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- POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY SHOULD SEEK TRANSCENDENT MORAL PRINCIPLES
Some ObjectionsAlmost all conservative, natural right proponents are also people who believe that Western culture is superior to other cultures and that society should reflect a nature that is patriarchal and elitist. Strauss is no exception; although he grounds these beliefs in an appeal to classical philosophy, many people see his ideas as simply another manifestation of narrow-minded bigotry. Nietzsche argued that we invent such “noble lies” merely to perpetuate existing power relations. It is easy to imagine critics accusing Strauss of appealing to broad-based transcendent truths simply to reject other versions of reality more suited to changing society. It may be that our Western culture induces such a bias in us, a bias which can be overcome by adhering to a version of relativism that not only preserves our beliefs, but also respects the beliefs of other cultures. This is because, for many people, relativism is not so much an ethical belief as it is a methodological imperative. For anthropologists, relativism is necessary to truly appreciate the beliefs and customs of other cultures. But what might alarm Straussians is that these differing “cultures” can exist in the same overriding civilizations. Within a liberal and democratic America, many people must follow different paths, even if it is possible conflict may result The alternative is the imposition of one standard of “natural” right, which may or may not be valid, placed upon all sub-groups. This may result in the appearance of stability, but at the expense of the diversity many see as essential to progress. Natural right, or natural law, moreover, may itself be flawed in its acceptation of the term “natural” to describe what some people see as more rational than other beliefs concerning morality. Strauss believes we can arrive at these conclusions through the exercise of reason, but postmodern thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault believe that reason itself is a construct of Western thinking that is itself subject to criticism. Strauss, however, would question whence such criticism is to occur. If one needs to use the very methods of “Western” reason to criticize the absolutist tendency of Western thought, does this not in its own way prove the absolute validity of Western thought? Additionally, it is in the very nature of Western thought, including natural right theory, to be anti-authoritarian. Natural right does not require a mindless appeal to authority. Different morals and customs can be proven appropriate or inappropriate; what is necessary is that such a tradition of rationality, fostered by excellence in education and strong democratic traditions, be willing to hold to the notion of rationalism itself as an absolute. Ideas For DebateMost Lincoln-Douglas debaters talk about values, and there has been an increasing tendency to question the values themselves. Even in this handbook there will be found thinkers who criticize the absolutist nature of value-holding, and propose that values be rejected entirely. In Strauss is found the foil for such “critiques.” He is a strong defender of the absolute and necessary nature of values. Not only are they important, he argues; they are also inevitable. The attempt to reject them will simply make them manifest themselves elsewhere, in places where we are not aware of them, and hence less likely to carefully choose or defend them. Strauss also serves as an impressive source for natural right as a value to be upheld. Its basic components are found in most of his works; they reflect both Platonic and Lockean traditions of morality, and reject the historicism of thinkers like Marx and the nihilism of thinkers like Nietzsche. Natural right is justified by Strauss on two counts: its philosophical viability and its necessity for a stable society. The second reason, stability, means that even if a debater cannot always justify natural right logically, he or she can justify it as necessary for a just social order. Leo Strauss is one of the most thoughtful and eloquent defenders of the “unpopular” idea that transcendent values exist, and that societies should hold to unifying principles rather than relativistic diversity. Debaters can employ his work to their advantage by reading the literature carefully and thinking about how it might apply to the recent “multicultural” and relativistic tendency in Western thinking. BibliographyStrauss, Leo. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (New York: Pegasus Books, 1975). . THE REBIRTH OF CLASSICAL POLITICAL RATIONALISM (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). . NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). . ON TYRANNY (New York: Free Press, 1991). . PERSECUTION AND THE ART OF WRITING (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952). . THOUGHTS ON MACHIAVELLI (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958). . WHAT IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY? (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958). . THE CITY AND MAN (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). . LIBERALISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN (New York: Basic Books, 1968). . STUDIES IN PLATONIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Deutsch, Kenneth L and Walter Nicgorski, editors. LEO STRAUSS: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER AND JEWISH THINKER (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994). Kieimansegg, Peter Graf, et al, editors. HANNAH ARENDT AND LEO STRAUSS (Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Drury, Shadia. THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF LEO STRAUSS (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). Udoff, Alan, ed. LEO STRESS’ THOUGHT: TOWARDS A CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991). POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY SHOULD SEEK TRANSCENDENT MORAL PRINCIPLES1. TRANSCENDENT MORAL PRINCIPLES EXIST Leo Strauss, political philosopher. NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY, 1968, p. 89. In brief, then, it can be said that the discovery of nature is identical with the actualization of a human possibility which, at least according to its own interpretation, is trans-historical, trans-social, trans-moral, and trans-religious. The philosophic quest for the first things presupposes not merely that there are first things but that the first things are always and that things which are always or are imperishable are more truly beings than the things which are not always. These presuppositions follow from the fundamental premise that no being emerges without a cause or that it is impossible that “at first Chaos came to be,” i.e., that the first things jumped into being out of nothing and through nothing. In other words, the manifest changes would be impossible if there did not exist something permanent or eternal, or the manifest contingent beings require the existence of something necessary and therefore eternal. 2. SEARCH FOR THE GOOD IS IMPLICIT IN ALL POLITICAL THOUGHT Leo Strauss, political philosopher. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1975, p. 3. All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change to the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse. But thought of better or worse implies thought of the good. The awareness of the good which guides all our actions has the character of opinion: it is no longer questioned but, on reflection, it proves to be questionable. The very fact that we can question it directs us towards such a thought of the good as is no longer questionable--towards a thought which is no longer opinion but knowledge. All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good.
Leo Strauss, political philosopher. NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY, 1968, p. 92. Nature is the ancestor of all ancestors or the mother of all mothers. Nature is older than any tradition; hence it is more venerable than any tradition. The view that natural things have a higher dignity than things produced by men is not based on any surreptitious or unconscious borrowings from myth, or on residues of myth, but on the discovery of nature itself. Art presupposes nature, whereas nature does not presuppose art. Man’s “creative” abilities, which are more admirable than any of his products, are not themselves produced by man: the genius of Shakespeare was not the work of Shakespeare. Nature supplies not only the materials but also the models for all arts; ‘the greatest and fairest things” are the work of nature as distinguished from art. By uprooting the authority of the ancestral, philosophy recognizes that nature is the authority.
Leo Strauss, political philosopher. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1975, pp. 145-6. Far from legitimizing the historicist inference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles.
Leo Strauss, political philosopher. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1975, p. 11. All knowledge of political things implies assumptions concerning the nature of political things; i.e., assumptions which concern not merely the given political situation, but political life or human life as such. One cannot know anything about a war going on at a given time without having some notion, however dim and hazy, of war as such and its place within human life as such. One cannot see a policeman as a policeman without having made an assumption about law and government as such. The assumptions concerning the nature of political things, which are implied in all knowledge of political things, have the character of opinions. It is only when these assumptions are made the theme of critical and coherent analysis that a philosophic or scientific approach to politics emerges.
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