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Leo Strauss on Nietzsche'sthus Spoke Zarathustra Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’sThus Spoke Zarathustra A course offered in the Department of Political Science, the University of Chicago, spring quarter 1959 Edited and with an Introduction by Richard Velkley Richard Velkley is Celia Scott Weatherhead Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. He is author of Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (University of Chicago Press, 2011), and other works on philosophy. With assistance from Alex Priou and Gayle McKeen © 2016 Estate of Leo Strauss. All rights reserved. ii Table of Contents Editor’s Introduction i-vii Note on the Leo Strauss Transcript Project viii-ix Editorial Headnote ix-x Session 1: Introduction: Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Existentialism, and the Problem of our Age 1-13 Session 2: Restoring Nature as Ethical Principle: Zarathustra, Prologue 14-28 Session 3: The Creative Self: Zarathustra, Part 1, 1-8 29-42 Session 4: The True Individual as the Highest Goal: Zarathustra, Part 1, 9-15 43-59 Session 5: Postulated Nature and Final Truth: Zarathustra, Part 1, 16-22 60-67 Session 6: Truth, Interpretation, and Intelligibility: Zarathustra, Part 2, 1-12 68-89 Session 7: Will to Power and Self-Overcoming: Zarathustra, Part 2, 15-20 90-110 Session 8: Summary and Review: Fusing Plato and the Creative Self 111-122 Session 9: Greek Philosophy and the Bible; Nature and History: Zarathustra, Part 2, 20-22 123-130 Session 10: Eternal Recurrence: Zarathustra, Part 2, 21; Part 3, 1-13 131-147 Session 11: Survey: Nietzsche and Political Philosophy 148-157 Session 12: The Goodness of the Whole, Socratic and Heideggerian Critiques: Zarathustra, Part 3, 4-12 158-176 Session 13: Creative Contemplation: Zarathustra, Part 3, 13 177-197 Session 14: Restoring the Sacred and the Final Question: Zarathustra, Part 4 198-219 i Editor’s Introduction Strauss, Nietzsche, and the History of Political Philosophy Leo Strauss had a special relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy from his early years. He remarks that being “dominated and charmed” by Nietzsche between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, “I believed literally every word I understood in him.”i At age thirty he writes that “through Nietzsche tradition has been shaken to its roots. It has completely lost its self-evident truth,” an event he finds liberating since it means that one is now free to raise “the question pos bioteon [how to live] again.”ii Nietzsche and Heidegger together are the figures that Strauss sees in the early 1930s as exposing “the unradicality of modern philosophy,” consisting in its belief that “it can presuppose the fundamental questions as already answered, and that it therefore can ‘progress.’”iii Specific failures in modern philosophy revealed by these two figures are the neglect of the Socratic question about the best life (Nietzsche) and the question about Being (Heidegger). These thinkers complete modern philosophy even as they bring it to an end, and they “lead to the point at which Socrates begins.”iv Yet both also draw on the Christian tradition in different ways. In Nietzsche’s case this appears in his account of the “probity” of conscience, a factor in his thought that complicates, if not undermines, his effort to recover the “original ideal” of philosophy in the Greeks. Strauss in 1933 claims that Nietzsche fails to overthrow the powers he struggled against, while Plato enables one to “pose Nietzsche’s questions, thus our questions, in a simpler, clearer, and more original way.”v With this insight Strauss begins the return to premodern rationalism, the possibility of which he previously doubted.vi In the following decades Strauss develops his understanding of the history of political philosophy and the central problem that underlies the contrast between premodern and modern rationalism: the inherently aporetic relation of the philosophic way of life to its political context. Strauss arrives at the view that modern rationalism, although having “unradical” consequences in cementing the dogma of progress (the belief that philosophy or science is able and required to solve the fundamental human problems), is founded by a radical innovator, Niccolo Machiavelli. Writing of Machiavelli, Strauss states: He achieves the decisive turn toward the notion of philosophy according to which its purpose is to relieve man’s estate or to increase man’s power or to guide man toward the rational society, the bond and the end of which is enlightened self-interest or the comfortable self-preservation of i Leo Strauss to Karl Löwith, 23 June 1935, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. H. Meier and W. Meier, 3 vols. (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1996–2001), 3: 648. Hereafter cited as GS. An English translation of this letter appears in “Correspondence, Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 5–6 (1988): 182–84. ii “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart,” GS, 2: 389. For an English translation, see “Religious Situation of the Present,” in Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s, ed. Martin D. Yaffe and Richard S. Ruderman (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 234. iii Strauss to Gerhard Krüger, 17 November 1932, GS, 3: 406. iv Strauss to Krüger, 12 December 1932, GS, 3: 415. v Strauss to Löwith, 2 February 1933, GS, 3: 620–21. vi Preface to the English Translation, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965), 31. ii its members. The cave becomes the “substance.” By supplying all men with the goods which they desire, by being the obvious benefactress of all men, philosophy (or science) ceases to be suspect or alien.vii Strauss proposes that the “realism” of Machiavelli, or his critique of the ideal republics and principalities of premodern philosophy, is adopted by the succeeding tradition of modern philosophy in its project of relieving man’s estate, with the intent to overcome the philosopher’s ancient plight as outsider and exile. Strauss ascribes to the modern philosopher the primacy of a practical end that is beneficial to all humans, although perhaps above all to the philosopher. The practical end surpasses, if it does not simply replace, contemplative activity as the core of philosophy. In Strauss’s account, philosophy’s assumption of the task of mastering nature requires the narrowing of the horizon of philosophical thought to the temporal-historical realm of human projects. In the course of three successive “waves,” the enlargement of philosophy’s practical responsibility for human welfare is accompanied by the deepening historicization of its theoretical foundations. Nietzsche is the profoundly paradoxical completion of this development, in that his thought presents both a radical critique of modern rationalism and the consummation of the historical turn in modern philosophy. He is thus a crucial figure for Strauss’s conception of the history of political philosophy, indeed of the history of philosophy as such. In Strauss’s unconventional usage, “political philosophy” is the reflection on the political conditions of philosophy, or on the ineluctable tension between politics and the inquiring mind (thematic throughout Greek poetry, history, and philosophy, but emerging most fully with Socrates), which forms an indispensable (but in the course of modernity, increasingly neglected) starting point of philosophy. In ascribing to Nietzsche a critical-pivotal position as both completing this history and pointing to a new beginning, Strauss gives him a role notably akin to the one he plays in Heidegger’s “history of Being.” Accordingly, in Strauss’s 1959 and 1967 Nietzsche seminars, the reflection on Nietzsche’s dual character (as radically modern and as seeking the recovery of Greek wisdom) proceeds as an implicit dialogue with Heidegger’s interpretations of Nietzsche. Although this has been little appreciated, Strauss’s reading of Nietzsche is one of the major philosophical-historical inquiries of the past century, being not only an original interpretation of this author but also centrally engaged with the foremost reexaminations of the basis and meaning of modernity in recent philosophy. The remarks that follow offer preliminary considerations on Strauss’s fascinating friendly agon with the explosive duality of Nietzsche, about which one gains only indications from Strauss’s published works. From his early years onward, Strauss understands that Nietzsche’s true concern is with philosophy and not politics. In his later writing and teaching Strauss returns to crediting Nietzsche with rediscovering “the problem of Socrates,” thus raising anew the question of the meaning and goodness of the life dedicated to knowledge, even as Nietzsche himself rejects the Socratic alternative as Nietzsche interprets it.viii But at the time of the 1959 seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Strauss’s most prominent published statement on Nietzsche is the concluding vii Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 296. viii See Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 6–8; “The Problem of Socrates,” Interpretation 22 (1995): 322–24 (1970 lecture); and “The Origins of Political Science and the Problem of Socrates,” Interpretation 23 (1996): 136–39 (1958 lecture). iii paragraph of the lecture “What Is Political Philosophy?” in which the connection between Nietzsche and Socrates is absent.ix It describes the most widely known perspective of Strauss on Nietzsche as the initiator of the “third wave” of modernity, and it is highly critical in tone. Nevertheless,
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