The Limits of Reason

...and "How can this be...

...The deeper trouble is that he is content to be merely critical...

...Modern thought cannot recognize this fact and thus has seriously weakened our understanding of politics and society...

...One would think that if Strauss finds the political understanding of his fellow citizens dangerously in error?particularly in a time of political crisis—he would make it his business to inculcate a better understanding...

...Strauss makes one recommendation in his latest book, and it is touched with irony...

...It may be, as Socrates held, that the truth cannot be captured by the written word and that one should speak differently to different people...

...For several decades now, Professor Leo Strauss, probably the most brilliant and disputed student of political thought in our time, has been writing about precisely this disparity between the appearance and reality of our intellectual grasp...

...What we ignore, argues Strauss, is that reason unsettles matters more than it settles them...

...The proper expression of that superiority is honest condescension...

...The justification of liberal education was that it secured and improved the political system by supplying wise, publicspirited, virtuous (or "liberal" in the old sense) men to govern the city...

...he does explain why the darkness exists...

...Instead of deferring to the arguments and opinions of the great minds, it wipes the slate clean...

...True, Strauss has not simply cursed the darkness...

...The original idea, Strauss says, was that liberal education should create an aristocracy, a larger or smaller group of "gentlemen" who would hold "the good order of the soul and the city" above all else, by training students in the "best" opinion...

...Modern education, at least the part dominated by scientific method, is very different...

...Reviewed by PAUL H. WEAVER Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard America is said to be enjoying a spectacular enlightenment...

...The other essays, in the more familiar and accessible tradition of social criticism, offer a fascinating, often devastating view of three matters Strauss believes are important to an understanding of our time: liberal education...

...Few people today believe they really understand even one of our major public problems, and those who think they do, all too often do not...

...We cannot understand who we are as long as we do not accept, in practice and belief, the value as well as the reality of the nomos?the arbitrary, nonrational human conventions—to which we are born...

...This is strange, since he argues that the ultimate purpose of an educator is to serve the public interest...

...He added that it "is excused by two facts...

...It is rare for "universal laws" to be found, and rarer still for them to be of any guidance to active men...

...In his "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion," Strauss argues that the blindness of modern thought is vividly illustrated by the fate of German Jewry...

...What is more, at exactly the points where the well-meaning but misguided man to whom he is presumably speaking would have some question or doubt, Strauss responds not with a reasoned answer but with silence...

...Thus we imagine that a "rational society" is possible, and that its natural development will make our lives pleasanter and easier...

...But that society remained German and Christian and, under Hitler, emphatically rejected the Jews, assimilated or not...

...We are like a ship's captain who finds himself navigating dangerous waters with a questionable chart...

...While providing us with immense riches of fact, the new knowledge offers little in the way of useful social and political understanding...

...The tragedy of the German Jews, as Strauss sees it, was not just Hitler's genocide or the Jews' failure to prevent it...

...We assume that reason solves all problems worth solving?that for every question there is in principle a definitive answer scientific method can supply...

...Its method was to study the "great minds" critically but deferentially—not all the great minds, of course, but only the great of the particular culture...

...have become prominent features of contemporary public discourse...

...and the liberal political ethos of contemporary Western Jewry...

...Value" questions, since they have no scientific answer, either do not matter or have little public standing...

...Every society is founded on a community of opinion, largely religious in nature, which gives it unity and direction...

...But while he has struck a spark, no candle has been lit...

...Nowhere else do so many people attend so many institutions of higher learning for such long periods, and our top universities are the best in the world...

...The only difference is that once his ship runs against a rock, the captain knows his chart is wrong...

...But Strauss' defective rhetoric is not the only reason this book does little to close our "enlightenment gap...

...we draw no such conclusion...

...modern social science...

...But, as Strauss points out and as is implicit in the old idea of liberal education, politics is a part of practical life and consequently in the realm of opinion...

...The only solution to the Jewish problem, he writes, is for all Jews to return to the ways and beliefs of their ancestors...

...Except in the physical and natural sciences, our modern enlightenment is largely a fake...

...Such a society, it was felt, offered a solution to the Jewish problem—or to the problem of any religious or ethnic minority...

...It does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns...

...Liberal education worked entirely within the realm of opinion, and so shunned the radical skepticism of scientific method...

...The consequences of this idea are explored in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, a collection of one new and nine separately published essays...

...Opinion aims at truth yet rests on belief...

...This may not always be easy or safe, but that, to Strauss, is not the point...

...Nowhere else has the search for knowledge been so dramatically transformed from the arcane entertainment of an elite few into a major growth industry, with the communications media competing to disseminate the educators' ever increasing product...

...Strauss has no such excuses, giving one all the more reason to wish that his own instincts were a little less Neronian...

...The skepticism of this political theory, however, led the German Jews to deprecate their religious and cultural heritage as non-rational...

...Significantly, the questions "How could this happen...

...Like God, liberal education today is dead, or has been corrupted beyond recognition...

...That skepticism, by creating the fact-value distinction, is subversive of belief and culture, and therefore of the political system itself...

...Other countries may have higher rates of literacy or annual per capita book readership, yet by objective measure we are the most knowledgeable society in history...

...And ultimately, he contends, the fact-value distinction, suggesting that all values are equally good, makes social science covertly democratic and vulgarian...

...In this and other books, Strauss seems reluctant to make good on his implicit responsibility...

...And we cannot understand how things are as long as we assume everything can be improved...

...Following Aristotle, Strauss claims this melange of the true and the conventional is the basis and medium of all political life...

...Since the aim of social science is to formulate laws of human behavior with precision and certainty, it is forced to reject the terms and concepts of everyday usage...

...But the "objective measure" of our intellectual progress is misleading, for it conceals the fact that when confronted by critical issues we are usually uncertain and frequently mystified...

...Unfortunately, he does not take this last step, leaving unexplored what is for us the most important question of all: Who and what are we in America, and what are things in this country really like...

...A contemplative man may enjoy the luxury of leaving things in doubt, but a practical man is primarily concerned with getting about his business...

...To study politics without reference to opinion is like studying music without reference to harmony and dissonance...

...Critics naturally have a sense of superiority...

...Another, according to Strauss, is that this knowledge is rarely useful to men thinking about or acting on the public interest...

...The German Jews were the most prominent believers in the possibility of a thoroughly liberal society, in which cultural and religious differences, being nonra-tional, had no public standing...

...Then it proceeds to build a body of scientific knowledge by formulating hypotheses and testing them rigorously...

...To do this, he needs questions answered, and the less hesitation the better...

...Strauss has much of great importance to say to us, yet his extremely cryptic style precludes the possibility of persuading any but the initiated...

...Rather than the truth, which is always partial, uncertain, and when applied to any specific circumstance, ambiguous, opinion is the decisive element of all practical life...

...I wish that reading Leo Strauss were a little more edifying...

...Some of those, making up the "high-academic" part of the book anatomize the thought of certain pre-moderns (Plato, Lucretius, Maimon-ides, and Marsilius of Padua), where the tension between truth and opinion, philosophy and religion, or, more generally, logos and nomos is particularly acute...

...Strauss said of a social science which in time of crisis offered neither relevant understanding nor practical guidance, that "it fiddles while Rome burns...

...and in it, "fact," "value," "inference," and "deduction" are inseparably intermixed...

...Still, publishing a book implies that one is trying to improve the understanding of thoughtful people, even if they are only capable of "opinion" as opposed to "knowledge...

...Our difficulty, says Strauss, is an absurdly inflated idea of the capabilities of reason and "scientific method...

...One result is that the social-scientific knowledge of politics often consists of commonplaces rephrased in jargon...

...The consequence, if not the intention, was a progressive assimilation into the surrounding society...

...Finally, we believe that these laws will provide a solid guide for conducting and improving our lives...

...His basic contention (developed most forthrightly over a decade ago in his Natural Right and History) is that the assumptions underlying modern thought distort our vision so badly, we can neither see nor know important parts of the personal and political world we live in...

...it is at once fictional and rational...

...it was also that, in the end, they died neither German nor Jewish...

...Even though we may find "evils" which "break our hearts," the important point is to understand clearly and vividly who and what we are, and how things are, for understanding is "the true ground of the dignity of man...

...There is, Strauss insists, no "solution" to the Jewish problem that will insure an absence of hostility, discrimination, or even genocide...

...In Strauss, though, it comes across as superciliousness...

...We also assume that by answering enough questions, we will eventually arrive at "universal laws" of human behavior...

...My complaint here is not with his esotericism—there is nothing wrong with writing about little-known thinkers—but rather with the often maddeningly indirect and laconic way he makes his points...