Why Read Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss?

Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Leo Strauss need no introduction to students of philosophy, especially students of political philosophy. Although these three figures are well-known and well-read, have we exhausted our interpretative lens on these three crucial philosophers? Laurence Lampert, considered by some to be the definitive Nietzsche scholar in the West, has argued No! And in A New Politics For Philosophy, philosophy professors from North America, Europe, and China bring together a wonderfully edited anthology of interpretative essays bringing new insights into Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss while honoring the legacy of Lampert’s life work.

Why read Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss? One answer, the canonical answer, is because these three men occupy important windows or turning points in the history of philosophy. Plato begins the systematic tradition of philosophy. Nietzsche inaugurates the critique of modernity with an assessment of the end of Platonic civilization—the “death of God” that most people have no idea what Nietzsche was referring to. Strauss, despite the hackery of leftwing conspiracy theorists since the 1990s, was arguably the most profound reader of the modern crisis after Nietzsche, often relying upon, and turning to, Plato for a new philosophy of dialectic and thereby reviving Plato and Platonic scholarship in the modern age following Plato’s death from Nietzsche’s mad hand and mind.

Another reason to read these three is as a counterweight to the rise of herd totalitarianism. Despite the promise and language of democracy, human rights, and equality most thinking people can sense a despotic spirit in modernity—especially from within the democratic states where human rights and equality are the only language of politics. Dissent is treated as anathema, “cancel culture” runs amok. To stand against the herd, the mass movement of the zeitgeist, is quasi-blasphemous to our herd society and herd politics. This is troubling because the herd and its moralizing homogeneity is “unassailable.” For Lampert, Nietzsche is essential in the recovery of the critique of modern totalitarianism and the return to “human greatness” and true individuality that is otherwise thoroughly crushed by the false individualism of herd homogeneity.

This critique of herd totalitarianism is, in fact, also found in Plato. One must remember that Plato’s opposition to Athenian democracy wasn’t to democracy in of itself but to the injustice and despotism of the democratic masses. Plato was a friend to justice and human liberty, he simply stood against the herd in seeing Athenian democracy as unjust, despotic, and prone to demagoguery. So too is this true in the remarkable works of Leo Strauss. Contrary the conspiracy theorists and leftwing hacks who have argued Strauss was a closet Nazi and intellectual godfather to American imperialist foreign policy (“neoconservatism”), all serious Strauss scholars know that he was a friend of Western liberty and democratic individualism but a critic of the West’s own worst instincts: democratic despotism, herd politics, and the catatonic materialism of socialist welfarism. Without individual virtue, a strong moral center of society, and a transcendental horizon for civilization which gives it hope for the future Strauss feared the West would succumb to the totalitarian forces it was opposing in the twentieth century (fascism and communism).

What these three philosophers have in common is they all lived during a time of civilizational and societal crisis. As George Dunn and Mango Telli importantly remind us, “Plato tendered a new moral interpretation of the world at a time when Athenian society was undergoing a dire spiritual crisis due to the death of the old Homeric gods.” This, too, is true for Nietzsche, whose prophet Zarathustra stands amid the ruins of modern civilization and proclaims a new moral interpretation: the self-creating Übermensch in the ruins of Platonic-Christian civilization (the “death of God”). Likewise, Strauss lived through the crises of the twentieth century: World War I, World II, and the beginning of the Cold War. Strauss feared that the lack of moral virtue, the exhaustion of spiritual forces harnessed in the fight against fascism (and communism), and the slow drift toward herd homogeneity and the universal world state of absolute comfort, security, and “justice” would signal the end of the heroic individualism and creative liberty central to the spirit of Western civilization that survived the death of the Homeric world and the ashes of a ruined Christendom. We can go so far as to say that Nietzsche and Strauss also “tendered a new moral interpretation of the world at a time when society was undergoing a dire spiritual crisis.” This is what philosophy is all about.

Moving on to Nietzsche, the crude and popular perception of the German philosopher is that he was adamantly opposed to Platonism and Christianity. While true in a soft sense, serious scholars know that this popular portrait is a half-truth that hides how much Nietzsche was also indebted to Platonism and Christianity and the more pronounced nuances between he and his predecessors.

Nietzsche is worth reading, then, because of the extensive commentary on Plato and Christianity—even if he got a lot wrong, and most people recognize the fact that he did get a lot wrong. Nonetheless, “There are so many striking similarities between Plato’s portrayal of Sokrates and Nietzsche’s portrayal of himself.” In fact, Leon Harold Craig’s chapter on Ecce Homo is a brilliant exposé on how much Nietzsche’s own writings and ideas are modeled after Plato even as he attempts to go beyond Socratic Platonism. Socrates may have been wrong in what he promoted from Nietzsche’s view, but Socrates was invaluable as the necessary gadfly of a weakened and degenerate Athenian society to try and rouse it from its catatonic slumber and defeatism. On this note Craig asks us, “Yet do we not need a stinging gadfly to awaken us from our decadent slumber even more desperately than ever did Athens?” That gadfly is Nietzsche who seemingly modeled himself after Socrates despite his dislike of Socratic-Platonic philosophy.

Not only is Nietzsche relevant in Platonic interpretation regarding moral, political, and spiritual crises amid the ruin of modernity, Nietzsche is also—perhaps surprisingly—useful on the topic of ecological philosophy. Few people generally see Nietzsche as a friend to ecological holism, but Laurence Lampert’s writings, as reflected on by Graham Parkes, shows how Nietzsche’s criticism of the Baconian project of scientistic conquest leads lends itself to contemporary environmental concerns. While one can easily dismiss Parkes’ alarmist language that the earth is not going to soon be livable (the same alarmist rhetoric was preached 50 years ago and we’re still here), he nevertheless does an admirable job highlighting the prospects of a green Nietzsche. In the midst of our environmental problems, Nietzsche can become a surprising ally.

Reading Plato and Nietzsche in light of the crises of modernity seems straightforward, so why Strauss? Reading Strauss amid our contemporary crises is also straightforward once we accept the need to (re)read Plato and Nietzsche: Strauss was the greatest commentator and philosophical sparring partner of Plato and Nietzsche in the previous century, a man who “achieved considerable academic fame” during his life (and after). If there is one person of the past century to aid us in reacquainting ourselves with Plato and Nietzsche and finding their relevance to the manifold issues we are currently facing it is Leo Strauss.

A New Politics For Philosophy provides a superb set of essays on the enduring relevance of Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss. But if we take a Nietzschean lens to philosophy, that lens of critique amid crisis that is the now ubiquitous feature of philosophy since Nietzsche’s own life, “Can we understand Plato correctly?” Our scholars answer unambiguously Yes! The first chapter, by Liu Xiaofeng, importantly sets the tone after Dunn and Telli’s introduction. Plato really did write amid crisis, offer a new moral and politico-theological legislation in that crisis, while also critiquing and deconstructing the existing (and failing) paradigm of political and spiritual governance (the pragmatism of the sophists and the cosmogonic theology of the Hesiodic-Homeric deities). Nietzsche and Strauss did the same. We who take seriously the problems of the contemporary world must do the same. That is the demand of the philosopher.

A New Politics For Philosophy: Perspectives on Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss
Edited by George A Dunn and Mango Telli
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022; 338pp

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