Chapter Fifteen. How To Read Maimonides After Heidegger: The Cases Of Strauss And Levinas

Abstract

This chapter explores how Strauss and Levinas understood their philosophical projects as Maimonidean: both were committed to understanding the relationship between religion and philosophy, and committed as well to a model of transcendental reason in keeping with Cohen's Platonic reading of Maimonides. Heidegger's significance for twentieth-century philosophy is notoriously hard to summarize and it is best to understand his importance for Levinas and Strauss by reconstructing his thought from their perspectives. It is unclear when Levinas and Strauss each learned of Heidegger's Nazism. Levinas' critique of Heidegger's mit-sein can be usefully compared to another, more explicitly Jewish critique penned years earlier by Martin Buber. Strauss, like Levinas, saw an intimate link between existentialism's disregard for certain crucial philosophical questions and Heidegger's Nazism-however, where those questions were couched in terms of ethics for Levinas, for Strauss they were couched in political terms. Keywords: Heidegger; Levinas; Maimonides; Martin Buber; Nazism; Strauss