Leo Strauss Quotes on Knowledge
Leo Strauss (1899–1973), the German-American political philosopher whose Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Natural Right and History (1953), and Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) defined the postwar "Straussian" tradition of close reading, defended the case that the great philosophical authors of antiquity wrote on two levels — an exoteric surface intelligible to the careful reader of the dominant orthodoxy and an esoteric philosophical teaching accessible only through the deeper interpretive labor that Strauss took to be the proper work of philosophy. The framework grounds Strauss's broader case for the recovery of classical political philosophy against the modern historicisms whose corrosive consequences he diagnosed as the central crisis of the modern West.
Quotes
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“Liberal education is the counter-poison to mass culture.”
What is liberal education,” p. 5 The phrase “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” is from Max Weber . -
Attributed to Leo Strauss:
“The fundamental question is whether men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives by the unaided efforts of their natural powers.”
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Attributed to Leo Strauss:
“Philosophy is the quest for wisdom or for knowledge regarding the most important things.”
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Attributed to Leo Strauss:
“The philosopher is and remains a stranger in the city.”
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“Why We Remain Jews" (1962)”
Science, as the positivist understands it, is susceptible of infinite progress. That you learn in every elementary school today, I believe. Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision, and this will never change. In other words, fifty thousand years from now there will still be results entirely different from those now, but still subject to revision. Science is susceptibl -
“No bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.”
The City and Man , p. 5 (1964) -
“The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. … The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.”
Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil ", Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 3, nos. 2 and 3 (1973) -
“We are confronted with the incompatible claims of Jerusalem and Athens to our allegiance. We are open to both and willing to listen to each. We ourselves are not wise but we wish to become wise. We are seekers for wisdom, philo-sophoi .”
Athens and Jerusalem : Some Preliminary Reflections in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1985), p. 149