Leo Strauss and socratism after Nietzsche and Heidegger

pp. 153-175

in: David McIlwain, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

This chapter examines the little heralded but profound philosophical insights that Leo Strauss achieved in the wake of Heidegger's vision of the arrival of a global technological society as the result of the failure of Nietzsche's call for a new Western nobility. Separating Nietzsche and Heidegger from their polemical elevation of courage against Hobbesian fear of death, Strauss emphasized their commitment to the higher nobility of philosophy. McIlwain reveals how Strauss developed his own contributions to philosophy in contemplating Nietzsche and Heidegger's insights into the problem of thinking and the origin and ultimate ground of Western rationalism. This would involve a renewed confrontation with the poetic conception of the gods and a reencounter with the Bible understood trans-culturally as "the East within us, Western men."