1. Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). All parenthetical references in the text are to this book. [BACK]

2. The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 474. Philosophers and their judgments concerning life “have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms.” [BACK]

3. Martin Heidegger, “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,” in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. W. Barrett and H. D. Aiken (New York: Random House, 1962), 267. [BACK]

4. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 130. [BACK]

5. Ibid., 129. [BACK]

6. “Gadamer on Strauss: An Interview,” Interpretation 12, no. i (Jan. 1984): 10. The context is a response to Fortin's challenge to the universality of hermeneutics in reference to notions of a “pre-hermeneutical” and “post-hermeneutical” situation in Strauss and Heidegger respectively. [BACK]

7. Zuckert suggests that Strauss makes more concessions to history than he professes. See, for instance, Zuckert 197 on “the untraditional character of [Strauss's] view of the tradition”; cf. 276. As discussed earlier, what Zuckert has in mind is that Strauss cannot simply return to the ancients because the need to deal with the tension between ancient political philosophy and biblical morality complicates his philosophical task in a way that wasn't the case for the ancient political philosophers themselves (see 329, n. 67). This strikes me as a vindication of Gadamer's view of Strauss's (necessarily historically mediated) relation to the tradition. [BACK]

8. Cf. “Gadamer on Strauss,” 11–12: “Finitude corresponds to Hegel's ‘bad infinity’…. The emphasis on finitude is just another way of saying that there is always one step more. Bad infinity in the Hegelian sense belongs to finitude. As I once wrote, this bad infinity is not as bad as it sounds.” [BACK]

9. Ibid., 3: “I tried to convince Strauss that one could recognize the superiority of Plato and Aristotle without being committed to the view that their thought was immediately recoverable and that, even though we have to take seriously the challenge

10. Stanley Rosen, “Horizontverschmelzung” (PHGG2O7-i8); and Gadamer's reply (PHGG2ig-2i). Gadamer writes, “Rosen's contribution seems to me to confirm precisely that which I had in view in my analysis of understanding” (221). In general, Gadamer seems to agree with Strauss that “human thought is capable of transcending its historical limitation or of grasping something trans-historical” (Zuckert 128, quoting Natural Right and History). [BACK]

11. “The similarities between Strauss and Derrida are both surprising and striking” (Zuckert 201). “Derrida and Strauss arrive at a remarkably similar understanding of the problematic character and foundation of our common life” (Zuckert 267). See also 225 and 244–45 on Derrida's acknowledgment of Platonic esoteri-cism. The affinities are not hard to locate—for instance, in Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus. Like Strauss, Derrida embraces the Phaedrus's. doctrine of “logographic necessity” (Dissemination 69, 78, 79–80, 85–86, 95–96) and applies his own version of that doctrine to his reading of the dialogue. Derrida, too, is on the lookout for “a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words” (67). Derrida, too, is not above counting lines in order to calculate the center of a text (68). And Derrida, too, attends not just to what is present in the text but equally to what is absent—the silences of the text: what the text should but doesritsay (129–30). [BACK]

12. Cf. Zuckert 270: in contrast to Strauss and Derrida, Gadamer's view is that “there are [in principle] no unbridgeable rifts or differences.” [BACK]

13. Cf. Zuckert 102–3 on how fctfA Derrida and Strauss reject universal dialogue. Also, p. 270: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Strauss, and Derrida share the view that “there is an irreducible conflict at the heart of things.” Gadamer's view, by contrast, is less conflictual; as he puts it in his interview with Fortin, “I think that without some agreement, some basic agreement, no disagreement is possible. In my opinion, the primacy of disagreement is a prejudice” (“Gadamer on Strauss” 9). [BACK]

14. I take it for granted that this applies not only to Nietzsche himself but also to his most influential twentieth-century disciple, Michel Foucault. Cf. Charles Taylor: “[Foucault] is … the most profoundly antidialogical thinker” (“Living with Difference,” in Debating Democracy's Discontent: Essays on American Politics, Law and Public Philosophy, ed. Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 224). [BACK]

15. In chapter 1 of Zuckert's book, one is struck by the extraordinary resemblance between Nietzsche's Plato and Strauss's Plato: Plato is a liar (18, 22, 25), a legislator (21–22, 28), someone who believes above all that philosophy is “the only form of human life truly worth living” (30), and someone who propagates salutary untruths in order to mask and minister to this esoteric wisdom. [BACK]

16. Cf. Zuckert 202: “According to both Strauss and Derrida, what an author does not say can be more important than what is said.” Needless to say, I have no interest in denying that each of them, Derrida and Strauss as well as Nietzsche and Heidegger, makes available genuine insights in their interpretations of, for instance, Plato, and that someone who rejects their conceptions of philosophy can nonetheless profit enormously from their interpretive insights. [BACK]

17. Cf. “Gadamer on Strauss,” 6–7: “As I see it, the hermeneutical experience is the experience of the difficulty that we encounter when we try to follow a book, a

18. Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation” (DDea6). [BACK]

19. Ibid., 33. Cf. Gadamer, “Reply to Jacques Derrida” (DDe55): “one does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far as possible to strengthen the other's viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating. Such an attitude seems essential to me for any understanding at all to come about.” [BACK]

20. Derrida, “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer” (DDe53). [BACK]

21. Ibid., 54. Gadamer, of course, never appeals to knowledge of being perfectly understood. Mutual understanding is an aspiration, in the absence of which it would be pointless to engage in any act of communication at all. [BACK]

23. Ibid., 56–57. [BACK]

24. Cf. ibid., 56: contrary to the hermeneutical intention of mutual understanding, “psychoanalytic interpretation does not seek to understand what someone wants to say, but instead what that person doesn't want to say or even admit to him or herself.” Gadamer argues very persuasively that “it is a mistake to privilege these forms of distorted intelligibility, of neurotic derangement, as the normal case in textual interpretation” when in fact they are aberrations in relation to the norm of attempted mutual understanding (“Text and Interpretation,” DDe4o). [BACK]

25. See, for instance, Dissemination, 103, 107–8, no, 112, 127–33, 149, 158, 169. [BACK]

26. See Zuckert 164: both Nietzsche and Heidegger read Plato in terms of the doctrines concerning the ideas and the soul. See also 154 (citing Thomas Pangle on “Strauss's discounting of the doctrine of the ideas”), 155, 164 (“Farabi led Strauss to question the status of the doctrines concerning the ideas and the soul”), and 178. [BACK]

27. See Rosen's review of Zuckert's book in The Review of Politics 59, no. i (Winter 1997): 162–64. “The praise of the Socratic way of life makes sense as a contra-nihilistic celebration of philosophy if and only if Socrates' way of life is guided by or culminates in knowledge of what we may call here ‘the Ideas'” (164). [BACK]

28. Ibid., 164. [BACK]

29. Ibid. [BACK]

30. Cf. Zuckert 162 and 167 on the need of philosophical atheists to hide their unbelief (or to disclose it “only to sensible friends”); and 175 on Socrates' “dissimulation.” According to Zuckert, the fundamental meaning of the Platonic virtues of justice and moderation (as Strauss interpreted them) is the need to hide one's skepticism about the existence of god and the immortality of the soul out of deference to the needs of the city. [BACK]

31. Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112; cf. 17 and 107. [BACK]

32. Thomas Pangle, contribution to APSA Roundtable on Leo Strauss and Religion (1994), manuscript, p. i. Pangle explains that in calling Strauss an emphatic theist, he has in mind a radical dichotomy between natural theology and revealed

33. Cf. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 109: “the philosophic spirit points to itself, points to its own nobility as a primary ground for gratitude for the goodness of the world.” [BACK]

34. Cf. Zuckert 148: “The secret Strauss thought he discovered by studying Farabi's Plato was that Socrates represented the only fully satisfying form of human existence … but the open presentation of that fact was apt to provoke popular envy”; see also 276. [BACK]

35. Zuckert 132: “To ask why a human being should pursue philosophy is to ask why human beings should devote their efforts to acquiring knowledge rather than power or wealth; it is to ask what is the best way of life.” Why is it power and wealth that are presented as the alternatives? Why not beauty, or pursuit of justice, or saint-liness? It may be relatively easy to demonstrate the superiority of the philosophic life if the alternative is living the life of a sophist or tyrant (cf. Theatetus i72cff.); a much more ambitious argument is required if one also considers the life of a sculptor, dancer, poet, journalist, community activist, pastor, or jurist. [BACK]