LEO STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD: HISTORICISM AND THE GREEKS Alessandra Fussi Abstract: Strauss’s invitation to understand Greek authors as they understood themselves was attacked by inluential scholars as anti-historical. In the irst part of the paper, I argue that the charge is due to a misunderstanding of Strauss’s position on the respective role of interpretation and criticism in historicism. In the second part, I highlight Strauss’s view of the tension between scientiic history as the manifestation of a certain age, and scientiic history as the culmination of historical progress. In the third part, I discuss Strauss’s thesis that the belief in progress prevented Collingwood from taking past thinkers seriously. Collingwood claimed that the Greeks failed to appreciate that age-long traditions shaped their thought. Strauss held the opposite: the beginning of Greek philosophy coincides with questioning the identity between the ancestral and the good, and philosophy in Plato’s Republic is shown to be a form of critical relection on the reasons why certain traditions and myths can exercise political, religious, and psychological power. I. Introduction Strauss’s considerations on philosophical content were never disjoined from relections concerning form. He was convinced that without a detailed analysis of style and dramatic setting one would miss the most important philosophical questions raised in Plato’s and Xenophon’s dialogues, and this is why he devoted as much attention to poetic and rhetorical aspects as others would give to explicit arguments. Consequently, his interpretation of Plato’s Republic in The City and Man, the lectures on Plato’s Symposium, the book on Plato’s Laws and the commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero offer both original contributions to the study of ancient philosophy, and striking relections on hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Strauss’s style was deceptively simple: it was almost entirely free of the technical jargon that characterized scholarly books in ancient philosophy during the most part of the twentieth century. He adopted a way of writing as faithful as possible to the phenomena of everyday life—a style he found exempliied in Plato’s dialogues and in Xenophon’s works. To borrow a © 2014. Idealistic Studies, Volume 44, Issues 2 & 3. ISSN 0046-8541. DOI: 10.5840/idstudies20154722 pp. 149–162 IDEALISTIC STUDIES Nietzschean expression, Strauss admired in the Greeks their gift for being supericial out of profundity. Unfortunately, his interpretations of ancient thought attracted much polemical attention. His writings became instrumental in heated political debates, but the consideration they received was often separate from their philosophical content. Specialists in ancient philosophy denied that his work deserved serious study. His books met with vicious attacks, fanatical approval, and for the most part hasty, shallow, unbalanced and unrelective judgments. In 1985 Miles Burnyeat wrote a polemical piece, in the “New York Review of Books,” which set the tone for subsequent readings of Strauss in much of the Anglo-American scholarship in ancient philosophy, and was quoted over and over again as the inal word on Strauss’s interpretation of Plato. Burnyeat’s article aimed to show that Strauss was a terrible teacher and a terrible scholar—literally an evil and incompetent man, a corruptor of youth: I submit in all seriousness that surrender of the critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss’s ideas.1 Burnyeat drew such a destructive conclusion from one student’s report— Werner Dannhauser. Dannhauser had described the irst meeting of Strauss’s Hobbes seminar at the University of Chicago in the fall term of 1956 in a somewhat exalted tone: He exposed our opinion as mere opinions; he caused us to realize that we were the prisoners of our opinions by showing us the larger horizons behind and beyond them. . . . Not the least remarkable of a number of remarkable suggestions—or commands—which Leo Strauss produced that day was that we must begin with the assumption that Hobbes’ teaching was true— not relatively true, not true for Hobbes, not true for its time, but simply true. That was why we had to read him with all the care we could muster, and that was why (I was to hear him say this again and again) one ought not even to begin to criticize an author before one had done all one could do to understand him correctly, to understand him as he understood himself.2 A naive reader would recognize in this recollection an experience common to those of us whose irst approach with philosophical studies left a signiicant impression on our memory. The most cherished convictions turned out to be less reliable than we thought. Sooner or later we discovered that we were unable to defend our opinions, or, even worse, that they were mere prejudices. Some of us realized that there was no reason to be proud of a kind of knowledge that expressed itself in sweeping generalizations and was based on handbooks. The point of studying Hobbes or Plato revealed itself to be more complicated than expected. One had to learn humility and patience: one could not criticize the philosophers of the past before having done all one could to understand them. 150 STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD AND THE GREEKS Burnyeat, however, on the basis of Dannhauser’s report draws a completely different picture: When other teachers invite students to explore the origins of modern thought, they encourage criticism as the road to active understanding. Understanding grows through a dialectical interaction between the students and the author they are studying. Strauss asks—or commands—his students to start by accepting that any inclination they may have to disagree with Hobbes (Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides), any opinion contrary to his, is mistaken. They must suspend their own judgment, suspend even “modern thought as such,” until they understand their author “as he understood himself.” It is all too clear that this illusory goal will not be achieved by the end of the term. Abandon self all ye who enter here. The question is, to whom is the surrender made: to the text or to the teacher?3 Dannhauser’s report is clearly not enough to justify such a massive attack. Why did Burnyeat claim that Strauss intimidated his students into submission? The reason seems to reside in a deep form of disagreement concerning the meaning and role of critical thinking in philosophical studies, at the core of which lies Burnyeat’s disapproval of Strauss’s critique of historicism: The injunction to understand one’s author “as he understood himself” is fundamental to Straussian interpretation, but he never explains what that means—only that it is directed against his chief bugbear, “historicism”; or the belief that old books should be understood according to their historical context. Thus “I have not tried to relate his [Xenophon’s] thought to his ‘historical situation’ because it is not the natural way of reading the work of a wise man and, in addition, Xenophon never indicated that he wanted to be understood that way.”4 Evidently it would be presumptuous for students to criticize a “wise man” on their own watered-down twentieth-century thoughts.5 Burnyeat understood neither Strauss’s style of interpretation nor his position on historicism, but he realized the importance of the connection between the two. If we abstract from the polemical tone, we can see that he raised a serious objection: if Strauss’s argument about historicism is ungrounded, then his interpretative strategy concerning ancient Greek philosophers, insofar as it is a response to historicism, can be called into question. Burnyeat believed that there was something appalling in Strauss’s command to his students: you “must begin with the assumption that Hobbes’s teaching was true—not relatively true, not true for Hobbes, not true for its time, but simply true.” He found, exempliied here, the opposite of what a good teacher should do—inviting students to criticize the texts they are reading. He thought Strauss wanted his students to entertain blind beliefs. 151 IDEALISTIC STUDIES Someone acquainted with Strauss’s work will be likely to ind this accusation profoundly misleading and to dismiss it as grotesque. The accusation is indeed grotesque, but the question it raises is quite interesting. Why did Strauss read the Greeks the way he did? Let us consider again the quotation from Strauss’s introduction to his book on Xenophon’s Hiero: I have not tried to relate his [Xenophon’s] thought to his “historical situation” because it is not the natural way of reading the work of a wise man and, in addition, Xenophon never indicated that he wanted to be understood that way. Why does Strauss refuse to dwell on the relationship between Xenophon’s thought and his “historical situation”? Why does he object to historicism? Strauss’s essay on Collingwood’s philosophy of history will help us understand his reasons.6 II. Historicism Strauss begins his essay by addressing the concept of scientiic history, which, according to Collingwood, represents the correct way of interpreting the past. Strauss’s irst thesis is that we cannot ind conirmation of the validity of this concept by analyzing historical data, since scientiic history is itself a criterion for analyzing historical data. Scientiic history is a philosophical concept, and, as such, it should be approached from a philosophical point of view. This is why Strauss proceeds to address what he considers to be the fundamental historicist thesis: every philosophical thought relects its time. According to Strauss, this thesis, which is often taken for granted, inverts the traditional way to view the relationship between philosophy and history. If every philosophical thought expresses its time, philosophy cannot transcend its time: philosophical thought is not free, it is determined by history. Hence, philosophy is absorbed in, and subordinated to, history. Strauss argues that the subordination of philosophy to history can be understood as a subordination of the question of human nature to the question of the history of human nature. What men have done becomes the fundamental criterion to understand what men are: It was always admitted that the central theme of philosophy is the question of what man is, and that history is the knowledge of what men have done; but now it has been realized that man is what he can do, and “the only clue to what man can do” is what he has done [10]; therefore, “the so-called science of human nature or of the human mind resolves itself into history” [220, 209]. Philosophy of history is identical with philosophy as such, which has become radically historical: “philosophy as a separate discipline is liquidated by being converted into history” [x].7 152 STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD AND THE GREEKS As we will see in more detail shortly, this point is further clariied by Strauss when he addresses the ancient conception of the relationship between philosophy and history (572–573). The Aristotelian and Platonic positions in particular are not reconcilable with scientiic history. Plato and Aristotle did not view philosophical thought as an expression of any particular historical time: philosophy, in their view, was capable of transcending the limitations of time. This fundamental disagreement according to Strauss creates a serious problem: Collingwood cannot take seriously the classic position. He simply perceives it as immature, as a worldview that we should be thankful to scientiic history for having overcome. Taking a philosopher seriously means being open to the possibility that he or she may be right. However, because the premise of the ancients and the premise of scientiic history are fundamentally at odds, scientiic history cannot take ancient thought seriously. Strauss inds the concept of re-enactment problematic because he thinks that it entails an unjustiied mixture of interpretation and criticism. Collingwood maintained that for the scientiic historian the thought of the past is not a dead object, but something with which he can empathize. Such empathy, however, is determined by the perspective of the present. Hence, interpreting the thought of the past is the same as criticizing that thought from the point of view of the present. To put it differently, while interpreting the thought of the past the historian forces his own questions on the texts he is studying, and, to use Collingwood’s own words, puts them to the torture.8 In this perspective, studying the past entails criticizing the past from the point of view of the present, i.e., from the stage of civilization to which the historian belongs. We can see here that, when Burnyeat objected to Strauss’s way of addressing history of philosophy, he was in fact assuming the same standpoint as Collingwood. Burnyeat understood that Strauss refused to identify interpretation of history with criticism of history, but he did not see why Strauss disagreed with Collingwood. The point is not, as Burnyeat suggested, that we should leave our critical intelligence aside, but, rather, that we should use our intelligence irst and foremost to understand ancient authors as much as possible in their own terms. Only after we have done all we can to understand an author can we then criticize him or her. If we do not do so, i.e., if we identify interpretation of the past with criticism of the past, we exclude from the outset that we, as historians, may learn not just something about past authors, but, more importantly, something from them.9 Another way in which Strauss conveys this point is by concentrating on the tension between scientiic history as the manifestation of a certain age, and scientiic history as the culmination of historical progress, a progress from forms of thought which, seen from the perspective of scientiic his- 153 IDEALISTIC STUDIES tory, appear to be naïve and defective. Here Strauss inds scientiic history entangled in a contradiction that we can express as follows: 1) Collingwood assumes that his way of considering history is the correct way (this way being that each thinker will express the spirit of his or her age). Since ancient historians and philosophers conceived of the relationship between thinking and history in a different way, their conception was naïve and defective. 2) The very thesis that each thinker expresses the spirit of his age rules out the possibility that there may be an absolute standpoint from which to judge the achievements of different ages. If every age sees its past from the perspective of the present, the historical thinking of one age is as legitimate a perspective as that of other ages. From the second thesis one ought to have drawn the conclusion that the paradigm of scientiic history endorsed by Collingwood could not be applied to thinkers who did not share that paradigm—who, in fact, worked under very different assumptions concerning the meaning of their work. Yet, according to Strauss, the underlying assumption, faith in progress, made it impossible for Collingwood to consider earlier paradigms worthy of serious attention: The belief in the equality of all ages leads to the consequence that our interpretation of the thought of the past, while not superior to the way in which the thought of the past interpreted itself, is as legitimate as the past’s self-interpretation and, in addition, is the only way in which we today can interpret the thought of the past. Accordingly, there arises no necessity to take seriously the way in which the thought of the past understood itself. In other words, the belief in the equality of all ages is only a more subtle form of the belief in progress. The alleged insight into the equality of all ages which is said to make possible passionate interest in the thought of the different ages, necessarily conceives of itself as a progress beyond all earlier thought: every earlier age erroneously ‘absolutized’ the standpoint from which it looked at things and therefore was incapable of taking very seriously the thought of other ages; hence earlier ages were incapable of scientiic history.10 At the bottom of the historicist position Strauss identiies a subtle form of what we could call “historical colonialism”: the claim that all historical perspectives have equal dignity reveals itself as an imperious attempt to impose our present view onto previous perspectives. This attitude generates a peculiar failure to listen to those voices with which we cannot identify. The problem, according to Strauss, becomes apparent in Collingwood’s actual analysis of ancient historians and philosophers, who are judged positively or negatively according to whether they contributed to the development of scientiic history or failed to promote its emergence.11 For example, the belief that thought is relative to its time governs Collingwood’s analysis of Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes: 154 STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD AND THE GREEKS The Republic of Plato is an account, not of the unchanging ideal of political life, but of the Greek ideal as Plato received it and reinterpreted it. The Ethics of Aristotle describes not an eternal morality but the morality of the Greek gentleman. Hobbes’ Leviathan expounds the political ideas of seventeenth century absolutism in their English form. Kant’s ethical theory expresses the moral convictions of German pietism.12 The historical perspective superimposes itself on the thinker’s own perspective. When Plato wrote his Republic, he did not intend to provide posterity with a picture of the Greek ideal of life. On the contrary, he was extremely critical of that ideal. When he made his Socrates construct the paradigm of a perfect city, he considered justice from an absolute standpoint. If one follows Collingwood’s way of reading, however, one inds that the question concerning each philosopher’s speciic standpoint tends to be ignored in favor of an ideal of philosophical history that most ancient philosophers would have opposed: Collingwood understood then the thought of a time in the light of its time. He did not then re-enact that thought. For to re-enact the thought which expresses itself in Plato’s Republic, for example, means to understand Plato’s description of the simply good social order as a description of the true model of society with reference to which all societies of all ages and countries must be judged. Collingwood’s attitude towards the thought of the past was in fact that of a spectator who sees from the outside the relation of an earlier thought to its time. The deiciencies of Collingwood’s historiography can be traced to a fundamental dilemma. The same belief which forced him to attempt to become a historian of thought, prevented him from becoming a historian of thought. He was forced to attempt to become a historian of thought because he believed that to know the human mind is to know its history, or that self-knowledge is historical understanding. But this belief contradicts the tacit premise of all earlier thought, that premise being the view that to know the human mind is something fundamentally different from knowing the history of the human mind. Collingwood therefore rejected the thought of the past as untrue in the decisive respect.13 Let us note the following points in Strauss’s argument: 1. The concept of re-enactment ought to lead the historian to empathize with the thought of the past, to try to understand it in its own terms, but the idea that “thought is relative to time” gets precedence over the attempt to understand the point of view of any given thinker. 2. Each work (the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics, etc.) is reduced to a manifestation of its time. This amounts to the thesis, which we have addressed earlier, that history has precedence over philosophy, 155 IDEALISTIC STUDIES that history is a necessary movement towards progress, so that each thinker is the prisoner of his or her time. 3. However, this was not the perspective from which Plato or Aristotle saw their thought. They believed they were studying something that had value beyond time. When they studied the human mind they did not think that they were describing the minds of their contemporaries. Their project was much more ambitious: they were aiming at truth. They did not believe that studying the mind is the same as studying the history of the mind. For this reason they were blamed by Collingwood as naïve and their works could not be taken seriously enough. In the essay on Collingwood, we ind discussed a few interesting cases which show that the idea of progress underlies Collingwood’s understanding of ancient philosophers and historians. Strauss’s analysis anticipates points that more recently attracted the attention of scholars thanks to Bernard Williams.14 Williams never quoted Strauss, but his criticism of the most common interpretations of Homer, the tragic poets, and Plato were very similar to those made by Strauss forty years earlier. He and Williams shared a deep distrust of the idea of progress, especially when applied to the interpretation of ancient Greek texts, and both in turn owed much to Nietzsche’s relections on history. In Shame and Necessity, for example, Williams argues that such readings of Homer as that of Snell and Adkins lead to serious misunderstandings concerning the conception of the mind, of agency and of responsibility exempliied in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Furthermore, he maintains that from the point of view of progressive history it is not possible to appreciate the signiicance of chance for the tragic writers. Strauss raises the same issue with respect to Collingwood’s failure to appreciate the function of chance in Aristotle’s philosophy.15 III. The Greeks as Children One problem Strauss found particularly important to address with respect to Collingwood’s practice as a thought historian is his view of the role that ancient thinkers attributed to their own tradition. This is of course a central issue: if the ancients did not share Collingwood’s view that thought relects its time, what kind of view did they have of the relationship between history and thought? According to Collingwood, the Greeks had “a substantialist metaphysics,” and this “implies a theory of knowledge according to which only what is unchanging is knowable” (42). From this premise Collingwood drew the conclusion that thinking in terms of substance and thinking in terms of historical knowledge are mutually exclusive activities. He afirms: “it is metaphysically axiomatic that an agent, being a substance, can never come into being and can never undergo any change of nature” (43). From the metaphysical and episte156 STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD AND THE GREEKS mological point of view, then, the Greeks, according to Collingwood, could not provide any justiication of historical knowledge, which was therefore relegated to the realm of opinion. Their “peculiar sensitiveness to history” (22) was due to the fact that they experimented violent and rapid change, i.e., they found themselves in the midst of social and political upheavals. The conclusion Collingwood draws from his assessment is that the Greeks’ historical consciousness was of a peculiar kind: [It was] not a consciousness of age-long tradition molding the life of one generation after another into a uniform pattern; it was a consciousness of violent peripeteiai, catastrophic changes from one state of things to its opposite, from smallness to greatness, from pride to abasement, from happiness to misery.16 However, because they believed that only the permanent is knowable or intelligible, they regarded such catastrophic changes as fundamentally unintelligible. To the thesis that a substantialist metaphysics prevented the Greeks from attaining knowledge of the realm of becoming, Strauss responds with three observations. His irst point is expressed with unmistakable irony: Collingwood presupposed that “it is metaphysically axiomatic that an agent, being a substance, can never come into being and can never undergo any change of nature” (43). Did the Greeks then not know that human beings, for example, come into being? Or is it necessary to refer to Aristotle’s statement that coming into being simply is said only of substances? Why then should the Greeks have been unable to observe and to describe the coming into being of substances and their changes?17 Secondarily, Strauss argues that an interest in what is stable and permanent need not prevent one from studying what is impermanent, including what is unique and catastrophic. His example here is Thucydides: One may be chiely concerned with the permanent or recurrent and yet hold that a given unique event (the Peloponnesian War, for example) supplies the only available basis for reliable observation which would enable one to form a correct judgment about certain recurrences of utmost importance.18 Strauss’s third and most important point concerns the alleged simple-mindedness of the Greeks, their failure to appreciate the importance of age-long traditions and their impact on thought. Strauss responds by quoting the exchange between the old Egyptian priest and Timaeus from Plato’s Timaeus: “The Greeks” were perfectly conscious of the existence of “age-long traditions molding the life of one generation after another into a uniform pattern.” But they believed, or at any rate Plato believed or suggested, that Greek life—in contradistinction especially to Egyptian life—was not dominated by such traditions: “you Greeks are always children . . . you are, all of you, young in soul; for you do not possess in your souls a single 157 IDEALISTIC STUDIES ancient opinion transmitted by old tradition nor a single piece of learning that is hoary with age.”19 The Greeks were less dominated by age-long traditions than were other nations because there lived in their midst men who had the habit of questioning such traditions, i.e., philosophers. In other words, there was a greater awareness in Greece than elsewhere of the essential difference between the ancestral and the good.20 The acute awareness of the difference between the ancestral and the good is, according to Strauss, a distinctive aspect of the Greek tradition and a central theme in Plato’s philosophy, since it concerns the difference between political life on the one hand, and the philosophical relection on the foundation of the political life on the other. It is also a recurrent theme in Strauss’s work. For example, in Natural Right and History Strauss maintains that the prephilosophic equivalent of the concept of nature is the concept of custom or way, i.e., of the characteristic behavior of any given thing, without a distinction between customs or ways which are always and everywhere the same, and customs or ways which differ from tribe to tribe: Barking and wagging the tail is the way of dogs, menstruation is the way of women, the crazy things done by madmen are the way of madmen, just as not eating pork is the way of Jews and not drinking wine is the way of Moslems.21 From this perspective comes to take central stage what appears as “our way,” the way of “us” living “here,” the way of life with which each particular group or tribe identiies itself. We want to afirm our way of life as the right way in contrast with the customs and the ways of others. We want our customs to become preeminent and paradigmatic. Yet, what guarantees that our way of life is the right way? Its rightness is guaranteed by its oldness. . . . But not everything old everywhere is right. “Our” way is the right way because it is both old and “our own” or because it is both “home-bred and prescriptive.” Just as “old and one’s own” originally was identical with right or good, so “new and strange” originally stood for bad. The notion connecting “old” and “one’s own” is “ancestral.”22 In the devotion to the ancestral one can join love of one’s own (the ancestors belong to our family or group), respect for what is old, and a sort of presumption against what is new and alien: neither familiar, nor customary, nor ancient. In the pre-philosophic sense of what is right, then, there is an equivalence between what has roots in an ancient and unreachable past and what we can trust as good. Yet, we might suspect that not all that is both ours and ancient is also necessarily good. This is why we ind the need to imagine that our ancestors were superior beings: those who initiated our customary way must 158 STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD AND THE GREEKS have been gods, children of gods, or men raised by gods. This is how the right way, “our way,” came to be grounded in divine authority. Strauss thinks that the original identiication of the ancestral with the good is coeval with the distinction between friends and enemies. Two authors come to mind: Carl Schmitt and Plato. Plato’s Republic offers Strauss the philosophical context for Schmitt’s claim that the distinction between friends and enemies is fundamental to politics.23 At the same time, the Republic puts Schmitt’s discovery in perspective, since, by showing the genealogy of patriotism, it also shows that the distinction between friends and enemies is not natural. It is the result of an attempt to make a political myth look like nature. Precisely because he refused to accept the dogma that Plato’s thought relected the ideal of the Greek city, Strauss saw in the episode of the noble lie from Plato’s Republic the philosopher’s relection on the political origin of the identiication between the ancestral and the good. At the core of each city, even of the supposedly best city, Plato shows an artiicial construction aiming at blurring the distinction between nature and convention. The lie that Plato has his Socrates invent after the education of the guardians is completed is that the guardians’ beliefs are not, as Plato’s readers well know, the result of education. Rather, the guardians are told that they were born of the earth, and that their convictions are by nature. Their beliefs came to them as a dream when they were still within the bosom of the earth. The city they inhabit is like their own mother: this is why they have to defend it with all their force against its enemies.24 Forms of education and kinds of governments are subject to change—they belong to the sphere of nomos—while what is by nature always follows the same path, and trying to alter it would be foolish. This point is very clear in Strauss’s comment in The City and Man: The irst part [of the noble lie] is meant to make the citizens forget the truth about their education or the true character of their becoming citizens out of mere human beings or out of what one may call natural human beings. It surely is meant to blur the distinction between nature and art and between nature and convention.25 The citizens (the rulers and the warriors) have to forget that their beliefs had been shaped from childhood by the poets, whose tales were formed according to the models prescribed by the founders of the city in speech (Resp., 378e–379a). The noble lie confers ancestral prestige on the political structure that Socrates and his friends have been building in words. The new polity must appear ancient: this can be achieved by erasing the historical memory and replacing it with ungrounded beliefs, i.e., by blurring the distinction between what one sees with one’s own eyes and what one believes as a result of hearsay. If we are allowed to use Collingwood’s words, the noble lie will indeed generate “age-long traditions molding the life of one generation 159 IDEALISTIC STUDIES after another into a uniform pattern.” Yet, according to Strauss, the pattern Plato invited his readers to recognize was characterized by the confusion of experience and myth. At this point Strauss’s reasons for being irritated with Collingwood’s view of the Greeks should be understandable. Far from being ignorant of age-long traditions capable of shaping the minds of people, Plato saw this as a problem about which one needs to be painfully aware. This is the case to such an extent, that he even imagined how a particular tradition could be artiicially generated by substituting myth (the birth of the ancestors from the bosom of the earth) for what people actually saw with their eyes and heard with their ears (the education of the guardians). In the noble lie we witness one of the irst relections on the genealogy of patriotism. This is one of the reasons behind the assertion that there were among the Greeks people who had a keen awareness of the difference between the ancestral and the good. When he claims that Collingwood could not understand Plato, Strauss means to say that he could not learn from Plato that philosophy is irst of all an exercise of freedom, and a relection on the political and psychological conditions of certain traditions. Philosophy can gain independence from politics by relecting on the coming to be of cities, and on what keeps them together not just from an economic and social standpoint, but also from a psychological standpoint. Plato, for example, devoted his Republic to the study of the structure of a city and of the structure and ordering of souls. Of course, if one understands the importance of tradition one also needs to focus on persuasion: how it is best achieved, which emotions make it powerful, what kinds of language and style are best suited to which psychological types. If a lie can generate the idea that certain people are natural friends and other people are natural enemies, which psychological forces make this idea a fundamental motivation to action? Plato’s Republic is not a utopia but, rather, a philosophical relection on the essence of politics, in which human nature is portrayed as fundamentally aggressive, as prone to accepting a kind of lie in which friends and enemies play a central role. According to Strauss the beginning of philosophy coincides with the calling into question of the identity between the ancestral and the good. This is why he took the dramatic setting of the Platonic dialogues so seriously. He came to think that precisely because Plato was acutely aware of the critical and destructive role of philosophy with respect to political myths, he adopted a style that was meant to protect philosophy from political persecution. Strauss’s reasoning can be reconstructed as follows. If it is true that for Plato philosophy calls into question the uncritical identiication between the ancestral and the good, and if it is also true that the authority of the lawful and the pious lies in the identiication between the ancestral and the good, then philosophy is by essence a form of skepticism. It is a desire to see with one’s 160 STRAUSS ON COLLINGWOOD AND THE GREEKS own eyes, which stems from the recognition that political life and religious life, as enchanting and perfect as they might appear to be, are equivalent to life in the cave. Philosophy amounts to the desire to exit the cave in order to recollect what is natural after one has become aware that the more cherished convictions are artiicial in origin. If we relect on this point we can see that here is the root of the deepest disagreement with Collingwood. In the end, for both Strauss and Collingwood, philosophy was essentially critical. Strauss, however, thought that the irst and most urgent form of criticism had to be directed not to the past, but to the present: to its own myths. He thought that Collingwood was still too much entangled in the idea of progress to realize that the ancients could be of help. University of Pisa Notes 1. M. F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32, May 30, 1985, reprinted in Plato: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, ed. N. D. Smith (London: Routledge 1998), 333–348, 336. 2. W. J. Dannhauser, “Leo Strauss: Becoming Naive Again,” The American Scholar 44 (1974–1975): 636–642, 638; quoted by Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” 335. 3. Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” 335. 4. L. Strauss, On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. V. Gourevitch and M. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 25. 5. Burnyeat, “Sphinx Without a Secret,” 335. 6. L. Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” Review of Metaphysics 5(4) (June 1952): 559–586. 7. Ibid., 559–560. The page numbers in square brackets refer to R. G. Collingwood, The Idea Of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). 8. Cf. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 269–270. 9. Cf. C. Altini, “Beyond Historicism: Collingwood, Strauss, Momigliano,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 34(1) (2006): 47–66. 10. Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” 574. 11. Ibid., 566. 12. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 229. 13. Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” 575. 14. B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 15. For Williams’s criticism of progressive history, cf. Shame and Necessity, 1–49. For the issue of chance, cf. 100–168. On Aristotle and chance, cf. Strauss, “On Collingwood’s 161 IDEALISTIC STUDIES Philosophy of History,” 571: “Collingwood mistook for no theory of causation what is in effect a theory of causation that includes chance as a cause of historical events.” 16. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 22. 17. Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” 568. 18. Ibid., 569. 19. Plato, Timaeus, 22b. 20. Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” 570. 21. L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 82–83. 22. Ibid., 83. 23. L. Strauss, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 67(6) (August–September 1932): 732–749; translated by E. M. Sinclair as “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 81–105; reprinted in H. Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 91–119. 24. Plato, Republic, 414d: “And I’ll attempt to persuade irst the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams; they only thought they were undergoing all that was happening to them, while, in truth, at the time they were under the earth within, being fashioned and reared themselves, and their arms and other tools being crafted. When the job had been completely inished, the earth, which is their mother, sent them up. And now, as though the land they were in were a mother and nurse, they must plan for and defend it, if anyone attacks, and they must think of the other citizens as brothers and born of the earth”; The Republic of Plato, trans. A. Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 25. L. Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 102. 162