The Anti-Enlightenment Enlightenment On Leo Strauss’s Political Philosophy

Leo Strauss’s final intention is to reflect the modern-enlightenment, and to save the enlightenment spirit at the same time. Therefore he must study the history of political philosophy in a hard way, and then try to revive a kind of Platonic classical political philosophy.Leo Strauss must do so because he thinks that after the modern-enlightenment collapsed because of its success, not only the modern political philosophy has become ideology, but also philosophy itself has lost its possibility and necessity. Strauss uses "The Second Cave" to describe the special post-modern situation. This self-aware cave is not fit for human beings to live in, because on the one hand, it lacks of steady foundation, nihilism threats its foundation everywhere; and on the other hand, there are double bonds in this cave, which makes the desire of human to go out of the cave lost its natural foundation, and thus the possibility of human faces with the risk of exhaustion. This is Strauss’s special diagnose to modern crisis.Leo Strauss thinks the reason is that the modern-enlightenment has disposed the relationship between philosophy and politics mistakenly, therefore this is a political philosophy disease. Ever since Machiavelli, all modern philosopher discontented with utopia character of classical political philosophy, they want to insure an ideal amalgamation between philosophy and politics through enlightenment, and let the light of truth lighten every corner of political society. What a grand and captivating blueprint! But in order to do so, modern philosophers must willing to set their sights lower, and let philosophical enlightenment service for the reconstruction of politics. It is a fatal error from the beginning, because it fantasy two mutually exclusive things together, and the only result is that both of them will be damaged. Strauss uses a famous "The Three Waves of Modernity" to show clearly how the modern-enlightenment ultimately self-collapsed step by step because of the inner chronic illness: Rousseau (The Second Wave) and Nietzsche (The Third Wave), both of the two iconic characters radicalized philosophy because they were dissatisfied with the moral of modern-enlightenment and wanted to turn the degenerate tendency of modernity through returning to classicality. But because they haven’t been able to jump out of the modern-enlightenment inherent vision, they were far from holding back the exacerbation of the chronic illness of modernity, but pushed modernity to its peak.In order to overcome the modern crisis result from modern political philosophy, Strauss thinks that it is necessary to revive the classical political philosophy wisdom. The core of this wisdom is to clearly recognize the distinct-different characteristics of philosophy and politics:the endless seek for wisdom of philosophy certainly will threaten the dependence of opinions and dogmas from philosophy, and therefore it will need a political philosophy to deal with the relationship between philosophy and politics properly, to make sure they won’t do harm to each other. In that sense, political philosophy is completely not a political layout, even The Republic of Plato should be considered as an acutely attack to political idealism. Its real intention is to reveal the highest limit of political life contrary to the highest possibility of human. Only when we grasp this classical wisdom can we catch a whole complete vision to look upon human and political affairs, and then let it give us meaningful revelation today.However, this kind of classical political philosophy can not be understood today, because we are living in a "Second Cave" which makes philosophy and politics lose their pristine meanings. So Strauss argues that we need a special method which the ancients should and will not need, that is studying the history of political philosophy, trying hard to climb back to "The First Cave" from "The Second Cave". The latter is a natural and self-aware-less cave, which has the steady "theological-political confederation" as its foundation, and philosophy comes up and grows up on this soil. In that sense, philosophy is the transcendence of polis, it yearn for the sunlight out side of the cave, and the concomitant of the highest possibility of the whole complete human.Of cause, it means that there will not be any pristine philosophical enlightenment in the post-modern situation; all of those is a theoretically attempt. Once it put into effect, it even looks like "anti-enlightenment", this is an important reason that Strauss has been censured. Therefore, we must clarify Strauss’s political position on liberal democracy on the one hand, prove that the classical political philosophy can be beneficial to resolve present political dispute; and on the other hand, we must put it in the level of free education or general education, which requires us to read those great classical books painstakingly, and try our best to understand forefathers’thought just as they thought, and then we can get a whole complete vision, and liberate ourselves from "The Second Cave" ultimately.This is Leo Strauss’s job:revive a kind of wisdom of classical political philosophy in order to reply to the political and philosophical crisis today. In despite of how we evaluate Strauss’s job (of cause, before that, we must understand him correctly), the orientation that Strauss points out for us must be regarded seriously and adequately.