Spring 1995 Volume 22 Number 3 301 Leo Strauss Two Lectures 339 Mark Blitz Plato's Alcibiades I 359 Jacob A. Howland Aristotle on Tragedy: Rediscovering the Poetics Discussion 405 Dorothy L. Sayers Aristotle on Detective Fiction Review Essays 417 Daniel J. Mahoney Modern Man and Man Tout Court: The Flight from Nature and the Modern Difference, Review Essay on La Cite de I'homme, by Pierre Manent 439 Peter McNamara Popular Government and Effective Government, Review Essay on The Effective Republic, by Harvey Flaumenhaft, and Alexander Hamilton and the Political Order, by Morton J. Frisch Interpretation Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. ofPhilosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey Genera] Editors Seth G. Benardete Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowell (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. Mansfield Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) Ellis Sandoz Leo Strauss (d. 1973) Kenneth W. Thompson International Editors Terence E. Marshall Heinrich Meier Editors Wayne Ambler Maurice Auerbach Fred Baumarm Michael Blaustein Patrick Coby Thomas S. Engeman Edward J. Erler Maureen Feder-Marcus Joseph E. Goldberg Steven Harvey Pamela K. Jensen Ken Masugi Grant B. Mindle James W. Morris Will Morrisey Susan Orr Charles T. Rubin Leslie G. Rubin Susan Shell Richard Velkley Bradford P. Wilson Michael Zuckert Catherine Zuckert Manuscript Editor Lucia B Prochnow . Subscriptions Subscription rates per volume (3 issues): individuals $25 libraries and all other institutions $40 students (four-year limit) $16 Single copies available. Postage outside U.S.: Canada $4.50 extra; elsewhere $5.40 extra by surface mail (8 weeks or longer) or $11.00 by air. Payments: in U.S. dollars and payable by a financial institution located within the U.S.A. (or the U.S. Postal Service). The Journal WelcomesManuscripts in Political Philosophy as Wellas Those in Theology, Literature and Jurisprudence. contributors should follow The Chicago Manual ofStyle, 13th ed. or manuals basedon it; double-space theirmanuscripts, including notes; place references in the text, in endnotes or follow currentjournal style in printing references. Words from languages not rooted in Latin should be transliterated to English. To ensure impartial judgment of their manuscripts, contributors should omit mention oftheir other work; put, on the title page only, their name, any affiliation desired, address with postal/zip code in full, and telephone. Contributors using computers should, if possible, provide a character count of the entire manuscript. Please send three clear copies, which will not be returned. Composition by Eastern Composition, Inc., Binghamton, N.Y. 13905 U.S.A. Printed and bound by Wickersham Printing Co., Lancaster, PA 17603 U.S.A. Inquiries: Patricia D'Allura, Assistant to the Editor, interpretation, Queens College, Flushing, N Y 11367-1597, U.S.A. (718)997-5542 Interpretation A Spring 1995 Volume 22 Number 3 Leo Strauss Two Lectures 301 Mark Blitz Plato's Alcibiades I 339 Jacob A. Howland Aristotle on Tragedy: Rediscovering the Poetics 359 Discussion Dorothy L. Sayers Aristotle on Detective Fiction 405 Review Essays Daniel J. Mahoney Modem Man and Man Tout Court: The Flight from Nature and the Modem Difference, Review Essay on La Cite de I'homme, by Pierre Manent 417 Peter McNamara Popular Government and Effective Government, Review Essay on The Effective Republic, by Harvey Flaumenhaft, andAlexander Hamilton and the Political Order, by Morton J. Frisch 439 Copyright 1995 interpretation ISSN 0020-9635 Interpretation Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. ofPhilosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey General Editors Seth G. Benardete Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowell (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. Mansfield Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) Ellis Sandoz Leo Strauss (d. 1973) Kenneth W. Thompson International Editors Terence E. Marshall Heinrich Meier Editors Wayne Ambler Maurice Auerbach Fred Baumann Michael Blaustein Patrick Coby - Thomas S. Engeman * Edward J. Erler Maureen Feder-Marcus Joseph E. Goldberg Steven Harvey Pamela K. Jensen Ken Masugi Grant B. Mindle James W. Morris Will Morrisey Susan Orr Charles T. Rubin Leslie G. Rubin Susan Shell Richard Velkley Bradford P. Wilson Michael Zuckert Catherine Zuckert Manuscript Editor Lucia B. Prochnow Subscriptions Subscription rates per volume (3 issues): individuals $25 libraries and all other institutions $40 students (four-year limit) $16 Single copies available. Postage outside U.S.: Canada $4.50 extra; elsewhere $5.40 extra by surface mail (8 weeks or longer) or $11.00 by air. Payments: in U.S. dollars and payable by a financial institution located within the U.S.A. (or the U.S. Postal Service). The Journal Welcomes Manuscripts in Political Philosophy as Wellas Those in Theology, Literature and Jurisprudence. contributors should follow The Chicago Manual ofStyle, 13th ed. or manuals based on it; double-space their manuscripts, including notes; place references in the text, in endnotes or follow currentjournal style in printing references. Words from languages not rooted in Latin should be transliterated to English. To ensure impartial judgment of their manuscripts, contributors should omit mention of their other work; put, on the title page only, their name, any affiliation desired, address with postal/zip code in full, and telephone. Contributors using computers should, if possible, provide a character count of the entire manuscript. Please send three clear copies, which will not be returned. Composition by Eastern Composition, Inc., Binghamton, N.Y. 13905 U.S.A. Printed and bound by Wickersham Printing Co. , Lancaster, PA 17603 U.S.A. Inquiries: Patricia D'Allura, Assistant to the Editor, interpretation, Queens College, Flushing, N Y 11367-1597, U.S.A. (718)997-5542 Two Lectures by Leo Strauss Edited By David Bolotin St. John's College, Santa Fe Christopher Bruell Boston College Thomas L. Pangle University ofToronto The following two lectures are the first of a number of lectures by the late Leo Strauss which Interpretation has undertaken to publish. The editors of these lectures for Interpretation have been able to obtain copies or transcripts from various sources: none of the lectures was edited by Professor Strauss for the purposes of publication nor even left behind by him among his papers in a state that would have suggested a wish on his part that it be published post humously. In order to underline this fact, the editors have decided to present the lectures as they have found them, with the bare minimum of editorial changes. These lectures have all been published once before, at least in part, but in a more heavily edited form intended to make them more accessible to a wider audience (TheRebirth ofClassicalPoliticalRationalism:AnIntroduction to the Thought ofLeo Strauss, edited by Thomas L. Pangle [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989]). The University of Chicago Press, which holds the copyright on the materials and which retains the copyright on them in the ver sion now to be published, has generously given its permission for their repub lication in Interpretation, as has Professor Joseph Cropsey, Leo Strauss's literary executor. A notice will be attached to each lecture indicating the state in which the manuscript or transcription was found; and a list will be appended to some of the lectures calling attention to divergences from the previously published version. interpretation, Spring 1995, Vol. 22, No. 3 302 Interpretation Thefirst ofthese two lectures, "Existentialism," was delivered by Professor Straussfourteenyears earlier than the secondone, "Theproblem ofSocrates." They are, however, related to one another by their common concern to under stand and to respond to the thought ofHeidegger. Indeed, they are Professor Strauss's most extensive public statements about Heidegger, at least sofar as we know, andwe have accordingly chosen topresent them here together. Existentialism Leo Strauss According to Dr. Victor Gourevitch, whose own lecture on Existentialism is referredto byProfessorStrauss in the text, this lecture wasdeliveredin Febru ary, 1956, at the Hillel Foundation ofthe University ofChicago. The lecture was available to the editors in a copy ofa typescript with additions, correc tions, and alterations by Professor Strauss's own hand. The original of this typescript, with Professor Strauss's revisions, can befound in the Strauss ar chives at the University of Chicago. We have chosen to present the revised version in the text, while indicating in notes what the revisions were. However, whereProfessorStraussmerely correcteda typographicalmistake, orwhere he added a comma or made other small changes ofpunctuation, we have pre sented only the corrected version. We have also taken the liberty ofcorrecting, without comment, afew misspellings in the typescript. We are grateful toHein rich and Wiebke Meierfor their most generous help in deciphering Professor Strauss's handwriting. A more heavily edited version of this lecture, based on a typescript that differs, inpart,from the one we used, andon a copy thatgives no indication of having been seen by Professor Strauss, was previously published, under the title "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," in The Rebirth ofClas sical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought ofLeo Strauss (Chi cago: University ofChicago Press, 1989 [ 1989 by The University ofChicago]), pp. 2746. We have noted in an epilogue what appear to us to be the most important divergences between the earlier version and thepresent one. This series of lectures a reminder of the perplexities of modem man should help the Jewish students in particular towards facing the perplexities of the modem Jew with somewhat greater clarity. Existentialism has reminded many people that thinking is incomplete and defective ifthe thinking being, the triinking individual, forgets himself as what he is. It is the old Socratic warn ing. Compare1 Theodorus in the Theaetetus, the purely theoretic, purely objec tive man who loses himself completely in the contemplation of mathematical objects, who knows nothing about himself and his fellow men, in particular about his own defects. The thinking2 man is not a pure mind, a pointer-reading observer, for instance. The3 question what am I, or who am I cannot be an swered by science, for this would mean that there are some self-forgetting 1995 byTheUniversity ofChicago. Allrights reserved. interpretation, Spring 1995, Vol. 22, No. 3 304 Interpretation Theodoruses who have gotten hold ofthe limits ofthe human soul by means of scientific method. For if they have not done so, iftheir results are necessarily provisional, hypothetical, it is barely possible that what we can find out by examining ourselves and our situation honestly, without the pride and the pre tence of scientific knowledge, is more helpful than science. 'Existentialism is a school of philosophic thought. The name is not like Platonism, Epicureanism, and Thomism. Existentialism is a nameless move ment like pragmatism or positivism. This is deceptive.5 Existentialism owes its overriding significance to a single man: Heidegger. Heidegger alone brought about such a radical change in philosophic thought as is revolutionizing all thought in Germany, in continental Europe, and is beginning to affect even Anglo-Saxony. I am not surprised by this effect. I rememberthe impression he made on me when I heard him first as a young Ph.D. in 1922. Up to thattime I had been particularly impressed, as many of my contemporaries in Germany were, by Max Weber, by Weber's6 intransigent devotion to intellectual hon esty, by his passionate devotion to the idea of science, a devotion that was combined with a profound uneasiness regarding themeaning ofscience. On my way north from Freiburg where Heidegger then taught, I saw in Frankfurt am Main Franz Rosenzweig whose name will always be remembered when in formed people speak about Existentialism, and I told him of Heidegger. I said to him: in comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an orphan child in regard to precision, and probing, and competence. I had never seen before such seriousness, profundity, and concentration in the interpretation of philosophic texts. I had heard Heidegger's interpretation of certain sections in Aristotle. Sometime later I heard Werner Jaeger in Berlin interpret the same texts. Charity compels me to limit the comparison to the remark7 that there was no comparison. Gradually the breadth of the revolution of thought which Heidegger was preparing dawned upon me and my generation. We saw with our own eyes that there had been no such phenomenon in the world since Hegel. He succeeded in a very short time in dethroning the established schools of philosophy in Germany. There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative ofestablished academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirerhad been a pupil ofHermann Cohen, the founder ofthe neo- Kantian school.8 Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared: it had been silently dropped: he had notfaced the problem. 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. Prior to Heidegger's emergence the most outstanding German philosopher I would say the only5 German philoso pher was Edmund Husserl. It was Heidegger's critique ofHusserl's phenom enology which became decisive: precisely because that criticism consisted in a Existentialism 305 radicalization of Husserl's own question and questioning. Briefly, as8 Husserl once said to me who had been trained in9 the Marburg neo-Kantian school, the10 neo-Kantians were superior to all other German philosophical schools, but they made the mistake of beginning with the roof. He meant: the primary theme of Marburg neo-Kantianism was the analysis of science. But science, Husserl taught, is derivative from our primary knowledge ofthe world of things; sci ence is not the perfection of man's understanding of the world, but a specific modification of that pre-scientific understanding. The meaningful genesis of science out of pre-scientific understanding is a problem; the primary theme is the philosophical understanding of the pre-scientific world and therefore in the first place the analysis ofthe sensibly perceived thing. According to Heidegger Husserl himself5 began with the roof: the merely sensibly perceived thing is itself derivative; there are not first sensibly perceived things and thereafter the same things in a state ofbeing valued or in a state ofaffecting us. Our primary understanding of the world is not an understanding of things as objects but of what the Greeks indicated" by pragmata, things which we handle and use.12 The horizon within which Husserl had analyzed the world ofpre-scientific un derstanding was the pure consciousness as the absolute being. Heidegger ques tioned that orientation by referring to the fact that the inner time belonging to the pure consciousness cannot be understood ifone abstracts from the fact that this time is necessarily finite and even constituted by man's mortality. The same effect which Heidegger had in the late twenties and early thirties in Ger many, he hadvery soon in continental Europe as a whole. There is nolonger in existence a philosophic position apart from neo-Thomism and Marxism crude or refined. All rational13 liberal philosophic positions have lost their signifi cance and power. One may deplore this but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be8 inadequate. I am14 afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellec tual plight. But here is the great trouble, the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger. The only question of importance of course is the question whether Heideg ger's teaching is true or not. But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence of who is competent to judge. Per haps only great thinkers are really competent tojudge of5 the thought of great thinkers. Kant16 made a distinction between philosophers and those for whom philosophy is identical with thehistory ofphilosophy. He made a distinction, in other words, between the thinker and the scholar. I know that I am only a scholar. But I know also that most people that call themselves philosophers are mostly, at best, scholars. The scholar is radically dependent on the work ofthe great thinkers, of men who faced the problems without being covered" by any authority. The scholar is cautious, methodic, notbold. He does not become lost to our sight in, to us inaccessible heights and mists as the great thinkers do. Yet 306 Interpretation while the great thinkers are so bold they are also much more cautious than we are; they see pitfalls where we are sure of our ground. We scholars live in a charmed circle, light-living like the Homeric gods, protected against the prob lems by the great thinkers. The scholar becomes possible through the fact that the great thinkers disagree. Their disagreement creates a possibility for us to reason about their differences for wondering which ofthem is more likely to be right. We may think that the possible alternatives are exhausted by the great thinkers of the past. We may try to classify their doctrines and make a kind of herbarium and think that we look over them from a vantage point. But we cannot exclude the possibility that other great thinkers might arise in the fu ture in 2200 in Burma the character18 of whose thought has in no way been provided for by our schemata. For who are we to believe that we have found out the limits ofhuman possibilities?19 In brief, we are occupied with reasoning about the little we understand oP what the great thinkers have said. The scholar faces the fundamental problems through the intermediacy of books. Ifhe is a serious man through the intermediacy ofthe great books. The great thinker faces the problems directly. I apply this to my situation inregard to Heidegger. A famous psychologist I saw in Europe, an old man, told me that in his view it is not yet possible to form a judgment about the significance as well as the truth of Heidegger's work. Because this work changed the intellectual orientation so radically21 that a long long time is needed in order to understand with even tolerable adequacy and in a most general way22 whatthis work means. The more I understand what Heidegger is aiming at the more I see how much still escapes me. The most stupid thing I could do would be to close my eyes or to reject his work. There is a not altogether unrespectablejustification for doing so. Heidegger became a Nazi in 1933. This was not due to a mere error ofjudgment on the part of a man who lived on great heights high above the lowland23 of politics. Everyone who had read his first great book and did not overlook the wood for the trees could see the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis. What was the practical, that is to say serious meaning of the contempt forreasonableness and the praise ofresoluteness which permeated the work24 except to encourage that extremist movement? When Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933 he delivered an official speech in which he identified himself with the movement which then swept Germany. Heidegger has not yet dared to mention that speech in the otherwise complete list of his writings, which appear from time to time on the bookjackets of his recent publications. Yet8 in 195325 he published a book, lectures given in 1935, in which he spoke of the greatness and dignity of the National Socialist move ment. In the preface written in 195325 he said that all mistakes had been cor rected. The case of Heidegger reminds to a certain extent of the case of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, naturally, would not have sided with Hitler. Yet there is an undeniable kinship between Nietzsche's thought and fascism. If one rejects