The Great Books Might Be True
On Leo Strauss's Critique of Academia and What Comes Next
One of Leo Strauss’s core points is that we should read Great Books not because they are historically interesting, or politically useful, and not because they are good brain teasers, but because they might be true. They might know something we don’t.
Does it help to know something about the historical context of the book? Sure. But does saying a bunch of factually correct things about it get us closer to truth? No.
“Science doesn’t think,” says Heidegger. This doesn’t mean science isn’t useful or valuable—just that it doesn’t “think,” a term that obviously needs definition. (Heidegger says that not only are we still not yet thinking, but we don’t even know what thinking entails). Strauss not only agrees with Heidegger’s anti-positivist sentiment but emphasizes it even more deeply. The Humanities and Social Sciences, insofar as they aspire to be scientific, really don’t think. They are doubly lost. Science pretends to be philosophical. The Humanities pretend to be scientific.
The Humanities, in the sense that Strauss understands their purpose, aren’t “dead” because of defunding. They aren’t dead for any recent economic reasons. They’ve been dead since the 19th century university institution replaced thinking with research. I should know—my dissertation on Heidegger was judged a success not on the basis of its contribution to wisdom or truth but on its narrow contribution to the field of Heidegger studies. How ironic. The dissertation I wanted to write: a Zoharian rendering of Heidegger’s advice on how to live a poetic life in a technological age was deemed too speculative and unrigorous to pass through the confirmation stage.
From Strauss’s perspective, the historically oriented study of philosophy is at best a supplement to the search for truth and at worst a wild goose chase.
Implicit in this stance is the view that truth doesn’t change. Good ideas are good ideas. Kojeve, following Hegel, takes the opposite view as Strauss: the best, truest ideas are in the future since the past and present are riddled with contradiction that need resolution.
Weber and Ranke are less “progressive” than Hegel/Kojeve but nonetheless relativistic; there are no true ideas, just ideas that societies venerate until they don’t. Strauss critiques both the Hegelian and the Weberian approaches in his introduction to Natural Right and History.
The University, whether it follows Hegel or Ranke, thinks of ideas in terms of development. The Classics are a foundation for the cutting edge, which is always now. As if the latest paper in Ethnic Studies (blaming all social woe on white supremacy, patriarchy, and, why not also throw it in for good measure, the State of Israel) is an Aufhebung of hundreds of years of outdated thought.
But Strauss, and by the way, Walter Benjamin, too, reject this presentist stance. I mention Benjamin to emphasize that it’s a mistake to associate Strauss with the right and Benjamin with the left. Their critique cuts through the superficiality of partisan point-scoring.
Truth, say Strauss and Benjamin, is always “anachronistic,” “against the grain.” We don’t need to say that Plato was right about everything, we just can’t come in assuming he’s wrong about everything. Heidegger makes the point most aggressively: the pre-Socratics, by virtue of having come before the official beginning of philosophy, may have the most to teach us!
Religion rightfully teaches the idea that truth is anachronistic, which is one reason Strauss respected “Jerusalem” despite being a man of Athens himself.
But religion, especially doctrinal religion (i.e., orthodoxy) presumes truth rather than investigates it. So religion, at least sociologically, succeeds in raising the table stakes, but is “sectarian” rather than “philosophical” because it doesn’t ask “What is true?” It declares it as a foregone conclusion. (I’d suggest that Judaism’s emphasis on mitzvah, commandment, renders it a more philosophically capable religion than Christianity, because action counts irrespective of belief or knowledge). In Judaism, you aren’t required to prove God’s existence. You are required to give Tzedaka.
There is a third way that is not doctrinal religion and not the 19th century research university and that is Great Books as a source of challenging wisdom. Strauss was a champion for this third way, as am I.
In my view, a lot of religious life, especially on the liberal end of the spectrum, could be improved by simply applying a Straussian posture to learning. I.e., the Bible or the Koran or the Mahabarata is a Great Book, which means it might be true. It might be wiser than us. This is a fundamentally different posture than that of Mordechai Kaplan for whom Torah is only worthwhile qua “folk-ways,” qua inheritance, qua “civilization.” Kaplan is fine to get us in the door, but he’s not going to keep us there.
But at the same time that weakened forms of religion might achieve a renaissance through an embrace of Great Books, academia needs to take a page from religion.
What is the objective of academic humanities? Is it to know more stuff? Be a critical thinker? Both of those objectives are weak. Even self-knowledge, while important, is insufficient.
Religion has an answer: Be a servant of God. I think Humanities should also have an answer. Be a servant of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Can you be a servant of the good, the true, and the beautiful if you don’t seek to understand what they are? At the highest level, no.
But understanding what is good is not enough. Understanding what is true is not enough. Understanding what is beautiful is not enough.
It’s a 2x2. We want to be in the right hand quadrant of understanding and doing. That said, better to do good and not understand than understand the good and fail to do it.
Good religion can be thought of as a hedge against the downside risk of understanding good, but failing to do it, or even doing evil. The bottoms up, practical approach is superior at scale to the purely intellectual one.
Reading the Bible won’t make you a better person. Having brilliant things to say about it also won't guarantee it. But that shouldn’t become license to binge on Tiktok videos.
The failure of Great Books to humanize their readers is no excuse for turning to Mediocre ones. It's just a tu quoque to help people justify a self-serving anti-intellectualism.
Despite my praise and admiration for Strauss, I think his approach to learning doesn't scale. If you want more people on the planet to love learning you need to find a way to make the pursuit of learning warm not severe.
We need to establish standards of excellence that encourage hypertrophy—the feeling at the gym of maxing out, of pushing yourself to the limit. But we also need to welcome and celebrate the novice. Does it really take 10 years of close reading to know if Plato is right? Not all onerous effort leads to hypertrophy.
Socrates himself enjoyed discoursing with amateurs. We need to celebrate white belts more. Their love, idealism, and enthusiasm is sustaining, especially for Masters, and especially for Masters-in-training.
That is what I'm hoping to build with Lightning, a community of seekers comprised of both amateurs and veteran teachers; who humbly believe old books have something to teach; and who want the interaction with them to be both demanding and warm.
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