German Sokrates: Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss

This dissertation traces the genesis of three conceptions of political philosophizing in the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss. I draw on recently published works to shed light on their respective turns to 'political philosophy' as responses to the crisis of the Weimar Republic. I argue that the philosophical, theological, and political dimensions of the crisis led to a rediscovery of Socratic philosophizing.;Heidegger rediscovered the Socratic project of a 'philosophy of human affairs' in his early lectures on Aristotle, which Strauss and Arendt attended in 1922 and 1924/25 respectively. Heidegger's project was to refound philosophy on its existential basis by redirecting the 'care' of philosophy away from attempts to secure universal and binding knowledge to the self-illumination of life in its historical 'facticity'. In an unprecedented effort to understand the phenomena to which Plato and Aristotle referred, Heidegger showed that philosophy grows out of a world of common practical concerns, opinions, and passions. He thus inadvertently refounded philosophy as 'political philosophy' and made possible the projects of Arendt and Strauss.;Strauss was particularly affected by Heidegger's confrontation with the problem of ethics or of providing a rational answer to the question concerning the right or the good way of life. Strauss understood this problem Socratically as the question of the necessity and possibility of a techne politike or political science. I argue that Strauss's work as a whole responds to this question. Like Heidegger, Strauss was aware of the fact that a rational justification of one's way of life---especially when it is shared with a political community---may be impossible. Beyond this, it may be unnecessary---if faith or divine revelation are sufficient for achieving human perfection.;Drawing on Arendt's Denktagebuch and her dissertation on Augustine, I argue that her project emerged from a similar 'theological-political predicament': whether or not we should be completely at home in this world is the guiding question of Arendt's oeuvre. This question grew out of Arendt's condition as a Jew born and raised in Germany and her discovery of neo-orthodox 'dialectical theology'.;Thus read, the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Strauss appears in a fresh light. It becomes the source of a conception of neo-Socratic political philosophy.