The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

Abstract

The importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to Leo Strauss’s intellectual development is well established.1 Indeed, Strauss was open about the unparalleled influence Heidegger exerted over him. In one lecture Strauss proclaimed that “the only question of importance . . . is the question whether Heidegger’s teaching is true or not.”2 It is also widely acknowledged that Heidegger, the “radical historicist” and philosophical collaborator with the National Socialist Party, served as the foil to Strauss’s constructive project. Strauss nicely captured the paradoxical position Heidegger came to occupy in his mind when he said: “Only a great thinker can help us in our plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.”3 But while the fact of Heidegger’s importance and notoriety is beyond doubt, we are still a far cry from reaching a satisfactory understanding of how these two assessments relate to each other. This may be, in part, because Heidegger scholars rarely read Strauss, and those scholars of Strauss who read Heidegger tend to take Strauss’s reading of Heidegger at face value. One area in which scholarship still lags pertains to the role of religion in Strauss’s interpretation of Heidegger. It is no longer debated that Strauss’s political philosophy cannot be genuinely understood without taking into account his reflections on revealed religion. Jacob Klein’s testimony, that in his early years Strauss was obsessed “with two questions: one, the question of God; and two, the question of politics,” stands true with respect to Strauss’s mature thinking as well.4 How, then, does Strauss’s intense concern with religion and revelation relate to his persistent occupation with Heidegger? And how does it figure into the larger context of his political philosophy?The argument I wish to develop here is that we cannot fully grasp Strauss’s understanding of his former teacher without appreciating the religious horizon and connotations that he identified in Heidegger’s philosophy. More specifically, Strauss’s engagement with Heidegger is bound up with the former’s critical attitude toward Christianity and what he took to be its detrimental impact on (political) philosophy and religion. To illustrate this, I focus on a single motif that Strauss evoked several times and developed over three decades: the call. This motif is taken from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, where it is introduced at a critical moment in the portrayal of Dasein’s achievement of authenticity. Strauss followed a prevalent reading of Heidegger’s early philosophical anthropology, interpreting the Heideggerian call as a secularization of the Christian category of revelation, and this played into Strauss’s more general conceptualization of the impoverished turn toward historicism, experientialism, and ultimately nihilism in modern philosophy and religion. Tracing and analyzing the occasions in which Strauss evokes this motif shed invaluable light on the place Heidegger occupied in Strauss’s understanding of what he famously termed the “theologico-political predicament” of modernity.Some of the texts examined below have been discussed by Heinrich Meier in his chapter “Death as God: A Note on Martin Heidegger” in his work Leo Strauss and the Theologico-political Problem.5 However, my analysis diverges significantly from Meier’s. This counterinterpretation is rooted in a competing understanding of the relationship between revealed religion and philosophy in Strauss. It is thus worthwhile, by way of introduction, to unpack in brief the contours of this interpretive difference.From early on Strauss held that there is a radical distinction between philosophy and religion, and any form of synthesis between the two was anathema to him. Later on, he conceptualized this distinction by asserting that there exist two basic alternatives to approaching the knowledge of the good: “human guidance or divine guidance”—the unaided effort of natural human reason, which he termed symbolically “Athens,” or divine revelation, “Jerusalem.” “No alternative is more fundamental than this.”6 Strauss believed that these alternatives are incompatible, but the dialectical tension between them is the secret to the West’s vitality. In modern times, however, the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem had been repressed because it was mistakenly thought to have been resolved. Disqualifying Jerusalem through mockery, demonstrating its irrationality by rational means, or attempting to synthesize it with Athens, the conflict was rendered inane and the fundamental irreconcilability of the two “cities” nullified. Since this is a dire situation in Strauss’s view, he sought to revive the confrontation between revelation and philosophy in order to attend again to the most fundamental question of political philosophy, namely, that of the just life. While there is no doubt that Strauss himself was a “citizen of Athens,” that is, a philosopher, his aim was, at the very least, a return to an admittance of the gravity, and insolvability, of this question. It was his contention that “no one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, or, for that matter, some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology, or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.”7 Meier claims that while Strauss appears to be attempting to revive the confrontation between revelation and philosophy, we should not deduce from this that he actually believed that revelation can challenge philosophy. To the contrary, Strauss hoped his readers would understand from his writings that revelation cannot offer a compelling alternative to philosophy. The “quarrel” Strauss set up, according to Meier, is between revelation, defined as blind and irrational faith, and philosophy. Thus defined, revelation cannot be considered a serious position from a philosophical perspective and, as a result, cannot call philosophy into question. In Meier’s depiction, revelation served as a straw man endowed with the purpose of emboldening philosophy correctly understood. Accordingly, there is no difference for Meier’s Strauss between Jewish, Christian, or Islamic revelation, and the problematic of interpreting the content of revelation is of no concern to him. Strauss was interested in the category of revelation only insofar as it served the purpose of bolstering philosophy’s self-recognition.8While it must be admitted that Strauss’s statements on the matter are not always clear-cut, Leora Batnitzky has convincingly argued that Meier’s interpretation implicates Strauss in the very flaw he chastised modern philosophy for, namely, the rendition of revelation as refutable theoretical knowledge. This, Strauss claimed, was a caricature of revealed religion. It also amounts to the denial of the incommensurability of revelation and philosophy and the rejection of the distinction between the two symbolic cities as a problem to be reckoned with in the first place.9 In Strauss’s view, the misguided assumption that revelation can be disproved has taken philosophy (and religion) on an erroneous path culminating in the modern nihilistic state of crisis that he himself sought to rectify. The way he believed that the present crisis could be addressed was by reinstating the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which he defined in the following way: “A philosophy which believes that it can refute the possibility of revelation—and a philosophy which does not believe that: this is the real meaning of la querelle des anciens et des modernes.”10 Moreover, Strauss most definitely was not indifferent to the content of revelation or to the problem of its interpretation. He contrasted what he took to be the characteristically Christian idea of revelation as doctrinal knowledge with the medieval Jewish and Islamic accounts of revelation as divine law. The distinction is crucial: by taking revelation to be dogmatic doctrine, historical Christianity committed the fallacy of attempting to reconcile philosophy and revelation by placing them in a single domain. The making of revelation into knowledge contributed to the rise of the modern conviction that reason refuted revelation, which in effect gave rise to impossible expectations of reason that caused the mistrust and ultimate self-destruction of modern rationalism. The modern belief in the self-sufficiency of reason led to the eschewing of prudence and moderation, to the reducing of knowledge to history, and to the relativizing of truth. In Strauss’s narrative, the collapse of modern philosophy is exemplified by Friedrich Nietzsche and even more so by Heidegger’s historicist philosophy and nihilistic Nazi politics. While it is easy to see that Strauss’s reading of Christian theology is overschematic, his philosophical point is that much of the ills of modern European thought spring from inherited religious assumptions pertaining to the possibility of synthesizing Athens and Jerusalem.11 Thus, while claiming to refute religion, modern thought is made possible by, and indeed has not entirely liberated itself from, its religious Christian past. Over against this, Strauss’s restorative effort consisted partly in positing the medieval Jewish and Islamic traditions and their conception of the insufficiency of reason and revelation as divine law, which, he claimed, does not succumb to the aforementioned pitfall because it coordinates between, while maintaining the distinction and incommensurability of, revelation and philosophy.This distinction stands at the heart of his claim that the medieval Jewish and Islamic tradition, based as it is on ancient Greek philosophy, offers itself as a corrective to the modern crisis-laden theoretical framework. According to this tradition, in Strauss’s view, revealed religion was not “culture,” “science,” “consciousness,” “experience,” or “a ‘field of validity.’” Rather, it upheld an account of revelation as public and political divine legislation. Strauss articulated his fundamental position on this matter in a footnote to the chapter of his Philosophy and Law (1935) dedicated to criticizing Julius Guttmann’s interpretation of medieval Jewish philosophy. “We do not deny . . . that the problem of ‘belief and knowledge’ is the central problem of medieval rationalism,” he declared. “Our quarrel with Guttmann is only about the meaning of ‘belief’ here, and it seems to us more precise to say ‘law and philosophy’ rather than ‘belief and knowledge.’”12Once revelation is understood primarily as ceremonial law and not as knowledge, it follows that belief in revelation does not resort to scientific standards for its justification. Obedience to divine law is not based on demonstration, so it cannot be proved or refuted by philosophical argumentation. But this does not mean that revelation is irrational blind faith or that the distinction between revelation and reason is equal to the distinction between irrationalism and rationalism. Rather, Strauss called for a return to an account of rationalism that does not perceive reason as self-sufficient and that does not expect it to comprehend the “whole” unassisted. The representative of this premodern tradition of rationalism is Maimonides. In the center of the thesis that Strauss offered in Philosophy and Law and that he would continue to develop in the ensuing years was the claim, based on Alfarabi’s Platonic political perspective, that the meaning of prophecy for Maimonides was fundamentally political and that Moses, whose prophecy was equal to none, is best understood as the Platonic legislating philosopher. Within this framework, philosophical inquiry was licensed and even required to interpret the law, which is public and aimed at the perfection of the body and soul. This inquiry was guided by reason, but its rationalism was checked. “Not the mystery of [the Torah’s] origin, the search for which leads either to theosophy or ‘Epicureanism,’ but its end, the comprehension of which guarantees obedience to the Torah, is accessible to human reason.”13 For the sake of the discussion below, it should be added that according to this account, the effort to reach the true meaning of revelation was easily verified, for it had to be, at least outwardly, justified by and in accordance with the demand for obedience to the heteronomous divine law, the highest authority of the religious community.14 Since philosophical inquiry into the meaning and truth of the law can jeopardize social stability, the conflict between philosophy and society necessitated a dual mode of interpretation: one directed at the masses and one directed at philosophers. This premodern theologico-political structure, Strauss asserted, avoided an illegitimate synthesis of philosophy and faith.Once it is recognized that Strauss sought to pose anew the Athens-Jerusalem confrontation—best represented, in his mind, by ancient Greek philosophy and the ethical monotheistic tradition of the Hebrew Bible—it can be seen that he accepted that revelation presents a continual challenge to philosophy. This challenge does not take the form of a scientific claim but of a contesting and incompatible worldview, grounded in a competing answer to the question of the life worth living. Both Athens and Jerusalem operate through reasoning, but the core of their dispute pertains to what constitutes the criteria for the starting point of truthful reasoning.This introduction puts us in a more informed position to examine how Strauss’s use of the motif of Heidegger’s call is tied to his reflections on revelation and how it illuminates his thought as a whole. Unlike Meier, who in his analysis of the call focuses on the issue of “death as God,” I argue that Strauss’s repeated employment of this motif is driven by his attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the various ills that secularism, historicism, and the privatization of philosophy and religion in modernity have brought about—ills, which he believed, are exemplified by Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus Strauss’s assessment of Heidegger’s “call of conscience” becomes the crucial foundation for his own philosophical project, beginning in the 1930s, to return to a pre-Christian or non-Christian assessment of the conflict between philosophy and revelation.15_________The first reference to this motif is recorded in an early stage of Strauss’s intellectual career, in a letter to his friend Gerhard Krüger from 1930, when Strauss began developing many of the views outlined above. Here Strauss offered a condensed account of the main argument of his recently published book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.16 Seeking to clarify “the actual core of my reflections,” which he suspected was inadequately conveyed in the book, Strauss explained that the main question he was grappling with was this: in its confrontation with revelation, “how was it possible for the Enlightenment to have been victorious?”17 As he understood it, the heart of the matter is encapsulated in the Enlightenment’s rejection of miracles. He considered Franz Rosenzweig’s treatment of the matter as the “typical view” of the modern religious person. In The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig admitted that while for moderns the belief in miracles is “an embarrassment,” he set out to reinterpret them as signs or predictions that verify divine providence and revelation and as such legitimate religious categories.18 However, Strauss contended, in his attempt to revitalize miracles, Rosenzweig actually internalized the very post-Enlightenment assumptions that had rendered miracles embarrassing in the first place, thereby exhibiting his admittance that the traditional understanding was no longer acceptable. The argument he tried to offer in his Spinoza book, Strauss explained, is that the Enlightenment did not in fact refute the possibility of miracles. This is because “a miracle, according to its own meaning, can be experienced as a miracle only on the basis of faith,” and it cannot, by definition, be refuted through presuppositions external to faith. Rather than refute miracles, the Enlightenment “only succeeded in securing itself, i.e. the already enlightened human being, against miracles. It created a position that is unattainable for miracles.” This means that the project of modern philosophy that sprang from the Enlightenment celebrated a victory over revealed religion that it believed had been achieved through scientific refutation, but no such victory was actually achieved, as no such refutation is possible. Instead of offering an argument to refute miracles, it in fact only expressed a will against revealed religion. Modern philosophy’s foundation is an unproved decision, not knowledge.It is at this point in the letter that Heidegger is drawn into the analysis. “I see indications of such a will in Machiavelli, Bruno, and Spinoza,” Strauss wrote to Krüger, adding that “its most extreme representation is reached in Nietzsche, and its completion attained in—Being and Time.” The example he culled to demonstrate that Heidegger’s early masterpiece represents the completion of the modern tradition of antireligious will is the notion of the call. “I mean,” he continued, “in the interpretation of the call of conscience and in the answer given there to the question of who is calling. It is only on the basis of Heidegger’s Dasein interpretation that an adequate atheistic interpretation of the Bible should be possible.” According to Strauss, Heidegger’s philosophy reflects an important truth about modern philosophy’s attitude toward religion. The analysis of human existence—Dasein—in Sein und Zeit, which Strauss interpreted as an atheistic work of “existence philosophy,” is the culmination of the tradition that emerged from the inadequate charge against revealed religion initiated in the seventeenth century. More specifically, the precise moment reflecting the completion of this atheistic modernist tradition is Heidegger’s notion of “the call of conscience.” To understand why this is so, we must turn to Sein und Zeit.The notion of “the call of conscience” is introduced and developed in sections 54–60 in division 2 of Sein und Zeit as part of the discussion of Dasein’s existence as a structural totality.19 According to Heidegger, in its average everydayness, Dasein’s default manner of being, its “who,” is the “who” of the “they” (Das Man). Its possibilities of being have been predetermined by the anonymity of Das Man, and thus it is held back from “taking hold” of these possibilities. Heidegger’s general term for this mode of existence is “inauthenticity.” To take itself “back to itself from the lostness in the ‘they’” (BT, 312; SZ, 267–68), Dasein must choose to own, or own up to, the totality and particularity of its existence. Doing so amounts to what Heidegger terms “authenticity.” What prompts this existential transformation is the “call of conscience” (Ruf des Gewissen) or the “voice of conscience” (Stimme des Gewissen). If the they conceals Dasein’s ownmost possibilities, the call reveals them. “Conscience,” Heidegger explains, “gives us ‘something’ to understand; it discloses” (BT, 314; SZ, 269). It appeals, summons Dasein to its ownmost potentiality of being, that is, to resoluteness, to authenticity. Importantly, while characterized as a call, Heidegger does not have in mind an actual, ontic “vocal utterance.” Ontologically construed, the call is the primordial openness of Dasein’s ownmost interiority that has been concealed by the chatter of the they. “We are not comparing this phenomenon with a call,” he insists. Instead, it is “a giving-to-understand,” a “kind of discourse” featured by disclosedness. “Conscience” is “the call of Care,” Dasein’s most fundamental ontological structure. In its calling, it reasserts the integrity of Dasein’s being by revealing that its lostness in Das Man has covered over the possibilities of its own existence and, most notably, the possibility of impossibility, its death. The call individuates Dasein by alerting it to its nullity, its constitutive negativity, its being-toward-death. Loosening the fetters of Das Man, the call calls Dasein to its uncanniness and anxiety and lays bare the “guilt” or “in-debtness” (Schuld) of its existence.As Strauss related in his letter to Krüger, the reason he identified this Heideggerian notion as a crucial moment in the tradition of modern atheism is “the answer given there to the question of who is calling.” Dasein is called, but by whom? Heidegger’s answer is clear: “In conscience Dasein calls itself” (BT, 320; SZ, 275). What is the content of the call? Here, too, the answer is straightforward. “Taken strictly,” Heidegger states, “nothing” (BT, 318; SZ, 273). But while it is Dasein who summons itself in this silent call, void of content or information, this does not mean the call is voluntarily performed or can be anticipated. To the contrary, it is something that happens to Dasein. Heidegger expresses this complex feature as follows: “‘It’ [Es] calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtfully does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond and over me” (translation amended). Strauss’s remark that Heidegger’s answer to the question of “who is calling” constitutes a milestone in the philosophical tradition of atheism directs our attention to the distinct religious overtones of the call. For what is presented is the familiar religious structure of the transition from foresakenness (Verlassenheit) and being-abandoned (Überlassenheit) to existential redemption through an eruptive and transformative revelatory summoning. Strong religious reverberations mark the description of this call: it is “an abrupt arousal,” coming “from afar unto afar” and “reaches him who wants to be brought back” (BT, 316; SZ, 271), and it is “something like an alien voice” (BT, 321; SZ, 277). At the same time, this religious imagery is employed in an otherwise strictly philosophical context. Indeed, Heidegger explicitly asserts that what he is concerned with “is prior to any description and classification of experiences of conscience” (BT, 313; SZ, 269), particularly warning against misinterpreting the call as a theological referral. “It is no less distant,” he posits, “from a theological exegesis of conscience or any employment of this phenomenon for proofs of God or for establishing an ‘immediate’ consciousness of God” (BT, 313; SZ, 269). He also cautions against understanding “the voice of conscience as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated,” a power that could be understood “as a person who makes himself known—namely God” (BT, 320; SZ, 275).The presence of identifiably religious markers amid explicit denial of confessional interpretation is repeated throughout Sein und Zeit and led many to interpret the Dasein analytic as a secular philosophical anthropology deeply imprinted by Christian texts, structures, and assumptions, wherein Christian categories are divested of their original content and formulized ontologically as universal structures. From this perspective, the Heideggerian call is a secularization of the theological notion of divine revelation. Retaining its structure but stripped of its content, this secularized category involves the immanentization of the transcendent origin of the caller and the internalization of the impact of its summoning. As the mark of Augustine on Heidegger’s thought is well recorded, the “call of consciousness” may be said to betray, in a secular register, a trace of the Augustinian idiom regarding God’s voice being “more intimate to me than I am to myself.”20 The secularized overtones of the call are accentuated when the undeniable parallels to Søren Kierkegaard’s thought are taken into account. Heidegger evidently emulates the features of the Danish thinker’s discussion of being lost in the “crowd” and found by divine grace, albeit while omitting its overt theistic import.21 Accordingly, the Heideggerian distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity emerges as a secularized equivalent of the Christian distinction between sinful unredeemed existence and graced redeemed existence. Heidegger, it must be noted, rejected this interpretation in toto. He insisted that interpreting the call ontically as a secularized event of divine revelation is mistaken on a number of fronts, not the least because the ontological nature of his philosophical project means that it is to be distinguished from, and indeed intends to undergird, the ontic contours of both existential thinking and traditional theology.What is evident from Strauss’s letter, however, is that he was attuned to this interpretive trend and harnessed it in the service of his own concerns. For him, the Heideggerian call constituted the replacement and secularization of a transcendent God revealing himself to human beings with a Dasein-centered immanent call from itself to itself. But why is the Heideggerian call the ultimate fulfillment of the antireligious philosophical attitude that commenced with the early modern thinkers? According to Strauss’s logic, the historicization and psychologization of biblical revelation that was accomplished in Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise deprived the law of its divine and absolute authority and of its public political function. What remains in the post-Spinoza age is a notion of revelation as a personal experience of a call that gives itself to Heidegger’s secularized, interior, subject-centered, and atheistic call from Dasein to itself. Following his study of Spinoza, Strauss believed that the victory of philosophical thinking over revealed religion can be accomplished only if the “whole” can be interpreted without resort to God. With the godless depiction of human existence offered in Sein und Zeit and the existentially salvific call cut off from its divine origin, it appears that Heidegger had done just that.It should be pointed out that Strauss’s characterization of Heidegger’s philosophy as atheistic is misleading if it is intended to denote an affirmation of godlessness or a positivistic rejection of the possibility of revelation. This appears to be the case here, for Heidegger is said to perpetuate the Enlightenment’s atheism, which for Strauss meant the belief that revelation has been refuted. The truth of the matter is that while Heidegger was deeply critical of Christianity, he did not argue for the impossibility of revelation, nor did he perceive the world as definitively godless. Rather, he delimited the relevance of the content of revelation to the domain of faith and claimed that philosophy ought to bracket the question of God without taking a definitive stand on the matter—either affirmative or negative. He believed that philosophy and theology were categorically distinct and that the self-attestation of faith “remains closed off in principle from any philosophical experience” (BT, 496; SZ, 306).22 In other words, claiming that philosophy has refuted revelation would make little sense to him. There is, moreover, much indication that in his own way, Heidegger was a god seeker. In the winter semester of 1921–22, lecturing on Aristotle, he claimed that “the more radical philosophy is, the more determinately is it on a path away from God; yet, precisely in the radical actualization of the ‘away,’ it has its own difficult proximity to God.”23 More than three decades later, in 1957, he expressed a similar sentiment when he noted that “the godless thinking . . . is thus closer to the divine God. Here this means only: godless thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.”24 Indeed, in his philosophy he sought to prepare for a time when “the gods” would return and establish a new ordering in which the holiness of being would radiate once more. However, even as Strauss misrepresented Heidegger’s position, we should not lose sight of the gravity of his claim: Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and its notion of the call represent the zenith of modern philosophy. This assessment is both striking and revealing, as it helps us appreciate the motivation and strategy of Strauss’s own philosophical project: insofar as Heidegger occupies this momentous status in the history of philosophy, overcoming his thought would amount to breaking free of the impasse of modern thought and enable the reopening of the dispute over the fundamental questions once again.But there is some uncertainty in Strauss’s position as it is expressed in this letter. Strauss wrote that “it is only on the basis of Heidegger’s Dasein interpretation that an adequate atheistic interpretation of the Bible should be possible.” This seems to entail that until Heidegger’s Dasein interpretation, modern philosophers presented only inadequate atheistic interpretations of the Bible. Strauss certainly held this to be true with regard to, for example, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza, who leveled a critique against religion but who were still bound by its determinations.25 It follows that unlike his predecessors, Heidegger’s atheism is completely liberated from the directives of any theological past and hence allows for an “adequate” atheism. This would mean that his philosophy—and emblematically his account of the call—is utterly secular, and any secularization that may have occurred has left no remnants of its past religious making. It is in this sense, it seems, that it represents the “completion” of the modern atheistic tradition. The difficulty with this interpretation is that the Heideggerian moment that Strauss claimed exhibits the final overcoming of the religious impact on philosophy is precisely one in which the detheologization of its religious orig