husserl and the young Leo Strauss. I argue that critics and followers of Strauss have forgotten the phenomenological grounds of his thought in the “fundamental problems” arising from the structure of human experience.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Pippin, Robert B., “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992): 457Google Scholar.

2 Larmore, Charles, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 71, 66, 75–76.

4 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 3132Google Scholar. The critique of what came to be known as the “Myth of the Given” extends from Kant's first interpreters, through Fichte, Hegel, Cohen, and Cassirer, to contemporary postanalytical philosophy. Strauss knew that critique firsthand from his doctoral supervisor Cassirer. On Cassirer's legacy, see Pollock, Konstantin, “The ‘Transcendental Method’: On the Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in Neo-Kantianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason,” ed. Guyer, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 378Google Scholar.

5 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, B1, (p. 136), cf. A1 (p. 127). See also A19/B33 (p. 155); A22/B36 (p. 157); B75/A51 (p. 193); B428 (p. 456).

6 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 77.

7 Strauss, Leo, “Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 152Google Scholar (hereafter JPCM ). See, e.g., Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” 458.

8 Leo Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Philosophie und Gesetz; frühe Schriften, ed. Meier, Heinrich (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 237–93Google Scholar (hereafter EPJ).

9 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 77.

10 See, respectively, Rosen, Stanley, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 126–27Google Scholar; Lampert, Laurence, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar, e.g., 129, 147, 164; Smith, Steven B., Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1617Google Scholar; see also 79–80.

11 On Strauss's debt to phenomenology and Husserl in particular, see his Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2937Google Scholar, and The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, by Meier, Heinrich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137Google Scholar. On the importance of the phenomenological thought of Husserl and Heidegger—and Strauss's critique of it—see Velkley, Richard, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 3, 41, 7172Google Scholar, 130.

12 Jacobi, Friedrich H., “Something Lessing Said: A Commentary on Journeys of the Popes,” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt, James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 209Google Scholar. Cf. Strauss, Leo, “Exoteric Teaching,” Interpretation 14, no.1 (1986): 5159Google Scholar, esp. 58.

13 See Strauss, Leo, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Adler, Eve (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 42, 138n2.

14 Strauss, Leo, “Introduction to Morning Hours and To the Friends of Lessing,” in Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn, ed. and trans. Yaffe, Martin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 77Google Scholar (“radical”); EPJ, 283 (“timeless problems”).

15 Crowe, Benjamin D., “F. H. Jacobi on Faith, Or What It Takes to Be an Irrationalist,” Religious Studies 45, no. 3 (2009): 309–24Google Scholar. On Strauss's debt to Jacobi, see Altman, William H. F., The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011)Google Scholar; Smith, Steven B., Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Janssens, David, “The Problem of the Enlightenment: Strauss, Jacobi, and the Pantheism Controversy,” Review of Metaphysics 56, no. 3 (2003): 605–31Google Scholar; Gunnell, John, “Strauss before Straussianism: Reason, Revelation, and Nature,” Review of Politics 53, no. 1 (1991): 5374CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other accounts are discussed below.

16 See, respectively, Moyn, Samuel, “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion,” History of European Ideas 33, no. 2 (2007): 174–94Google Scholar; Altman, German Stranger, 35, 48, 87.

17 See, respectively, Shell, Susan, “Taking Evil Seriously: Schmitt's ‘Concept of the Political’ and Strauss's ‘True Politics,’” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Deutsch, Kenneth L. and Nicgorski, Walter (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 183Google Scholar, and Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 80.

18 Strauss, Leo, “A Giving of Accounts,” in JPCM, 460Google Scholar. Recent scholarship on German idealism suggests that, far from being disgraceful, Strauss's dissertation correctly identified the “defining core” of Jacobi's thought in his “principled realism”—a philosophical stance defended, mutatis mutandis, by Hegel. See Halbig, Christoph, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus? Philosophy and Common Sense in Jacobi and Hegel,” in Deutscher Idealismus und die gegenwärtige analytische Philosophie, ed. Ameriks, Karl and Stolzenberg, Jürgen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 261–82, 265Google Scholar.

19 Strauss, “Preface,” 156.

20 This is the controversial claim that Jacobi attributes to Lessing. See F. H. Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” ed. di Giovanni, George (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), 187Google Scholar. (Hereafter MPW).

21 Strauss, “Preface,” 155–57. For an incisive account of Strauss's understanding of Spinoza in the “Preface,” see Martin Yaffe, “Strauss on Mendelssohn: An Interpretive Essay,” in Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn, 219–317, esp. 312–16.

22 Strauss, Leo, Spinoza's Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 204Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 195.

24 See Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 80; Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously,” 183; Tanguay, Daniel, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Nadon, Christopher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 165Google Scholar. Cf. Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 606; Pelluchon, Corine, Leo Strauss: Une autre raison, d'autres lumières (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 43Google Scholar. The quest for the ground (Boden) on which the conflict between belief and unbelief can be adequately addressed is a central leitmotif of Strauss's book on Spinoza. See Leo Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Die Relgionskritik Spinozas und zugehörige Schriften, 2nd ed., ed. Meier, Heinrich (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 176, 207, 215, 231Google Scholar. See also Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 31.

25 Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 71, 81, 79; cf. 83.

26 Ibid., 82.

27 Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously,” 183.

28 Strauss, “Preface,” 173.

29 On Strauss's understanding of historicism, see Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem, 55–56. For Strauss's critique of Jacobi's historicist turn, see his “Introduction to Morning Hours and To the Friends of Lessing,” 127; cf. the important qualification at 128 discussed below. See also Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 626.

30 Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, 204.

31 In his translation of Strauss's writings on Mendelssohn, Martin Yaffe argues that, according to Strauss, Jacobi understood reason as an “instrument of the passions.” He thus misses—and omits from his translation—what Strauss means, namely, that in his early work Jacobi “understands ‘reason’ still entirely in the sense of the Enlightenment” (my emphasis). The crucial “still” (noch) pointing to Jacobi's fundamental distinction, introduced around 1800, between reason and understanding, is missing in the translation. On the late Jacobi's Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of reason see Strauss, EPJ, 242, and the section “Rational Intuition” below.

32 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 128.

33 Ibid., 77, 73.

34 MPW, 336.

35 This is because of the transcendental use of the category of causality which attributes causality to the thing-in-itself. For commentary and critique, see Franks, Paul, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 156Google Scholar.

36 MPW, 338.

37 On Fichte, see Gillespie, Michael Allen, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64100Google Scholar. On Cohen, see note 71 below.

38 Jacobi provides no definition of the term. For different accounts, see Beiser, Frederick C., The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 8182Google Scholar; Cho, Stephen, “Before Nietzsche: Nihilism as a Critique of German Idealism,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18, no. 1 (1995): 205–33Google Scholar; Höhn, Gerhard, “F. H. Jacobi et G. W. Hegel ou la naissance du nihilisme et la renaissance du ‘Logos’,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 75, no. 2 (1970): 129–50Google Scholar; Franks, All or Nothing, 164–65, 192–93, 198.

39 See, e.g., MPW, 507; Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 82.

40 Cf. Gillespie, Nihilism, 66.

41 MPW, 502.

42 Ibid., 508.

43 Ibid., 505.

44 Cf. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 82.

45 Di Giovanni, introduction to MPW, 79. See MPW, 193; Franks, All or Nothing, 170.

46 MPW, 220, quoting Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, in Complete Works, ed. Shirley, Samuel and Morgan, Michael L. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 21Google Scholar (trans. modified). I have rendered Jacobi's Latin quotation of Spinoza (“ens reale, hoc est, est omne esse, & praeter quod nullum datur esse”) in English following Franks, All or Nothing, 170.

47 This is arguably the foundational principle of Western metaphysics, which, according to Jacobi, Spinoza was the first to make explicit (di Giovanni, introduction, 74, 77).

48 MPW, 189.

49 Ibid., 189, 195, 352–53, 366, 519.

50 Zank, Michael, introduction to Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932) (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 34Google Scholar.

51 Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 80.

52 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 49.

53 See Gunnel, “Strauss before Straussianism,” 72.

54 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 71.

55 EPJ, 255.

56 Windelband, Wilhelm, Geschichte der Philosophie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1900), 463Google Scholar.

57 EPJ, 252. On phenomenological description as an “epoch-making” discovery of the foundation of the human sciences (Dilthey), see Moran, Dermot, editor's introduction to The Shorter Logical Investigations, by Husserl, Edmund (London: Routledge, 2000), lxxviGoogle Scholar. See, e.g., Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), §74Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., 281. For a critical analysis of Jacobi's realism drawing on Strauss's dissertation, see Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?,” esp. 274, 268–69.

59 EPJ, 281.

60 See Husserl, Ideen, §§ 97, 228.

61 Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” 457.

62 See Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?,” 274.

63 EPJ, 251.

64 MPW, 253–54.

65 Through sensible and intellectual intuition. Ibid., 255. See Jacobi, MPW, 550–51.

66 EPJ, 255.

67 Ibid., 251; MPW, 324, 550–51.

68 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B1 (p. 136)Google Scholar; Cohen, Hermann, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1902), 67Google Scholar; Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Manheim, R. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 20Google Scholar.

69 See Friedman, Michael, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 91, 95, 97Google Scholar.

70 Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem, 90.

71 Cohen, Logik, 68–69. See Courtine, Jean-François, “Réduction, construction, destruction. D'un dialogue à trois: Natorp, Husserl, Heidegger,” Philosophiques 36, no. 2 (2009): 559–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 EPJ, 248.

73 Ibid., 249.

74 Ibid., citing MPW, 500.

75 Ibid., 274. Strauss refers to Jacobi, Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, in Der Streit um die Göttlichen Dinge (1799–1812), ed. Jaeschke, Walter (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999), 177–79Google Scholar. On Strauss and Barth, see Lazier, Benjamin, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 96Google Scholar.

76 Cf. EPJ, 251.

77 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75 (p. 193).

78 Cf. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 77. This claim is already at the core of Strauss's dissertation, as will be seen shortly. See, e.g., EPJ, 261–63.

79 Reinach, Adolf, “Concerning Phenomenology,” trans. Willard, Dallas, in The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Moran, Dermot and Mooney, Timothy (London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar. Cited in EPJ, 258.

80 Reinach, “Concerning Phenomenology,” 185.

81 Ibid., 183.

82 In this case, we explain the red given in sense perception in terms of the wavelength—“between 620 and 740 nanometers”—generated by the mind. Cf. EPJ, 258.

83 Reinach, “Concerning Phenomenology,” 183.

84 EPJ, 255. See also ibid., 247 and Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 618.

85 Ibid., 256. For different interpretations of the “transcendence of irrationality” in Strauss's reading of Jacobi, cf. Altman, German Stranger, esp. 43; Lazier, God Interrupted, 94–99, esp. 99; Pelluchon, Leo Strauss, 41–44; and Moyn, “From Experience to Law,” 182.

86 EPJ, 257 (quoting Jacobi, “Über eine Weissagung Lichtenbergs,” in Der Streit um die Göttlichen Dinge, ed. Jaeschke, 172–73).

87 EPJ, 257.

88 Ibid., 263.

89 Ibid., 260.

90 Ibid., 261.

91 EPJ, 261.

92 Ibid.

93 MPW, 513 (translation modified); see also 230.

94 See Bowie, Andrew, “Rethinking the History of the Subject: Jacobi, Schelling, and Heidegger,” in Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. Critchley, Simon and Dews, Peter (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 110Google Scholar; see also Ankersmit, Frank, “Jacobi: Realist, Romanticist, and Beacon for our Time,” Common Knowledge 14, no. 2 (2008): 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 EPJ, 262. See Kisiel, Theodore, “Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask,” Man and World 28, no. 3 (1995): 197240Google Scholar.

96 See Crowell, Steven, “Meaning and the Ontological Difference,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, no. 32 (1984): 3744Google Scholar.

97 Lask, Emil, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, in Gesammelte Schriften 2 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923), 32Google Scholar.

98 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 77.

99 For recent scholarship confirming this appraisal, see Dahlstrom, Daniel O., “Jacobi and Kant,” in Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 60Google Scholar; Franks, “All or Nothing,” 95–97.

100 Cf. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 123–24.

101 EPJ, 262–63. Strauss refers to MPW, 424, 451, 514. Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987), 73Google Scholar.

102 EPJ, 263.

103 Cf. ibid., 263.

104 See MPW, 264–65.

105 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 71.

106 MPW, 277.

107 Ibid., 265.

108 Ibid., 272.

109 EPJ, 267.

110 On the centrality of belief in Husserl, see Brainard, Marcus, Belief and Its Neutralization: Husserl's System of Phenomenology in “Ideas I” (Albany: Statue University of New York Press, 2002)Google Scholar. On Strauss's understanding of belief as implying knowledge of ignorance, and hence as an impulse to speculation, see his “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 127, as well as Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 624.

111 EPJ, 264.

112 Ibid., 265. See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, section V, part I.

113 Hume, Enquiry, sect. V, pt. II.

114 EPJ, 265.

115 Notably by Cassirer. See his Das Erkenntnisproblem, 32–33, and Berlin, Isaiah, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1979)Google Scholar.

116 EPJ, 266.

117 Ibid., 267.

118 Ibid., 274 (Strauss's emphasis).

119 Ibid., 267.

120 Cf. ibid., 269. From a phenomenological standpoint, each of our perceptions is an act of belief (or faith) in that it affirms more than we strictly know. That is, we perceive parts of things (say, the front side of a house) but we intuit whole things.

121 EPJ, 275–76.

122 MPW, 541.

123 Franks, All or Nothing, 164.

124 MPW, 541.

125 Ibid.

126 Franks, All or Nothing, 165.

127 MPW, 544.

128 Ibid., 563.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid., 540.

131 EPJ, 273–74.

132 Ibid., 274.

133 Ibid.

134 Ibid., 275–76.

135 Jacobi, Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Werke, ed. Roth, F. and Köppen, F. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 3:317Google Scholar. (Hereafter Werke.)

136 EPJ, 274.

137 Ibid., 274.

138 MPW, 493.

139 Jacobi, Werke, 4:1, 32–33.

140 EPJ, 275; Jacobi, Werke, 3:206.

141 EPJ, 275.

142 Against “religious materialism,” Jacobi claims that “true religion … can so little be attributed a particular and necessary shape (Gestalt) that it is part of its essence not to have such a shape” (Von den Göttlichen Dingen, in Der Streit, 182–83). The critique of religious materialism has been taken up recently by Mark Johnston, whose phenomenological articulation of “religion after idolatry” is remarkably close to the young Strauss's (due, no doubt, to common sources in phenomenology and the neo-orthodoxy of Barth and others). See his Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

143 EPJ, 280. The term “logique du coeur” cannot be found in Pascal but it became common in the reception of his thought. See Coriando, Paola-Ludovica, Affektenlehre und Phänomenologie der Stimmungen: Wege einer Ontologie und Ethik des Emotionalen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002), 26n21Google Scholar. See Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. Krailsheimer, A. J. (London: Penguin Books, 1966)Google Scholar, § 272 (127); 282 (28); 278 (127); 283 (94). The distinction between “reason” and “heart” in Jacobi is analytical, as Jacobi often uses the terms interchangeably.

144 EPJ, 295.

145 Ibid., 295–96.

146 Ibid., 279.

147 Ibid., 279. The quest for an ethics between “a naturalism, which aims only at sanctioning the savage and destructive instincts of ‘natural’ man,” and “a supernaturalism, which tends to become the basis of slave morality,” can be traced across Strauss's early writings. What he first seeks in Jacobi—an answer to a “fundamental problem” described in Nietzschean terms—he later finds in Farabi and, further back, in Socrates. This attests to the remarkable continuity of Strauss's quest for what in 1936 he calls a “truly critical philosophy.” Such a philosophy uproots traditional oppositions (in this case between naturalism and supernaturalism) by raising “a more fundamental problem,” namely, the Socratic problem of the essence of virtue (ti estin aretē). The ground of Strauss's thought thus appears to be from the beginning a questioning ground—a grounding in foundational problems. Cf. Strauss, Leo, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi” (1936), trans. Bartlett, Robert, Interpretation 18, no.1 (1990): 6Google Scholar.

148 EPJ, 279, 281.

149 Ibid., 278. See MPW, 563–64.

150 MPW, 517.

151 Ibid.

152 EPJ, 278.

153 Ibid., 278. Cf. the remarkably similar phrasing in Strauss, “Some Remarks,” 6.

154 Ibid., 278–79.

155 Jacobi, Werke, 3:321. Cited in EPJ, 279.

156 EPJ, 279.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid., 280.

159 Jacobi, Werke, 6:140–41.

160 EPJ, 281.

161 Ibid.

162 Ibid.

163 Ibid. MPW, 570.

164 EPJ, 281.

165 Ibid.

166 Ibid., 281–82. For Strauss's critique of Jacobi's defense of heteronomy in these lines, see ibid. and Janssens, “Problem of the Enlightenment,” 619, 626.

167 See Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?”

168 Strauss, Leo, “Progress or Return?,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, Thomas L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 243Google Scholar.

169 Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” 457.

170 See especially “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” in JPCM, 361.

171 Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 20Google Scholar.

172 See note 11.

173 Strauss, Leo, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 39Google Scholar.

174 Strauss, “Introduction to Morning Hours,” 71.

175 Cf. Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 12.

176 Velkley, Strauss, Heidegger, 3. See also 41, 71–72.

177 For Strauss's critique of phenomenology as an “unqualified empiricism” linked to Franz Rosenzweig's “New Thinking,” see “Preface,” in JPCM, 152, 147. For his understanding of “common sense” as presupposing science, see also The City and Man, 11–12. For “common sense” as an obstacle to “knowledge of ignorance” and “speculation,” see note 110 above.

178 Strauss, “Preface,” 152.

179 See MPW, 570, and Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus?”

180 Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 2009), 143, 141Google Scholar.

181 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 124–26. On this point, see Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, 15.

182 Natural Right and History, 32. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, 132.

183 Strauss, “Some Remarks,” 6.

184 Cf. Strauss, “Einleitung zu ‘Morgenstunden,’” 537.

185 See Cho, “Nihilism Before Nietzsche.”

186 MPW, 256, 324, 551.

187 Jacobi, “Something Lessing Said,” 209.

188 Höhn, “F. H. Jacobi et G. W. Hegel,” 146.

189 On the genealogy of the problem of “facticity,” see Kisiel, Theodore, The Genesis of Heidegger's “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 27Google Scholar. On the “status of individuality,” see Strauss, Natural Right and History, 323; cf. 5, 46.