Historical Sickness:Strauss and Heidegger

Ian LoadmanArkansas State University

Prepared for presentation at the conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2008.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, but the import

of his thought for political theory is not immediately evident. Many writers have attempted to

discover a political philosophy hidden in his reflections on Being or to extrapolate one from his

involvement with the Nazis. While these attempts have often cast light upon Heidegger’s

thought they have produced a confusing variety of conclusions about his politics. Perhaps a

more modest approach to the question of Heidegger’s relevance to political philosophy would be

more fruitful. I believe that Heidegger’s thought is useful to political theorists when connected

to issues that have an independent life in political thought.

This paper examines the relevance of Heidegger, and particularly his concept of

historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), for political thought by examining Leo Strauss's critiques of him.

It is possible to discern three distinct critiques of Heidegger in Strauss and all three have, to

varying degrees, been discussed in the growing secondary literature about Strauss1. They are:

1. Historicity is nothing but a philosophically incoherent type of historicism, subject to the criticism that, either its claims cannot be applied to itself, or it posits an absolute moment in history for which objective evidence is lacking.

2. Heidegger’s history of Being charts a mistaken path through the history of philosophy and an alternative reconstruction of that history both points to an alternate diagnosis of nihilism and discovers in the “natural consciousness” a starting point for philosophical reflection that undercuts Heidegger’s concentration on Being.

3. Heidegger’s analysis of existence employs categories of thought that he has borrowed, unexamined, from religious thought. These categories distort the nature of his thought, allowing religious longings to take root in philosophy.

There is a clear connection between the line of thought running from the “natural consciousness”

revealed by Strauss’s excavations of classical political thought to his criticism of Heidegger for

relying on religious categories, but the two criticisms do not collapse into one another as

witnessed by the fact that a number of commentators make the second criticism while

disagreeing among themselves over Strauss’s exact position on the theologico-political problem.

While I will argue that it is the second critique that provides the basis for the deepest

consideration of the real differences between Strauss and Heidegger, the centrality of the contest

between philosophy and revealed religion is so crucial to Strauss’s conception of philosophy that

it amply repays separate consideration. Although I will conclude that Strauss’s second and third

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critiques have some bite against Heidegger, they are far from conclusive and Heidegger’s

position has significant resources with which to respond to Strauss. A full consideration of

Strauss’s critiques of Heidegger casts considerable light on the importance of historicity for

political theory and on the status of history as a source of normative standards a major concern

of contemporary political thought.

Contrasting Heidegger and Strauss also opens a vista on the question of what philosophy

is and can be in late modernity. Both Strauss and Heidegger are concerned to defend the dignity

of philosophy against the claims of scientific historiography and the history-based human

sciences.2 And both take their point of departure from what, following Nietzsche, I will call

modernity's historical sickness. Nonetheless, they base their defenses of philosophy on

strikingly different grounds. Strauss appeals to a conception of fundamental problems and a

zetetic attitude toward the few typical solutions to these problems, while Heidegger finds the

historicity of Being to be the basis for overcoming historicism. In evaluating Strauss's critiques

of Heidegger, I will also judge which conception of the human situation provides a more

adequate basis for the claim that philosophy is a vital and necessary form of thought. Here too I

will conclude that Heidegger's thought has more to offer political theory than Strauss's critiques

would lead one to expect.

1. Historical Sickness

Since Nietzsche's essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life"3 it has been

a commonplace of philosophical and social thought that modernity suffers from a historical

malady. The surfeit of history has become a burden impeding action. The source of this malady

is, according to Nietzsche, "the demand that history be a science."4 Scientific rationality has,

Nietzsche suggests, been pursued so far that it has coiled around and bitten its own tail. Science

produces a "white" discourse, one without values, and one that devalues what have heretofore

served as humanity's highest goals. Nietzsche fears that without such goals humanity is doomed

to degenerate into a mediocre self-satisfied mass. The problem then would seem to be the need

to find a type of knowing that, rather than impeding, promotes action. Scientific historiography

needs to be replaced by a different relation to historical knowledge, one that promotes life. We

seem to face a problem about the relation of theory and practice. Nietzsche initially proposes

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two solutions to this problem: the unhistorical and the suprahistorical. He appeals both to youth,

with its innocence born of lack of memory, and to the eternalizing power of art and religion.5

Subsequent to "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche realizes

that the hope of curing historical sickness by a once and for all redemptive teaching - whether

the unhistorical or the suprahistorical - is a form of revenge against time. When his Zarathustra

meditates upon the eternal return, he learns that even the last man returns eternally.6 Since even

the last man returns, Zarathustra's teaching of the superman cannot be understood simply as

propounding a new enduring relation of knowing to doing that will banish historical sickness.

Rather the problem of historical sickness becomes more complicated; it becomes a matter of

affirming the superman even though that teaching is now understood not to offer a final

redemption.7

The problem then is more than simply a problem of arranging a productive relation of

knowing and doing. Nietzsche realizes that, given the demand for truth that modern man has

acquired, there is a deeper problem. Humanity needs goals, goals which Nietzsche, thinking of

the hardening of the will into phenomena, does not hesitate to call appearances, or indeed

illusions. But this need for illusion battles against the need to be true to oneself. Nietzsche

knows, having learned his Socratic lesson despite his detestation of Socrates, that if one is to be

true to oneself about one's goals these goals must be truly given. The problem that the historical

malady points to is not simply the problem of how it is possible to have goals now that God is

dead. This problem of combining knowing and doing is the easy problem, for we can imagine,

as Nietzsche imagined, both the innocence of youth and the return to the eternal. The deeper

problem is to discover what makes good faith good, why it is good to be true to oneself, and why

we should not settle for bad faith, or illusion. This problem is not at the level of knowing and

doing, but at the level of existence and meaning.

Historical sickness is a result of the split between existence and meaning, or between

mind and world. What I have called Nietzsche's Socratic lesson, what Nietzsche himself often

calls the will to truth, is the demand that, even if we are to take leave of philosophy, we must do

so philosophically. The historical malady cannot be cured simply by the construction of a new

"noble lie." We need to know that we are philosophically entitled to our cure for modernity's

historical sickness. Only an explanation of how existence and meaning belong together can hope

to provide such a cure. Only an account of the human situation, and this means an account of

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the ontological basis of the constitution of meaning, will suffice. Attempted cures at the level of

knowing and doing merely repress the deeper problem.8 Whether Nietzsche himself overcomes

historical sickness is unclear. Does Zarathustra succeed in remaining true to both of his

mistresses: life and wisdom? Strauss and Heidegger attempt to find a definitive cure for

historical sickness.

Strauss is well known for his trenchant criticism of historicism, so the centrality of

historical sickness to his thought is hardly surprising. What is perhaps less obvious is the

intimate relation between the problematic of historical sickness and Strauss's own preferred

formulation of the problem facing modernity: the question of natural right or, more broadly, of

political philosophy.9 When properly understood, Strauss argues, "political" in political

philosophy indicates not the subject matter of a particular branch of philosophy but the manner

in which philosophy is treated or presented.10 The problem of political philosophy so understood

is the problem of the relation between philosophy and the city, or of thought to life. This is the

first problem of historical sickness, the problem of knowing and doing, or theory and practice.

There is however, as noted above, a deeper question inherent in historical sickness. This

deeper question asks about the human situation. This is where a thinker is required to make his

or her most comprehensive and fundamental statement about the place of the human within the

whole. By contrast questions of science, or morality, or questions about the nature of the good

life, for example, are not fundamental because they leave open the further question of the place

of scientific knowledge, or morality, or conceptions of the good life within the whole. Are

human efforts to achieve knowledge, to act well, or to be happy supported by the non-human

parts of reality? Are they harmonious with or antagonistic to the whole? It is here that a thinker

must face the question of being and explain his or her conception of philosophy. This deeper

question coincides with the "philosophy" in Strauss's conception of political philosophy. What

does Strauss conceive philosophy to be?

Strauss argues for his understanding of philosophy in a negative fashion.11 That is to say,

he attempts to undermine the self-certainty of modernity rather than directly arguing for the

superiority of classical philosophy. He attempts to reopen the quarrel between the ancients and

the moderns. This approach has a certain rhetorical appeal, but nothing would succeed in

reopening the quarrel as well as a demonstration of the philosophical basis of classical thought

and a convincing defense of that basis. This Strauss does not undertake.12 Strauss advocates not

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a simple return to classical political thought but a retrieval of that thought. Such a retrieval will

necessarily require an adaptation of classical political philosophy to modernity.

The crucial issue here is the role played by teleology or ancient cosmology in classical

political philosophy. Strauss explicitly acknowledges that classical political philosophy cannot

be revived on the basis of a conception of nature as beneficent.13 In place of a conception of

nature as an ordered whole, or of the Platonic forms, or an appeal to the common sense natural

experience of the world, Strauss relies upon a conception of philosophy as "nothing but genuine

awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems," and a "zetetic

(or skeptic in the original sense of the term)" attitude toward "the very few typical solutions."14

This basis of philosophy fits well with Strauss's understanding that philosophy is not a set of

doctrines, but a way of life.15

The Nietzschean problematic of historical sickness also informs Heidegger's reflections

on history. Heidegger's conception of historicity transforms the twin demands faced by

Nietzsche's Zarathustra: the demands to be faithful both to life and wisdom. Wisdom is no

longer taken as the will to truth, but as truth itself and an ontological conception of truth. Life is

seen not from the perspective of the individual or culture, but as a property of Being. The

problem of historical sickness becomes the question of the truth of Being. In the process of this

transformation Heidegger purges Nietzsche's thought of what he perceives to be its lingering

subjectivist or metaphysical basis.

Heidegger's cure for historical sickness is a homeopathic one, for it is by appealing to the

essentially historical happening of the truth of Being that he attempts to overcome the dualism

between historical existence and historical meaning. Because the subject matter of philosophy is

itself historical, Heidegger conceives of philosophy as a continuously renewed questioning.

It [philosophy] is not a direct possession like everyday knowledge of things and of ourselves. The πρώτη πιλoσoπια is the έπιστήμη ξητoυμέvη: the science sought after, the science that can never become a fixed possession and that, as such, would just have to be passed on. It is rather the knowledge that can be obtained only if it is each time sought anew. It is precisely a venture...16

The necessity for philosophy to remain the "science sought after" is in the matter for thought

itself.

The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes up against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in the singleness and simplicity of

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its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a renewed awakening.17

The similarities between Strauss and Heidegger flow from the common root of their

thought in the Nietzschean problematic of historical sickness. Both Strauss and Heidegger

devote considerable attention to the thought of the Greeks, considering it necessary to reconsider

the beginning of philosophy in order to loosen the grip of the dogmatic view of the tradition.

Both are concerned with philosophy not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of life. Both seek to

restore philosophy to a place of dignity in the face of the history-based human sciences.18 To see

philosophy as only one element of a Weltanschauung seems to both Strauss and Heidegger

fundamentally to misunderstand philosophy. Both believe philosophy to be the highest type of

human activity. Both react against the instrumentalization of reason and the subjectivization of

all elements of life that they see around them. And both seek to understand the rise of nihilism.19

Despite these many similarities, one is led badly astray if one considers the thought of

Strauss and Heidegger as of a piece.20 There are important differences between them. Most

obviously, they locate the roots of the crisis of modernity at different points in the philosophical

history of the West. Strauss believes that classical thought contains resources with which to

combat the crisis that began with Machiavelli, while Heidegger traces the roots of modern

nihilism back to Greek thought.21 This is not, however, the fundamental difference. A decision

about which view of the origin of nihilism is correct can only be made by comparing the

different bases upon which Strauss and Heidegger build their conceptions of philosophy. The

fundamental difference between Strauss and Heidegger is found here. Strauss appeals to

fundamental problems and a zetetic quest for wisdom, while Heidegger appeals to the historicity

of Being. Who is correct?

2. Strauss's First Critique of Heidegger

Strauss calls Martin Heidegger "the only great thinker in our time."22 Yet he also

characterizes Heidegger's thought as insane23 and maintained that there is an obvious connection

between Being and Time and Heidegger's support of the Nazis.24 Strauss believes that

Heidegger's thought is a "radical historicism"25 that leads to an "unqualified relativism."26 The

problem is to understand exactly what Strauss means by these comments, and why he thinks they

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apply to Heidegger. This task is made more difficult by the lack of any sustained analysis of

Heidegger's works by Strauss. Strauss is a theorist well-known for his detailed textual analysis

of a variety of philosophers, but when it comes to Heidegger his comments are unsupported by

textual analysis. Only two essays - "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy"

and "An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism"27 - deal explicitly with Heidegger in any

real depth. These two essays will form the basis of my analysis in this section. Although this

first critiques is, I argue, the weakest of Strauss’s three critiques, it is the most explicit and its

currency in the secondary literature28 on Strauss justifies treating it at length.

In the course of this analysis I will argue that Strauss misunderstood Heidegger's project

in Being and Time and placed that project within a dubious reconstruction of the history of

German post-Kantian reflection on the relation of history to philosophy. The misunderstanding

of Being and Time takes two forms: one relatively sophisticated, the other polemical. The latter

rests on the former. In his more polemical moments Strauss is not averse to claiming that

Heidegger is simply arguing that all thought is relative to its social and cultural setting.29 This

misunderstanding of Heidegger is based upon a more plausible, although I believe still mistaken,

understanding of Heidegger as continuing Husserl's project of developing a transcendental

phenomenology.

The general drift of Strauss's argument is clear in both essays. Existentialism, whose

intellectual center is Heidegger,30 opposes and debunks rational philosophy.31 Rational

philosophy, deprived of its basis in universal reason and historical progress, can offer no real

opposition to "poetic, emotional existentialism."32 Existentialism argues that what is basic to

human experience is not the universal, but what is particular. All knowing takes place within the

horizon of a particular world, and thought must remain unaware of the total character of this

horizon.33 Existentialism shows that what was believed to be objective is problematic, while the

subjective is "profound, assertoric - with the understanding that there is no apodicticity."34

Given the profundity of the particular, philosophy must become the "analytics of Existenz."35

"Existential philosophy is subjective truth about subjective truth."36 Existentialism grows out of

the particular historical situation of the demise of the belief in progress.37 Strauss identifies the

social and cultural setting of existentialism as post-World War One Europe where all thought is

dominated by an unacknowledged Weltanschauung of historical and moral relativism.38

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This picture should, I think, strike even the casual reader of Heidegger as puzzling. Is

not Heidegger rejecting the subjectivization of knowledge that is typical of modernity? Does he

not appeal to a history of Being rather than to a theory of human understanding? Does not

Heidegger repeatedly reject the idea that he is concerned with cultural or social issues as

determinants of thought? How then does Strauss find him guilty of all these sins? A closer

examination of the workings of Strauss's critique is clearly in order.

In both the essays under consideration, Strauss introduces Heidegger's project by means

of a detour through Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.39 Husserl's phenomenology

remains in the tradition of transcendental philosophy as begun by Kant.40 That is to say, it

attempts to discover the conditions under which subjectivity constructs the objectivities of the

world, whether this world is considered the world of natural science or the everyday "lifeworld."

Transcendental phenomenology attempts to discover the ultimate "horizon" within which

transcendental subjectivity constitutes objectivity. It is concerned with the need to start

philosophizing from "our common understanding of the world."41 At issue then are the

conditions for the possibility of understanding.

Strauss reads Being and Time as a continuation of Husserl's transcendental

phenomenology that radicalizes its starting point by stressing that human beings are first and

foremost absorbed in a web of practical everyday activities in which they conduct themselves

understandingly, but without stopping to reflect on what they are doing.42 Thus it appears that

Heidegger, like Husserl, is concerned with the conditions of understanding. Such a reading of

Being and Time is clearly not absurd. Indeed the book ends with the question "Does time reveal

itself as the horizon of Being?"43 This suggests that Heidegger is searching for the ultimate

horizon within which transcendental subjectivity constructs the objectivities of the world.

Nonetheless, although far from absurd, such a reading is mistaken. Heidegger is not

attempting to establish time as a Husserlian horizon, but rather to suggest that Being is time. As

Hans-Georg Gadamer notes, Being and Time does not take the being that has an understanding

of Being as "the ultimate basis from which a transcendental approach has to start... [r]ather, there

is a quite different reason why the understanding of Being is possible at all, namely that there is

a 'there,' a clearing in Being..."44 What is at issue here is whether time is the ultimate horizon

within which an anonymous transcendental subjectivity constitutes the world, or whether it is the

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way that Being happens. On the latter view human beings participate in the clearing as

"perceivers and preservers"45 of the happening of Being and not as subjects constituting objects.

On Strauss's Husserlian reading of Being and Time it makes sense, once one has rejected

the idea of a pure transcendental form of the understanding, to raise the question of whether

philosophy is not thereby relativized to its social or cultural setting. This way of reading Being

and Time fails, however, to give enough weight to the centrality of the connection between

historicity and the destruction of the history of ontology that Heidegger projected as Part II of

that book. As we will see, Heidegger insists that historicity does not relativize thought but rather

binds it to a "higher lawfulness."

Strauss is not blind to the connection between historicity and ontology,46 and he raises it

in a brief consideration of the turn in Heidegger's thought. Strauss suggests three reasons for the

turn.47 Of these the last is the most important. Strauss asks whether it is really possible to

understand finitude without the contrasting "light of infinity."48 He suggests that a consideration

of this question led Heidegger to abandon the existential analytic and to turn to what is, if not

metaphysics, then at least "some repetition of what metaphysics intended on an entirely different

plane."49

I believe that in drawing so strong a contrast between the early and late Heidegger,

Strauss misinterprets the turn. In Strauss's explanation, Being and Time is a form of

anthropological relativism that is completely rejected in Heidegger's later thought. He compares

the later Heidegger's criticism of the existential analytic to Hegel's criticism of Kant.50 In other

words, the early project is tied up with the transcendental conditions of understanding, that is to

say a purely formal "psychologizing"51 while the later Heidegger is bound to a metaphysics of

the absolute historical moment. If understood in these terms, the turn does become a rejection of

Being and Time. But this is far too extreme a view of the turn. If instead we see the importance

of the historicity of Being already present in Being and Time the need for such an extreme

interpretation vanishes.

Strauss is surely correct, however, to raise the question of whether an understanding of

finitude can be arrived at without employing the concept of the infinite. Heidegger poses this

question himself at the end of his book on Kant.52 It is clear that insofar as the Heideggerian

Verwindung of metaphysics is possible his own answer to this question must be "yes." Strauss

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recognizes that this is the crucial issue. "The only question of importance, of course, is whether

Heidegger's teaching is true or not."53

Having recognized that Heidegger's project involves a rethinking of metaphysics "on an

entirely different plane," Strauss proceeds to place that project in a questionable account of

German philosophical thought about history. Beginning with a characterization of Hegel as

propounding the end of history as the realization of the absolute moment in history, this account

moves on to present Marx and Nietzsche as advocating an overcoming of all history in order to

realize a new, fully or more than human ideal.54 The limitations of Kojève's end of history

interpretation of Hegel are well known,55 and it is to be regretted that Strauss never critically

engaged a more accurate presentation of the Hegelian legitimation of modernity. As I have

suggested in my discussion of historical sickness, Nietzsche cannot be understood as advocating

a simple overcoming of the human because of the modification of the teaching of the superman

by the idea of the eternal return. According to Strauss, "Heidegger's philosophy of history has

the same structure of Marx' and Nietzsche's: the moment in which the final insight is arriving

opens the eschatological prospect."56 But Heidegger's concept of historicity is intended precisely

to free the future from the grasp of the present that inevitably turns that future into a vision of

itself. Strauss's account of Heidegger here insists on reading Heidegger back into the well-

recognized problems of philosophical reflection on history that Heidegger seeks to overcome.

Are there good reasons to resists this reading of Heidegger?

3. Heideggerian Historicity

In this section I examine the place of historicity in Heidegger's thought. In order to bring

this large task down to a manageable size I concentrate on showing how historicity evades the

criticisms leveled against it by Strauss. This will serve not only to answer Strauss’s first

critique, but also to provide the basis for consideration of the second critique, for historicity is

Heidegger's answer to the deeper question of historical sickness. As such, it is his account of the

human situation, the place in his thought where he explains what situates human beings and how

they are able to orient themselves. Historicity informs Heidegger's conception of philosophy, or

seinsgeschicklich thought, thought of the destiny of Being. This thought "never becomes

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groundless or beyond all question."57 In other words historicity provides thought with a measure

that is neither arbitrary, nor a surrender to an external, given authority. The central concern of

this section will be to bring out the content of this measure for thought.

My assertion that historicity provides the thread of continuity between Heidegger's early

and late writings is a controversial one. The opposite view, that historicity is an active concept

only in Being and Time where it relates to human temporality in a way incompatible with the

later history of Being (Seinsgeschichte)58, appears to receive support from Heidegger's comment

that one must not interpret the destiny of Being "in terms of what was said in Being and Time

about the historicity of man."59 Heidegger's position is, however, more nuanced than this

quotation initially indicates, for he goes on to say that "the only possible way to anticipate the

latter thought on the destiny of Being from the perspective of Being and Time is to think through

what was presented in Being and Time about the dismantling of the ontological doctrine of the

Being of beings."60 This refers to the destruction or destructuring (Destruktion) of the history of

ontology planned for Part II of Being and Time, but never written. Presumably the destruction

could not take place on the methodological basis provided by the existential analytic. A clue as

to why this was so is provided in Heidegger's comments about the relation of the destiny of

Being to the historicity of man. One should not attempt to understand the destiny of Being on

the basis of the historicity of man "because one everywhere represents the destiny of Being only

as history, and history only as a kind of occurrence."61

If one reads Being and Time in light of Heidegger's analysis of history in his pre-Being

and Time lecture courses one will be well armed against the representation of history as a kind of

occurrence. Heidegger's reflections in these courses fall within the tradition of German

philosophical and theological reflection on history and face the problem that all such reflections

faced in the 1920s: the fracturing of the unified conception of historical science as cultural

legitimation, a conception that informed the work of the German historical school, into the view

of history as either Wissenschaft or Weltanschauung, but not both.62 Historicity developed as

Heidegger's answer to the Krisis des Historismus. As research on Heidegger's pre-Being and

Time works has progressed over the past 35 years, it has become clear that Heidegger believed

that both the idea of history as science and of history as a source of world views found their

ground in a mistaken understanding of what history is.63 Heidegger called this view the

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objective or object-historical.64 In contrast to this objective view of history as something that

occurs, Heidegger developed a view of history he called the actualization historical.

The actualization-historical understanding of history focuses on the being-possible of

factical life. Factical life is Heidegger's replacement for Husserl's transcendental I. Factical life

is inherently historical and finds its meaning grounded in life's "sense of performance,"65 its

happening. The being-possible of factical life is evidenced by its restless, distressed concern for

itself. This view of history runs strongly counter to the idea of history as occurrence.

As important as the early works are for evidence of the sense of history at work in Being

and Time the actual argument of that work itself must be decisive for any assessment of

historicity. Being and Time intends to ground the account of historicity in the account of

existential temporality, and therefore, in the authentic temporalizing of Dasein. This attempted

grounding of historicity fails however. I believe that the tension between historicity and

temporality is one of the places where Being and Time invites a reading that goes against its own

intention. Historicity describes the belonging together of Being and human beings. This

understanding of historicity refuses to fit comfortably within the place provided for it by

existential temporality.

Even if one takes historicity as "basically just a more concrete development of

temporality"66 however, it is crucial to note the limitations of a reading of Being and Time as

transcendental philosophy. Strong evidence that Heidegger is not attempting to make

temporality into a transcendental horizon comes in section 65, "Temporality as the Ontological

Meaning of Care." There it appears to many commentators that Heidegger is attempting to

establish something called original temporality as a horizon for authentic temporality.67 The

problem with this attempt is that Heidegger identifies authentic and original temporality in the

same terms. A transcendental horizon cannot have the same definition as one of the particular

modes for which it is supposed to serve as a horizon. As Heidegger nowhere in section 65

explicitly claims to be grounding both authentic and inauthentic temporality in original

temporality, the better view of this section is that Heidegger is pointing to the role that authentic

existence plays in a correct understanding of time and history.68 The identification of original

and authentic temporality is not a mistake or ambiguity in Heidegger's analysis; it is rather an

indication that when it is understood authentically temporality provides standards for thought

and action.

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The case for this claim can be elaborated by examining the relation between existential

temporality and historicity. When the sections on existential temporality and historicity are read

carefully it turns out that historicity must be the more fundamental concept. The tension

between historicity and existential temporality is, I suggest, at least one important reason why

Heidegger felt himself unable to complete Being and Time. Heidegger's attempt to contain

historicity within the formal framework of existential temporality runs aground on the issue of

the relation among the three ecstases of time, and especially the status of the authentic present,

what Heidegger also calls the moment.

The problem is that although Heidegger is able to account for the authentic past ("being

already in as having been") and the authentic future ("being ahead of as coming toward") on the

basis of the structures of authentic temporality, he cannot give an account of the authentic

present ("being alongside as making present") on that basis.69 Heidegger is reduced to assuring

the reader that the authentic present "remains included in the future and in having been."70

It is important to understand what has happened here. The analysis of Dasein started

with everyday life. This analysis, however, did not achieve access to Dasein as a totality, nor

did it discover authentic Dasein. The analysis had to seek a more primordial level.71 This was

found in anticipatory resoluteness, and it was the access to Dasein provided by anticipatory

resoluteness that allowed the interpretation of temporality as the meaning of care to take place.

Yet, in the analysis of authentic Dasein as a totality, an essential part of Dasein's being seems to

have disappeared. The present has vanished into the past and the future, and we are left with

only Heidegger's assurance that it is still included in the other two parts.

What is at issue here is not simply a technical problem in the interpretation of Being and

Time. Heidegger repeatedly pointed out that Dasein is a being-possible (Seinkönnen, literally a

can-be).72 This is Dasein's authentic way of being.73 The question is how a being that exists

futurally, as being-possible, can be authentically present in the here and now. This is a question

that goes to the root of modernity's self-understanding. If human beings are to be autonomous

they cannot take their standards from anything objectively present. But if time becomes the

dimension of transcendence of what is objectively present does not this generate a Hegelian bad

infinite? Does not the promise of authentic existence continually recede before the constant

negating of the present?

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Heidegger's answer to these questions is "No," and this answer is possible because of his

elaboration of the moment as the authentic present.74 It is with the discovery of the moment that,

as Heidegger remarked a couple of years after the publication of Being and Time, "the

possibility of a completely new epoch of philosophy has begun for the first time since

antiquity."75 Heidegger elaborates the moment only in his discussion of historicity. Indeed, the

moment's elaboration is only possible when Dasein is "explicitly" aware of "the provenance of

its possibilities upon which it projects itself."76 This awareness is only available when Dasein

understands its resoluteness as the repetition of a heritage.77

Authentic Dasein cannot find the possibilities upon which to project itself among what is

objectively present. This means that Dasein cannot find standards for thought or action from a

theory of human nature, or from a causal analysis of its situation. Authentic Dasein can only

find a measure in something that, like itself, has being-possible as a way of being. Dasein must

decide. It cannot deduce or calculate. One needs to choose oneself, one's authentic self,

precisely because it is possible to lose oneself among what is objectively present.

If history is understood as the object-historical, Dasein does lose itself in the curiosity of

historiographical research.78 The moment does not permit such an understanding of history

because it is a temporally enriched present, a present that includes both the projection of the

future and a repetition of the past.79 This does not mean that the future or the past is to be

organized on the basis of the interests of the present. When the past is forced to submit to the

objective interests of the present the result is historicism. When the future is projected on the

basis of these interests the result is a messianic vision or "eschatological prospect." Rather the

authentic present allows the other ecstases of time their freedom, and in doing so creates order.80

Augenblicklich thought - thought that takes place in the authentic present - is the

repetition of a heritage. It creatively reappropriates the tradition while succumbing to neither

historicism nor a messianic vision of the future. The question that has always plagued readers of

Being and Time is: How does Dasein decide on a particular way of reappropriating the tradition?

Heidegger claims that repetition enables Dasein to "choose its hero."81 How does one find a

measure for this choice? To this question Being and Time returns no answer.82 I believe that

this reflects its status as an unfinished work, but some commentators have seized upon the

absence of a measure to accuse Heidegger of either an empty decisionism, a blind fatalism or

both.83 In light of these criticisms it is important to suggest where in Being and Time Heidegger

15

intended to find the resources for an answer to the question of how one chooses a hero. Here the

observation that the existential analytic is grounded not in the transcendental subject but in the

clearing (Lichtung) shows the way.

The clearing is one of Heidegger's descriptions of the belonging together of human being

and Being.84 In Being and Time Heidegger notes that Dasein is its disclosedness,85 that is to say

Dasein is the open region created by the clearing. Dasein is "cleared" by ecstatic temporality.86

In being ahead of itself (as futural) human thought is self-transcending. Dasein is not, however,

simply another name for human being, rather it is "a pure expression of Being."87 As a result the

clearing cannot be understood as simply the product of human thought. The clearing is also

formed by Being's originary transcendence. Being's originary transcendence is excessive; Being

is never simply or absolutely present. This double transcendence (self-transcendence and

originary transcendence) defines the human situation; it describes how human beings are

situated.88 As such it is Heidegger's way of overcoming the dualism between historical existence

and historical meaning. More primordial than this dualism is the duality of the double

transcendence. It is reasonable then to expect that in choosing its hero Dasein situates itself

within the history of Being and not, as Strauss's critique suggests, by reference to social or

cultural values.

The way in which the history of Being can provide a concrete way of situating oneself is

not spelled out in Being and Time, for this one must turn to Heidegger's later works. There

Heidegger claims that historical reflection or seinsgeschicklich thought is governed by a "higher

lawfulness;" it is "bound to a higher and more rigorous law than historiography."89 Clearly

Heidegger's explanation of what this law is will be crucial to any assessment of his thought.

Seinsgeschicklich thought finds what is valid in the past not in the doctrines elaborated

by past thinkers, but in the grounds upon which those doctrines rest, and in the creative

establishment of those grounds. So the measure for seinsgeschicklich thought is found in the

character of the thought in the history of Being itself, and not in something external to that

thought. The higher lawfulness is "the very character" of a thinking; it is thought's "way of

questioning," or the "direction from which [one] pursues an answer" to the question.90 The

higher lawfulness is not something outside of, or separate from seinsgeschicklich thought, but

the ground of that thought itself.

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The validity that seinsgeschicklich thought finds in the past is not simply a formal

validity. It is not simply that the thinkers of the past established values, and therefore we can

too. On this view the content of the values would be a matter of indifference. Seinsgeschicklich

thought does not leave behind the thought of the past in an overcoming of that thought, but takes

it up as part of what determines the future and the present.91 The measure for seinsgeschicklich

thought is not a matter of causality. The past does not cause the present, nor does it causally

determine the future. Thought is not limited to tracing the chain of causes that characterize

historiography.92 There is a matter for thought beyond causality. "History does not withhold

itself from prediction but from calculating judgement."93 It is for this reason that Heidegger

speaks of seinsgeschicklich thought as tolerating and sustaining the unexplainable.94

How one finds a measure for thought can be made clearer by examining Heidegger's

account of the first beginning of the history of Being in Greek thought. The question that

concerns Heidegger is how the conception of truth as correctness came to be established. As

originally formulated by Aristotle, this conception did not, Heidegger notes, rest upon a

foundation.95 Rather than appeal to "something already present at hand,"96 Aristotle simply

asserts that truth is correctness. Heidegger claims that this determination of the essence of truth

comes about as a positing of the ground for that essence that is a productive seeing of the

ground.97 This productive seeing is not a manufacturing of the ground, but a seeing because the

ground is what determines the essence in advance.98 The truth of Being is at work in the

productive seeing that takes place as a moving onto the ground that opens up the ground. In the

case of the determination of truth as correctness, the ground onto which thought moves is

aletheia or unconcealedness. This ground was not explicitly interrogated by Greek thought.99

This is the unthought upon which Greek thought rests. Heidegger is clear that the failure to

question unconcealedness is not a defect of Greek thought, but rather resulted from faithfulness

to the destiny meted out to that thought.100 That destiny was to ask what beings are as such and

as a whole.101

To think of the Greek determination of the essence of truth not as a particular doctrine in

the history of philosophy, but as an episode in the history of Being is to understand the ground

upon which that thought moved. By opening this ground through the discovery of the

questionableness of the usual - an opening that takes place through the mood of wonder - the

Greeks began philosophy.102

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Wonder is no longer the mood that governs thought. We now stand at the end of the

Greek beginning. In his analyses of anxiety (Being and Time, "What is Metaphysics?") and

boredom (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics) Heidegger attempts to awaken the need

for thought in preparation for another beginning in the history of Being. This preparation takes

place out of the very lack of need for a questioning of Being that dominates contemporary

thought. The "abandonment of beings by Being," or in other words the oblivion of the question

of Being, is itself "an event which proceeds from beings as a whole, indeed in such a way that

precisely this event is the least visible and experienceable."103 It is this abandonment that is "the

concealed ground of the still veiled basic disposition which compels us into another necessity of

another original questioning."104

Heidegger's analysis of the absence of need created by the oblivion of Being is an

example of seinsgeschicklich thought, the thought that finds the higher lawfulness of historical

reflection. What seinsgeschicklich thought finds is not simply the essence of truth, the

conception of truth that governs the current epoch. Heidegger does, of course, undertake the

task of determining what this conception is. His analysis of Gestell in "The Question

Concerning Technology," for example, pursues this question. But it is not here that the higher

lawfulness of historical reflection is found. Heidegger's search is for the unthought in thinking,

and this in our epoch is the abandonment of the question of Being, a question which is no longer

even recognized as such because of the unthinking nature of the epoch.105

Does this claim that we stand at the end of the first beginning of thought amount to a

claim that the present is an absolute moment in history as Strauss suggests? We have already

seen that historicity is an attempt neither to dominate the future, nor "open the eschatological

prospect." As Heidegger does not maintain that Being is ever something fully present, it cannot

be the case that any moment is the moment of the absolute presence of Being. Heidegger does

find that the present moment stands before a decision, a decision about "whether we still want

and can want the truth at all."106 But this decision, which will not be made "in the well tended

garden of our inclinations, wishes and intentions,"107 can only be made because of the "richness

that again and again demands a renewed awakening." It is a decision that is required because of

the absence of an absolute moment in history.

Nonetheless, Heidegger does seem to suggest that the present stands in a privileged

relation to the past. He asserts that while the Greeks did not explicitly interrogate the ground of

18

the determination of truth as correctness, that is aletheia or unconcealedness, the task of thinking

today is to awaken to the need to ask about that ground. After all, is not what Strauss is really

attacking when he invokes the idea of an absolute moment the view that we now have

knowledge of what occurred in the past and led up to the present moment that thinkers in the

past could not have had? Perhaps it is, but it remains important to see why this mischaracterizes

Heidegger’s view. What drives Heidegger’s view is not the limitations on human thought

created by its historical position but the historicity of Being itself. Being happens. The

historical situation of the Greeks, at the most fundamental level of reality, was different from

that of today. This situation, far from representing a limitation on the thought of the Greeks,

was the source of its greatness. Is our insight superior to that of the Greeks because we are able

to see how their thought unfolded in the intervening millennia? Heidegger’s view is that, for the

most part, current day thought fails even to perceive the question that animated Greek thought as

a question. In order to rise to the level of Greek thought, a perceptive questioning of beings,

would, Heidegger suggests, be a major accomplishment. It would require the destruction of the

history of philosophy so as to recover the living kernel of seinsgeschicklich thought that

animates that history.

Heidegger does suggest that the fate of thought in our epoch is to think what remained

unthought in the Greek beginning, to respond to the oblivion of Being by a questioning of

unconcealedness. But there is no suggestion in Heidegger’s account of the history of Being that

a thoughtful response to the matter for thinking meted out to one’s epoch makes one superior to

the thinkers of the past. Nor does he suggest that such a response will master the sources of its

own thinking. Rather it too will open a ground for thought by moving onto that ground and in

so doing will have its own unthought, and unthought that may become an issue for future

thinkers. No eschatological prospect is opened.

It is precisely because of the way that Heidegger conceives of the history of Being that

philosophy must remain the “science sought after.” Rather than producing a more or less

authoritative history of philosophy, reflection on Being discovers an inexhaustible fount for

thinking. Situated by both self-transcendence (Dasein’s concern for its own existence which

prevents it from finding standards in things that are merely objectively present alongside it) and

Being’s originary transcendence (Being’s happening that gives a matter for thought) human

beings come to thinking by finding themselves already underway. This duality of self-

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transcendence and Being’s originary transcendence, or more broadly the belonging together of

Being and human being, is Heidegger’s cure for the dualism of historical existence versus

historical meaning (and ultimately that of mind and world) that creates historical sickness.

Simply asserting that more primordial that the dualism of historical sickness is the

duality of the belonging together of Being and human being hardly proves anything. The proof

would come in the effort to articulate and illuminate the more common experiences of life on the

basis of this picture of the human situation. And it would come in efforts to find an awareness

of this situation in past thought. Heidegger found traces of such an awareness in sources as

diverse as Aristotle’s Physics, St. Paul’s letters and Kant’s reflections on time while maintaining

that they always succumbed to theoretical interpretation through the lens of the metaphysics of

presence which distorts the underlying experience. Keeping in mind the centrality of the

historicity of Being to all of his work is a valuable way of thinking about Heidegger.

4. Strauss’s Second Critique: Historicity versus Political Philosophy

In the previous section I argued that Heidegger's concept of historicity is not a theory of

understanding searching for the horizon within which subjectivity constitutes the world and it

does not relativize thought to its social or cultural setting. Nor does historicity depend upon the

achievement of an absolute moment in history. I now turn to Strauss’s second critique, a

critique which will motivate a comparison of Heidegger and Strauss's alternative conceptions of

philosophy. Even more than is the case with the first critique, this second line of attack is based,

not on detailed textual analysis, but rather upon scattered remarks, whose target is certainly

Heidegger. I strongly agree with Steven B. Smith’s contention that “one could almost say that

Heidegger is the unnamed presence to whom or against whom all of Strauss’s writings are

directed.”108

In this line of criticism Strauss is seen as “appropriating various Heideggerian problems

and terminology” but for the purpose of “a far-reaching critique of Heidegger’s

antimodernity.”109 Heidegger opens new questions regarding the philosophical tradition and by

doing so opens the road to a new and fresh recovery of the ancients and in particular of classical

political philosophy.110 This return to classical thought discovers or rather rediscovers “the

primacy of political things”111 and recovers the natural consciousness or common sense

20

articulation of natural phenomena.112 This natural consciousness is then favorably contrasted to

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, which had already covered over the natural surface of life

with a particular philosophic interpretation.113

Based upon the rediscovery of “the primacy of the political” – that is, of the fact that

human existence is “essentially moral and political”114 – Strauss finds the basis of his own

interpretation of the history of philosophy. Ordinary experience is shot through with judgments

of right and wrong, what is just and what unjust, and it is through the examination of these

experiences that Socratic philosophy found the basis of its “second sailing.” Strauss follows the

Socratic path and discovers the history of natural right that he outlines in Natural Right and

History. It is this rediscovery of the fact that classical political philosophy is based on the

natural consciousness, and not any cosmological or metaphysical doctrines, that provides the

reason for thinking Strauss’s history of the nihilism as superior to Heidegger’s. “Strauss’s

emphasis on the irreducibly political character of natural right constitutes his most significant

disagreement with Heidegger.”115 In Strauss’s history nihilism is not the fate of the modern west

because of its position in the history of Being, but a result of a loss of nerve rooted in intellectual

confusion. Natural right remains a position that can be defended and justified and as a live

alternative it justifies a comprehensive reevaluation of the crisis of the West.116

It is important to understand the role that the natural attitude or the primacy of the

political plays in Strauss’s thought. Strauss does not argue that natural right is or could be a

direct solution to the current crisis of the West, nor does he argue that nature provides a standard

for judging all political actions or evaluating different regimes. What he does claim is that

classical political thought, with its natural right teaching, is the essential precondition to

rediscovering the natural attitude. Classical political thought displays the attitudes out of which

it arises, the beliefs and desires of the city, and it is these attitudes, supplemented by the most

elementary premises of the Bible which classical political philosophy took as its starting point.117

Rather than a straightforward appeal to a natural standard for political action or evaluation, the

rediscovery of the primacy of the political for the natural consciousness is developed by Strauss

into a conception of philosophy that expresses a profound appreciation for the limits of human

thought.118 This conception of philosophy expresses the natural “manifestation of eros for

understanding.119

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Heidegger based his own response to the problem of historical sickness on historicity and

seinsgeschicklich thought. By contrast Strauss attempts to revive classical political philosophy

on the basis of a zetetic attitude toward the few typical solutions of fundamental problems. It is

difficult to get a completely clear picture of what Strauss has in mind when he speaks of these

fundamental problems and a zetetic attitude toward them. It is not clear what the fundamental

problems are. In Natural Right and History Strauss gives the problem of justice as an example

but the broader context of that remark leaves one to wonder if the question of whether “to be”

has as its fundamental meaning to be always is also such a question.120 At one point Strauss

suggests that “the fundamental alternatives regarding their [the fundamental problems]

solution… are coeval with human thought,”121 at another he suggests that it is always possible

that a future great thinker will develop a new alternative.122 Even more vexing is the question of

what exactly “awareness” of the problems and a “zetetic” attitude toward the solutions implies

about the type of thinking that Strauss takes philosophy to be.

It is worth reiterating that Strauss does not undertake a simple return to classical political

thought but rather a retrieval of that thought. This retrieval does not rest upon a contemplative

attitude toward an eternal cosmological order. The attitude of the thinker toward the few typical

solutions to the fundamental problems is said by Strauss to be “neither dogmatic, nor skeptic,

and still less ‘decisionistic’.”123 Rather it is zetetic by which Strauss means an awareness of the

problems as problems that remain problems despite one’s best efforts to solve them.

Nonetheless, Strauss argues, one cannot “think about the problems without becoming inclined

toward a solution.”124

Strauss's conception of philosophy has the virtue of preserving the otherness of Being to

thought. There will be no dialectical mediation of the solutions to the fundamental problems

into a totality. But Strauss's aversion to direct engagement with ontological questions leaves one

unsatisfied with the account of the relation between zetetic thought and the problems. The

problems are "fundamental and comprehensive"125 while their contemplators are finite and

temporal. Does this not raise the dualism problem? Are not the problems separated from the

awareness of them in such a way that their supposed interaction becomes somewhat mysterious?

One might suggest that interpretation is itself the way in which the temporal partakes of the

eternal, but this raises the question of the nature of this participation.

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Strauss's conception of philosophy as zetetic awareness of the fundamental problems runs

the risk of taking on the character of a fake sort of questioning. Strauss himself is aware of this

danger; indeed the reason that one must become "inclined toward a solution" is to avoid the

danger that philosophy will "degenerate into playing with the problems."126 Nonetheless since

one must also, Strauss believes, remain aware that "the evidence of all solutions is necessarily

smaller than the evidence of the problems"127 it is difficult to see what this inclining toward a

solution can really amount to. What is at issue here is not the degree of "subjective certainty"128

one feels about a particular solution, nor is it a matter of being for or against progress in the

understanding of the fundamental problems. The question is how philosophy can be the sort of

ever renewed questioning that both Strauss and Heidegger believe it to be.

Even given his awareness of the danger of philosophy becoming a mere playing with

problems, however, Strauss is unable to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. The

fundamental problems remain on the far side of a dualism from the human beings who, for

reasons unrelated to any ultimate solution to these problems, incline toward different typical

answers. Any explanation of why different people incline toward different answers is restricted

to the human side of the dualism cut off from the problems and the question of Being. As

awareness of the fundamental problems, philosophy can never be more than an empty

edification, perhaps morally uplifting but groundless. Life and wisdom remain unreconciled and

modernity’s historical sickness remains uncured.

This conclusion certainly does not require one to reject all of Strauss’s varied

contributions to political thought. Nonetheless, Strauss's challenge to modernity's self-

understanding depends upon his argument that the abandonment of nature as a normative

standard leads inevitably to a relativistic or decisionistic "radical historicism." Insofar as his

critique of Heidegger fails, his own argument for the need to retrieve classical political

philosophy is undermined. And insofar as it remains unclear how Strauss’s account of

philosophy as zetetic awareness of the fundamental problems answers the dualism problem of

historical sickness one is forced to wonder how that retrieval can succeed.

5. Strauss’s Third Critique: The Theologico-Political Problem

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The final critique of Heidegger I examine requires even more extrapolation from

Strauss’s texts than did the second. It touches on what most interpreters of Strauss agree is the

deepest root of his thought, the theologico-political problem. Something close to a consensus

among commentators on Strauss is beginning to form around the idea that the theologico-

political problem is the true vital center of his thought.129 Paradoxically however, what Strauss

believed about the exact relation of philosophy to revealed religion remains a matter of debate.

In the third critique, Heidegger is called to account for relying on religious categories of thought

to dominate his existential analytic and for allowing religious hopes and longings to take root in

philosophy. It is further suggested that these hopes and longings found expression in

Heidegger’s political involvement. I intend to discuss these criticisms relatively briefly and to

devote most of my attention to the theologico-political problem, for the criticism of Heidegger is

that he errs precisely because of his inadequate attention to the confrontation of philosophy with

revealed religion. In other words he fails to understand the theologico-political problem.

The immediate criticism of Heidegger in this instance is that he relies on Christian

categories of experience such as conscience and guilt without subjecting them to analytic

scrutiny and this leads to unanalyzed religious hopes taking root within his philosophy.130 It is

particularly difficult to address this criticism at the level of textual analysis, both because so

little textual analysis is actually given to support it and because, as I argue below, the claim gets

its best support when seen in the context of Strauss’s analysis of the theologico-political

problem. There is no doubt that Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard

were of critical importance to Heidegger as he was preparing Being and Time, but it is also

indisputable that many of Heidegger’s analyses take their starting point from non-Christian

sources: from Sophocles, Heraclitus and Holderlin. There are certainly similarities between

some of Heidegger’s concepts and those of Christian thought; far more important than the

examples such as guilt, fate, decision or conscience usually cited by Straussians, is the parallel

between Heidegger’s ontological difference and the difference between creator and creature in

Christian theology. None of these similarities go very far however in undermining Heidegger’s

analysis unless one adds the assumption that Christian theology has so completely

misunderstood basic elements of human existence that any resemblance to theology renders

philosophy faulty. This assumption is extremely unlikely to be true.131

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Strauss’s third critique only gains plausibility if revealed religion is fundamentally and

systematically misunderstood by any analysis other than Strauss’s own theologico-political

understanding. In Strauss’s analysis theology is first and foremost political theology and while

theology and philosophy are rivals for the status of guide to the best life, they are also

dialectically entwined. The Bible was, for Strauss, alongside Plato the source for his

understanding of the pre-philosophic consciousness. Religion is also seen as necessary for sound

political order. Finally, and most importantly it is not clear whether Strauss thought that

philosophy could ever refute the claims of revealed religion.132 Rather, through keeping alive

the tension between the two, Strauss believed that revealed religion helped philosophy remember

its awareness of limitations. The inability of philosophy to refute the claims of revealed religion

is seen, by most commentators, as a consequence of Strauss’s zetetic conception of philosophy.

The tension between philosophy and revealed religion and their mutual inability to refute one

another prevents philosophy from becoming a science with results that could be simply passed

on. As Strauss writes:

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by dedication on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm. It is the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation. In spite of its highness or nobility, it could appear as Sisyphean or ugly, when one contrasts its achievement with its goal. Yet it is necessarily accompanied, sustained, and elevated by eros. It is graced by nature’s grace.133

A slightly different analysis of the theologico-political problem is given by Heinrich

Meier in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem.. The significant difference in

Meier’s account is that he does not believe that Strauss saw revealed religion as a serious

intellectual challenge to philosophy, believing rather that Strauss exoterically exaggerated the

case for revealed religion in order to revitalize the theologico-political problem itself, while

remaining fully committed, esoterically, to philosophy.134

Like other commentators, Meier stresses that, in Strauss’s understanding of it, philosophy

finds its true nature and path in the confrontation with the city and with poetry over the best way

of life. This orientation of philosophy carries over into philosophy’s confrontation with

religion, that is the conflict between philosophy and revealed religion is a conflict over the best

way of life; a conflict between political philosophy and political theology. Meier underlines this

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point through an interpretation of an unpublished lecture by Strauss where he develops what is in

effect a speculative account of the origin of monotheistic revealed religion.135 In addition, he

notes, as do other commentators, that Strauss pays particular attention to a line of interpretation

running through Alfarabi, Averroes, Avicenna and Maimonides which stresses the political side

of theology and the theological side of political philosophy.136

The difference between Meier and other interpreters of Strauss is somewhat narrowed by

Meier’s acknowledgement that is it the very success of the modern political theological

enterprise that has relegated both philosophy and religion to the status or independent realms of

culture without public claim to affect the political or spiritual life of society. The theological

political enterprise is the alliance between philosophy and politics against religion that followed

a Napoleonic strategy of bypassing rather than refuting the strong points of religion.137 Instead

of addressing the claims of religion to guide the search for the best political order, the

theological political enterprise created a new world in which religion was essentially a private

matter. The unintended consequence of the success of modern philosophy’s Napoleonic strategy

is that philosophy too is relegated to the private sphere and political irrelevance.

Like his fellow commentators on Strauss, Meier notes that without the challenge posed to

philosophy by revealed religion’s claim to be both the guide to truth and the source of the

commands that order the good political community, philosophy is in danger of misunderstanding

itself. “For Strauss, a critique of modernity (of culture) must take place via a (new) theological-

political treatise.”138 Perhaps this is itself a productive tension between philosophy and religion,

though Meier’s claim that Strauss plays up the strengths of religion only exoterically seems to

undermine the possibility of religion being one of the fundamental alternatives that support the

idea of philosophy as zetetic.

In Strauss’s analysis it is precisely the Napoleonic strategy of evasion that allows

religious longings to take root in philosophy and this is the key to his third critique of

Heidegger, so everything rests on this analysis. In the remainder of this section, I want to raise a

few questions about Strauss’s analysis of the theological, political enterprise. I want to

emphasize that this discussion does not even begin to settle the question of how much weight to

grant to Strauss’s theologico-political problem: it does however indicate a number of not

insignificant problems that a full defense of Strauss’s views would have to overcome.

26

First, Strauss’s analysis of religion as political theology notoriously takes as its

predecessors Islamic and Jewish thinkers, thinkers immersed in religious traditions where

revealed religion takes the form of law. It is a commonplace that Christian thought is more akin

to philosophy than law and this immediately raises the question of whether Strauss’s analysis of

the centrality of political theology to the crisis of the modern West is correct: what is the place

of political rule in the Christian understanding of community. The following brief account does

no more than highlight some of the difficulties of understanding the relation of political rule and

religious authority as Strauss does on the basis of a sort of political theology.

The paradigmatic account of the relation of relation between political rule and the

Christian community is formulated by Pope Gelasius I and based upon St. Paul’s formulation of

that community as the corpus mysticum, the mystical body of Christ and the collective social

organization of that community. In Paul’s original formulation, carried over by Gelasius, the

members of the community are differentiated by the charismata (the gifts of grace), but political

power or temporal rule is specifically identified as not charismatic and the ruler is excluded from

the community, the ruler is exousia. The Gelasian formulation is designed to distinguish the

place of political rule in the broader Christian community from the Roman tradition of the

Pontifex Maximus, the Hellenistic concept of sacred kingship and the Byzantine practice of

Caeseropapism, prime examples of political theology.

The Gelasian tradition is transformed with the translatio imperi whereby the mantle of

Rome is passed on the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne at which time political rule is

recognized as charismatic. But even after this change, the philosophy of political rule never

reverts to the patterns of political theology that Gelasius sought to distinguish it from. The

medieval concept of the sacrum imperium, while acknowledging that the Emperor rules by the

grace of God, maintains a strict differentiation between temporal and spiritual. The Pope and

the Emperor rule jointly without ever collapsing the difference between political and theological

authority.139

While the concept of the sacrum imperium suffers a variety of practical vicissitudes,

including the tendency of medieval kings to increase their independence from the Papacy by

modeling themselves as theocratic monarchs and the tendency of the Church itself, through its

extensive holdings toward practical power – a sort of Papalcaeserism – the idea of a balance

between temporal and spiritual authority is never completely lost and constantly reasserts itself

27

throughout the Middle Ages. It is only with the fracturing of the universality of Christianity

with the Reformation that it is lost, as the idea of secular authority develops and replaces the

idea of temporal rule.

It is at this point in early modernity, that Strauss suggests there is an alliance between

politics and philosophy to relegate religion to the private realm, yet the immediate result of the

collapse of the sacrum imperium was the rise of the national churches. Toynbee and Voegelin,

for example, both analyze the collapse of the characteristically Western idea of the sacrum

imperium, in early modern Europe as a loss of civilizational substance and a reversion to an

earlier and lower pattern of church and state relations. Rather than an alliance between

philosophy and politics, the historical pattern can, perhaps with more justification, be interpreted

as an alliance between church and state, a “reemerging of the Church into an undifferentiated

“totalitarian” social order of the primitive kind.”140 This reemergence of something more closely

resembling Hellenic sacred kingship than the medieval Western ideal of the sacrum imperium is

in turn shattered by the proliferation of sects as non-conformists undermine the national

churches. There seems less of a role for the alliance between philosophy and political society in

this analysis than Strauss requires for his theologico-political account.

Second, Strauss maintains that the tension between Christianity and philosophy,

particularly ancient Greek philosophy, characterizes the West. Much turns here on what exactly

is understood by “the West.” It is worth noting that most historians and many political

philosophers concerned with the idea of civilizations take the fourth and fifth century migrations

of the Germanic tribes into what was then the Roman empire as the founding event of the West

and identify the conversion of these tribes to Christianity as a critical moment in the

differentiation of the West from predecessor civilizations.141 On this view, the West is Christian

to its core and the revivals of Greek thought remain intrusions from an affiliated, but

fundamentally separate civilization. On this view, rather than being the vital nerve of the West,

the tension between religion and philosophy may well be the point at which the destruction of

the spiritual substance of the West begins.

Finally, it is difficult to know what weight to attach to Strauss’s unpublished speculative

account of the emergence of monotheistic revealed religion which Meier has published and

analyzed with such insight. What are we to make of the fact that Strauss chose not to pursue and

28

publish these reflections? While his account compares favorably with many other speculative

accounts of religion, Freud’s one dimensional account in The Future of an Illusion springs

immediately to mind, there are other contenders with insights of their own, such as Durkheim’s

Elementary Forms of Religious Life. If the theologico-political problem is to bear the weight that

it Strauss’s account of modernity seems to require of it, much more needs to be said than Strauss

ever ventured.

This discussion of the theologico-political problem has done little to advance the

comparison of alternate visions of philosophy outlined at the end of section four of this paper.

Insofar as Strauss’s account of the nature of philosophy as zetetic is supposed to be supported by

his analysis of the theologico-political problem, there are fundamental questions about both the

theoretical and practical relations between religion and politics in the West that remain

unaddressed.

6. Conclusion

I have argued that Strauss’s critiques of Heidegger fail to show that historicity is an

incoherent idea and that Strauss’s alternative history and conception of philosophy, while casting

a critical light on elements of Heidegger’s thought are not without their own problems. This is

not, however, to claim that historicity can be immediately applied in political theory. The

question of whether seinsgeschicklich thought can really be practical is a staple of criticisms of

Heidegger.142 The complaint is that there is no obvious way to connect Heidegger's history of

Being with what we ordinarily understand as political or social history. Heidegger is arguing

that there is a type of thought, different from the causal analysis of history that is essential to

authentic existence. And he believes that because this is so our understanding of action and of

ethics will require a rethinking. But Heidegger does not undertake these tasks, providing at most

hints about the direction in which such an undertaking would proceed. This raises the question

of the relevance of his work to political theory.

For this reason I have approached Heidegger’s thought by way of the critique of

historicism and the question of how, by being a constantly renewed venture, philosophy can

29

offer a cure to modernity’s historical sickness. Strauss’s concern with both issues attests to their

relevance to political philosophy. It is worthwhile asking whether Strauss’s critique of radical

historicism succeeds, and political theory ought to be interested in the nature of philosophical

thought. Finally, the comparison of Strauss and Heidegger is interesting on its own merits.

While a consideration of Strauss’s explicit critique of Heidegger may be far from exhausting the

possibilities of such a comparison, it is the place to start.

30

1. Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy & American Democracy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006); Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Eugene R. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2006) and Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) trans. Christopher Nadon.2. Since Heidegger comes to speak of the end of philosophy it may seem mistaken to say that he is concerned to restore the dignity of something called philosophy. In most of his works, however, Heidegger is happy to use the term, although it always means something different from philosophy as traditionally practised. Throughout this paper philosophy for Heidegger will carry the sense of augenblicklich or seinsgeschicklich thought, a type of thinking that concerns Heidegger throughout his lifelong pursuit of the question of Being.3. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 59-123.4. Ibid., p. 77. Italics in the original.5. Ibid., pp. 120-1.6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 232-238, "The Convalescent."7. See Robert Pippin's excellent article "Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra," in Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong eds. Nietzsche's New Seas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 45-71.8. For a discussion of the dual problems of knowing/doing and existence/meaning in Nietzsche that relates them to Gadamer and Heidegger see Gianni Vattimo's essay "Hermeneutical Reason/ Dialectical Reason," in The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 9-39. 9. On the influence of Nietzsche on Strauss see Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. pp. 5-24. Strauss has been accused of being a secret Nietzschean by Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (London: St. Martin's Press, 1988) and Peter Levine, Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 152-9, but neither successfully makes the case that Strauss's attempted revival of classical political thought is purely exoteric.10. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 93-4.11. Victor Gourevitch, "Philosophy and Politics II," Review of Metaphysics 22 (1968): 281-325, pp. 324-5.12. Gourevitch puts the point nicely. After citing Strauss's comment in On Tyranny that both he and Kojève "appear to turn our attention away from Being and toward tyranny" (p. 212, emphasis added) Gourevitch notes that Strauss both "alerts us to the importance of the problem of Being and warns us not to expect an adequate discussion of it." "Philosophy and Politics II," p. 281.13. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 7-8.14. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 196. Also see Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 29-30; Natural Right and History, p. 32; What is Political Philosophy?, pp. 24, 93-4; and Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 36-7.

The question of how Strauss proposes to support the revival of classical political philosophy is admittedly a controversial one. There are appeals to the idea of an ordered whole of which the human soul is both a part and a reflection, as well as an appeal to the natural consciousness of such an order, throughout Strauss's works. But Strauss does not attempt to defend these assumptions of order in such a way as to suggest that they form the foundation for his retrieval of natural right. Nor, I believe, could they form such a foundation. See the discussions in Victor Gourevitch, "Philosophy and Politics II"; Robert Pippin, "The Modern World of Leo Strauss," Political Theory 20 (1992): 448-72; Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 107-140; and Richard Kennington, "Strauss's Natural Right and History," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1981): 57-86.15. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, p. 91.16. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 11.17. Ibid., pp. 155-6.18. Jürgen Gebhardt, "Leo Strauss: The Quest for Truth in Times of Perplexity," in Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought After World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 89.19. As this paragraph suggests there are many areas of Heidegger’s and Strauss’s thought that could be profitably compared. In concentrating on Strauss’s critique of historicity and the question of how philosophy can be the continually renewed venture that both Strauss and Heidegger take it to be, I do not wish to suggest that this is the only basis on which

one might prefer the thought of Strauss to that of Heidegger. For a comparison of Strauss and Heidegger on Plato see Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).20. A recent example of this identification of Strauss and Heidegger is Luc Ferry, Political Philosophy 1: Rights - The New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 3-4, 18-21.21. Two recent examples of this approach to the relationship between Heidegger and Strauss, both of which take Strauss's side of the argument, are Steven B. Smith, "Destruktion or Recovery: Leo Strauss's Critique of Heidegger," Review of Metaphysics 51 (1997): 345-77, and Horst Mewes, "Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger: Greek Antiquity and the Meaning of Modernity," in Kielmansegg, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, pp. 105-120.22. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); also see What is Political Philosophy?, p. 246.23. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, p. 241.24. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, p. 30; What is Political Philosophy?, p. 27.25. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 30-1; Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 30.26. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 2.27. The former was originally published in Interpretation in 1971. The latter is an unpublished piece put together from a student transcript of a recording of a talk and supplemented by other unpublished notes. See Thomas Pangle's comments on this piece in his Introduction to Classical Political Rationalism, p. xxix. In Natural Right and History, pp. 22-35, Strauss critiques a position he calls radical or existential historicism, a position whose central thesis is “prepared by Nietzsche.” (p.26) It is likely that Heidegger is the intended target of these remarks. The structure of Strauss’s argument here is similar to that of the two essays considered in the body of this paper. Historicism is a thesis about the historically imposed limitations on human Understanding which leads to relativism unless supplemented by the insight gained in an absolute moment. Similarly in his exchange with Gadamer over the latter’s book Truth and Method Strauss argues that historicism is an incoherent relativism unless it invokes an absolute moment. Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode: Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978):5-12. Also see Carl Page, “Historicist Finitude and Philosophical Hermeneutics,” The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), pp. 369-384 and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to Carl Page,” in the same volume, pp. 385-387.28. For example, Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, p. 94, 101and Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, p. 55.29. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 35-36, 39, 42; Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 33.30. Strauss, Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 30.31. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, p. 32.32. Ibid., p. 34.33. Ibid., p. 36.34. Ibid., p. 38.35. Ibid., p. 37.36. Ibid.37. Ibid., pp. 32-5.38. Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 9-35.39. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 28-9; Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 31.40. David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 27-33. It is a point of contention in the literature on Husserl whether Kant or Descartes is the great original whom Husserl follows, but this debate concerns not the constitution of objectivity by a transcendental subject, but the question of whether that subjectivity is primarily active or passive. This point is not crucial to my discussion of Strauss.41. Strauss, Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 31.42. Ibid.43. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Twelfth Edition (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1972), p. 437. Both translations of Sein und Zeit - Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) and Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) - contain the page numbers of the German edition so I have cited only these. For the most part I have followed Stambaugh's translation.44. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1992), p. 257. Gadamer's discussion of the relation of Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology (pp. 254-8) is enlightening.45. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: "Selected" Problems of "Logic", trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 120.46. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 37, 38-9; Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 32.

47. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, p. 38.48. Ibid.49. Ibid.50. Ibid., p. 39.51. See Hegel's remarks on "Critical Philosophy" in paragraphs 40-60 of G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Gaerts, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), pp. 80-108.52. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 172.53. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, p. 29.54. Ibid., p. 40; Platonic Political Philosophy, pp. 32-3.55. On Kojève see Patrick Riley, "An Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojève," Political Theory 9 (1981): 5-48; Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Michael S. Roth Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). A valuable corrective to Kojève's reading of Hegel's historicism is Frederick C. Beiser, "Hegel's Historicism," in Frederick C. Beiser ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 270-300.56. Strauss, Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 33.57. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 137.58. Otto Pöggeler, "'Historicity' in Heidegger's Later Work," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 4 (1973): 53-73. Also see Karl Löwith, "Dasein Resolute Unto Itself, and Being Which Gives Itself," in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 33-68. Recently the view that Being and Time is an anthropological misstep on the way to the antihumanist later works has been developed in France. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) argue that Heidegger's early work was still in the grip of a humanism that misled him into supporting the Nazis in 1933-4. They suggest that the later Heidegger overcomes this element of his early thought. For a critique of this view as a mere tactical reaction to the Heidegger controversy see Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 159-62.59. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 9.60. Ibid.61. Ibid.62. On German historical thought see Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983). Also of interest is the same author's "Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term," Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (January, 1995): 129-152, and Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). Good accounts of Heidegger's position in, and reaction to, the German tradition of philosophical thought about history are found in Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), and Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).63. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) contains a thorough account of Heidegger's early lecture courses. In addition to Kisiel and the Bambach and Barash works already cited, Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1987) and Hans Ruin, Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of Historicity Through Heidegger's Works (Karlshamn: Almquist & Wiksell, 1994) contain useful discussions of the pre-Being and Time works.64. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time, p. 145. The contrast between object-historical and actualization-historical is first made by Heidegger in his comments on Karl Jasper's Psychology of Worldviews. These comments were distributed by Heidegger in 1921. Also see Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 19.65. Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, p. 17.66. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 382.67. William D. Blattner, "Existential Temporality in Being and Time," in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 99-129 and Ruin, Enigmatic Origins both argue that Heidegger is attempting to establish original temporality as a transcendental horizon. They differ on whether this effort is successful or not, and draw quite different conclusions from their analyses.68. On this point see Daniel Dahlstrom's important article "Heidegger's Concept of Temporality: Reflections on a Recent Criticism," Review of Metaphysics 49 (1995): 95-115.

69. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 327-8.70. Ibid., p. 328. Italics in the original.71. Ibid., p. 233.72. Ibid., p. 262.73. Ibid., p. 311.74. Ibid., pp. 344, 347, 371, 386, 391, 410, 425, 427.75. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 150. Italics in the original.76. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 385.77. Ibid., p. 385. Up to the discussion of repetition of a heritage in section 74 Heidegger's discussion of historicity has moved entirely within the terms established by anticipatory resoluteness. As anticipation (or being-toward-death) corresponds to the future and resoluteness (or being-guilty) corresponds to the past, this is equivalent to saying that the discussion has moved within the terms established in the analysis of existential temporality. Only with repetition does the "included" dimension of time, the authentic present, come into its own. This supports the argument that historicity and not existential temporality is the more fundamental concept.78. Ibid., pp. 392-4; also Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, pp. 32-5, 45-51.79. On the idea of a temporally enriched or filled present see Robert J. Dostal, "Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger," in Charles Guignon ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 141-169.80. A good discussion relating the ecstases of time to order and justice is found in Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 119-25.81. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 385.82. This is a conclusion advanced by both David Couzens Hoy, "History, Historicity, and Historiography in Being and Time," in Michael Murray ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 329-53, and Karsten Harries, "Heidegger as a Political Thinker," in the same volume, pp. 304-28.83. Richard Wolin in The Politics of Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 62, finds that Being and Time contains a voluntaristic decisionism, and harbours "certain fatalistic tendencies." Italics in the original. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 43 finds historicity to be "rigorously Kantian" and a "structural matrix" and as such neutral between possible choices. Charles Guignon, "History and Commitment in the Early Heidegger," in Dreyfus and Hall eds., Heidegger: A Critical Reader, pp. 130-42; and Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 47, argue that the choice of oneself amounts to nothing more than affirming one's thrownness.84. In What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 79, Heidegger describes this belonging together as follows. "We ask what the relation is between man's nature and the Being of beings. But as soon as I thoughtfully say 'man's nature,' I have already said relatedness to Being. Likewise, as soon as I say thoughtfully: Being of beings, the relatedness to man's nature has been named. Each of the two members of the relation between man's nature and Being already implies the relation itself. To speak to the heart of the matter: there is no such thing here as members of the relation, nor the relation as such." In "The Principle of Identity," in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 27, 45, Heidegger remarks that "thinking and Being belong to the Same" and the same "is not merely the identical."85. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 133.86. Ibid., pp. 350-1.87. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 236.88. On the double transcendence see the discussion of the two meanings of physis in Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 182. For a fascinating discussion of what it means for human beings to be in the middle, the between of the double transcendence, see William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). Although Desmond is explicitly hostile to Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte, I believe that his sense of the between is, if not shaped by, at least compatible with, the Heidegger of Being and Time.89. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 46.90. Ibid., p. 112.91. On the difference between Verwindung and Überwindung, or the way that Heidegger believes that seinsgeschicklich thought takes up the past without overcoming it, see Gianni Vattimo, the End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 171-6.92. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 91.

93. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 80.94. Ibid., pp. 148-9.95. Ibid., p. 64.96. Ibid.97. Ibid., p. 74.98. Productive seeing is a "seeing which in the very act of seeing compels what is seen before it." Ibid., p. 76.99. Ibid., p. 97.100. Ibid., p. 107.101. Ibid., p. 112.102. Ibid., pp. 144-7.103. Ibid., p. 160. Italics in the original.104. Ibid.105. Werner Marx, Is There a Measure on Earth?, trans. Thomas J. Nenon and Reginald Lilly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 39-42, 129-46. 106. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 96.107. Ibid., p. 108.108. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, pp. 108-9.109. Ibid., p. 110.110. Ibid., pp. 115-6.111. Ibid., p. 111.112. Ibid., p. 116.113. Ibid., pp. 116-7. 114. Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, p. 97.115. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, p. 121. 116. Pangle, Leo Strauss, pp.26-32. 117. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, p. 120. While not crucial to the analysis here, these claims about the natural attitude remain problematic. For example, the parable of the poor man’s lamb that Nathan relates to David in II Samuel that Strauss uses as one of the epigrams of Natural Right and History is thought to be a late interpolation in the David and Bathsheba story dating from the prophetic period. The parable introduces a moral that it simply had not occurred to the original chroniclers of the political history of David to draw. For an interesting discussion of this passage see Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume I: Israel and Revelation ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), pp. 259-67. 118 . Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, p. 122.119. Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, pp. 153-4. 120. Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 30-32. 121 . Ibid., p. 32.122. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, p. 30. 123. Strauss, On Tyranny, p. 196. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid.126. Ibid.127. Ibid.128. Ibid.129. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, pp. 10-15; Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, pp. 36-46; Pangle, … and particularly Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem.130.See Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, p. 47; Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, pp. 95-6. 131. An clear and insightful account of the relation between Heidegger’s thought and Christian theology is John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1999).132. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, pp. 26-30. 133. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy, p. 40. 134. Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, pp. 22-28. 135. Ibid., pp. 141-180. The Strauss lecture is entitled “Reason and Revelation” and dates from 1948. 136. Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, pp. 36-46; Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, 12-13.137. Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, pp. 9-10. 138. Ibid., p. 10.

139. My account of the sacrum imperium is taken from Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume II: The Middle Ages to Aquinas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 52-65 and Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2006) pp. 266-92.140. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume 7 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 720. 141. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, pp. 41-65. 142. Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, pp. 246 ff., Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, pp. 144-147; David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 126: and Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 171-3.