Table Of ContentPHILOSOPHY
AND LAW
SUNY Series in the Jewish Writings of Leo Strauss
Kenneth Hart Green, editor
PHILOSOPHY
AND LAW
CONTRIBUTIONS
TO THE UNDERSTANDING
OF MAIMONIDES
AND HIS PREDECESSORS
Leo Strauss
TRANSLATED BY
EVE ADLER
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1995 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strauss, Leo.
IPhilosophie und Gesetz. Englishl
Philosophy and law: contributions to the understanding of
Maimonides and his predecessors / Leo Strauss; translated by Eve
Adler.
p. cm. - (SUNY series in the Jewish writings of Strauss)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7914-1975-4. - ISBN 0-7914-1976-2 (pbk.)
1. Philosophy, Jewish. 2. Law (Theology) 3. Maimonides, Moses,
1135-1204. Dalalat al-ba'irin. I. Title. II. Series.
B757.L38S7613 1995
181' .06-dc20 93-34046
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Translator's Introduction 1
Introduction 21
Chapter 1. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the
Moderns in the Philosophy of .J udaism:
Notes on Julius Guttmann,
The Philosophy of Judaism 41
Chapter 2. The Legal Foundation of Philosophy:
The Commandment to Philosophize
and the Freedom of Philosophizing 81
Chapter 3. The Philosophic Foundation of the Law:
Maimonides's Doctrine of Prophecy
and its Sources 101
Notes 135
Index 155
v
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 ground
breaking 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 pub
lication, it retains all of its startling freshness and its pow
er to awaken direct thought about the great human ques
tions it addresses. In this sense the book introduces itself
and speaks for itself. The purpose of the present introduc
tion 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 Maimoni
des'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 oppos
ing 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 of a 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 natu
ral 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 Enlight
enment has undermined the foundations of the Jewish tra
dition 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 con
ceded 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 compe
tent 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 with
out saying that the Enlightenment did not directly refute
the irrefutable premise of orthodoxy that God is omnipo
tent and His will unfathomable, or any of the claims of
orthodoxy-thE~ creation, miracles, the revelation-that de
pend 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 theo
retically 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 under
stands modern natural science as one historically condi
tioned form of world-construction among others, and by
which therefore the natural world-view of the Bible is certi
fied as equally eligible (p. 33). Nor can the Enlightenment
rest its case on the modern ideal of freedom as the autono
my 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 au
tonomy of man and his culture was only an unstable,
absent-minded derivative ofthe original, the primary ideal
of civilization as the self-assertion of man against overpow
ering nature (p. 35).
Here, then, is the true basis of the Enlightenment's
case against orthodoxy: the ideal of civilization as the self
assertion of man against overpowering nature. Strauss
characterizes this ideal as a species of Epicureanism,
though to be sure profoundly transformed: the original Epi
curean animus against the terror in the delusion of religion
has become the Enlightenment animus against the delu
sion in the comfort of religion. Epicureanism so trans
formed, Enlightenment Epicureanism, is marked by a new
virtue-intellectual probity-borrowed though from the
morality of the Biblical tradition against which it was as
serting itself: "This atheism with a good conscience, or even
with a bad conscience, differs from the conscienceless athe
ism at which the past shuddered precisely by its conscien
tiousness, by its morality." The new Epicurean, instead of
being willing to "live in hiding" safely, "learned to fight
and die for honor and truth," and finally to reject the belief
in God "for reasons of conscience." The true meaning of
