Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger

in the Anti-Liberalism of Leo Strauss

Robert C. Miner

After emigrating to the United States, Leo Strauss taught political philoso-
phy for thirty years, first at the New School for Social Research in New
York and then at the University of Chicago, before retiring at St. John’s
College. Richard Wolin observes that he “seems to have deeply mis-
trusted day-to-day politics—a very strange stance, to be sure, for someone
who made his living teaching political philosophy.”1 But is it really so
strange? What in his German Gymnasium education, or his participation
in the Zionist movement, would have prepared him for the peculiarities
of day-to-day American politics? Strauss did not underestimate the depth
of his connection to Germany: “I will never be able to write other than
in German, even if I must in another language,” he wrote to Karl Löwith
in 1933.2 One may apply to Strauss these words of Adorno: “Every intel-
lectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to
acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised
of it behind the tightly closed doors of his self-esteem. He lives in an
environment that must remain incomprehensible to him, however flawless
his knowledge of trade-union organizations or the automobile may be; he
is always astray.”3

1.  Richard Wolin, “Leo Strauss, Judaism and Liberalism,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education: The Chronicle Review 52, no. 32 (April 14, 2006): B13.
2.  Letter of May 19, 1933, to Karl Löwith, in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 3, ed. Heinrich Meier, with Wiebke Meier (Stuttgart and Weimar: B. Metzlar, 2001),
pp. 624–25.
3.  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (London: Verso, 1984), p. 33 (emphasis mine).

9
Telos 160 (Fall 2012): 9–27.
doi:10.3817/0912160009
www.telospress.com
10    Robert C. Miner

In what sense might Strauss have been “always astray”? Did he not
adapt himself with enthusiasm to the United States, throwing himself into
a spirited defense of American liberal democracy and “natural right”? Did
he not identify the “historicist” tendencies of German philosophy as the
ultimate enemy? In this essay, I will argue that Strauss remained “always
astray” in the deepest sense, never abandoning the political outlook at
which he arrived in his German youth under the intellectual tutelage of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. To many of his
admirers, this will seem perverse, not least because Strauss appears to
assume a sharply critical stance toward Heidegger. This essay will take
direct aim at this appearance.
My argument unfolds in four steps. First, I will show that Strauss’s
early Nietzschean formation leads him to suspicions that modern liberal
democracy fosters triviality and mediocrity—suspicions that he shares
with Schmitt. He writes a critique of the Concept of the Political not
owing to any horror of Schmitt’s sympathies with fascism, but because
he thinks that Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy does not go nearly
far enough. In a second section, I will argue that in order to attain a posi-
tion that he takes to be more radical than Schmitt’s, Strauss moves to the
thought of Heidegger. Drawing upon both his critique of Schmitt and a
letter to Löwith, I will show that despite his abhorrence of anti-Semitism,
Strauss’s political outlook in the 1930s does not differ appreciably from
that of Schmitt or Heidegger. But does not the mature Strauss, the émigré
who wants to befriend Anglo-American liberalism against its German
critics, clearly reject this outlook? Whatever transient sympathy he might
have had for fascism, Strauss becomes a friend of liberalism, an informed
and subtle critic of Heidegger—or so his contemporary defenders hold.
In a third section, I will show why one might take this view, rehearsing
the critique of Heidegger that appears in the autobiographical 1962 pref-
ace to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. A final
section will demonstrate that the picture of Strauss as anti-Heideggerian
depends on a superficial reading. When compared with other assessments
of Heidegger made by Strauss, the 1962 preface appears as an exoteric
work of pedagogy, an instance of artful writing designed to prevent his
English-speaking readers from being seduced too quickly by Heidegger’s
charms. However circumspect Strauss was about publicizing the view, he
remained doubtful that liberal democracy possesses any intellectually seri-
ous answer to the criticisms posed by Schmitt and Heidegger.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     11

I. Keeping the Bow Tensed:

Strauss and Schmitt contra Liberal Democracy
In the preface of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche evokes a fight between
two antagonists. On the one side is Plato and the “Christian-ecclesiastical
pressure of millennia.” The other combatant is left unnamed, though it is
reasonable to identify it with Voltaire’s Écrasez l’infâme and whatever
else opposes “Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and the good as such.”
This fight, Nietzsche thinks, has been good for Europe—not because
Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, or Voltaire have prevailed, but because it “has
created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had
never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the
most distant goals.”4 Nietzsche recognizes that not everyone shares this
sensibility. Those with less noble temperaments do not see the tension as
an enabling condition for greatness. They experience it merely as “need
and distress.” Inevitably they will attempt to relieve their distress by dis-
solving the tension. Nietzsche claims that two such attempts “have been
made in the grand style to unbend the bow—once by means of Jesuitism,
the second time by means of the democratic enlightenment which, with
the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might indeed bring
it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as a
‘need.’”5
Here Nietzsche makes at least three separate claims: that European
history is dominated by the tension he identifies, that the tension is ben-
eficial for the European spirit, and that “Jesuitism” and “democratic
enlightenment” are rightly understood as attempts to dissolve the ten-
sion. If the young Strauss was “mesmerized” by Nietzsche and “literally
believed everything that [he] understood of him,” as he told Löwith, one
would expect him to agree with each of these three claims.6 The evidence
of Strauss’s youthful “Zionist essays,” written from his twenty-fourth to
twenty-sixth year, confirms this expectation.7 Reacting in 1924 to attempts
to reconcile the warring antagonists of science and tradition, Strauss recalls

4.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 2.
5.  Ibid.
6.  “Correspondence of Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss,” trans. George Elliott Tucker,
Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 183.
7.  For a more expansive treatment, see Robert Miner, “‘Politics As Opposed to Tradi-
tion’: The Presence of Nietzsche and Spinoza in the ‘Zionist Essays’ of Leo Strauss,”
Interpretation 37 (2010): 203–26.
12    Robert C. Miner

“a time, not so long ago, when the two powers, tradition and science, did
not coexist peacefully on parallel planes, with no points of contact, but
engaged in a life-and-death struggle for hegemony on the single plane
of the ‘truth.’”8 Strauss’s language of “life-and-death struggle” is a close
echo of Nietzsche’s claim at Anti-Christ §47 that Christianity and science
are “mortal enemies.”9 Preserving this tension is beneficial for the Euro-
pean spirit, Strauss thinks; it is, he will say later, “the secret of the vitality
of the West.” What of the attempt to dissolve this tension by “Jesuitism,”
which Nietzsche understands as “the conscious holding on to illusion and
forcibly incorporating that illusion as the basis of culture”? Strauss shares
Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesuitism as an effort to unbend the bow.
In 1924’s “On the Argument with European Science,” he explicitly dis-
tinguishes a “Jesuit-pragmatist interpretation” from genuinely orthodox
attempts to come to terms with biblical criticism. For Strauss, Jesuitism
paves the way for the later “transcendentalist-idealist” interpretations that
take root in Germany, “the land of ‘reconciliations’ and ‘sublations.’”10
With Nietzsche, Strauss agrees that what Europe needs is not to dissolve
the conflict between science and religion by any strategy of reconciliation,
whether Jesuit or idealist, but to preserve the tension, to keep the bow
tensed.
In a lecture entitled “German Nihilism,” given at the New School
for Social Research in 1941 just after he emigrated to America, Strauss
looks back at the Nietzsche-influenced “young nihilists” who reject the
“open society” in favor of the “closed society.” (The terms “open society”
and “closed society” belong to Henri Bergson, one of the four great phi-
losophers of the twentieth century, according to Strauss. The others are
Whitehead, Husserl, and Heidegger.)11 The closed society is more human
than the open society precisely because it keeps the bow tensed. It is,
Strauss says, “constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward,
the Ernstfall, the serious moment, M-day, war. Only life in such a tense
atmosphere, only a life that is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices
to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of

8.  Leo Strauss, The Early Writings (1921–1932), trans. and ed. Michael Zank (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2002), p. 109.
9.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, §47, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-
Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 175.
10. Strauss, The Early Writings, p. 133.
11.  See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL:
The Free Press, 1959), p. 17.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     13

life and all worldly goods, is truly human: the sublime is unknown to the
open society.”12 Strauss identifies this view as the non-nihilistic motive
underlying German nihilism. That Strauss himself held this Nietzschean
view, at least in the 1920s, is difficult to doubt. In the 1941 lecture, he does
not directly associate himself with the view, but ascribes it to “quite a few
very intelligent and very decent, if very young Germans.”13 Among these
Germans are Heidegger and Schmitt.
Strauss admired Schmitt’s Concept of the Political and Schmitt him-
self. In March 1932, he wrote Schmitt: “the interest that you have shown
in my studies of Hobbes represents the most honorable and crucial valida-
tion of my scholarly work that has ever been bestowed upon me and that I
could ever dream of.”14 In the same year, he published a set of remarks on
Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. In these remarks, he locates the central
nerve of Schmitt’s argument in its claim that liberal internationalism, were
it to realize its highest aspirations, would eliminate the serious, “tense”
existence valued by Schmitt and Strauss alike. If the friend-enemy distinc-
tion were to disappear, Schmitt argues in the Concept of the Political, what
would remain is “neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, eco-
nomics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc.”15 As Strauss puts it in 1941,
liberal democracy and the open society tend toward a trivial form of life,
amounting to little more than “the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure,
or gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and
lack of seriousness.”16 It is true, Strauss adds, that German nihilism suffers
from inarticulacy about what to put in the place of decadent civilization.
It does not err, however, in opposing the “very prospect of a world in
which everyone would be happy and satisfied, in which everyone would
have his little pleasure by day and his little pleasure by night, a world in
which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe, a world
without real, unmetaphoric, sacrifice, i.e. a world without blood, sweat,
and tears.”17
12.  Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation 26 (1999): 353–78. This is the
text of a lecture delivered in February 1941 in the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty
of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research.
13.  Ibid., p. 360.
14.  Quoted in Eugene Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of
a Political Philosopher (Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2006), p. 57.
15.  Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 53.
16.  Strauss, “German Nihilism,” p. 358.
17.  Ibid., p. 360.
14    Robert C. Miner

Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the European spirit as thriving on tension and

endangered by grand attempts to unbend the bow—Jesuitism and demo-
cratic Enlightenment—is the common ground upon which Schmitt and
Strauss stand. From this ground, Strauss mounts a critique of Schmitt.
Beneath the veneer of Schmitt’s realpolitik, he argues, lurks a moral com-
mitment to human seriousness as such. This makes him, Strauss says, “just
as tolerant as the liberals,” since he respects anyone so long as he has seri-
ous convictions and is willing to die for them in war. Schmitt’s affirmation
of the political is therefore not a move beyond liberalism but “a liberalism
with the opposite polarity.”18 Disguised though it may be, his moralism
ensures that “he remains trapped in the view that he is attacking.”19 Notice
that Strauss does not dissent from Schmitt’s claim that liberal societies
breed mediocrity, valuing entertainment and comfort over conflict and
greatness. His critique is that Schmitt has not realized his own aspirations;
he has not genuinely transcended liberalism. “The critique introduced by
Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed only if one succeeds
in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.” Such completion, he adds, is an
“urgent task.”20
Strauss judges Schmitt’s project as worthy, while standing in need of
completion by a more radical mode of thought. Far from faulting Schmitt
for his opposition to liberalism, he thinks that his opposition does not go
nearly far enough because it does not go to the roots. This is the heart
of his critique, justifying the claim that Strauss criticizes Schmitt from
the right.21 Against this, one might try to argue that the true lesson for
Strauss is that no matter how anti-liberal one’s intentions, one simply can-
not succeed in “gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.” On this construal,
Schmitt’s work would be an unwitting testament to the inescapability of
liberalism. But did Strauss hold for the inescapability of liberalism? To see
that he did not, we may look first to his correspondence with Löwith in
1933, and then more closely at his relation to a thinker whom he takes to
be far more radical than Schmitt, Martin Heidegger.

18.  Leo Strauss, “Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen,” trans.
E. M. Sinclair; reprinted in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 120.
19.  Ibid., p. 119.
20.  Ibid., p. 122.
21.  For this claim, see Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, p. 121; and
William H. F. Altman, “Review Essay: Pyrrhic Victories and a Trojan Horse in the Strauss
Wars,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (2009): 310.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     15

II. The May 19, 1933, Letter to Löwith and the Turn to Heidegger
What impressed Strauss about Schmitt was not only his theoretical critique
of modern liberalism but also his personal generosity (Schmitt supported
Strauss’s application for a Rockefeller fellowship in 1932). On May  1,
1933, Schmitt joined the National Socialist party (as did Heidegger), end-
ing contact with Strauss and others of Jewish background. As Eugene
Sheppard remarks, “there is no doubt that Schmitt’s slight and affirmation
of the new Nazi regime dealt a heavy blow to Strauss.”22 But however
personally injured by Schmitt, Strauss did not break from the view that
an alternative to liberal democracy must be sought. Less than three weeks
later, he writes to Löwith:

I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deeper understanding, and I

think about Virgil: Tu regere imperio . . . parcere subjectis et debellare
superbos [“May you remember, Roman, to rule the peoples with an
empire. These will be your arts: to impose the custom of peace, to spare
the subjected and war down the proud”]. There exists no reason to crawl
to the cross, to liberalism’s cross as well, as long as somewhere in the
world there yet glimmers a spark of the Roman idea.23

22. Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, p. 57.

23.  In Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:624–25. Strauss is quoting Aeneid
6.851–52; words in italics are those quoted by Strauss. For the translation of both Strauss’s
German and Virgil’s Latin, I am using the sound renditions of William H. F. Altman, “Leo
Strauss on German Nihilism: Learning the Art of Writing,” Journal of the History of Ideas
68 (2007): 598–600. For other commentary, see Nicholas Xenos, “Leo Strauss and the
Noble Lie,” Xenos 3 (2004); Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, pp. 60–61
and 156n25; Alan Gilbert, “Leo Strauss and the Principles of the Right: An Introduction to
Strauss’ Letter,” Constellations 16 (2009): 78–81. For critical comment on Xenos, Shep-
pard, Gilbert, and Altman, see Peter Minowitz, Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss
and Straussians against Shadia Drury and other Accusers (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2009). As Minowitz notes, many prominent contemporary defenders of Strauss
have ignored the letter, leading non-defenders to “dismiss their books on Strauss because
of their failure to address this smoking gun/mushroom cloud” (Minowitz, Straussophobia,
p.  155). Minowitz’s own contribution to the debate is a worthy exception to this rule,
as is Werner Dannhauser’s acknowledgment that “the reading of such a passage causes
pain” (Werner Dannhauser, “Leo Strauss in his Letters,” in Svetozar Minkov and Stéphane
Douard, eds., Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner [Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2007], p.  359). A different tone is struck by Harvey Mansfield, who
addresses the letter in his review of Sheppard’s book (Harvey Mansfield, “Timeless Mind,”
Claremont Review of Books 8 [Winter 2007/08]). For a valuable interrogation of Mans-
field’s defense, see Scott Horton, “Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?” Harper’s
Magazine, January 21, 2008.
16    Robert C. Miner

“To crawl to the cross” is an allusion to Zarathustra  3.8 on “The

Apostates.”24 The allusion confirms the sense that Strauss’s disdain for
liberal democracy is rooted in his early and deep reading of Nietzsche. As
deplorable as he finds persecution of the Jews, Strauss denies any intrinsic
connection between anti-Semitism and a government unafraid to reject
parliamentary democracy, modeling itself on the Imperium Romanum.
The letter to Löwith continues:

And, as to the substance of the matter: i.e. that Germany having turned
to the right does not tolerate us, that proves absolutely nothing against
right-wing principles. On the contrary: only on the basis of right-wing
principles—on the basis of fascistic, authoritarian, imperial principles—
is it possible with integrity, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to
the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme, to protest against the repulsive
monster [das meskine Unwesen].

Clearly the critique of Schmitt was not intended as a critique of “fascis-

tic, authoritarian, imperial principles,” for which Strauss was in 1933 an
enthusiast. Rather, Schmitt fails to realize with sufficient clarity that these
principles require a grounding altogether free from liberalism. But of the
“young Germans” whom Strauss describes in 1941 as “very intelligent”
and “very decent,” the one whom he judges the most radical is not Schmitt
but Heidegger. Against the old guard whose defense of liberal progress
came to strike him as merely apologetic, Strauss cites the “young nihilists”
who opposed “the heavy burden of a tradition hoary with age and some-
what dusty” with “complete freedom of movement,” since they were “not
hampered by any tradition.” This served them well, since “in the wars of
the mind no less in real wars, freedom of action spells victory.”25 Though
Strauss does not name Heidegger in this passage, he clearly has him in
mind. If there is any doubt on the point, it suffices to quote his recollection
of the first time he heard Heidegger speak, in 1922.

In comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an orphan

child, in regard to precision and probing and competence. I had never
seen before such seriousness, profundity, and concentration in the inter-
pretation of philosophic texts. I had heard Heidegger’s interpretation of

24.  See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 179.
25.  Strauss, “German Nihilism,” p. 362.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     17

certain sections in Aristotle, and some time later I heard Werner Jaeger
in Berlin interpret the same texts. Charity compels me to limit my com-
parison to the remark that there was no comparison.26

In Strauss’s estimation, if any thinker is capable of attaining a horizon

beyond liberalism, it is Heidegger. Though Strauss admired Schmitt, he
thought himself capable of exhaustively understanding The Concept of the
Political, penetrating its surface and unearthing its concealed assumptions.
(Schmitt, incidentally, shared this high estimation of Strauss’s critical
power: he “saw through me and X-rayed me as nobody else has.”)27 He
saw Heidegger in a different light, praising him as no mere scholar, but as
belonging to the first rank of thinkers. He is driven by a “singleness of pur-
pose and of inspiration that characterizes every thinker who deserves to be
called great.”28 Unlike some contemporary admirers, who want to detach
what they take to be Heidegger’s philosophical greatness from his political
views, Strauss judges his anti-liberalism inseparable from his philosophy.
But for a person who thinks that “only on the basis of fascistic, author-
itarian, imperial principles” can one oppose inferior regimes, this is really
no condemnation.

III. Strauss’s 1962 Critique of Heidegger

The portrait of a young Strauss with Nietzschean leanings, who admires
Schmitt and holds Heidegger in even higher regard, is difficult to challenge.
It is amply supported by the textual evidence. Nonetheless, it remains pos-
sible that once Strauss perceived the full horror of National Socialism, he
emigrated to America and adopted significantly different views about the
relative merits of liberalism and Heidegger. If any such change does occur,
it is difficult to see in the 1941 lecture on German nihilism. In that lecture,
as Altman argues, “even when he reassures his audience that it is Britain
and not Germany that deserves to win this war, it is not because either
represents ‘the open society.’”29 Strauss says:

26.  Leo Strauss, “Existentialism,” Interpretation 22 (1995): 304. This is the text of a
lecture delivered in February 1956 at the Hillel Foundation of the University of Chicago.
27.  As reported by Henrich Meier in the preface to the American edition of his Carl
Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006),
p. xvii.
28.  Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 309.
29.  William H.  F. Altman, “Leo Strauss on German Nihilism: Learning the Art of
Writing,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 598.
18    Robert C. Miner

But this much is clear beyond any doubt: by choosing Hitler for their
leader in the crucial moment, in which the question of who is to exercise
planetary rule became the order of the day, the Germans ceased to have
any rightful claim to be more than a provincial nation; it is the English,
and not the Germans, who deserve to be, and to remain, an imperial
nation: whatever may be the outcome of this war, it is the English, and
not the Germans, who deserve to have an empire. For only the English,
and not the Germans, have understood that in order to deserve to exer-
cise imperial rule, regere imperio populos, one must have learned for a
very long time to spare the vanquished and to crush the arrogant: parcere
subjectis et debellare superbos.30

Altman comments: “It is not qua liberal democracy but as analogue to

Virgil’s Imperial Rome that Britain deserves to crush Hitler. Strauss’s
imperialist orientation serves to reemphasize the point: it is precisely Hit-
ler’s Germany—as opposed to an imperialist or even a National Socialist
Germany—that deserves to lose.”31
Whatever critical remarks about “the young nihilists” appear in the
1941 lecture, no basic shift in perspective from the 1933 correspondence
seems to have occurred. It may be, however, that I have overlooked a
crucial difference between the mature Strauss and the “young nihilists,”
including Heidegger. In the 1941 lecture, Strauss identifies atheism as
a central feature of the young nihilists’ view, singling out Nietzsche:
“Nietzsche asserted that the atheist assumption is not only reconcilable
with, but indispensable for, a radical anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and
anti-pacifist policy: according to him, even the communist creed is only a
secularized form of theism, of the belief in providence. There is no other
philosopher whose influence on postwar German thought is comparable
to that of Nietzsche, of the atheist Nietzsche.”32 This assessment implies
that atheism is no less crucial for Heidegger. But if Strauss were to subject
Heidegger’s atheism to questioning, this would (at least by his own lights)
amount to a serious critique of Heidegger. It suggests that even if Strauss
had been deeply sympathetic to Heidegger from 1929 to 1941, he bids
Heidegger a clear farewell in his decision to question his atheism.

30.  Strauss, “German Nihilism,” p. 373.

31.  Altman, “Leo Strauss on German Nihilism,” pp. 598–99. Though I find Altman’s
reading of this lecture mostly convincing, Peter Minowitz’s fair-minded assessment of
Altman’s reading should also be consulted (Minowitz, Straussophobia, pp. 84–85).
32.  Strauss, “German Nihilism,” pp. 361–62.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     19

The best evidence for the view that Strauss intends a sustained, hard-
hitting critique of Heidegger’s atheism, and thus breaks with Nietzsche
and Heidegger, is the autobiographical 1962 preface to the English transla-
tion of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Let us turn directly to that preface,
expounding its critical remarks on Heidegger. On the “intellectual probity”
that leads Heidegger to deny theistic longings for eternity and the desire
for security, Strauss comments:

The controversy can easily degenerate into a race in which he wins who
offers the smallest security and the greatest terror. It would not be dif-
ficult to guess who would be the winner. But just as an assertion does not
become true because it is shown to be comforting, so it does not become
true because it is shown to be terrifying.33

For Heidegger, intellectual probity requires us to not accept anything on

account of its being the least bit consoling. This drives Heidegger to inter-
pret primal human experience in as terrifying a manner as possible. Such a
move appears to protect him from the possibility that he is interpreting the
experience in such a way as to make it consoling, or otherwise tampering
with it. As Strauss summarizes Heidegger’s thinking, consoling interpreta-
tions may be “suspected of being attempts to render bearable and harmless
the experience which admittedly comes from without down upon man
and is undesired; or of being attempts to cover over man’s radical unpro-
tectedness, loneliness, and exposedness.”34 Heidegger’s understanding of
divinity as death or nothingness accords with his conception of probity.
But is this conception vulnerable to criticism? Strauss imagines a trio of
rhetorical questions that Martin Buber could pose against Heidegger:

Does not precisely this objection mean that the atheistic suspicion is
as much a possibility, an interpretation and hence is as much “merely
believed” as the theistic one? And is not being based on belief, which is
the pride of religion, a calamity for philosophy? Can the new thinking
consistently reject or (what is the same thing) pass by revelation?35

In describing itself as the authentic experience of the call, Heidegger’s

atheism does not acknowledge its own status as one of several possible

33. Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1997), p. 11.
34.  Ibid., pp. 11–12.
35.  Ibid., p. 12.
20    Robert C. Miner

interpretations. It denies the alternative proposed by Buber—that our pri-

mal experience is that of being addressed by a “Thou”—but without any
ultimate rational justification. Thus, Strauss concludes that Heidegger’s
atheism falls short of the highest type of intellectual probity. He unmasks
it as yet another philosophical dogmatism.
The reader familiar with Strauss’s remarks on Schmitt will not be sur-
prised by the next move of the 1962 preface’s critique. Just as Schmitt
remains secretly dependent on the liberalism from which he wanted to
escape, so Heidegger does not succeed in transcending the horizon of
Christianity. In this respect, he replicates the predicament of his prede-
cessor Nietzsche, who fails to escape from Biblical morality. “Not only
was Biblical morality as veracity or intellectual probity at work in the
destruction of Biblical theology and Biblical morality; not only is it at
work in the questioning of that very probity, of ‘our virtue, which alone
has remained to us’; Biblical morality will remain at work in the morality
of the over-man.”36 If this is true of Nietzsche, it applies even more clearly
to Heidegger:

Heidegger wishes to expel from philosophy the last relics of Christian

theology like the notions of “eternal truths” and “the idealized absolute
subject.” But the understanding of man which he opposes to the Greek
understanding of man as the rational animal is, as he emphasizes, pri-
marily the Biblical understanding of man as created in the image of
God. Accordingly, he interprets human life in the light of “being towards
death,” “anguish,” “conscience,” and “guilt”; in this most important re-
spect he is much more Christian than Nietzsche.37

Insofar as Heidegger’s atheism turns out to be a rehash of Christian con-

cepts, it is incomplete at best. The claim that Heidegger in his philosophy
is “more Christian” than Nietzsche is not (coming from Strauss) any kind
of compliment.
Completing the critique of both Nietzsche and Heidegger is a well-
known sentence that closes the 1962 preface’s penultimate paragraph.

The last word and the ultimate justification of Spinoza’s critique is the
atheism from intellectual probity which overcomes orthodoxy radically
by understanding it radically, i.e. without the polemical bitterness of

36.  Ibid.
37.  Ibid.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     21

the Enlightenment and the equivocal reverence of romanticism. Yet this

claim however eloquently raised can not deceive one about the fact that
its basis is an act of will, of belief, and, being based on belief, is fatal to
any philosophy.38

Wanting to be the purest form of unbelief, the atheism from intellectual

probity turns out to be another mode of belief, and thus the very opposite
of philosophy: “philosophy, the quest for evident and necessary knowl-
edge, rests itself on an unevident decision, on an act of the will, just as
faith does.”39 Such philosophy, as Meier observes, assumes “a position
of faith that, in comparison with the faith in revelation that philosophy
opposes, has the weakness of not wanting to admit to itself that it, too, is
faith. The faith of philosophy would thus distinguish itself from revelation
by a lack of probity.”40 Intellectual probity undoes itself, or so it appears.

IV. Reconsidering Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger

Someone who reads the 1962 preface without knowing Strauss’s other
writings and lectures will naturally assume that Strauss is by intention
a forceful critic of Heidegger. He will think that Strauss took himself to
expose Heidegger’s thought as little more than a “secularized Christian
preaching about guilt, dread and death,” despite its claim to have broken
with two thousand years of Western thought.41 That Strauss makes such an
argument in the 1962 preface cannot be disputed. But does it represent his
considered judgment of Heidegger? To answer this question, we cannot
confine ourselves to the young Strauss. Any such procedure would beg
the question, since it remains possible that while Strauss was enamored
of Heidegger’s thought in the 1920s and 1930s, the longer he lived in
the United States, the more clearly he came to see the good of liberal
democracy. But Altman offers an insightful caution against the tendency
to assume that Strauss reversed himself:

38.  Ibid., p. 30.

39.  Ibid., p. 29.
40.  Henrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 16.
41.  For the view that Heidegger’s thought amounts to little more than this, see Walter
Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind, vol. 2 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992);
and Denis Dutton’s review of Kaufmann’s book in Philosophy and Literature 12 (1988):
325–36.
22    Robert C. Miner

No matter how useful it may be to his defenders, the view that radical
thinkers outgrow the controversial positions of their youth while embrac-
ing moderate ones as they age is foreign to the thought of Leo Strauss.
Among several reasons for this, “the art of writing” is central: according
to Strauss, even if an author were to state the moderate position repeat-
edly and the radical position only once, we would not be entitled to
assume that the former constitutes the author’s genuine position.42

In what follows, I will provide grounds for the suspicion that the 1962
preface’s remarks on Heidegger are exoteric, intended not to refute him on
the plane of philosophy but to protect his English-speaking readers from
the danger of being seduced too quickly by Heidegger’s charms.43 If the
effect of reading Heidegger through the grill of translation, mediated by
the commentaries of epigoni, is to drive Anglophone readers toward a self-
satisfied atheism or historicism, then Strauss is happy to arouse a prejudice
against Heidegger in the souls of such readers.44 But this does not exclude
the possibility that Strauss’s deeper thought moves in a different direction.
As we have seen, Strauss admires Heidegger’s power as an original
interpreter of texts. It is not, however, that Strauss views Heidegger merely
as an ingenious reader. On the contrary, he regards his interpretive pow-
ers as an expression of his radicalism as a thinker. “Prior to Heidegger’s
emergence the most outstanding German philosopher—I would say the
only German philosopher—was Edmund Husserl. It was Heidegger’s
critique of Husserl’s phenomenology which became decisive: precisely
because that criticism consisted in a radicalization of Husserl’s own ques-
tion and questioning.”45 Strauss does not merely learn an art of exegesis
from Heidegger. More profoundly, he believes that Heidegger’s thought is

42.  William H. F. Altman, “Leo Strauss in 1962,” Perspectives on Political Science

39 (2010): 1.
43.  For statements of the view that Strauss came to practice esotericism, see Stanley
Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), pp. 107–9, 118, 122, 137;
and Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, pp. 79, 83, 91, 108.
44.  As David Lachterman notes, Strauss never writes neutral doxography; his engagé
historiography “may also be said be to consist in the effort to awaken, even to create,
certain prejudices or to combat countervailing prejudices.” Lachterman adds that it is not
“immediately apparent whether all the prejudices Strauss attempts to arouse are compat-
ible with one another” (David Lachterman, “Strauss Read From France,” The Review of
Politics 53 [1991]: 226).
45.  Strauss, “Existentialism,” pp. 304–5.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     23

sufficiently powerful to show the utter inadequacy of all liberal positions.46

In his own words:

There is no longer in existence a philosophic position apart from neo-

Thomism and Marxism crude or refined. All rational liberal philosophic
positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this
but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions
which have been shown to be inadequate. I am afraid that we shall have
to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational lib-
eralism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But
here is the great trouble, the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.47

This suffices to dispel the claim that Strauss merely learned to read texts
from Heidegger, while considering himself to be in possession of a per-
spective clearly more sound than Heidegger’s own. The 1962 preface’s
confident, self-assured presentation of arguments that seem to convict
Heidegger of a lack of self-knowledge sits uneasily with Strauss’s 1956
claim that Heidegger is a great thinker, as opposed to a scholar, and that
“perhaps only great thinkers are really competent to judge of the thought
of other great thinkers.”48 Did Strauss regard himself as a great thinker? “I
know that I am only a scholar,” he says. “But I know also that most people
that call themselves philosophers are mostly, at best, scholars.”49 Far from
being in possession of forceful arguments that constitute a penetrating
critique of Heidegger, Strauss confesses his utter incapacity to judge him.
“The more I understand what Heidegger is aiming at the more I see how
much still escapes me. The most stupid thing I could do would be to close
my eyes or reject his work.”50
It remains logically possible that between 1956 and 1962 Strauss
changes his mind, gaining more confidence in his own capacity as a sharp

46.  A letter to Kojève of June 3, 1965, suggests a distinction between reasoned

political views and those of “U.S. liberals”; see Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Including the
Strauss–Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 313. One could argue that he meant to slight only “U.S.
liberals,” not liberals tout court. But in light of his remarks on Schmitt’s critique of liberal-
ism (i.e., European liberalism), this seems unconvincing.
47.  Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 305.
48.  Ibid.
49.  Ibid.
50.  Ibid., p. 306.
24    Robert C. Miner

critic of Heidegger’s thought. Perhaps he suddenly realized that his earlier

respect for Heidegger as a great thinker was misplaced; perhaps he decided
that an argument statable in a single page would be sufficient to dispense
with his thought. But this is exceedingly doubtful. In 1971 Strauss says
that even if one has to take a stand on a thinker whose involvement in
National Socialism must be held against him, it remains true that Hei-
degger understands himself better than we understand him. “As far as I
can see, he is of the opinion that none of his critics and none of his fol-
lowers had understood him adequately. I believe that he is right, for is the
same not also true, more or less, of all outstanding thinkers?”51
How can the confident critique of Heidegger, given by Strauss in
the 1962 preface, be reconciled with his elevation to the status of a great
thinker whom we can barely judge, an elevation characteristic of Strauss’s
lectures to smaller audiences? The key, I think, is to recognize that Strauss
writes the 1962 preface with pedagogical intent, addressing himself to his
Anglophone readers “within the bounds of propriety,” as he tells Kojève.52
In the 1956 lecture, Strauss seems more candid about his deeper thoughts
on Heidegger. There he characterizes Heidegger as entirely aware of the
difficulties contained in the “analytics of existence” of Being and Time.
Among these difficulties is the recognition that “his understanding of
existence was obviously of Christian origin (conscience, guilt, being unto
death, anguish).”53 This is the linchpin of the 1962 preface’s critique. But
the auditor of the 1956 lecture learns from Strauss that this is one of sev-
eral “objections which Heidegger made to himself” and responded to in
his work after Being and Time.54 The apparently forceful critique given in
the 1962 preface turns out to be something that Heidegger already knows
about himself and had long since incorporated into his own activity as the
“only great thinker in our time.”55 Moreover, Heidegger’s use of biblical
thinking emerges as something quite different from an incapacity to free
himself from Christianity. Heidegger uses the Bible as a source of insight
into the limitations of Western rationalism, regarding the Bible as “one

51.  Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy,” in Stud-
ies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1983), p. 30.
52.  Letter of May 29, 1962, from Leo Strauss to Alexandre Kojève, in Strauss, On
Tyranny, p. 309.
53.  Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 313.
54.  Ibid.
55.  Ibid., p. 305.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     25

form of Eastern thought,” since “the Bible is the east within us, within
western man,” Strauss says, echoing Nietzsche’s association of the Bible
with “Asia.”56 “Here lies,” he says, “the justification for the biblical ele-
ment in Heidegger’s earlier thought.”57 Far from reducing Heidegger to
an incompetent secularizer who remains entangled in Christianity, Strauss
regards him as a great thinker who knows exactly what he is doing. His
grasp of “the deepest root of the west” and its specific experience of Being
is so profound, he thinks, that it is no exaggeration to say that “Heidegger
is the only man who has an inkling of the dimensions of the problem of a
world society.”58
For the reader of the 1956 lecture, the critique offered in the 1962 pref-
ace can only appear as derivative, a pale statement of something already
known profoundly by Heidegger himself. In light of Strauss’s view that
Martin Buber is at best a “first-rate perfumer,” whose “absolute indifference
to historical truth is perhaps the clearest symptom of the lack of intellectual
honesty which shows itself in his uncontrollable drive for acclaim and his
showmanship,” the 1962 preface’s portrayal of Buber as capable of posing
penetrating questions to which Heidegger could respond only with dif-
ficulty, if at all, is plainly a piece of exotericism.59 On Strauss’s own view
of the matter, the 1962 preface has virtually no power as a philosophical
critique. This is not to deny, however, that it might be useful or salutary
for those tempted to adopt and propagate Heideggerian formulae without
any serious understanding of the master’s thought. Stanley Rosen suggests
that while Strauss is no less committed than Heidegger to a type of “strong
interpretation,” perhaps his “greatest accomplishment” is that he “inocu-
lates the young against Heidegger’s speculative excesses and brutality.”60
Early in life Strauss became enamored of Heidegger. Never did he
become the acute philosophical critic of Heidegger that some would like
him to have become. Even in areas where Heidegger’s thought seems
especially vulnerable to criticism, e.g., his reading of Nietzsche, Strauss
could not help but regard Heidegger as “the profoundest interpreter
and at the same time the profoundest critic of Nietzsche” (emphasis in

56.  See Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), §§114, 265, 475.
57.  Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 317.
58.  Ibid.
59.  These words appear in a letter of December 15, 1963, from Strauss to Gershom
Scholem, quoted in Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, p. 178n22.
60.  Stanley Rosen, “Leo Strauss in Chicago,” Daedalus 135 (2006): 111.
26    Robert C. Miner

original).61 Altman suggests that at the 1929 confrontation between Ernst

Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos, he made the “transition—indications of
which survive in his letters—from Nietzsche’s follower to Heidegger’s.”62
Despite my broad agreement with this view of Strauss, I will conclude by
suggesting that near the end of his life, the thinker whom he admires most
is not Heidegger but Nietzsche.
What Strauss values from first to last is Redlichkeit, “intellectual pro-
bity.” The probity distinctive to Nietzsche contains a type of self-criticism
and resistance to irrationalist propaganda not associated with Heidegger.
Nietzsche’s numerous critiques of anti-Semitism, along with his declara-
tion that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies,”63
importantly distinguishes him from the thinker who proclaimed in the
Freiburger Studenten Zeitung that “the Führer himself and alone is the
German reality, present and future, and its law.” As Denis Dutton writes,
no forty-four-year-old professor who possesses the gift of “unbridled
intellectual criticism”—the style of critique that belongs to Nietzsche—
“heaps contempt on academic freedom and instructs his students to find
their ‘freedom’ in servility to the will of some Führer.”64 Strauss came
to accept this distinction, or something like it, between the two philoso-
phers: “Nietzsche, naturally, would not have sided with Hitler.”65 He adds,
however, that it must not become an excuse for ignoring Heidegger. “It
would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the crit-
ics of democracy even if they are enemies of democracy—provided they
are thinking men and especially great thinkers and not blustering fools.”66
Strauss wants his auditors to take Heidegger seriously, without postulat-
ing a merely extrinsic relation between his philosophy and his politics.
“Despite his disclaimer,” he says before an audience at St. John’s College
in 1970, Heidegger has a “moral teaching.” He operates with a morality
whose key term is “‘resoluteness,’ without any indication as to what are

61.  Leo Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” Interpretation 22 (1995): 324.

62.  Altman, “Leo Strauss on German Nihilism,” p. 593. Drawing upon volume 3
of the Gesammelte Schriften, Altman cites the following letters to support his claim that
Strauss makes the transition from a follower of Nietzsche to a follower of Heidegger: 380,
613, 621, 632, and 686.
63.  Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §483.
64.  Denis Dutton, review of Walter Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind, vol. 2, in
Philosophy and Literature 12 (1988): 325–36.
65.  Strauss, “Existentialism,” p. 306.
66.  Ibid., p. 307.
 Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger     27

the proper objects of resoluteness. There is a straight line which leads from
Heidegger’s resoluteness to his siding with the so-called Nazis in 1933.”67
Heidegger’s apotheosis of Entschlossenheit makes his Redlichkeit less
pure than Nietzsche’s, since it prevents him from asking relevant ques-
tions concerning who or what we should be resolute about.
None of this implies that Strauss exactly reversed himself on Hei-
degger. “The view that radical thinkers outgrow the controversial positions
of their youth while embracing moderate ones as they age is foreign to
the thought of Leo Strauss.”68 Altman is right about this. Nonetheless, the
mature Strauss’s defense of Redlichkeit is more Nietzschean than Heideg-
gerian. “I think clarity or honesty about the most important matters is a
most important thing,” he comments in 1962.69 Just before making that
remark, he tells his interlocutor that “I have also some training in seeing,
by which I do not necessarily mean the social science training.” This recalls
Nietzsche’s words in Twilight of the Idols on “learning to see—habituat-
ing the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to
defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all
its aspects.”70 It is not that Strauss ever lost his sense of Heidegger’s great-
ness. A few months before he died in 1973, he told Gershom Scholem that
Heidegger had a “phenomenal intellect” joined to a “soul of Kitsch.”71 A
similar judgment from Strauss on Nietzsche is difficult to imagine. One
suspects that Strauss took Nietzsche not only to write about the noble soul
but also to have one himself.

67.  Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of
Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 461.
68.  Altman, “Leo Strauss in 1962,” p. 1.
69.  Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Nicgor-
ski, eds., Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: Rowan &
Littlefield, 1994), p. 77.
70.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Pen-
guin Books, 1990), p. 76.
71.  Letter of July 7, 1973, from Strauss to Scholem, quoted in Dannhauser, “Leo
Strauss in his Letters,” p. 358.