Leo Strauss (1899 – 1973)
German-Jewish philosopher who specialized in the study of classical political philosophy.
All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible.
I may never have experienced a centaur, but by imagining one, I know that I can also imagine others that resemble this one and yet are different. But the God of the Bible is not only One, but the only possible One. As such, He cannot become an object of knowledge. And He cannot be imagined. A god that can be imagined would be a pagan deity (of which their always can be many), but not the One of the Bible. This is why the second of the Ten Commandments forbids the making of images; that is to say, it forbids any suggestion that God can become an object of knowledge by being an object of perception. It is because He cannot become an object of knowledge that He can, and indeed must, be an object of faith.
All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.
Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.
[The philosopher] is ultimately compelled to transcend not merely the dimensions of common opinion, of political opinion, but the dimension of political life as such; for he is left to realize that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy.
Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.
Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. But to grant that revelation is possible means to grant that philosophy is perhaps something infinitely unimportant. To grant that revelation is possible means to grant that the philosophic life is not necessarily, not evidently, the right life. Philosophy, the life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as man, would itself rest on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision. This would merely confirm the thesis of faith, that there is no possibility of consistency, of a consistent and thoroughly sincere life, without belief in revelation. The mere fact that philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy by revelation.
Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.
By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.
Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm. It is the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation. In spite of its highness or nobility, it could appear as Sisyphean or ugly, when one contrasts its achievement with its goal. Yet it is necessarily accompanied, sustained and elevated by eros. It is graced by nature's grace.
Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.
I cannot know anything of which there is and can only be one. If God is One, and if there be no other God, there can be no idea of God. God is unique in that in Him no distinction can be drawn between the universal and the particular, which is the ground of all intelligibility within the dispensation of unassisted human reason. God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.
The belief that value judgments are not subject, in the last analysis, to rational control, encourages the inclination to make irresponsible assertions regarding right and wrong or good and bad. One evades discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arose out of man’s very agreement regarding values.
Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.
Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.
Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them anymore... In order to live, we have to silence the easily silenced voice of reason, which tells us that our principles are in themselves as good or as bad an any other principles. The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism...
To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life—that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion—or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate... If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger] adopted the second alternative.
We believe that failing to call a spade a spade is not scientific.
At the time and in the country in which the present study was written, it was granted by everyone except backward people that the Jewish faith had not been refuted by science or by history.... one could grant to science and history everything they seem to teach regarding the age of the world, the origin of man, the impossibility of miracles, the impossibility of the immortality of the soul, and of the resurrection of the body, the Jahvist, the Elohist, the third Isaah, and so on, without abandoning one iota of the substance of the Jewish faith.
It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.