The following thread expresses my criticism of an element of Strauss’ thought that has long gnawed at me. These are speculations, mind you. Please don’t hold back in your criticism, if you have one.

In criticizing not only natural law thinkers but all thinkers who fail to meet the standard of what a “philosopher” is, Strauss/Straussians point to a specific premise in these thinkers’ work that keeps them from meeting that standard.

This premise is a divinely revealed principle or a principle that depends on divine revelation in one way or another. The thinker in question may or may not recognize the allegedly supernatural provenance of his principles, but that is beside the point.

So far, so fair, it seems to me.

That is, I think the Straussian understanding of philosophy (though not necessarily of happiness) is sound and logically coherent. The theologian HAS abandoned philosophy strictly speaking. The question is whether such abandonment is more reasonable than non-abandonment.

But there is, ironically, a similarly hidden premise in Strauss’ thought that remains relatively unexplored or at least relatively unacknowledged. This premise is connected with the specter of Nietzsche.

More precisely, it is the specter of Nietzsche’s criticism of “idealism,” which entails a criticism of morality PROPER, that is, of justice as an end in itself rather than as mere means to a higher end.

By his own admission, Strauss was so bewitched by Nietzsche during his 20’s that he believed everything in his thought that he understood. Who could blame him? Nietzsche, as a friend of mine recently put it, was a man of transcendent genius.

And a great part of the work to which Nietzsche put that genius was the merciless destruction of the metaphysical tradition, both classical and Scholastic.

Plato was drowned in the whirlpool of that criticism as a boring “idealist” who fled from life by spinning comforting illusions about a higher and truer world beyond the grasp of the senses.

For Nietzsche, this flight from life is the absolute rejection of life on its own terms and hence genuine nihilism. The defense of morality proper, which is tied up with this flight, is obviously a part of that nihilism. In this Nietzschean sense Callicles is far wiser than Plato

In response to the challenge posed by Nietzsche, Strauss tried to recover a version of the classics, and especially of Plato, that could WITHSTAND Nietzsche’s criticism by being utterly devoid of the intellectual errors Nietzsche had excoriated.

Nietzsche destroyed the possibility of natural right and decent regimes, it seemed, by attacking the metaphysical underpinnings of those things in Plato (among others).

Strauss responded by in effect asking, What if the deepest argument for natural right in Plato does not depend on metaphysics or any kind of “idealism”?

To defend Plato in these terms, however, Strauss had to concede that there is no defense of morality proper in Plato.

Morality is good, not in itself, but because it helps to create the conditions for the philosophic life for those naturally fit for it, on the one hand, and because it helps to create the conditions for social stability and the division of labor for everyone else, on the other.

It is in this way, and this way only, that morality is good. To ask that morality be good for properly moral reasons (good in itself) is to ask for an “idealistic” defense of morality.

By letting a part of Nietzsche’s criticism stand, Strauss was thus able, or thought he was able, to defend the rest of the classical tradition from Nietzsche’s destructive critique.

This is THE Straussian gambit: to immunize the classical understanding of politics and ethics against the late-modern and post-modern attack on it by detaching it from the metaphysical and theological arguments that had traditionally been understood to be its foundation.

Nietzsche delivered an impassioned and unforgettable demand for a return to PSYCHOLOGY, in contrast to all daydreaming about higher “foundations,” and Strauss answered that call, though not entirely as Nietzsche would’ve liked.

Put differently, Strauss’ position is that Nietzsche is right to think that the metaphysical tradition (classical and Scholastic) is unsound. And Nietzsche is right, in theory though not in practice, to sink the ship of metaphysics and theology.

But he is wrong to think, Strauss would add, that the classics must go down with the ship of metaphysics. The classics stand on their own natural and empirically real feet. The classics were the first psychologists, both literally and in Nietzsche’s sense.

The question for me is whether Strauss’ interpretation of the classics along these lines is ultimately satisfying.

The question, in other words, is whether the price Strauss had to pay to immunize the classics from Nietzsche’s criticism was ultimately too high and the philosophical victory obtained at such a price pyrrhic.

One notable consequence of the exorbitant cost of this victory is the Straussian treatment of the noble in the classics. For Strauss, or at least many Straussians, routinely insist on the disjunction of the good and the noble.

That is, the hallmark of the philosopher is his awareness that what is ordinarily thought to be noble is not actually good because doing what is noble may lead to great pain or even death.Only an “idealist” could think that risking his life for a just cause is, in principle, good

Whether or not this view of the noble is false, I cannot with absolute confidence say. But I would with modest confidence say that it is very difficult, if not indeed impossible, to find a clear and incontestable endorsement of it in the classics.

Of course, the esoteric interpretation of the classics presupposes the extreme difficulty of finding a clear and incontestable endorsement of this view.

He who writes between the lines does so because he thinks that what lies between the lines would be repugnant and hateful to most people.

But doesn’t the esoteric interpretation of the classics risk weighing textual evidence in a deliberately lopsided manner, giving precedence to the ambiguous hint, the awkward clause, the curt statement that may imply something, etc....

... over and against clearly stated logical arguments?

If we are committed to reading between the lines, do we not run the risk of becoming secretly committed to finding things between the lines? We may even learn to keep this secret commitment from ourselves.

Then again, the psychological, as opposed to metaphysical, Plato that Strauss finds is utterly bewitching, if nothing else because psychological arguments have an empirical force that metaphysical arguments, especially when they take an overly speculative turn, lack.

The question, it seems to me, can only be resolved by placing the esoteric and the exoteric understandings of the classics side by side, and judging which one makes a more rational case for the goodness of justice. Perhaps there is a middle way?

But it seems to me that many Straussians nowadays don’t even consider the possibility that at least a part of the classics’ allegedly exoteric arguments for the goodness of justice might actually stand on firm intellectual ground.

And they don’t consider this possibility because they don’t consider the possibility that Nietzsche’s criticism of “idealism” may be simply unsound or largely unsound or at least somewhat unsound.

This, then, is my point: Nietzsche’s criticism of “idealism” occupies the same place in the thought of many Straussians that divine revelation does in the thought of faith-based “philosophers” or theologians.

In the case of both groups, a somewhat hidden and possibly unexamined or not fully examined but in any case contestable premise deeply informs what they claim natural reason clearly shows.