STRAUSS AND HUSSERL

Rodrigo Chacón

Abstract: Among the great philosophers of the twentieth century, only

one, perhaps, shared Leo Strauss’s understanding of “ideas” as funda-
mental problems: his teacher Husserl. Throughout his work, Strauss
heeded Husserl’s call to return to the “things themselves” and “the
problems connected with them.” I argue that “natural right” is one
such phenomenon or problem which Strauss seeks to recover—and
reactivate—from centuries of sedimented interpretations. I further
propose that “natural right” may be a “sense-formation” analogous
to Husserl’s “geometry.” If this is true, Natural Right and History
may be modeled on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences.

The impulse to research must proceed not from philosophies but

from things, and from the problems connected with them. . . . Phi-
losophy . . . , by its very essence, is the science of true beginnings, of
origins, the ριζώματα παντων. And the method of a science concerned
with the roots of things, the method of a radical science, must itself be
radical, and this in every respect.—Edmund Husserl

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems,

i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems.—Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss’s most important contribution is widely considered to be his re-

trieval of “classical political philosophy.” This retrieval has been understood
as a “return” which presupposes a break with modern philosophy. Yet on
close inspection it becomes clear that Strauss rejects a return to the classi-
cal teaching as simply true.1 Strauss’s “return,” then, seems to be modern or
postmodern. While much has been written about his debt in this respect to
Nietzsche and Heidegger, the importance of Husserl is not so well known.2
Strauss suggested that Heidegger surpassed Husserl, yet he also made clear
that—for political philosophy at least—it is more advisable to follow Hus-
serl.3 The reason for this, I shall argue, is that the Husserlian turn to “the
things themselves” opens the way to what Strauss called “the fundamental
problems.” That is, to understand Strauss’s claim that philosophy is grounded

© 2014. Idealistic Studies. ISSN 0046-8541 Online First: April 28, 2015
DOI: 10.5840/idstudies201542031
 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

in, or is “nothing but,” awareness of fundamental problems it is necessary to

understand his debt to Husserl.4
This, at least, is what Strauss’s terms suggest. The “fundamental prob-
lems” are the “ideas,” not in the Platonic but in the “Socratic” sense.5 They
are permanent, yet only as permanent as there are human beings who “see”
them. Thus, they also have a genesis: they come to be—or, more precisely,
they appear and disappear—such that, for example, there is an “origin of the
idea of natural right.”6 The capacity to see the problems or “ideas” depends
on the existence of a “natural horizon.”7 This horizon has an intrinsic articula-
tion consisting of essential “shapes” or “forms,” that is, precisely of “ideas”
or eide.8 There is perhaps only one major modern thinker who shared these
views, and that is Strauss’s teacher, Husserl.
This essay provides an overview of Strauss’s engagement with Husserl,
and phenomenology more generally, during three key moments: Strauss’s
beginnings (1921–1922), his “change of orientation” towards ancient ratio-
nalism (ca. 1928–1935), and his American retrieval of “classical political
philosophy” (ca. 1946–1953). My aim is to offer some reasons for reading
Strauss as an important interpreter of Husserl, and for reading the Husser-
lian turn to “the things themselves” as foundational for Strauss’s political
philosophy. The wide reception of Strauss’s thought has so far left this
connection unexplored. This is puzzling, not only in light of Strauss’s high
estimation of Husserl, but also in light of the importance of phenomenology
for twentieth-century thought. In the same way that one cannot fully under-
stand the grounds of the thought of Heidegger, Adorno, Arendt, Derrida,
Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and several others who thought with and against
Husserl, so I shall suggest, Strauss’s project may be radically misunderstood
as long as its phenomenological grounding remains obscure.
In trying to clarify that grounding, the main difficulty may be, to put it
simply, that there are no final grounds in Husserl—or that the grounds are
precisely the “fundamental” or “foundational” problems (Grundprobleme).9
The question is why, and what are those problems? Moreover, in what sense
are they permanent? What follows are some preliminary reflections on those
questions. Read in light of Husserl, the grounds (or roots) of reason in Strauss
could be described as follows. Philosophy or science must begin from “the
things themselves.” We intuit whole things, yet we can only ever know parts of
things. The “things” or wholes we see are, accordingly, “problems” or riddles.
Knowledge must be based on acknowledgment of these problems. But that is
not as easy as it may sound. For “things” or “problems” or “essences” have a
history: their original meaning appears and disappears, as does our very belief
or trust in their essential form. Whereas Plato and Aristotle saw “things” and
“forms,” we may think it is more precise to speak of “facts” and “realities.”
Thus to attain the “things” or the “problems,” we need a kind of history
that is not simply concerned with “historical facts” but with their genesis as
 STRAUSS AND HUSSERL

“facts” or “history.” This is an “intentional history”—for Husserl, the only

legitimate kind of epistemology—which seeks to rediscover the roots of
“sense-formations” (Sinngebilde).10 Among them are “history,” “geometry,”
and—as Strauss famously proposes—“natural right.” This kind of historical
study is meant first of all to reveal the “sedimented history” of the “constitu-
tion” of sense-formations. Ultimately, for Strauss, it is meant to reactivate
the original “evidence” and the original experience of the “things” that gave
rise to both “natural right” and “history.”

Phenomenological Beginnings (1921–1929)

In Strauss’s early work we find the first clues as to why philosophy or science
is awareness of fundamental problems. The path to the problems is not yet
the path of “intentional history.” Rather, the problems become visible through
the radicalization of two Husserlian principles. On one hand, Strauss radi-
calizes the phenomenological “principle of principles,” according to which
philosophy or science must start not from theories, hypotheses, or concepts
but from “the things themselves,” that is, from the “matters” (Sachen) as
they appear prior to any theory.11 Whereas Husserl focused on the matters
pertaining to knowledge or theory, Strauss focuses on religion and govern-
ment as “the two poles of human life,” thus radicalizing the Husserlian turn
to pre-theoretical experience.12 On the other hand, Strauss also adheres to
the Husserlian quest for a philosophy understood as “rigorous science.”13
Thus philosophy, or rather “political philosophy,” must navigate between
two extremes. It must attend closely to every experience of the human soul
as the only access to the phenomena. Nothing human is foreign to it. Yet it
must also seek to attain complete clarity about the phenomena. Thus it must
both trust the surface of things and radically critique what is known merely
through hearsay or tradition or authority.
Strauss began his studies as a “doubting and dubious adherent of the Mar-
burg school of neo-Kantianism.”14 As his 1921 dissertation shows, the seeds
of doubt were planted through his encounter with phenomenological critics
of neo-Kantianism, such as Husserl, Scheler, Reinach, Otto, and Lask.15 What
phenomenology held against neo-Kantianism, Strauss suggested in his dis-
sertation, Jacobi had held against Kant. Jacobi could not enter Kant’s system
without the “thing-in-itself.”16 In an analogous way, philosophy or science,
according to Husserl, could not get off the ground without a prior description
and understanding of “the things themselves.”17 Instead of beginning from the
rooftop, that is, from “fact of science” (neo-Kantianism) or from the “manifold
of raw intuition” organized by the mind (Kant), philosophy must begin from
the foundations, that is, from our prescientific or “natural” understanding of
the world.18 From that standpoint, reality appears to us as always already
laden with meaning and intelligibility. Thus prior to knowing, we must have
already “seen” or intimated a “transcendent,” or mind-independent, reality.19
 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

What that reality is remains, according to Strauss, a fundamental problem.20

All we know following the phenomenological “principle of principles,” is
that philosophy or science cannot determine a priori what may count as a
source of authority for knowledge.21 Feelings, intimations, desires, dreams,
beliefs, opinions—in short, the whole range of human intentional experi-
ence—responds to phenomena that must be clarified.
Husserl likened the discovery of phenomenolgy to a new continent. What
traditional philosophy had considered irrational or unknowable or simply
unimportant—say, embodiment, or the perception of this cup, or the face of
the other—became not only worthy of attention but also foundational. No
“objective” account of the psyche, for example, could omit the first-person
perspective of dreams which are not merely “in our heads” (Freud). No sci-
entific account of religion could ignore the (first-person) experience of the
holy (Rudolph Otto). No account of political foundings could be complete
without a clarification of the phenomenon of promising as its elementary
form (Arendt). The very possibility of objectivity or concreteness was shown
to depend on an adequate understanding of subjective experience. And yet,
according to Husserl, not even the richest, most poetic description of a phe-
nomenon amounts to knowledge. In order for philosophy to live up to its
original vocation to be “rigorous science,” it must first bracket or suspend
our commonsense understanding of the world. It must first see that what ap-
pears to commonsense as a “ready-made” stage in which we act—i.e., the
world as a kind of macro-object that exists independently of us—is, in truth,
the “constituted achievement” of consciousness. Thus phenomenology must
move back from lived experience as a constituted whole to the movement of
constitution through which objects are constituted. By turning to the study of
phenomena as they appear in consciousness, philosophy could ground itself
anew on direct “self-evidence.”
What counts as directly self-evident, according to Husserl, remains dis-
puted to this day.22 Yet the basic principle is clear. Only that which is present
to consciousness—not through hearsay, not through reading old books—can
count as a “source of authority for knowledge.”23 To the extent that Strauss
adhered to such standards of evidence, and I shall argue that he did, the result
was a deep tension. On one hand, philosophy for Strauss must take into ac-
count the widest range of human experiences: nothing less than “the whole”
to which the soul is open. On the other hand, it must also attempt a “radical
clarification” of experience. Or, as Strauss recalled Husserl’s teaching towards
the end of his life, it must make “nature” or “being” “completely intelligible.”24
The tension between the expansiveness of the “principle of principles”
and the quest for complete intelligibility became clear to Strauss in 1922.
Having traveled to Freiburg in order “to see and hear Husserl,” he once asked
the master “about the subject [of theology].” Husserl’s response was that “If
there is datum ‘God’ we shall describe it.”25 As Strauss recalled decades later,
 STRAUSS AND HUSSERL

Husserl’s answer was “truly philosophical.”26 It was not a dismissal of the

problem of God, which is said to have been for Husserl the “fundamental
problem” of philosophy.27 It was simply the only answer consistent with
the standards of evidence required by philosophy understood as rigorous
science. The problem was different: Husserl’s answer may not have been
radical, or indeed phenomenological, enough. For, as Strauss put it, “those
who believe they know something about God deny that he is a describable
datum.”28 From his dissertation on, Strauss insisted that philosophy must
come to terms with—and must understand on its own terms—the two massive
“facts” of human life that are experienced as irreducibly “given”: religion
and government.29 Philosophy must attempt a radical clarification of its pre-
suppositions as an activity that takes place within political societies. It must
become “political philosophy.”

The “Change of Orientation” (1928–1935)

Strauss began to find this possibility in the late 1920s. Thanks to Heidegger’s
interpretations of Aristotle, he came to see that “the phenomena themselves,”
sought by post-Kantian philosophy from Hegel to Husserl, had been the
subject of the analyses of Plato and Aristotle.30 Partly against Heidegger and
drawing on Jacob Klein (who, like Strauss, had been Husserl’s student), he
began to find in ancient thought the “natural,” prescientific horizon sought by
phenomenology. This horizon was “natural” in the seemingly trivial sense that
it understood itself as such, or that it witnessed the philosophical discovery
of “nature” as a term and as a problem.31 It was also “natural” in the para-
doxical sense that it conceived of human life as open to, and constituted by,
a binding order or nomos—by what Strauss at the time called the “original
fact” (Tatsache) of the “given law.”32 Thus the classics philosophized “natu-
rally” in light of the phenomena as they appear to everyday experience in
the ancient city. Yet precisely by virtue of their attention to the phenomena,
or the “surface of things,” they were anything but naturalists.33 That is, they
knew that the world as it appears in everyday life is not already according to
nature, without that insight being “tied to a previous knowledge of physis”
or to a “naturalistic cosmology.”34
This requires some explanation. In accordance with Husserl’s critique of
naturalism, Strauss consistently denied that political philosophy could (or
should) begin from knowledge of nature. Not even the question concerning
human nature was the right starting point.35 That knowledge is simply not
available to us—at least not immediately. The difficulty resides in the fact
that we cannot know nature, and yet neither can we help “imitating nature as
[we] understand nature.”36 So we do understand, or we do have an awareness
of the “natural.” The phenomenological premise behind this difficulty seems
to be that there is no insight into the human that is not tied to an insight into
the order of the world. As Klein put it in the 1930s, this does not mean simply
 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

“that we are always located in a ‘world.’” Rather, it means that “all possible
thoughts, above all those which are related to ourselves, can in the first place
only arise with regard to the order of the world.”37 According to Klein, the
Greeks understood this, yet only “unreflectively,” as part of their “natural
consciousness.”38 Reflective knowledge about our “world-relatedness,”
however, is extremely rare; it only appears much later in the work of Kant
or Heidegger.39 Absent that reflection, human thought is bound to become
dogmatic: it is bound to substitute the “natural world” with (for example)
the “historical” world or the world “beyond.”40 The task of what Strauss calls
a “truly critical philosophy”41 is then to move from unreflective “natural
consciousness” to reflective consciousness. The “natural consciousness” is
expressed in common opinions, which in turn are shaped by the “given law.”42
To the extent that it is possible, then, knowledge of the order of nature, i.e.,
of the first presupposition of all thought, must begin from such opinions.
This beginning—and remaining—with the “surface of things” inoculated
the Socratic Greeks against dogmatic metaphysics.
However, it would take decades for Strauss to attempt a return to the
“natural consciousness” of the ancients. Long before this, he relied on phe-
nomenology for the sake of critique—or, more precisely, “radical critique,”
“radical reflection,” and Destruktion.43 The target in the 1920s was the hid-
den presuppositions of modern thought. During this time his reliance on
phenomenology is eclectic, critical, and historical, drawing occasionally on
its Hegelian variant.44 Here a brief summary must suffice.
Strauss’s first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, has been read as
establishing the failure of the modern Enlightenment to refute the claims of
divine revelation. Insofar as modern rationalism cannot prove that it is the
superior alternative, it undermines itself (since it is thus shown to rest on an
arbitrary decision). Spinoza’s Critique has accordingly been understood as a
vindication of revelation.45 At best we can choose to believe in reason. In this
reading, the young Strauss appears as a fideist or as a decisionist.46 Modern
rationalism fares no better: from Descartes to Kant to Husserl, it appears as
groundless, even self-destructive. These conclusions, however, are not only,
to say the least, highly implausible as accounts of the arc of modern thought;
they are also exactly opposed to Strauss’s aim in Spinoza’s Critique. There
he seeks to find more solid, phenomenological, foundations for the critical
project of modern rationalism—in his words, to find the ground (Boden)
or “the conditions for the possibility of radical critique of religion.”47 For
radical critique to be possible, Strauss suggests, philosophy must first see
the roots of the phenomenon: it must first see the criticized (religious) posi-
tion, “as it shows itself from itself.”48 However, it must also clarify its own
presuppositions. It must undertake an inquiry into the pre-scientific ground
or soil of modern science, in particular, of Biblical criticism. Neither belief
in revelation nor scientific unbelief are given “naturally”: they presuppose,
 STRAUSS AND HUSSERL

in Husserl’s terms, particular “attitudes,” “directions of the will,” “interests,”

and “ultimate ends.”49
In Strauss’s first book no standpoint is spared from “radical reflection.”
The result could be read as a stalemate in which “reason” appears as inca-
pable of refuting “revelation.” Yet that would be, in a sense, to miss the whole
point, namely Strauss’s dismantling of that abstract opposition in order to
lay bare the experiential grounds of belief and unbelief. Read in this way,
one of the most striking results of Spinoza’s Critique is the dismantling of
phenomenological rationalism itself. Anticipating Derrida’s critique of the
“metaphysics of presence,” Strauss describes the (Husserlian) rationalism that
seeks to explain everything without presupposing anything as uncritically
privileging the present over the past, seeing over hearing, and the “will to
presence” over the “the desire for non-presence.”50

Refounding “Political Philosophy” (1945–1968)

Yet, a third phase shows that Husserl’s thought remains not only important for
Strauss but also foundational. Indeed, without an adequate understanding of
his influence, I want to argue, Strauss’s thought will be radically misunder-
stood. Perhaps Strauss’s most revealing statements on Husserl can be found
in his correspondence with Eric Voegelin during the late 1940s, that is, dur-
ing the time of Strauss’s introduction of “classical political philosophy” to
America. There Strauss notes that Husserl was “the only one [in the twentieth
century] who really sought a new beginning.”51 In particular, he saw “with
incomparable clarity that the restoration of philosophy or science . . . presup-
poses the restoration of the Platonic-Aristotelian level of questioning.”52 Thus
Strauss recalls that the return to classical philosophy, which was shown to
be possible by Heidegger, had in fact been commenced by Husserl.53 As to
the kind of work that is needed to restore “philosophy or science,” Strauss
suggests that the clearest statement is Husserl’s late work on the “Crisis of
European Science.” There is “nothing in the literature of our century that
would be comparable in rigor, depth, and breadth.”54
Soon thereafter Strauss would elaborate his own understanding of the
“new beginning” in Natural Right and History (1953). This work retrieves
the problem of “natural right” from centuries of sedimented interpretations.
In structure and substance it could be modeled on Husserl’s Crisis. The
crisis, according to Husserl, concerns the meaning of science or philosophy
for life. The dominant powers of (positive) science and history provide no
answer. While the former excludes “all valuative positions,” the latter has
“nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all
the conditions of life, ideals, norms . . . form and dissolve themselves like
fleeting waves.”55 The roots of the crisis lie in a particular conception of
objectivity that dominates the positive sciences, and that is rejected (and
thus presupposed) by the historical sciences. The “objective world,” as com-
 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

monsense now understands it, is the great achievement of mathematics—the

world that is “universally determinable for everyone,” and that allows us to
calculate and predict unknown events with ever-greater exactness.56 This
world appears to modern humanity as the “true world,” indeed as “true
nature,” while the intuited world, which includes “all the truths of pre- and
extrascientific life,” appears as merely subjective.57 The awesome success of
mathematical objectivity, however, comes at a heavy price. First, scientific
“objectivism” leads to—and may even thrive on—the forgetfulness of the
“meaning-fundament” of all human thought in the “lifeworld,” that is, the
world of praxis “in which practically our whole life takes place,” and which
is “ever experienced and experienceable.”58 Secondly, and more insidiously,
modern objectivism is virtually blind to the sense or the mode of being of
mathematical idealities themselves. As such, it is oblivious or unaware of the
“garb of ideas” and symbols that encompasses everything “dressing it up as
objectively actual and true.”59
The “Crisis of European Sciences” may seem to be the most high-flying
diagnosis of the crisis of modernity, the subject of philosophers who saw
themselves (rather absurdly to post-modern sensibilities) as “functionaries of
mankind.”60 As such, it would seem to have nothing to do with our lifeworld.
Yet, of course, in its own self-understanding, Husserlian phenomenology is
all about the lifeworld as the “meaning-fundament” of reason: it is about the
genuine responsibility of reason.
The same spirit of responsibility of those who “live for truth,” and the
same kind of inquiry, it seems to me, underlie Strauss’s Natural Right and
History. Strauss’s lectures propose an inquiry into the origins of the “idea”
of “natural right.”61 In the late 1940s, Strauss had raised the question con-
cerning its “manner of existence”: “‘is’ it in the sense in which numbers and
figures ‘are’ or ‘is’ it in a different sense?”62 Rejecting both the traditional
Platonic view that “natural right” could exist as a metaphysical entity and
the view that it is always known or available—somehow “given” in human
nature—Strauss inquires into its genesis in the “‘natural’ understanding of
the world.”63 Just as there must have been a first geometer—a first person who
saw a “circle” in a round thing-shape, or a smooth surface as “even,” or who
perfected the rough estimate of magnitudes into measurement by counting
equal parts—so, Strauss suggests, there must have been a “first philosopher
. . . who discovered nature.”64
“To understand the meaning of that discovery,” Strauss argues, “one must
return from the idea of nature to its prephilosophic equivalent,” namely “cus-
tom” or “way.”65 The questioning of customs or ways in terms of “nature,”
is preceded by two fundamental distinctions, first, between “the names of
things [we] know through hearsay . . . and the things themselves which [we]
. . . can see with [our] own eyes,” and second, between artificial and man-
made things.66 Thus, Strauss establishes the possibility of “natural right” on
 STRAUSS AND HUSSERL

the basis of essential insights: notably, on the apodictic necessity that the
“idea” of “nature” has a (human, experiential) origin (if it does not reside in
a topos ouranios), as well as on the necessity that “men must always have
distinguished (e.g., in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with
one’s own eyes.”67
As to the meaning of that discovery, Strauss’s “intentional history” reveals
it as a possibility that, “at least according to its own interpretation, is trans-
historical, trans-social, trans-moral, and trans-religious.”68 Thus, “natural
right” is essentially a challenge to history, society, morality, and religion—in
short to law and convention—because it is in law and convention that nature
is both revealed and concealed.

Concluding Remarks: A Husserlian Strauss?

This essay has argued that to understand Strauss’s grounding of philosophy
in “fundamental problems” it is necessary to understand his relation to Hus-
serl. That philosophy is “nothing but genuine awareness of the problems”
seems to follow from basic Husserlian (and phenomenological) principles.
The first is a principle of acknowledgment: philosophy or science cannot
determine a priori what may count as a source of authority for knowledge.
Every experience of consciousness points to phenomena that must be clari-
fied. Thus philosophy must begin from awareness of the wealth of meaning
and intelligibility that is granted us by the “things themselves.” Yet there is
a second principle that imposes severe limits on intelligibility—the principle
of finitude. We can only ever see parts of things. We may have direct self-
evidence of mathematical principles, but phenomenal experience—including
that presupposed by mathematical insight—is always subject to revision. The
“problems” are, then, the intelligible yet ultimately impenetrable “things” or
“matters” (Sachen) from which phenomenology famously begins.
What are these matters or problems, and in what sense are they inherently
intelligible? If I understand Husserl correctly, “things” are intelligible by
virtue of their essential form. Humans have the capacity to become aware of
these forms or essences, which are simply common patterns—for example,
the “form” of a courageous deed in Plato or the “commodity form” in Marx.
As Husserl put it, we “see” essences all the time, yet we are not always aware
of them. We may “know” without full awareness, for example, that a sound
must possess a timbre, pitch, and intensity, or that even a god could only
ever see parts or profiles of spatial things, or, more controversially perhaps,
that nobleness is a higher value than cleverness. Yet again, even essential
knowledge of this kind seems to be subject to revision, or in need of ever
more adequate articulation. As Strauss’s work suggests, this is true also of
insight into “nature,” whose meaning and genesis as a sense-formation re-
mains precisely a problem.
 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

What do we gain from a Husserlian reading of Strauss? First, greater

clarity about his fundamental concepts: there is nothing mysterious in his
disputed definition of philosophy. “Awareness of fundamental problems” is
neither an esoteric secret nor the key to a neo-conservative ideology. The
implications of the definition may indeed be conservative—if, for example,
the “fundamental problem” of justice is insoluble, then we may never live in a
society that is free of contradictions (pace Marx or Hegel). But the generality
of this insight makes an unambiguous translation into practice impossible. The
“problem of justice” is qua problem or task always a justice to come—and
thus also a challenge to authority. Something similar holds for the concept of
“nature.” If, as I have argued, Strauss is a consistent critic of naturalism (in
Husserl’s sense), and if he also finds the ur-source of dogma in the “natural
attitude” of “commonsense,” then his work is as much a retrieval of “natural
right” as a radical critique of any insight into “nature” based on purportedly
universal experiences.
A second insight we may gain is that Strauss was much more of a “mod-
ern,” and specifically a philosophical “idealist,” than is generally believed.
If being is intrinsically intelligible, or if the world is the home of the human
mind, then the space of “groundless choice” and decision must be rather
limited, or even non-existent. At least we possess knowledge of ignorance,
and thus of what we cannot know—and cannot decide. Like Husserl, Strauss
was neither an anti-foundationalist nor a foundationalist. Insofar as his thought
leads to awareness of problems, it is rather a liberation from the compulsion
to find—or “destroy”—foundations where they are not needed.

Harvard University

Notes
1. Leo Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social
Research 13(3) (September 1946): 326–367, esp. 326, 338.
2. On Nietzsche and Heidegger, see, most recently, Laurence Lampert, The Enduring
Importance of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Richard
Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). I explore the latter relation in “Reading
Strauss from the Start: On the Heideggerian Origins of ‘Political Philosophy,’” European
Journal of Political Theory 9(3) (2010): 287–307. On Strauss and Husserl, see Hwa Yol
Jung, “Two Critics of Scientism: Leo Strauss and Edmund Husserl,” The Independent
Journal of Philosophy 3 (1978): 81–88; Laurence Berns, “The Prescientific World and
Historicism: Some Reflections on Strauss, Heidegger, and Husserl,” in Leo Strauss’s
Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,
1991), 169–181; and especially Pierpaolo Ciccarelli, “Filosofia e politica in Heidegger:
l’interpretazione fenomenologica di Leo Strauss,” Etica & Politica 11(1) (2009): 25–58.
The importance of Husserl and phenomenology has long been recognized (implicitly at
 STRAUSS AND HUSSERL

least) in French scholarship on Strauss. See, e.g., Raymond Aron, ed., Le savant et le
politique (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1963). Emmanuel Cattin, “La philosophie
politique comme philosophie première,” in Leo Strauss: art d’écrire, politique, philosophie,
ed. Laurent Jaffro, Benoît Frydman, and Emmanuel Cattin (Paris: J. Vrin, 2001), 41–57;
Gérald Sfez, Leo Strauss et les choses politiques (Futuroscope: SCÉRÉN-CNDP, 2011).
3. Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Studies
in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 36.
4. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 196.
5. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1953), 125 (hereafter NRH). This paragraph draws on Richard Kennington’s indispens-
able “Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” The Review of Metaphysics 35(1) (September
1981): 57–86.
6. NRH, 81.
7. Leo Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History,” The Review of Metaphys-
ics 5(4) (June): 559–86, 586.
8. NRH, 123.
9. “Grounds” is used here in the ordinary sense of “ground or soil,” as a translation
of Strauss’s Boden. As Jacob Klein explains, Husserl’s favored term was “roots,” instead
of the traditional arche or “principle.” “A ‘root’ is something out of which things grow
until they reach their perfect shape . . . The ‘radical’ aspect of phenomenology is more
important to Husserl than its perfection.” Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History
of Science,” in The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein, ed. R. Williamson and E. Zuck-
ermann (Annapolis, Md: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 65–85, 69.
10. Ibid., 70 (“intentional history”), 78 (epistemology), 67 (Sinngebilde). As Jacques
Derrida notes, this kind of history remains hidden to both the conventional history of em-
pirical facts or events and the non-historical, a priori, approach of Kant. Both appear as
uncritical insofar as they presuppose “nonempirical objects” (or sense-formations) without
inquiring into their genesis. “Kant’s indifference to empirical history is only legitimated
from the moment that a more profound history has already created nonempirical objects.
This history remains hidden from Kant.” Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of
Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989), 42.
11. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenlogie und phänomenolo-
gischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), §24, p. 44.
12. See Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of
Maimonides and His Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1995), 42, 138n2; and “Exoteric Teaching,” Interpretation 14(1) (1986):
51–59, esp. 58. I discuss this at greater length in “On a Forgotten Kind of Grounding:
Strauss, Jacobi, and the Phenomenological Critique of Modern Rationalism,” The Review
of Politics 76 (2014): 589–618.
13. See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and
the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
 IDEALISTIC STUDIES

14. Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” 31.

15. Leo Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis,
in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Philosophie und Gesetz; frühe Schriften, ed. Heinrich
Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 237–293. Hereafter GS2.
16. See F. H. Jacobi, David Hume on Faith, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: The Main
Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, ed. George Di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1994), 336.
17. Edmund Husserl, The Shorter Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, 2000),
Introduction, §2.
18. Husserl called this an “idealism from the bottom up.” See Claude Romano, Au
Coeur de la raison, La Phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 730; and Strauss,
“Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” 31.
19. Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis, 255.
See Husserl, Ideen I, §97, p. 228; NRH, 125; Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of
History,” 586.
20. Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem, 255.
21. Husserl, Ideen, §24, p. 44.
22. For helpful, yet conflicting, accounts, see Taylor Carman, “The Principle of
Phenomenology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd ed., ed. Charles B.
Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 97–120; Jean-Luc Marion,
Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology
(Evanston, Ill..: Northwestern University Press, 1998); and Gail Soffer, “Revisiting
the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given,” The Review of Metaphysics 57(2) (2003):
301–337.
23. Husserl, Ideen, §24, p. 44. That there are different degrees of evidence depending
of the mode of givenness of objects is also uncontroversial. For example, the direct self-
evidence that three is greater than two ranks higher than perceptual givenness which is
always subject to revision. See Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 28–30.
24. Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” 35.
25. Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of
Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 461. See also Strauss’s
letter to Karl Löwith of 15 August 1946, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, Hobbes’ politische
Wissenschaft und Zugehörige Schriften—Briefe, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler
Verlag, 2001), 663–664. Hereafter GS3.
26. Strauss’s letter to Löwith, 15 August 1946, in GS3, 663.
27. Louis Dupré, “Husserl’s Thought on God and Faith,” Philosophy and Phenom-
enological Research 29(2) (1968): 201–215, 201: “Once asked by his disciple Roman
Ingarden what he thought to be the fundamental problem in philosophy, Husserl replied:
‘The problem of God, of course.’” For a more thorough account, see Marcus Brainard,
Belief and Its Neutralization: Husserl’s System of Phenomenology in Ideas I (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2002).
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28. Strauss, GS3, 664. As I argue below, Strauss takes up the challenge of providing
a phenomenology of belief in his first book, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997). For the German original, see Leo Strauss, Die Reli-
gionskritik Spinozas. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Die Religionskritik Spinozas und
zugehörige Schriften, 2nd ed., ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler), 2001.
29. See note 12 above.
30. Leo Strauss, “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier,
Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 136.
31. See NRH, as discussed below.
32. Letter to Gerhard Krüger, 27 December 1932, in GS3, 417 “Die ursprüngliche
Tatsache ist ein gegebenes Gesetz, wie sogar die Psychoanalyse unfreiwillig bestätigt.”
33. Cf. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), 13: “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things,
is the heart of things.”
34. As, for instance, that presupposed by a sophist like Callicles. See Strauss’s letters
to Krüger of 7 February 1933, in GS3, 426 and 18 August 1934 in GS3, 440.
35. See, e.g., GS3, 409: Hobbes “misses” the Socratic question concerning the right
life because he begins “with that completely different question concerning the ‘nature’
of man.” See also GS3, 172, 407, 416; NRH, 145: “Human nature is one thing, virtue or
the perfection of human nature is another.” Further, Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964), 13: “‘the human things’ are not ‘the nature of man.’”
Political philosophy is concerned with “the human things,” not with “the nature of man.”
36. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 298.
37. Jacob Klein to Gerhard Krüger, undated, ca. 1933, in “Selected Letters from
Jacob Klein to Gerhard Krüger, 1929–1933,” ed. and trans. Emmanuel Patard, in The
New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. 6, Issue 1
(Seattle: Noesis Press, 2006), 309–328, 325.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. See Leo Strauss, “Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and
Farabi,” trans. Robert Bartlett, Interpretation 18(1) ([1936] 1990): 3–30, 6. See also GS3,
440, on “Plato’s critical philosophy.”
42. See note 32 above.
43. See Strauss, Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes (MS) cited in GS3, xix
(“Destruktion”); Die Religionskritik Spinozas, in GS1, 152 (“radical reflection” and
“radical critique”).
44. GS3, 407.
45. Kenneth H. Green, Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish
Thought of Leo Strauss (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 93.
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46. For Strauss as fideist, see Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics,
Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16–17; and Daniel
Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 165. For Strauss as decisionist, see Michael Zank,
“Introduction,” in Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932) (New York: SUNY Press,
2002), 34.
47. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 108; GS1, 152.
48. GS1, 196: “So wie diese von sich selbst her zeigt.” This is lost in the English
translation; cf. Spinoza’s Critique, 148. The phrase is an almost verbatim repetition of
Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology in Being and Time. See Martin Heidegger, Sein
und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 34: “Das was sich zeigt, so wie es sich
von ihm selbst her zeigt.”
49. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom-
enology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1970), 280.
50. Strauss, GS1, 230, cf. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 179. In 1931, Strauss
takes explicit distance from phenomenology, understood rather loosely as akin to the
“New Thinking” of Franz Rosenweig and Heidegger, later described (in 1962) as a form
of “experiencing philosophy” or “unqualified empiricism.” See Strauss, “Cohen und
Maimuni,” in GS2, 410; and Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in
Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1997), 147, 151. Importantly, as expressed in the 1962 “Preface,” Strauss’s critique
of the “New Thinking” is aimed at its anti-essentialism and anti-idealism. As such it does
not target the core of Husserl’s essentialist and idealist project. Yet it would also be false
to deny that by the 1930s, Strauss had moved far away from the main modern alterna-
tives. Suffice it to recall his claim, in 1935, that “the true natural model” of rationalism
is Maimonides—“the stumbling-block on which modern rationalism falls.” Strauss,
Philosophy and Law, 21.
51. See Strauss’s letter to Voegelin of 9 March 1946 in Glaube und Wissen: Der
Briefwechsel zwischen Eric Voegelin und Leo Strauss von 1934 bis 1964. trans. Emmanuel
Patard and Peter-Joachim Opitz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 36.
52. Ibid., 41.
53. Indeed, even the most “modern” neo-Cartesian development in his thought,
Husserl’s egology, “can be understood only as an answer to the Platonic-Aristotelian
question regarding the Nous.” Ibid. For Husserl’s 1929 defense of phenomenology as
“transcendental idealism”—and, specifically, as a “systematic egological science” and
an explication of the ego from which the world “gets its whole sense,” see his Cartesian
Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999),
86, 21.
54. Strauss’s letter to Voegelin of 9 March 1946 in Glaube und Wissen, 36. Strauss
refers to Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
For Strauss’s praise of Husserl, see also his “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,”
137: “As regards Husserl’s work, I can only say that I believe it surpasses in significance
everything I know of, which was done in Germany in the last 50 years.”
55. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 7.
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56. Ibid., 32.

57. Ibid., 54.
58. Ibid., 48–51.
59. Ibid., 51.
60. Ibid., 17.
61. Among several other “ideas” or “problems,” such as the “idea of philosophy” (as
the attempt to grasp an eternal order), the “idea of science,” the “idea of justice,” and the
“idea of man.” See NRH, 145, and Kennington, “Strauss’s Natural Right and History.”
62. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010), 34.
63. NRH, 77.
64. See Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, in Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s
Origin of Geometry, 178; and NRH, 82.
65. NRH, 83.
66. Ibid., 87.
67. Ibid., 86. My emphasis.
68. Ibid., 89.