Memo #5: The Philosophy of Leo Strauss
Day 1: Intellectual Keto Diet Experiment
Hi there,
Today is Day 1 of my Intellectual Keto Diet experiment. For the next 10 days, I will only be consuming old content – old books, texts, scriptures, and philosophy, and cutting all ephemeral social media and news from my information diet.
For Day 1, I’m jumping straight into the trenches by reading and writing about Leo Strauss.
Born in 1899, Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher. He rose to fame with his seminal texts on Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes. Contemporarily, he is perhaps best known for birthing the tradition of what is now called Straussianism.
On the Limits of Rationality
Despite being a hardcore Rationalist, Strauss offers strong critiques of Rationality. He goes further to say that the entire project of Western Modernity, which is fundamentally based on Rationality, is doomed to failure. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, consider the question – Is our Rationality, that is the Enlightenment version of Rationality, the pinnacle of all reason and rational principles?
We like to think so. But didn’t the previous civilizations think they had reached the pinnacle of reason and rationality too? Is Rationality really this ahistorical, non-cultural tool to arrive at the Truth, or is it embedded within the culture which produces it?
Strauss says that our Rationality, far from being the pinnacle of it, is but one version. Consider for example the rationality of Ancient Greece. Their version was considerably different than ours. As a result, it produced a vastly different society. Each version may have its trade-offs, and to Strauss, that’s a good thing.
Is Modernity Doomed to Fail?
Strauss offers strong critiques of Modernity. I want to talk about two of those specifically.
Crisis of Meaning
Modernity undoubtedly produces material progress. For instance, our medicine is far superior to that of Ancient Greece. But Strauss would ask, what about the absolute worst famine of meaning that we are going through? Our society’s structure of labor, economics, and politics, lead to alienation. In Ancient Greece, people had a purpose for life, which provided them with stable meaning.
Value-free vs. Value-laden Society
In Ancient Greece, society had embedded values that one was supposed to live up to. These ‘Ideals’ were goals one was always working toward, using them as orienting reflexes for one’s life.
On the contrary, our Modern society begins from the assumption of value-neutrality. We don’t have ideals and values anymore, as The Enlightenment Rationality offers none beyond the Rationalist/Capitalist impulse of looking out for our self-interest. And that is why Strauss believes the project of modernity is doomed to failure.
Strauss says that Liberal Enlightenment-led Modernity inexorably devolves into some combination of these five pernicious “-isms”.
Relativism - to derive values from all cultures with no clear hierarchy of what’s to be pursued when values conflict.
Historicism - to derive values from whatever was historically recent.
Scientism - to derive values from Science.
Economism - to derive values from Economics.
Nihilism - to derive no values at all, and descent into meaninglessness.
If the value-free arrangement of The West is doomed to fail, why has it lasted so long? It’s because The West still carries, as baggage, the value-laden ideals of a forgotten past.
Ideas and Connections
Reading Strauss was like being jolted in my sleep only to wake up strapped to a train-track onlooking an incoming train.
Strauss makes visible the upcoming demise of The West. And that is an extremely worthwhile intellectual exercise to go through.
Here are my top insights, ideas, and connections I made thinking about Strauss’s philosophy.
Strauss says that the modern individual only values his self-interest. Nowhere is this better captured than in the foundational text of all of Economics.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.
- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The most important question facing our society – is time linear or cyclical? That is, is there actual progress, or is it just a cycle of rise and fall, creation and extinction, abundance and decadence, progress and stagnation? Everything else will be a rounding error in the history books.
Critiques
I didn’t agree with everything Strauss claims. Here are my top counter-questions and counter-arguments.
Did the societies of past actually provide more meaning and connection to their life than modern societies? Weren't they enmeshed in tribal violence, kingdom-expansion-warfare, pointless feuds, plagues, preventable deaths? I’d be careful here to avoid selection and rosy-retrospection bias.
To say that Modernity has only progressed in the very narrow area of material welfare is an understatement. We have improved on important well-being metrics like infant-mortality, birth-giving deaths, violence, life-expectancy, preventable deaths, and more. I mean, there were entire plagues that happened because there was no sanitation system. Now, that’s something we rarely have to think about.
Is the demise of the West a foregone conclusion? I don’t think so. I think better Institutions and more knowledge are the way out of the trappings of cyclical time. That said, the crisis of meaning and values absolutely has to be addressed. Otherwise, the cultural moment is ripe for tyrannical forces to step up and fill the void.
Favorite Quote from Leo Strauss
On Philosophy, Strauss writes
“Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.”
Bonus links
See you tomorrow,
Ayush