Stanley Rosen's Critique of Leo Strauss

Summary

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For Rosen, philosophy requires the noetic grasp of pure form, which is apprehended in the logoi.9 It is imperative that logoi here be understood not as "speeches" in any sense that might have the taint of opinion but as the enduring ratios of the beings of our common perception which endow those beings with identity and unity through the fluctuating change of genesis.\n This implies that the natural whole is beneficent and reliable. [...] Strauss's procedure of preparing the way to philosophy by means of historical studies depends on there being a continuity between opinion now, as it has been shaped by the philosophical project of modernity, and the currents of opinion within which early modern, medieval, and ancient philosophers lived and thought.

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Stanley Rosen's Critique of Leo Strauss

Was there ever a pupil, wise or foolish, who in fact agreed with his master in every point?

- Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern

STANLEY ROSEN'S CRITIQUES OF HIS TEACHER, Leo Strauss, are invariably brisk and stylish philosophic polemics. Over the course of more than forty years they have ranged in tone from the pugnacious to the laudatory. As critiques of Strauss go they are consistently in the highest philosophic echelon. What, then, are we to make of their frequent rough-handling of their subject? Even at their most temperate and even-handed - as in Rosen's chapter on Wittgenstein and Strauss in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary - Rosen's interpretations of Strauss rely on unsympathetic, distorting readings of Strauss.1

A number of scholars have interpreted Rosen's critiques of Strauss as unfair. While they are not dismissive of Rosen, they present an account of his relationship to his teacher that makes him seem either careless, ungenerous in his manner of reading Strauss, or both.2 These interpretations of Rosen correctly report a litany of false inferences, misplaced claims, forced conclusions, strident pronouncements, and in one case, an important misquotation. Surely the unique combination of brusqueness and celerity that characterizes Rosen's treatments of Strauss gives them warrant.3 These accounts fail, however, to credit the genuinely philosophical character of Rosen's encounter with Strauss and Rosen's manner of writing. Those who have written on Rosen's philosophical thought are closer to the mark.4 They remark on Rosen's differences with his teacher but do not at any length account for the extreme peculiarity of Rosen's critiques of Strauss. Without sufficiently addressing themselves to these critiques, these authors have not successfully answered the charge that Rosen's discussion of Strauss rests on a series of willful exaggerations and distortions. Rosen distorts Strauss because according to his own understanding of the nature of philosophy, such a distortion is required. This mode of speech is, for Rosen, an intrinsic element of philosophy. At the same time, paradoxically, Rosen's distortion of Strauss is the mark of respect shown by one thinker of high rank for another.

Rosen claims that philosophers do not really argue with other philosophers, they instead distort and "punish" them for their mistakes. Rosen writes, "Fair-mindedness and objectivity are (sometimes) the traits of scholars, not of thinkers of the highest rank.

Philosophers educate nonphilosophers; they punish other philosophe...

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