Leo Strauss on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Leo Strauss Transcript Series

Series editors: Nathan Tarcov and Gayle McKeen

http://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/

Volumes in the Series:

Strauss on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Edited by Richard L. Velkley

Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Edited and with an Introduction by Richard L. Velkley

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48663-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48677-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226486772.001.0001

Scattered excerpts from THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE by Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann, translation copyright 1954, © 1968, renewed © 1982 by Penguin Random House LLC, used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Strauss, Leo, author. | Velkley, Richard L., editor.

Title: Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra / edited and with an introduction by Richard L. Velkley.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017003600 | ISBN 9780226486635 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226486772 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. Also sprach Zarathustra. | Philosophy, German.

Classification: LCC B3313.A44 S77 2017 | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003600

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

The Leo Strauss Transcript Project

Editor’s Introduction: Strauss, Nietzsche, and the History of Political Philosophy

Editorial Headnote

1  Introduction: Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Existentialism, and the Problem of Our Age

2  Restoring Nature as Ethical Principle: Zarathustra, Prologue

3  The Creative Self: Zarathustra, Part 1, 1–8

4  The True Individual as the Highest Goal: Zarathustra, Part 1, 9–15

5  Postulated Nature and Final Truth: Zarathustra, Part 1, 16–22

6  Truth, Interpretation, and Intelligibility: Zarathustra, Part 2, 1–12

7  Will to Power and Self-Overcoming: Zarathustra, Part 2, 15–20

8  Summary and Review: Fusing Plato and the Creative Self

9  Greek Philosophy and the Bible; Nature and History: Zarathustra, Part 2, 20–22

10  Eternal Recurrence: Zarathustra, Part 2, 21; Part 3, 1–13

11  Survey: Nietzsche and Political Philosophy

12  The Goodness of the Whole, Socratic and Heideggerian Critiques: Zarathustra, Part 3, 4–12

13  Creative Contemplation: Zarathustra, Part 3, 13

14  Restoring the Sacred and the Final Question: Zarathustra, Part 4

Notes

Index

The Leo Strauss Transcript Project

Leo Strauss is well known as a thinker and writer, but he also had tremendous impact as a teacher. In the transcripts of his courses one can see Strauss comment on texts, including many he wrote little or nothing about, and respond generously to student questions and objections. The transcripts, amounting to more than twice the volume of Strauss’s published work, add immensely to the material available to scholars and students of Strauss’s work.

In the early 1950s mimeographed typescripts of student notes of Strauss’s courses were distributed among his students. In winter 1954, the first recording, of his course on natural right, was transcribed and distributed to students. Strauss’s colleague Herbert J. Storing obtained a grant from the Relm Foundation to support the taping and transcription, which resumed on a regular basis in the winter of 1956 with Strauss’s course Historicism and Modern Relativism. Of the 39 courses Strauss taught at the University of Chicago from 1958 until his departure in 1968, 34 were recorded and transcribed. After he retired from Chicago, recording of his courses continued at Claremont Men’s College in the spring of 1968 and the fall and spring of 1969 (although the tapes for his last two courses there have not been located), and at St. John’s College for the four years until his death in October 1973.

The surviving original audio recordings vary widely in quality and completeness, and after they had been transcribed, the audiotapes were sometimes reused, leaving the audio record very incomplete. Over time the audiotape deteriorated. Beginning in the late 1990s, Stephen Gregory, then administrator of the University’s John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, initiated digital remastering of the surviving tapes by Craig Harding of September Media to ensure their preservation, improve their audibility, and make possible their eventual publication. This project received financial support from the Olin Center and from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The remastered audiofiles are available at the Strauss Center website: https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/courses.

Strauss permitted the taping and transcribing to go forward but did not check the transcripts or otherwise participate in the project. Accordingly, Strauss’s close associate and colleague Joseph Cropsey originally put the copyright in his own name, though he assigned copyright to the Estate of Leo Strauss in 2008. Beginning in 1958 a headnote was placed at the beginning of each transcript: This transcription is a written record of essentially oral material, much of which developed spontaneously in the classroom and none of which was prepared with publication in mind. The transcription is made available to a limited number of interested persons, with the understanding that no use will be made of it that is inconsistent with the private and partly informal origin of the material. Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to increase the circulation of the transcription. This transcription has not been checked, seen, or passed on by the lecturer. In 2008, Strauss’s heir, his daughter Jenny Strauss, asked Nathan Tarcov to succeed Joseph Cropsey as Strauss’s literary executor. They agreed that because of the widespread circulation of the old, often inaccurate and incomplete transcripts and the continuing interest in Strauss’s thought and teaching, it would be a service to interested scholars and students to proceed with publication of the remastered audiofiles and transcripts. They were encouraged by the fact that Strauss himself signed a contract with Bantam Books to publish four of the transcripts although in the end none were published.

The University’s Leo Strauss Center, established in 2008, launched a project, presided over by its director, Nathan Tarcov, and managed by Stephen Gregory, to correct the old transcripts on the basis of the remastered audiofiles as they became available, transcribe those audiofiles not previously transcribed, and annotate and edit for readability all the transcripts including those for which no audiofiles survived. This project was supported by grants from the Winiarski Family Foundation, Mr. Richard S. Shiffrin and Mrs. Barbara Z. Schiffrin, Earhart Foundation, and the Hertog Foundation, and contributions from numerous other donors. The Strauss Center was ably assisted in its fundraising efforts by Nina Botting-Herbst and Patrick McCusker of the Office of the Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University.

Senior scholars familiar with both Strauss’s work and the texts he taught were commissioned as editors, with preliminary work done in most cases by student editorial assistants. The goal in editing the transcripts has been to preserve Strauss’s original words as much as possible while making the transcripts easier to read. Strauss’s impact (and indeed his charm) as a teacher is revealed in the sometimes informal character of his remarks. Readers should make allowance for the oral character of the transcripts. There are careless phrases, slips of the tongue, repetitions, and possible mistranscriptions. However enlightening the transcripts are, they cannot be regarded as the equivalent of works that Strauss himself wrote for publication.

Nathan Tarcov, Editor-in-Chief

Gayle McKeen, Managing Editor

August 2014

Editor’s Introduction

Strauss, Nietzsche, and the History of Political Philosophy

Leo Strauss had a special relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy from his early years. He remarks that being dominated and charmed by Nietzsche between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, I believed literally every word I understood in him.¹ At age thirty he writes that through Nietzsche tradition has been shaken to its roots. It has completely lost its self-evident truth, an event he finds liberating since it means that one is now free to raise "the question pos bioteon [how to live] again.² Nietzsche and Heidegger together are the figures that Strauss sees in the early 1930s as exposing the unradicality of modern philosophy, consisting in its belief that it can presuppose the fundamental questions as already answered, and that it therefore can ‘progress.’³ Specific failures in modern philosophy revealed by these two figures are the neglect of the Socratic question about the best life (Nietzsche) and the question about Being (Heidegger). These thinkers complete modern philosophy even as they bring it to an end, and they lead to the point at which Socrates begins.⁴ Yet both also draw on the Christian tradition in different ways. In Nietzsche’s case this appears in his account of the probity of conscience, a factor in his thought that complicates, if not undermines, his effort to recover the original ideal of philosophy in the Greeks. Strauss in 1933 claims that Nietzsche fails to overthrow the powers he struggled against, while Plato enables one to pose Nietzsche’s questions, thus our questions, in a simpler, clearer, and more original way."⁵ With this insight Strauss begins the return to premodern rationalism, the possibility of which he previously doubted.⁶

In the following decades Strauss develops his understanding of the history of political philosophy and the central problem that underlies the contrast between premodern and modern rationalism: the inherently aporetic relation of the philosophic way of life to its political context. Strauss arrives at the view that modern rationalism, although having unradical consequences in cementing the dogma of progress (the belief that philosophy or science is able and required to solve the fundamental human problems), is founded by a radical innovator, Niccolo Machiavelli. Writing of Machiavelli, Strauss states:

He achieves the decisive turn toward the notion of philosophy according to which its purpose is to relieve man’s estate or to increase man’s power or to guide man toward the rational society, the bond and the end of which is enlightened self-interest or the comfortable self-preservation of its members. The cave becomes the substance. By supplying all men with the goods which they desire, by being the obvious benefactress of all men, philosophy (or science) ceases to be suspect or alien.⁷

Strauss proposes that the realism of Machiavelli, or his critique of the ideal republics and principalities of premodern philosophy, is adopted by the succeeding tradition of modern philosophy in its project of relieving man’s estate, with the intent to overcome the philosopher’s ancient plight as outsider and exile. Strauss ascribes to the modern philosopher the primacy of a practical end that is beneficial to all humans, although perhaps above all to the philosopher. The practical end surpasses, if it does not simply replace, contemplative activity as the core of philosophy.

In Strauss’s account, philosophy’s assumption of the task of mastering nature requires the narrowing of the horizon of philosophical thought to the temporal-historical realm of human projects. In the course of three successive waves, the enlargement of philosophy’s practical responsibility for human welfare is accompanied by the deepening historicization of its theoretical foundations. Nietzsche is the profoundly paradoxical completion of this development, in that his thought presents both a radical critique of modern rationalism and the consummation of the historical turn in modern philosophy. He is thus a crucial figure for Strauss’s conception of the history of political philosophy, indeed of the history of philosophy as such. In Strauss’s unconventional usage, political philosophy is the reflection on the political conditions of philosophy, or on the ineluctable tension between politics and the inquiring mind (thematic throughout Greek poetry, history, and philosophy, but emerging most fully with Socrates), which forms an indispensable (but in the course of modernity, increasingly neglected) starting point of philosophy. In ascribing to Nietzsche a critical-pivotal position as both completing this history and pointing to a new beginning, Strauss gives him a role notably akin to the one he plays in Heidegger’s history of Being. Accordingly, in Strauss’s 1959 and 1967 Nietzsche seminars, the reflection on Nietzsche’s dual character (as radically modern and as seeking the recovery of Greek wisdom) proceeds as an implicit dialogue with Heidegger’s interpretations of Nietzsche. Although this has been little appreciated, Strauss’s reading of Nietzsche is one of the major philosophical-historical inquiries of the past century, being not only an original interpretation of this author but also centrally engaged with the foremost reexaminations of the basis and meaning of modernity in recent philosophy. The remarks that follow offer preliminary considerations on Strauss’s fascinating friendly agon with the explosive duality of Nietzsche, about which one gains only indications from Strauss’s published works.

From his early years onward, Strauss understands that Nietzsche’s true concern is with philosophy and not politics. In his later writing and teaching Strauss returns to crediting Nietzsche with rediscovering the problem of Socrates, thus raising anew the question of the meaning and goodness of the life dedicated to knowledge, even as Nietzsche himself rejects the Socratic alternative as Nietzsche interprets it.⁸ But at the time of the 1959 seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Strauss’s most prominent published statement on Nietzsche is the concluding paragraph of the lecture What Is Political Philosophy? in which the connection between Nietzsche and Socrates is absent.⁹ It describes the most widely known perspective of Strauss on Nietzsche as the initiator of the third wave of modernity, and it is highly critical in tone. Nevertheless, it sketches some of the most important themes of the contemporary seminar: (1) While retaining the nineteenth-century discovery of the historical consciousness, Nietzsche rejected the view that the historical process is rational; (2) he rejected the belief that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modern state is possible, thus returning to Rousseau’s antinomy from Hegel’s reconciliation; (3) he held that all human life and human thought ultimately rest on horizon-forming creations that are not susceptible to rational legitimization; (4) he proposed that the great individuals are creators of horizons, and that the will to power explains their activity; (5) Nietzsche’s call to creativity was addressed to individuals who should revolutionize their lives, not to society or the nation, but even so Nietzsche hoped that the genuine creators would form a new nobility able to rule the planet; (6) Nietzsche used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of speech to make his readers loathe all existing political alternatives, without pointing the way to political responsibility, thus helping to prepare the fascist regimes. As an addendum, Strauss alludes to Heidegger, noting that the difficulty of the philosophy of the will to power led after Nietzsche to the explicit renunciation of eternity.

In the 1959 seminar on Zarathustra and the 1967 seminar on Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals, a deeper and more sympathetic account of Nietzsche appears than what the publications before 1960 suggest, and it is further evident in the 1973 essay on Beyond Good and Evil.¹⁰ Strauss speaks of learning from Nietzsche in a fashion that is rare for Strauss’s treatments of modern philosophers. Nietzsche is a great critic of the progressive and egalitarian ideals of modernity, a stance that Strauss considers seriously. Nietzsche argues that modern scholarship and science cannot give direction to life, that human life at all times needs a hierarchy of ends and goals, that modern secular-atheistic society is confronted with the prospect of spiritual and physical devastation. Strauss claims that the Prologue of Zarathustra contains a deep and comprehensive analysis of modern times (chapter 2). Above all, Nietzsche attempts to restore the natural ranking of the philosophic life above the lives of scholars and scientists. It is this that most essentially ties Nietzsche to Plato and Socrates—the bond that Strauss sees already in the early 1930s, but that now becomes a theme of his teaching. Accordingly, Nietzsche in a Platonic mode realizes that profound spirits have need of masks, that philosophy is a mixture of seriousness and play, that the deepest thoughts elude direct communication and logical demonstration. Strauss claims that Nietzsche’s dictum that from now on psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems is the renewal of Platonic psychology.¹¹ Such psychology is the exploration of the distinctive nature of the philosophic soul and of the conditions in political-moral life, both favorable and prohibiting, for the turn toward the philosophic life. Rousseau as renewing the problematic relation of the philosopher to politics (the antinomy already mentioned) is Nietzsche’s modern predecessor in this regard. (Lessing as well earns high praise from Strauss for instructing him in the character of esoteric writing.)

This Platonic concern lies behind Strauss’s unusual language of classic natural right. The 1959 seminar emphasizes the theme that Nietzsche tried to return from history to nature and that he was thus on the way to restoring classical natural right (chapter 1). With the term classic natural right Strauss refers to the Platonic account of the natural order of society as based on the natural hierarchy of virtues, in which philosophic virtue is the peak.¹² Nietzsche’s effort to recover nature in this sense is deeply paradoxical, as he tried to find the way back to nature on the basis of the rejection of nature as a standard (chapter 1). The first use of nature refers to the ranking of lives; the second use of nature refers to nature in a traditional, universalist, nonhistoricized sense. The modern element in the attempt (Versuch) is the concept of the unique self as the source of creative interpretation, or as radically anti-universalist will to power. In other words, Nietzsche assumes the radical particularity of the historical individual, including the great creative spirits, a conception far from the Greek philosophical understanding of nature. On its basis, Nietzsche seeks in Zarathustra to achieve the highest unification of creation and contemplation, or of history and nature. Something akin to the Platonic hierarchical ranking of contemplation as the highest good must be achieved by the creative will, which replaces eros for an independent order of being (chapter 8). Nietzsche proposes to attain this in the willing of Eternal Recurrence. The creator who wills his existence eternally engages in a self-knowing or contemplation of what the creative will can achieve (chapter 11). In a pregnant formulation, Strauss states that nature exists through (not as object of) creative contemplation (chapter 13). With this thought Nietzsche seeks to grasp the goodness of nature and the whole in a new way. But the effort raises some unavoidable questions: Is the truth of this creativity an uncreated truth? (chapter 3). Is the will to power grounded in nature in some extrahuman sense or only in human willing? (chapter 14). Even if problematic, Nietzsche’s experiment is instructive since by understanding Nietzsche we shall understand the deepest objections or obstacles to natural right which exist in the modern mind (chapter 1).

Strikingly, Strauss says that Nietzsche somehow succeeds, without obvious contradiction, to solve the question of knowledge and the question of nature, and yet this does not mean that his thought is true (chapter 8). He avows that Nietzsche’s enigmatic vision, which combines philosophy, poetry, and religion, is very difficult to understand (chapter 9). At the same time, Strauss (still commenting on Zarathustra) is critical of Nietzsche’s disregard for the starting points in ordinary opinion by which philosophy should orient itself, a lack that he relates to the extremism of his rhetoric. Strauss notes that Nietzsche starts from the will to power, from which I believe one should not start (chapter 14). In the later essay on Beyond Good and Evil, however, Strauss suggests a qualification of this criticism, where he declares, as he does in both seminars, his preference for that work as Nietzsche’s most beautiful book. He makes his suggestion through restating Nietzsche’s self-assessment in Ecce Homo: "Beyond Good and Evil is the very opposite of the ‘inspired’ and ‘dithyrambic’ Zarathustra inasmuch as Zarathustra is most far-sighted, whereas in Beyond Good and Evil the eye is compelled to grasp clearly the nearest, the timely (the present), the around-us.¹³ This change involved the arbitrary turning away from the instincts out of which Zarathustra had become possible: the graceful subtlety as regards form, as regards intention, as regards the art of silence are in the foreground in Beyond Good and Evil" and not in Zarathustra.

Further reflection by the reader leads to something as basic as the self or will to power. The 1959 seminar contains the suggestions that the highest reconciliation of concern to Nietzsche is that of Greek and biblical wisdom, and that this is the source of both the depth and the paradoxical structure of Nietzsche’s thought (chapters 7, 9). This raises the highly vexed issue of the place of religion in Nietzsche’s thought. Strauss holds that Nietzsche is not the founder of a religion but that Zarathustra wears the mask of religious teaching (chapter 2). Are the religious elements in Nietzsche then only exoteric? Reverence for the higher human, for human nobility, replaces God, and such reverence is a nontheistic form of the sacred (chapter 3). The highest form of that reverence for self is expressed in the Eternal Recurrence, which is thus akin to religious doctrine (chapter 10). But rather than being theistic, the willing of Eternal Recurrence is the response to the death of God that transforms the nihilistic thought into an affirmation (chapter 11). The higher willing of the creator seeks to overcome the spirit of revenge, or the will to escape time and mortality, which lies behind the project of conquering suffering and the hope of progress in mastering nature (chapters 7, 12). Against that will, the willing of Eternal Recurrence affirms the goodness of nature and the whole.

To this extent the latter willing recalls a classical notion of contemplation that overcomes the fear of mortality. But Nietzsche raises this question: What if the conquest of chance should succeed and the last man, who aspires for nothing but prolonging a comfortable life, becomes the only man, satisfied in his ignoble desire (chapter 10)? Strauss seems to suggest that this is a possibility that classical thought could not foresee, and Nietzsche, seeing that the ranking of forms of life has a contingent basis, must project the continuing existence of the higher life—or nature as creative contemplation—through an act of will. The higher way of life is not sustained by an enduring, intelligible order, and its future depends on the noble benevolence of the creative spirits. As the best in the human depends on will, the philosopher has the sacred obligation to secure the future of the best. The existence of the best depends on particular benefactions of particular higher beings, whose work therefore is akin to the work of gods. Strauss indicates that Nietzsche relates this responsibility of the philosopher to his regard for the Hebraic injunction among the table of values in the section On the Thousand and One Goals in Zarathustra—the injunction that secures the eternity of a people (chapter 4). It is possible that Strauss thinks that Nietzsche hereby has insight into the deepest issue at stake in the quarrel between Jerusalem and Athens. The status of the self and individuality in modern philosophy is perhaps rooted in that quarrel, and Nietzsche may expose the central reason for the valorization of the modern concepts.¹⁴

The 1967 seminar presses further this line of inquiry.¹⁵ At the same time, in both seminars Strauss proceeds with an eye toward Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, with which he explicitly on several occasions compares his own reading. In the 1967 seminar he calls Heidegger’s two-volume set of lectures on Nietzsche the best introduction to the earlier philosopher (session 2).¹⁶ Strauss considers Heidegger the most significant and powerful philosophic successor to Nietzsche,¹⁷ and he finds himself instructed by and in sympathy with Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s attempt to ground philosophy on the self as will to power. Even so, Strauss remarks that Nietzsche has motives for his paradoxical highest thought of Eternal Recurrence that elude Heidegger (chapter 12). The contrast between Nietzsche’s effort to return to nature and the wholesale abandonment of nature in Heidegger’s existentialism is a theme of both seminars. Strauss weighs whether the difficulties in Nietzsche’s philosophy can be overcome in Heidegger’s fashion or whether another, more classical, alternative is possible. In this reflection Strauss underlines Nietzsche’s attempted unification of Greek philosophy and the Bible as a crux that Heidegger has missed. In other contexts, Strauss proposes that both Nietzsche and Heidegger are engaged in forms of this unification.¹⁸

This state of affairs suggests that Strauss may think that the limitation of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is connected to a lapse of self-knowledge: what Heidegger does not see in Nietzsche may be his own shadow. With both thinkers Strauss has a keen interest in evaluating their extraordinary undertakings to move beyond modern thought toward novel interpretations of Greek philosophy—efforts characterized by remarkable learning and penetration. Accordingly, the comprehension of their failures (if they are such) to embrace fully the Socratic way is a grave and inevitable task for the student drawn to Strauss’s recovery of Socratic-Platonic philosophy.

Richard L. Velkley

August 2016

Editorial Headnote

The course was taught in a seminar form. Strauss began class with general remarks; a student then read aloud portions of the text, followed by Strauss’s comments and responses to student questions and comments. The text assigned for this course was Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (Viking Penguin, 1954). When the text was read aloud in class, this transcript records the words as they appear in The Portable Nietzsche. Original spelling has been retained. Citations are included for all passages.

There are no surviving audiotapes of this course. This transcript is based upon the original transcript, made by persons unknown to us. The quality of the audiotapes was in some cases unreliable. Session 5 was too inaudible for them to transcribe; what appears here as session 5 is a transcript of notes taken by Werner Dannhauser. Sessions 11 and 14 break off with the transcriber’s observation that the remainder is inaudible. Sessions 13 and 14 are particularly challenging. The transcriber would in some cases note in parentheses that an airplane flew over or that a student’s question or the reader of the text was inaudible. In other cases, he or she would leave a blank space in the transcript. The transcriber also inserted ellipses, which may or may not have meant that the tape was inaudible.

We have dealt with these difficulties in the following way. Ellipses original to the transcript have been retained and are distinguished by a bold typeface. Blank spaces and other indications that the audio was inaudible are rendered by us with ellipses in normal typeface. In some cases, the editor has supplied what he thought was the missing word or phrase. These insertions are in brackets. In cases where the reader was inaudible, the editor has inserted the text.

Minor changes to the transcript are not noted. For example, we have corrected inaccurate noun-verb agreement, rectified peculiar word order, and inserted prepositions or connecting words in the interest of readability. Sentence fragments that might not be appropriate in academic prose have been kept; some long and rambling sentences have been divided; some repeated clauses or words have been deleted. A clause that breaks the syntax or train of thought may have been moved elsewhere in the sentence or paragraph. In rare cases sentences within a paragraph may have been reordered.

Administrative details regarding paper or seminar topics or meeting rooms or times have been deleted without being noted, but reading assignments have been retained. Endnotes have been provided to identify persons, texts, and events to which Strauss refers.

A version of the transcript showing all deletions and insertions will become available on the Leo Strauss Center website two years after print publication of this transcript and can be made available upon request meanwhile for the same price as the printed version. The original transcript may be consulted in the Strauss archive in Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library.

This transcript was edited by Richard Velkley, with assistance from Alex Priou and Gayle McKeen.

1

Introduction

Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Existentialism, and the Problem of Our Age

Leo Strauss: By natural right one understands the right which is by nature, the right which is not made by man, individuals, or society. That there is such a thing, a right by nature, was generally accepted until the early nineteenth century. Today it is generally rejected, and one can say all right is historical: nature has been replaced by history. The natural right doctrine originated in Greece. They were therefore in total ignorance of our experience and our situation, hence it does not seem to be applicable to our situation or to be helpful for the analysis and understanding of our situation. What we need, we are told, are empirical studies of society and proposals of policy based on such studies. But the difficulty arises that the empirical studies as now frequently understood are based on the fundamental distinction between facts and values. Accordingly, the social scientist as social scientist cannot propose policy; he must cease to be a social scientist in order to make value statements for proposals of any kind. Thus we cannot turn to our social scientists for guidance. What shall we do? Shall we turn for guidance to contemporary philosophy? As philosophy, it is not limited by the peculiar relations of science, and by being contemporary philosophy it would be aware of the peculiar character of our situation.

Now this contemporary philosophy is known by the name of existentialism. I am aware of the fact that there is also something called philosophy which is known by the name of positivism, but positivism is admittedly unable to give us any guidance. It cannot do more than clarify values. Existentialism, on the other hand, is a philosophy in the older sense of the term: it claims to be able to give us guidance. Existentialism is often called, and not without reason, the philosophy of our age and our society. Those who are entirely unfamiliar with this phenomenon would profit by Barrett’s book Irrational Man, which is, I think, the best English introduction to the subject.¹

Existentialism is surely related to the disillusionment characteristic of the West: the collapse of the belief in progress—that is to say, of the belief in the possibility of democracy as a rational society, a society of free and equals who are in the main rational and public-spirited. The disillusionment is known to all of us. Think of the praise of electoral apathy as a good sign. Think of the talk of elite (elite being in itself a nondemocratic concept), or of the phenomenon called anonymity. I refer only to well-known subjects in social science—The Lonely Crowd,² the beatnik, or juvenile delinquency—phenomena which can best and most simply be understood by the fact that great public hopes have ceased to determine the present young generation. Other terms are mass society and its mass culture. Whether people claim that these are merely descriptive terms or evaluative terms is a purely verbal affair; to hear these terms and to look at the phenomena designated by them means to evaluate them. There is a connection between this mass society and mass culture and technology, the greatest triumph of which may be said to be the H-bomb, and therewith the whole question whether technology, which promised to be the way toward human happiness on earth, may not be the way toward the extinction of the human race.

All these and an infinite variety of other phenomena are underlying that philosophy called existentialism. Existentialism, however, is not a mere accusation of the present situation or a diagnosis of it. Existentialism attempts to supply us with a profound analysis. We can state its thesis provisionally as follows. The root of all our activities is the belief in reason, the belief in man’s ability to master his fate. Existentialism, we may say, makes explicit what is only implied in the general uneasiness of our time and even in the present-day positivism. For present-day positivism, as you all know, denies the power of reason, that reason can establish any value judgments. To repeat, existentialism asserts that the root of the present difficulties is the belief in reason, in man’s ability to master his fate, which has given rise to the tremendous modern venture and to the apparently insoluble difficulties which we are confronted with. This is only a reminder of the very common and very popular phenomena with which we have to live.

But we would like to do more than that. We would like to try to understand existentialism and not merely report about it; therefore one must go beyond the popular conflict and turn to its sources. The most important source of existentialism is Nietzsche. In passing, I mention that the understanding of Nietzsche would have the additional advantage for us as social scientists in that it would enable us to understand the deepest roots of fascism. Nietzsche was not a fascist—fascism is only a stupid shortcoming of what Nietzsche meant. Still, there is some relation between Nietzsche and fascism, whereas there is no relation between Nietzsche and communism and hardly a relation between Nietzsche and democracy. To that extent, the crude statement that Nietzsche is the father of fascism contains an element of truth.

Now Nietzsche was not an existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer. Today natural right is generally rejected on the basis of the view that all right is historical. Nature has been replaced by history in the course of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche started from this fundamental change. He started from historicism, the view that all human thought is essentially and radically historical, but he saw in this view (which had become almost trivial by the nineteenth century, at least in Europe) a problem. Therefore, he tried to return from history to nature. To this extent, Nietzsche was on the way to the restoration of natural right as distinguished from mere historicism. By understanding Nietzsche, we shall understand the deepest objections, obstacles to natural right which exist in the modern mind. This is the reason why I plan to give this course in the form of an interpretation of Nietzsche or, more precisely, of Nietzsche’s most famous work, the work which he himself regarded as the greatest of his completed works: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There is a translation available in the Viking edition, The Portable Nietzsche, by Walter Kaufmann, and I will use this translation.³

In order to prepare the discussion, I would like to remind you of certain points which I have made in my book Natural Right and History. I will not repeat the argument of that book here—this would be very boring—but I would like to remind you briefly of what I believe I have done in that book. What I tried to do is show that natural right is an open question and not an obsolete issue, as is generally held. I tried to show this by taking issue with the two leading schools of our age, positivism and historicism. Positivism is characterized by the assertion that all value judgments are of a noncognitive nature, that human reason cannot substantiate any value judgment. Historicism is the view that all human thought is radically historical and therefore a natural right is impossible.

After having tried to show that the issue of natural right is not settled, I tried to clarify the whole issue of natural right by the following observation. In the first place, natural right is a very ambiguous term, because it means something very different in premodern thought and in modern thought. I would like to restate this as simply as I can. In premodern thought, the premise of natural right was the end of man as the rational animal, a rational and social animal. On the basis of the understanding of man as a rational and social animal, it is possible to give certain broad indications as to what course of action, what way of life, is conducive to the perfection of man. This, we may broadly say, is the premodern view of natural right. This complete end of man, the perfection of man as a rational and social animal, was also said to be the meaning of the common word happiness. Happiness, a word which we all use and which in a way is used by men of all times, was identified by the classical philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, with the complete perfection of man as a rational and social animal. Happiness did not mean mere contentedness but the contentedness of the reasonable human being, contentedness on a certain level. It was implied that a reasonable man cannot be contented unless he has reached perfection as a rational and social animal.

Now what about the modern natural right doctrine? Its starting point is not the end of man but, we