THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

Strauss, in my view, was a profoundly skeptical thinker. But this skepticism is not synonymous with Nietzschean nihilism, though neither does it provide comfort for those seeking eternal moral verities to guide human action. Strauss' skepticism, inspired by Socrates, is a distinctive way of comporting oneself in the world--one that takes as its touchstone an ever-present awareness that thinking invariably begins, and usually remains deeply mired in, dogmatic, unexamined opinions about morality, politics, justice, God, and even being (or "the whole" of things). Skeptical philosophizing is a way of life devoted to liberating oneself from these dogmatic, unexamined opinions and replacing them with knowledge--knowledge of our ignorance.

Strauss' Socratic skepticism differs from many other styles of skepticism in not being primarily a consequence of the limitations of human reason or some other defect of the human mind--as if another, less imperfect mind could discover an underlying coherence or fuller knowledge that eludes us. On the contrary, as one scholar has written, Socratic skepticism is a response to "the character of the world" itself. Elusiveness, hiddenness, confounding riddles, the primacy of questions to answers and problems to solutions--all of this "is a property of being itself."

But then why did Strauss deploy a rhetoric of conservative moralism at all? A good part of if it flowed from his rather unexceptional view, which was so widespread until recent times that it could be called the consensus position among political theorists from Aristotle through Alexis de Tocqueville, that good and decent politics (especially in a republic) depends on a citizenry possessing moral virtue.

In Strauss's case, the emphasis on moral virtue is both complicated and intensified by his conviction that philosophical reflection is fundamentally skeptical, potentially eroding the traditional moral and religious views on which good and decent politics depends. Strauss thus ended up in the unusual position of simultaneously advocating skeptical philosophical inquiry and working to prop up the very moral and religious views that such inquiry typically corrodes and dissolves.

To champion moral virtue in a modern liberal democracy is to sound like a conservative. To champion it while also advocating a form of philosophy that undermines the foundations of moral virtue is to sound like a uniquely cynical form of conservative--one who deploys conservative rhetoric as a mere subterfuge or "noble lie" for popular consumption. This has become one of the most common accusations critics make against Strauss. But his position is actually more complicated than that--and more interesting.

Strauss's moralism isn't simply a deception. It serves a philosophically justifiable purpose in light of what he took to be the permanent relation of philosophy to pre-philosophical opinion on the one hand, and the distinctive obstacles to philosophical skepticism in the modern world on the other.

Strauss maintains that in the pre-modern world, philosophy emerged (both historically and continually with each person down through the centuries who ended up drawn to it as a way of life) as an imminent critique of received opinions about virtue, justice, nobility, honor, love, friendship, the divine, and a range of other moral, political, and religious views. The philosopher examines these opinions, notices contradictions within them, and ascends dialectically to truer, less dogmatic, more enigmatic positions, and finally to genuine knowledge of the elusive character of truth.

On Strauss' reading, Plato's allegory of the cave encapsulates in metaphorical terms this vision of philosophy's genesis and relation to pre-philosophical life and experience. In the allegory, people live their lives unknowingly chained to the floor of a cave, which represents the political community (tribe, city-state, nation-state, or empire), along with its foundational laws and abiding customs. Within this cave, the people are forced to gaze at shadow-images (received opinions about morality, politics, and the gods) that they ignorantly mistake for reality. Philosophers are those rare individuals who come to doubt these received (false or at least badly distorted) opinions and seek to replace them with knowledge. In doing so, they liberate themselves from their confinement in the cave and ultimately ascend to the outside world of real objects bathed in the light of the sun.

Every political community, for Strauss, is a cave. That includes ancient Athens, the 20th-century United States in which he eventually made his home, and even the ideal or utopian city-in-speech elaborated by Socrates and his conversation partners in Plato's Republic, which is ruled by a class of philosopher kings. That's because Strauss was convinced that false and distorted political, moral, and religious opinions of one kind or another are, everywhere and always, the "very element of human or social or political life."

Scholars regularly make such claims about traditional societies, but Strauss' insistence on applying it to modern liberal democracies placed him at odds with the self-interpretation that often prevails within them. And that tension points to what Strauss considered to be an important shift in the relation of philosophical skepticism and political practice since the time of the 18th-century Enlightenment--a shift that helps to explain why Strauss frequently deployed conservative rhetoric in his writing and teaching.

Across all of its national variations, the Enlightenment sought to spread philosophical and scientific knowledge throughout society for the sake of improving the human condition, materially, spiritually, and intellectually. In classical terms, it aimed to bring everyone (or at least as many people as possible) out of the cave. 

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