"If Levinas was cautious about the prospect of translating philosophical insight into political commitment, Arendt and Strauss were explicitly opposed to it."

Philosophy and the Gods of the City: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s “Thinking in Public”

By Jon Baskin

If Levinas was cautious about the prospect of translating philosophical insight into political commitment, Arendt and Strauss were explicitly opposed to it. “Commitment,” Arendt said at a 1972 conference on her work, “can easily carry you to a point where you no longer think.” In this, she was in full agreement with Strauss, who stated succinctly that “[p]hilosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems.” It was, Strauss admitted, a perennial temptation for philosophers to become “inclined toward a solution,” and yet “the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the ‘subjective certainty’ of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.”