Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors

Translator's Introduction: The Argument of Philosophy and Law

Translator's Introduction: The Argument of Philosophy and Law Leo Strauss's Philosophy and Law (Philosophie und Gesetz: Beitriige zum Verstiindnis Maimunis und Seiner Vorlaiifer, Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935) contains a groundbreaking study of the political philosophy of Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors, and offers an argument on behalf of that philosophy which is also a profound critique of modern philosophy. Almost sixty years from its first publication , it retains all of its startling freshness and its power to awaken direct thought about the great human questions it addresses. In this sense the book introduces itself and speaks for itself. The purpose of the present introduction is only to serve as a tentative map of the territory that the reader will discover for himself in the book. I. Strauss's "Introduction" Strauss's professed aim in Philosophy and Law is to "awaken a prejudice" in favor of the view that Maimonides 's medieval rationalism is the true natural prototype of rationalism and, even more, to arouse a suspicion against the powerful opposing prejudice (p. 21). The powerful opposing prejudice, as it turns out, is not so much that modern rationalism is the true natural prototype of rationalism as that there is no true natural prototype of rationalism. 1 2 Translator's Introduction Strauss will take issue with the view that nature has been proved by modern thought to have been a delusion. His aim, then, is twofold: first, to arouse a suspicion against the view that it is irrational to inquire after the true natural prototype ofa thing; and only in the second place to awaken a prejudice to the effect that as for rationalism, not modern rationalism but Maimonides's rationalism is its true natural prototype. Strauss begins from the present situation of Judaism. This situation, like all phenomena peculiar to the present, has been determined by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment has undermined the foundations of the Jewish tradition by appearing to have defeated orthodoxy once and for all. Strauss however, comparing the "so-called victory" of the Enlightenment over orthodoxy to a prematurely conceded battle, and remarking that victories are in any case very dubious evidences of the just cause, proceeds to reopen the quarrel between orthodoxy and the Enlightenment, with a view to reaching a well-founded judgment. Thus the core of the Introduction has the dramatic character of a trial. The re-hearing of this old case is motivated by the urgent suspicion that the untenable situation of Judaism may have resulted from an error in the original disposition of the case. Ce~rtainly there was an error in the original jurisdiction: world history, indeed just the history of the last two or three hundred years, was mistaken for a competent court (p. 28). For what, after all, is the Enlightenment's case against orthodoxy? As a party whose interest lies both in solving the Jewish problem and in getting to the bottom of things, Strauss considers the arguments of both sides. It goes without saying that the Enlightenment did not directly refute the irrefutable premise of orthodoxy that God is omnipotent and His will unfathomable, or any of the claims of orthodoxy-thE~ creation, miracles, the revelation-that depend on that premise. Nor does the Enlightenment have a case in its supposed indirect refutation of orthodoxy, its elaboration of a philosophic system to prove that the world Translator's Introduction 3 and life are perfectly intelligible without the assumption of a mysterious God; for its attempt to show that man is theoretically and practically the master of the world and of life has run into obstacles (p. 32). Nor can the new natural science legitimate the Enlightenment, since it always had latent in it the modern "idealism" which finally understands modern natural science as one historically conditioned form of world-construction among others, and by which therefore the natural world-view of the Bible is certified as equally eligible (p. 33). Nor can the Enlightenment rest its case on the modern ideal of freedom as the autonomy of man and his culture. This ideal only temporarily seemed viable at a moment when, "after the decisive entry into the state of civilization, one had forgotten the state of nature." But the state of nature was not to be disposed of merely by being forgotten. The ideal of freedom as the autonomy of man and his culture was only an unstable, absent-minded derivative ofthe...