[This piece was originally posted in response to a series of discussions on the Leo Strauss discussion group.]

We have recently been discussing the relation of Strauss and Straussian modes of analysis (on the one hand) with the more traditional style of classical scholarship (on the other).  So, for example, we have heard that Strauss himself was trained according to certain canons of scholarship,  without which his obvious erudition would be unthinkable; on the other hand,  we have seen that Trevor J. Saunders [a translator of Plato's Laws], for instance, says that if Strauss is aware of any of the body of scholarly discussion on the Laws then at any rate he shows no signs of it.  And so the question has come up, did Strauss care?  How much connection did he ever intend between his work and that of the rest of the scholarly  community?

At this point, I am tending towards the answer that he didn't care, and that the connection is nil.  This is a sweeping verdict, and I haven't fully convinced myself yet.  But the longer I mull the issue, the less I see in common between Strauss and anything that we would normally call scholarship.  Let me explain how I see it, and maybe someone can show me where I am misled.

I take my start from the specific complaint of Saunders.  He doesn't say that Strauss appears to have read nothing about the Laws; what he says is that Strauss appears to have read none of the scholarly discussion of difficult passages, and so Strauss shows no sign of understanding which passages are "difficult", nor why.  What does Saunders mean by "difficult"?  I guess that in the first instance he means "philologically difficult"; passages where it is hard to make out what Plato really said.  And when you look at what goes into the scholarly discussion of difficult passages (in this sense), you see the problem right away.

Let me invent an example; I am going to make the example a ridiculous one, partly to be funny and partly because it will highlight what I mean. Suppose that in the best surviving manuscript of some dialogue, Socrates compares Being Itself to a pink elephant.  Suppose furthermore that the Greek phrase for "pink elephant" is very similar to the phrase for "crystalline sphere" -- maybe there are just a couple of letters difference between them.  [I know this can't really be true, but pretend that it is for the sake of the example.]

I dare say this passage would be the kind of passage Saunders would consider "difficult".  And I dare say there would be an extensive scholarly literature analyzing this one passage in this one dialogue, trying to determine what on earth Plato was really getting at.  But I am sure that most of the discussion would center on the condition of the manuscript, and the range of different readings in other manuscripts.  Most scholars would be reasonably sure that -- whatever Plato was really trying to say -- "pink elephant" wasn't it.  A lot of them, I'm reasonably sure, would be quite convinced that Plato could not possibly have meant to write "pink elephant", and so they would debate the likelihood that he really meant "crystalline sphere" and that the phrase was changed from one to the other by some
careless copyist in the 14th century.  And this is the kind of literature that Saunders would assume any intelligent reader of Plato would have to know, because without it a reader is going to be misled by stupid copying errors into thinking Plato was talking about pink elephants.

But a Straussian reading, by contrast, starts on the surface and takes careful note of everything that looks anomalous.  The passage about the pink elephant would plainly look anomalous, so a Straussian reading would devote itself to understanding what it means.  Why does Plato have Socrates introduce such an apparent non sequitur at exactly this point in the dialogue?  So a Straussian would look at the dramatic action and the character of Socrates's interlocutor, to understand the role that is played by this comparison of Being to a pink elephant.  In all of this, the suggestion that the phrase "pink elephant" should really be "crystalline sphere" would be rudely dismissed as the product of a special kind of modern arrogance that assumes that we are wiser than Plato, that we know what he should have written regardless of what he did write, and that therefore we really have nothing to learn from him.

You see the difference:  in the most extreme case, as a kind of caricature, we can say that the scholarly reading removes all difficult passages by deciding that they are copyist errors, while the Straussian reading invests even spelling mistakes with enormous hidden meaning.

There is a danger in each approach.  The danger in the scholarly approach is that the text can get diluted down to the level of the scholar who is reading or editing it.  If Mr. X is translating a Platonic dialogue, or commenting on it, he may well assume (if only unconsciously) that anything he can't understand must be a mistake.  Therefore, he may unintentionally gloss over -- or remove from the text -- all passages where Plato is smarter than he is.  If Mr. X is particularly stupid, he can manage to ruin or denigrate or explain away most of what makes the text worth reading in the first place, and a reader who comes upon Mr. X's analysis will conclude that Plato is pretty worthless.  This is the kind of thing that makes one appreciate the Straussian call for perfectly literal translations, to preserve all of a text's strangeness and to allow the author (Plato, or whoever) to speak as clearly as possible.

The danger in this Straussian attitude is that transcription errors are real.  Copyists really did make mistakes from time to time.  This is an inescapable historical fact.  There is a great deal to be said for the injunction to honor Plato's teaching, or that of any other wise man, as if it were literally true ... at least as a provisional measure to lead one to understand it in a deep way.  But to pay that kind of honor to words Plato never wrote -- to words that found their way into manuscripts just because some copyist was too lazy or too ignorant to check what he was doing -- to pay that kind of honor to those kinds of errors is just idiotic.  And to refuse to analyze the text in a scholarly way (on the grounds that doing so sets us up as smarter than Plato) simply invites that kind of idiocy.

Since both these approaches have potentially fatal flaws, I wish I could advocate mixing them, so that one could use each method to correct the faults of the other.  But I suspect that mixing them is impossible.  I fear that their premises are so different as to be totally incompatible, which means that one could not try to execute them both -- to mix them -- in any sane way.  But this in turn means that Straussian thought is very deliberately anti-scholarly, on principle.  It also means that there is no obvious way for practitioners of either approach to avoid the pitfalls endemic to that approach, or to aspire to the virtues of the other.  In some ways I find this a depressing conclusion, and I would be delighted to be proven wrong.