From history to nature: Leo Strauss’s return to non-historicist thought
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/2357797589733Keywords:
Leo Strauss, Political philosophy, Historicism, Nature, HistoryAbstract
Considering the scope of his critique of historicism, it is possible to assert that Leo Strauss's philosophical démarche consolidates itself as an attempt to return to what would be the non-historicist thought in its "pure form," that is, the thought in which an original understanding of the nature-history binomial is central. For the philosopher, the comprehension of this conceptual pair undergoes a radical transformation throughout modernity, rendering philosophy something impossible or absurd, and political philosophy something dated. Thus, it is suggested that Strauss's endeavor presents itself to us as an attempt to restore the category of nature (physis) and the notion of history (historia) as understood by non-historicist thinkers. The aim of this article is to retrace some steps taken by Strauss on this path back from history to nature, highlighting particularly two main and correlated aspects, which, I believe, provide a minimal understanding of the significance of Strauss's sophisticated enterprise: (i) the justified use of the author’s genetic and historical methodology, which should serve the task of emphasizing or, emphatically, reenacting the conditions of possibility for political philosophy; and (ii) Strauss's defense of a non-historicist understanding of nature, whose adequacy should reveal a certain insufficiency of the notion of history in the realm of knowledge concerning the nature of political things and the idea of natural right. From this emphasis, one can observe how Strauss provokes his audience, bringing to light the praise of philosophy and the unsettling suspicion regarding the limits of historical knowledge.
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