Expanding the Space of Reasons? Strauss, Jacobi, and the Sources of Normativity

Abstract

Perhaps the most important claim that Leo Strauss made about the “political philosophy” he sought to refound is that it arises from pre-scientific and pre-theoretical experiences that are in principle universal, or “coeval with human thought.” Much depends on it: above all, it seems, the possibility of “natural right” as Strauss understood it, that is, of a source of normativity that is prior to, and binding for, the human will, and that is somehow “given” to us as human beings. What this source might be; whether one can appeal to “nature” or to the “natural understanding of the world” in a philosophically coherent way; and whether one can thereby ground norms, which themselves justify the use of coercive power — these are intricate questions, which have been the subject of much scholarly debate. Ironically, however, what remains to be explored is the origins of the very idea that natural right can be grounded in experience, which must be traced back to the influence of the phenomenological movement on the young Strauss. This paper seeks to shed light on those origins by returning to Strauss’s earliest writing, his 1921 dissertation on The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophical Doctrine of F.H. Jacobi. The aim will be twofold. First, I shall seek to provide a close reading of Strauss’s youthful engagement with Jacobi in the context of the early phenomenological movement; or, more precisely, in the transitional phase between the “third wave” of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, in which Heidegger’s breakthrough to his own “path of thinking” also occurred. Second, I shall argue that the quest to retrieve the phenomenological origins of normativity, which characterized, not only that moment in German thought but the existential situation of a “young Jew born and raised in Germany,” made possible a dramatic expansion of our understanding of the “sources of normativity,” or what we may also call the space of reasons.