Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings

by Leo Strauss, Kenneth Hart Green (Editor), Kenneth Hart Green (Introduction)

Overview

Leo Strauss is widely recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Maimonides. His studies of the medieval Jewish philosopher led to his rediscovery of esotericism and deepened his sense that the tension between reason and revelation was central to modern political thought. His writings throughout the twentieth century were chiefly responsible for restoring Maimonides as a philosophical thinker of the first rank. Yet, to appreciate the extent of Strauss’s contribution to the scholarship on Maimonides, one has traditionally had to seek out essays he published separately spanning almost fifty years.
           
With Leo Strauss on Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green presents for the first time a comprehensive, annotated collection of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides, comprising sixteen essays, three of which appear in English for the first time. Green has also provided careful translations of materials that had originally been quoted in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, German, and French; written an informative introduction highlighting the original contributions found in each essay; and brought references to out-of-print editions fully up to date. The result will become the standard edition of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226776774
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/23/2013
Pages:	696
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was one of the preeminent political philosophers of the twentieth century. He is the author of many books, among them The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Natural Right and History, and Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, all published by the University of Chicago Press. Kenneth Hart Green is associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss.

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Leo Strauss on Maimonides

The Complete Writings

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By Kenneth Hart Green

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-77677-4

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

How to Study Medieval Philosophy

EDITOR'S NOTE

The first appearance in print of this lecture was in Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 207–26. That first version appeared with the title "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy," henceforth referred to as "HBSMP" (1989). A subsequent edition appeared in print as "How to Study Medieval Philosophy," edited by David Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, and Thomas L. Pangle, Interpretation 23, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 321–38, henceforth referred to as "HSMP" (1996). Those editors acknowledge the help of Heinrich and Wiebke Meier in deciphering handwritten changes made to the manuscript in pencil by Strauss, and of Hillel Fradkin in the translation and transcription of Hebrew and Arabic words. The subsequent edition represented an effort to produce a version as close as possible to the original typescript, which apparently was used by Strauss to deliver his lecture at the Fourth Institute of Biblical and Post-biblical Studies, on 16 May 1944. So far as I am aware, no one knows whether the lecture was actually delivered, or if it was, in what form it was spoken, since no tape recoding survives; hence, no one knows at what point Strauss made the changes of the main text and in the margins. The present editor has carefully consulted and compared both previous versions and has based this version on both of them, but with the greatest effort made to integrate the better readings that appear in the subsequent version. However, not every change made to the 1996 version has been utilized in the present version (e.g., for the sake of readability, some of the brackets have been removed). With regard to the meticulous notes of the 1996 version, only those judged most significant have been reproduced, but any divergences from the 1996 version that might affect the meaning in this version of the lecture have been duly noted. Thus, the notes to "How to Study Medieval Philosophy" in the present volume are entirely the work of the present editor, or of the editors of the same lecture in its 1996 version (from whose work the present editor has greatly benefited), and are not to be attributed to Strauss himself.

[I.] We raise the question of how to study medieval philosophy. We cannot discuss that question without saying something about how to study earlier philosophy in general, and indeed about how to study intellectual history in general.

In a sense, the answer to our question is self-evident. Everyone admits that, if we have to study medieval philosophy at all, we have to study it as exactly and as intelligently as possible. As exactly as possible: we are not permitted to consider any detail, however trifling, unworthy of our most careful observation. As intelligently as possible: in our exact study of all details, we must never lose sight of the whole; we must never, for a moment, overlook the wood for the trees. But these are trivialities, although we have to add that they are trivialities only if stated in general terms, and that they cease to be trivialities if one pays attention to them while engaged in actual work: the temptations to lose oneself in curious and unexplored details on the one hand, and to be generous as regards minutiae on the other, are always with us.

We touch upon a more controversial issue when we say that our understanding of medieval philosophy must be historical understanding. Frequently people reject an account of the past, not simply as inexact or unintelligent, but as unhistorical. What do they mean by it? What ought they to mean by it?

According to a saying of Kant, it is possible to understand a philosopher better than he understood himself. Now, such understanding may have the greatest merits; but it is clearly not historical understanding. If it goes so far as to claim to be the true understanding, it is positively unhistorical. The most outstanding example of such unhistorical interpretation, which we have in the field of the study of Jewish medieval philosophy, is Hermann Cohen's essay on Maimonides' ethics. Cohen constantly refers statements of Maimonides, not to Maimonides' center of reference, but to his own center of reference; he understands them not within Maimonides' horizon, but within his own horizon. Cohen had a technical term for his procedure: he called it "idealizing" interpretation. It may justly be described as the modern form of allegoric interpretation. At any rate, it is professedly an attempt to understand the old author better than he understood himself. Historical understanding means to understand an earlier philosopher exactly as he understood himself. Everyone who has ever tried his hand at such a task will bear me out when I say that this task is an already sufficiently tough assignment in itself.

In the normal and most interesting case, the philosopher studied by the historian of philosophy is a man by far superior to his historian in intelligence, imagination, and subtlety. This historian does well to remind himself of the experience which Gulliver had when he came in contact, through necromancy, with the illustrious dead. "I had a Whisper from a Ghost, who shall be nameless, that the Commentators of Aristotle and other great philosophers always kept in the most distant quarters from their Principals, through a Consciousness of Shame and Guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of those authors to Posterity." The most sustained effort of the most gifted historian hardly suffices to carry him for a short moment to the height which is the native and perpetual haunt of the philosopher: how can the historian even dream of reaching a point from which he can look down on a philosopher?

For the attempt to understand a philosopher of the past better than he understood himself, presupposes that the interpreter considers his insight superior to the insight of the old author. Kant made this quite clear when suggesting that one can understand a philosopher better than he understood himself. The average historian is much too modest a fellow to raise such an enormous claim in so many words. But he is in danger of doing so without noticing it. He will not claim that his personal insight is superior to that of, e.g., Maimonides. But only with difficulty can he avoid claiming that the collective insight available today is superior to the collective insight available in the twelfth century. There is more than one historian who in interpreting, say, Maimonides, tries to assess the contribution of Maimonides. His contribution to what? To the treasure of knowledge and insight which has been accumulated throughout the ages. That treasure appears to be greater today than it was, say, in the year of Maimonides' death. This means that when speaking of Maimonides' "contribution," the historian has in mind the contribution of Maimonides to the treasure of knowledge or insight as it is available today. Hence, he interprets Maimonides' thought in terms of the thought of the present day. His tacit assumption is that the history of thought is, generally speaking, a progress, and that therefore the philosophic thought of the twentieth century is superior to or nearer the truth than the philosophic thought of the twelfth century. I contend that this assumption is irreconcilable with true historical understanding. It necessarily leads to the attempt to understand the thought of the past better than it understood itself, and not as it understood itself. For it is evident that our understanding of the past will tend to be more adequate, the more we are interested in the past; but we cannot be seriously interested, i.e., passionately interested, in the past, if we know beforehand that the present is, in the most important respect, superior to the past. It is not a matter of chance that, generally speaking, the historical understanding of the continental romantics, of the historical school, was superior to the historical understanding of eighteenth-century rationalism; it is a necessary consequence of the fact that the representatives of the historical school did not believe in the superiority of their time to the past, whereas the eighteenth-century rationalist believed in the superiority of the Age of Reason to all former ages. Historians who start from the belief in the superiority of present-day thought to the thought of the past, feel no necessity to understand the past by itself: they understand it as a preparation for the present only. When studying a doctrine of the past, they do not ask primarily: what was the conscious and deliberate intention of its originator? They prefer to ask: what is the contribution of the doctrine to our beliefs? What is the meaning, unknown to its originator, of the doctrine from the point of view of the present? What is its meaning in the light of later developments? Against this approach, the historical consciousness rightly protested in the name of historical truth, of historical exactness. The task of the historian of thought is to understand the thinkers of the past exactly as they understood themselves, or to revitalize their thought according to their own interpretation of it. To sum up this point: the belief in the superiority of one's own approach, or of the approach of one's time, to the approach of the past is fatal to historical understanding.

We may express the same thought somewhat differently as follows. The task of the historian of thought is to understand the thought of the past exactly as it understood itself; for to abandon that task is tantamount to abandoning the only practicable criterion of objectivity in the history of thought. It is well known that the same historical phenomenon is interpreted in most different ways by different periods, different generations, and different types of men. The same historical phenomenon appears in different lights at different times. New human experiences shed light on old texts. No one can foresee, e.g., how the Bible will be read one hundred years hence. Observations such as these have led some people to adopt the view that the claim of any one interpretation to be the true interpretation is untenable. Yet the observations in question do not justify such a view. For the infinite variety of ways in which a given text can be understood does not do away with the fact that the author of the text, when writing it, understood it in one way only, provided he was not muddle-headed. The light in which, e.g., the history of Samuel and Saul appears on the basis of the Puritan revolution, is not the light in which the author of the biblical history understood that history. And the true interpretation of the biblical history in question is the one which restates, and makes intelligible, the biblical history as understood by the biblical author. Ultimately, the infinite variety of interpretations of an author is due to conscious or unconscious attempts to understand the author better than he understood himself; but there is only one way of understanding him as he understood himself.

To return to the point where I left off: the belief in the superiority of one's own approach, or of the approach of one's time, to the approach of the past is fatal to historical understanding. This dangerous assumption, which is characteristic of what one may call progressivism, was avoided by what is frequently called historicism. Whereas the progressivist believes that the present is superior to the past, the historicist believes that all periods are equally "immediate to God." The historicist does not want to judge the past, e.g., by assessing the contribution of each person, but rather seeks to understand and to relate how things have actually been, "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist," and in particular how the thought of the past has been. The historicist has at least the intention to understand the thought of the past exactly as it understood itself. But he is constitutionally unable to live up to his intention. For he knows, or rather he assumes, that, generally speaking and other things being equal, the thought of all epochs is equally true, because every philosophy is essentially the expression of the spirit of its time. Maimonides, e.g., expressed the spirit of his time as perfectly, as, say, Hermann Cohen expressed the spirit of his time. Now, all philosophers of the past claimed to have found the truth, and not merely the truth for their time. The historicist, however, asserts that they were mistaken in believing so. And he makes this assertion the basis of his interpretation. He knows a priori that the claim of Maimonides, e.g., to teach the truth, the truth valid for all times, is unfounded. In this most important respect, the historicist, just as his hostile brother the progressivist, believes that his approach is superior to the approach of the thinkers of old. The historicist is therefore compelled by his principle, if against his intention, to try to understand the past better than it understood itself. He merely repeats, if sometimes in a more sophisticated form, the sin for which he blames the progressivist so severely. For, to repeat, to understand a serious teaching, one must be seriously interested in it, one must take it seriously. But one cannot take it seriously if one knows beforehand that it is "dated." To take a serious teaching seriously, one must be willing to consider the possibility that it is simply true. Therefore, if we are interested in an adequate understanding of medieval philosophy, we must be willing to consider the possibility that medieval philosophy is simply true, or, to speak less paradoxically, that it is superior, in the most important respect, to all that we can learn from any of the contemporary philosophers. We can understand medieval philosophy only if we are prepared to learn something, not merely about the medieval philosophers, but from them.

It remains true, then, that if one wants to understand a philosophy of the past, one must approach it in a philosophic spirit, with philosophic questions: one's concern must be primarily, not with what other people have thought about the philosophic truth, but with the philosophic truth itself. But if one approaches an earlier thinker with a question which is not his central question, one is bound to misinterpret, to distort, his thought. Therefore, the philosophic question with which one approaches the thought of the past must be so broad, so comprehensive, that it permits of being narrowed down to the specific, precise formulation of the question which the author concerned adopted. It can be no question other than the question of the truth about the whole.

The historian of philosophy must then undergo a transformation into a philosopher or a conversion to philosophy, if he wants to do his job properly, if he wants to be a competent historian of philosophy. He must acquire a freedom of mind which is not too frequently met with among the professional philosophers: he must have as perfect a freedom of mind as is humanly possible. No prejudice in favor of contemporary thought, even of modern philosophy, of modern civilization, of modern science itself, must deter him from giving the thinkers of old the full benefit of the doubt. When engaging in the study of the philosophy of the past, he must cease to take his bearings by the modern signposts with which he has grown familiar since his earliest childhood; he must try to take his bearings by the signposts which guided the thinkers of old. Those old signposts are not immediately visible: they are concealed by heaps of dust and rubble. The most obnoxious part of the rubble consists of the superficial interpretations by modern writers, of the cheap clichés which are offered in the textbooks and which seem to unlock by one formula the mystery of the past. The signposts which guided the thinkers of the past must be recovered before they can be used. Before the historian has succeeded in recovering them, he cannot help being in a condition of utter bewilderment, of universal doubt: he finds himself in a darkness which is illumined exclusively by his knowledge that he knows nothing. When engaging in the study of the philosophy of the past, he must know that he embarks on a journey whose end is completely hidden from him: he is not likely to return to the shore of his time as the same man who left it.

II. True historical understanding of medieval philosophy presupposes that the student is willing to take seriously the claim of the medieval philosophers that they teach the truth. Now, it may justifiably be objected, is this demand not most unreasonable? Medieval philosophy is based, generally speaking, on the natural science of Aristotle: has that science not been refuted once and for all by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton? Medieval philosophy is based on practically complete unawareness of the principles of religious toleration, of the representative system, of the rights of man, of democracy as we understand it. It is characterized by an indifference touching on contempt to poetry and history. It seems to be based on a firm belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and in the Mosaic origin of the oral Law. It stands and falls with the use of a method of biblical interpretation as unsound as the allegoric interpretation. In brief, medieval philosophy arouses against itself all convictions fostered by the most indubitable results of modern science and modern scholarship.
(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Editor's Preface xi

Acknowledgments xxxiii

Editor's Introduction: Leo Strauss's Essays and Lectures on Maimonides 1

I Point of Departure: Why Study Medieval Thinkers?

1 How to Study Medieval Philosophy (1944) 91

II On Maimonides

2 Spinoza's Critique of Maimonides (1930) 119

3 Cohen and Maimonides (1931) 173

4 The Philosophic Foundation of the Law: Maimonides' Doctrine of Prophecy and Its Sources (1935) 223

Appendix 4A Introduction to Philosophy and Law [the First Two and the Last Three Paragraphs] 266

Appendix 4B Chapter 2 of Philosophy and Law, "The Legal Foundation of Philosophy: The Commandment to Philosophize and the Freedom of Philosophizing" [the Introductory Section and Section B, "Maimonides"] 269

5 Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi(1936) 275

6 The Place of the Doctrine of Providence according to Maimonides (1937) 314

7 Review of The Mishneh Torah, Book 1, by Moses Maimonides, Edited according to the Bodleian Codex with Introduction, Biblical and Talmudical References, Notes, and English Translation by Moses Hyamson (1939) 329

8 The Literary Character of The Guide of the Perplexed (1941) 341

9 Maimonides' Statement on Political Science (1953) 399

10 Introduction to Maimonides' The Guide of the Perplexed (1960) 417

11 How To Begin To Study The Guide of the Perplexed (1963) 491

12 Notes on Maimonides' Book of Knowledge (1967) 550

13 Note on Maimonides' Treatise on the Art of Logic (1968) 569

14 Note on Maimonides' Letter on Astrology (1968) 572

III On Isaac Abravanel, the Last Medieval Maimonidean

15 On Abravanel's Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching (1937) 579

Appendix: The Secret Teaching of Maimonides (c. 1937-40) 615

Abbreviations: Editions to Which Leo Strauss Frequently Refers, or Recent Editions and Translated Versions of Works to Which the Editor Frequently Refers 619

Sources and History of the Texts 627

Bibliography: Selected Works on Leo Strauss and Medieval Thought Related to Maimonides 633

Index 647

Editorial Reviews

[Strauss’s] numerous publications and lectures are required reading for any serious academic study of Maimonides and his works. . . . Now, thanks to the work of Green, all of those studies will be accessible in one beautifully edited volume.

Political Theory

Since the appearance of Strauss’s writings, the small handful of academics familiar with Maimonides has expanded to a sizable group, including academics in medieval studies, religious studies, philosophy, and political science. For the debate about Strauss and his legacy, for coming to terms with Maimonides, and for broaching the dispute between reason and revelation, this collection is indispensable."

Joshua Parens

Do we need medieval wisdom, and to explore anew the foundations of modern rationalism? Green gives a resolutely positive answer to these questions in his comprehensive study on Leo Strauss’s lifelong exploration of Maimonides’s work. His study is written in a personal and pleasing style which makes it a fitting companion to his recent edition of Strauss’s complete writings on this twelfth-century Jewish leader, physician, and philosopher. . . . One more significant contribution by Green to our understanding of Strauss’s work and to the contemporary resources for thinking through the theologico-political problem.

Review of Politics

It is to the enduring credit of Leo Strauss that he effected a radical reconsideration of Maimonides. To be sure, philosophers have engaged Maimonides over the centuries, but none reached down so deep into his modus operandi. Strauss made clear the strategies pursued by Maimonides in his effort to convey discrete messages to different audiences, and that newly regained awareness of how Maimonides wrote—and hence needed to be read—gave rise to renewed vigorous debate.

Ralph Lerner

"If Maimonides allows readers a new beginning with respect to an understanding of philosophy, and if Strauss allows readers a similarly new beginning concerning Maimonides’ thought, then surely Green’s two impressive new volumes allow readers an analogous beginning concerning the thought of Leo Strauss as it pertains to the question of revealed Law and reason—or, as Strauss put it, 'Jerusalem and Athens.' . . . From his early Jew and Philosopher to his two new volumes, Green has argued in sustained fashion for the central importance of Maimonides to the thought of Strauss. These two books establish [that] beyond any doubt."

International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion