Strauss on the Apology and Crito

CHAPTER 18 Strauss on the Apology and Crito John C. Koritansky At the time of his death in 1973, Leo Strauss was putting together a book that would be titled Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. We owe it to Thomas Pangle and Joseph Cropsey that the book was eventually published, posthu- mously, and that its chapters appeared in the order that Strauss had intended, absent the still unfinished chapter on Plato’s Gorgias [Cropsey, (1983) vii]. “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito” is the second chapter of the book, follow- ing one titled “On Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy.”1 In the first several pages of that first chapter Strauss writes mainly about Nietzsche and Heidegger; and he reveals considerable sympathy for the concern, central to these two thinkers, that humankind is in danger of losing its very humanity. The danger is posed by the excessively abstract and ultimately nihilistic sort of thinking that they believed to have been inaugurated by Plato. Strauss does not in that chapter mount a direct response to Nietzsche or Heidegger; he simply asserts that Heidegger’s call for a new dialogue that would involve the deepest insights of the Orient with the rationalism characteristic of the West has pro- duced “hopes more to be expected of a visionary than from philosophers. .” (34). With no further explanation he turns his attention to Husserl. The reader is expected to understand. Nietzsche and Heidegger had each hoped to save humanity through a new Weltanschauung or Weltanschauungphilosophie; however in Husserl Strauss finds the insistent and carefully drawn distinc- tion between Weltanschauungphilosophie and philosophy as rigorous science. Husserl thought that once we become fastidiously aware of the demands of philosophy as rigorous science it might be many centuries before such philosophy could yield a genuine, rigorous Weltanschauung. Heidegger, in Husserl’s implicit judgment, had been impatient. Strauss’ response to Husserl, in turn, 1 On Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” and “Crito” had been written earlier for a collection that would be published in 1976 as Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis, St. John’s Press, 1976). It seems likely that Strauss had intended On Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” and “Crito” for the Klein book as a statement on how he had come to understand Plato’s “esotericism,” insofar as he and his old friend had as youths congratulated each other for having “rediscov- ered esotericism.” That is to say, Strauss came to see esotericism as deriving from the political character of Plato’s political philosophy. [Green, p. 463] © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�9983�_0�� Strauss on the Apology and Crito 403 is that Husserl had not understood fully the dangers that are implicit in his own insight. Husserl was politically naïve. He had failed to appreciate the dependence of nearly all human beings in political society on some sort of Weltanschauung, or perhaps he had falsely presumed that in modern society there could and would be many Weltanschauungphilosophein living in some degree of harmony with one another. That is to say, Husserl’s faith in enlighten- ment had caused him to fail to understand the limits of toleration. Plato, Strauss thought, had seen those limits as well as their cause more clearly. Nearly all human beings in political society exhibit an irreducible need for some comprehensive account of the whole world and their own place within it; and yet our unassisted reason appears unable to provide such an account. The result is always that human beings lie to themselves. The city is a kind of collective lie in whose terms citizens presume to ground their duty and their ultimate hopes. This is the meaning of the cave as Plato’s most famous metaphor for the city. Because he understands this situation fully, Plato, or rather Plato’s Socrates, is always in a state of some tension with his city. In his conversations with and cross-examinations of others, Socrates risks disclosing the lie in their souls to those who find such a disclosure impossible to bear. At the same time, because he understands his dependence on his city, he always seeks to be governed by a prudence that seeks to prevent that tension from being mutually destructive. This prudence governs the rhetoric that Strauss shows Socrates employs in his apology so as to represent himself, but also in a way to misrepresent himself, as being innocent of Athens’ charges that he corrupts the youth and does not believe in the city’s gods. In the first paragraph of “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito,” Strauss tells us that “. the Apology of Socrates is the portal through which we enter the Platonic kosmos: it gives an account of Socrates’ whole life, of his whole way of life, to the largest multitude, to the authoritative multitude, to the city of Athens before which he was accused of a capital crime; it is the dialogue of Socrates with the city of Athens (cf. 37a4–7)” (p. 38). In the dialogue’s central section, however, Socrates says that if he states the unvarnished truth concern- ing his whole way of life, namely that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, his hearers would not believe him (37e–38a). Insofar as this is true, though, it would appear impossible for the dialogue to be, simply, what Strauss claims it to be. So what might Strauss be meaning? Socrates’ statement that his hearers will not believe him must itself be understood in the context of his whole apology. It comes after the guilty verdict has been pronounced, which in turn follows his elaborate and brilliant attempt to give an account of his way of life in such terms as could be intelligible, or more familiar, to the Athenians. The richness of the dialogue derives from just this startling fact—.

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