[This argument was originally written in response to a friend of mine who wrote me as follows:  "I suspect, deep down, that Strauss's 'hidden teaching' (I am agreeing with the speculation of the great apostate Stanley Rosen here) is that philosophy is now impossible because it always was impossible, and that Strauss believed that Plato from the beginning realized that philosophy was impossible, i.e., that it could not yield 'Truth', and that the mainstream of Western philosophy, following Aristotle, missed the boat here, and that only the 'Platonic tradition' [which for Strauss has nothing to do with ideas or souls or virtues or Platonic 'doctrines' of any kind], writing between the lines (Xenophon, Farabi, Maimonides, etc.) preserved this dark truth [the impossibility of philosophy], yet kept it hidden from the masses and even from the greatest part of the learned.  Why would Strauss then seem to endorse philosophy?  As Rosen suggests, because the belief that philosophy is possible does great good for the world.  Rosen doesn't say how, but I would say it is political-ethical.  The belief that philosophy might somehow be able to 'ground' politics and ethics in ontology, that right and wrong have a cosmic basis, is important to preserve in any society.  To say that philosophy is and always was a chimera would be to undermine some of the main moral forces (e.g., the Thomism of the Catholic Church) which still preserve society from chaos.  It would open the door to radical forms of subjectivism, which would take the political forms of totalitarianism and racism.  It is important that the world believes that philosophy is possible, though it isn't."  I replied to this extensive suggestion as follows.]

You may very well be right.  But this position, if you look at it for a minute, is incoherent. 

The position says that it is important that people believe philosophy is possible, because it is better that way.  If people stop believing this, genuinely bad things will happen: totalitarianism, genocide, random acts of meaningless violence and destruction ... and so on. 

But note that it does not say -- it does not even imply -- that one of the hazards of a failure to believe in philosophy will be an increase in things that I personally dislike, such as pickled beets.  The fear is that social chaos will overwhelm us and subject all of us to fates that we all fear equally ... things that are simply bad.  Bad?  By whose standards?  Why should we want to avoid totalitarianism and genocide?  Out of a personal distaste, the way I try to avoid pickled beets? 

No, because these things are bad for everybody -- they are universally accepted as bad.  And this fact alone -- that there are things universally accepted as bad -- is a starting place for philosophy.  If the same things are bad for all of us, then we know that we all somehow have something in common; call it "nature" or what you will, the name is not the important thing.  The commonality is; because the fact that we all share something in common impels us to look for more, and also to understand where this particular commonality came from.  This looking is philosophy; and while Plato's answers or Hobbes's answers may turn out to be wrong, there has to be some answer.  If there were no answer to explain the commonality, the commonality itself would not exist ... which it does.  Therefore there must be some possible account of why, if only we are clever enough to discover it.  Therefore philosophy cannot be impossible.

The alternative is that genocide and totalitarianism are not necessarily things to avoid, in which case why should the philosopher care?  Either way the position you sketch above and tentatively attribute to Strauss is incoherent.