On the phenomenological 'reactivation' or 'repetition' of Plato's Dialogues by Leo Strauss

The paper aims to explain the interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of ideas as advanced by Leo Strauss in one of his first works dealing with Hobbes (The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, 1935). According to this interpretation, the theory of the separate existence of ideas is specifically justified by Plato’s awareness that ordinary language is the only gateway to the ultimate causes of things. This interpretation is based, among others, on two passages in the Platonic dialogues, Phaedo 99 c-e and Republic 472 c-e. In the former Socrates speaks of the need to “take refuge in the logoi” in order to avoid being blinded by the sight of sensible things. In the latter, Socrates claims that the purpose of the inquiry into the nature of ideal republic is “not to demonstrate the possibility of the realization of this ideal". The paper shows that Leo Strauss’s hermeneutics of Plato was influenced by the teaching of Husserl and Heidegger, particularly by the need for a critique of the modern way of conceiving the relationship between theory and practice. The excursus on Plato in the book about Hobbes shows in an exemplary way the 'phenomenological function' that Strauss assigns to the hermeneutics of the ancient classics. According to Strauss, the Platonic dialogues and in particular the figure of Socrates shows that philosophy, understood as the pursuit of truth, can never neutralize the conflict with the doxa, understood as the order established by authority. Hence, Platonic dialogues have an intrinsically ‘political’ nature, which requires the reader to perform the difficult task of reactivating the process of liberation from captivity in the world of doxa.