Gerhard Krüger and Leo Strauss
the Kant motif
pp. 165-179
in: The Strauss-Krüger correspondence, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
One of the persistent puzzles of Strauss scholarship is the absence in any of his published works of a thematic treatment of Immanuel Kant (The sole exception is his early dissertation on Jacobi, which includes an extensive treatment of Kant from the perspective of Jacobi's critique. See Strauss, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis (1921)). This absence is all the more striking given Kant's importance in shaping the intellectual milieu in which the younger Strauss was educated and against which he, along with many of his early intellectual companions, including Gerhard Krüger, Jacob Klein, Gerschom Scholem, and others, rebelled more or less explicitly. And it gives the two seminars that he dedicated to Kant, in 1958 and 1967, respectively (an additional seminar, given in the early 1950s, was evidently not recorded), (with the sole exception of his early dissertation on Jacobi) special importance for anyone wishing to better grasp Strauss's understanding and appraisal of Kant's thought, including the meaning of that relative public silence.
