Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

6 Interpretation
not feel burdened by the need to defend itself rationally, are not unknown in
the twenty-first century. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing after all for those
proposing to make things better politically to feel obliged to show that what
they are proposing makes sense and is defensible rationally.
Strauss on occasion expressed his views regarding the quarrel
between ancient and modern philosophy by paraphrasing an observation of
Lessing’s: we know more than the ancients did, but they understood what they
knew better than we understand what we know (Strauss 1986, 59 note 37).
With this observation, Lessing concluded, in Strauss’s paraphrase, I think I
have settled the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. For Strauss,
recovering what the ancients understood better than we do required a return to
Socratic knowledge of ignorance:
What Pascal said with antiphilosophic intent about the impotence of
both dogmatism and skepticism [that we know too much to be skeptics
and too little to be dogmatists] is the only possible justification of philosophy
which as such is neither dogmatic, nor skeptic, and still less
“decisionist,” but zetetic (or skeptic in the original sense of the term).
Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems,
i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to
think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution,
toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long
as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all
solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems.
(Strauss 1991, 277)
To what extent is such zetetic skepticism compatible with the
knowledge of what is politically better and worse implied in the passages
quoted above or with the kind of knowledge of political life ascribed to Strauss
by Klein? How does the zetetic skepticism Strauss endorses differ from the
skepticism he rejects? Is it compatible with the conclusions at which we say he
arrived?
In a course Strauss gave on the Protagoras in 1965, Strauss
explained the difference between skepticism and zetetic skepticism in responding
to a question by a student who asked: “Isn’t it possible that we must always
be skeptics as to our abilities?” Strauss answered:
No, but always willing to reconsider. I mean skepticism comes from the
word skepsis and this means considering, looking at. Socrates says,“nothing
like having another look at it.” This kind of skepticism is the opposite
of that kind of lazy skepticism, which says we don’t know, we can’t know,
let’s do something else. But the industrious skeptic says let us examine it
again, even if we are quite sure of that.