Page 4 of 6
Well, then, what about Strauss's rhetoric? Although Strauss has gotten the aim wrong, can his rhetoric accidentally realize the right intention? This depends chiefly on the nature of the task. What must a god's rhetoric accomplish? Rosen has already specified a portion of the job, "to produce a new kind of human being, one who is mature rather than immature." This is only a part, though. One must recall the problem that moved Nietzsche's Zarathustra to come down from the mountain: "But at last a change came over his heart, and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: 'You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?'"
As Rosen knows well, deities must have "worshipers (disciples)," and "the masters require servants." 121 So, the would-be god must establish his divinity by willing it, by preparing many other individuals to will their divinity, too, and by convincing all these potential gods, who will want to act like supreme beings, and whose passions therefore might be quite strong, nevertheless to adore and obey him—a self-contradictory enterprise.
On top of that, the self-made god must face the difficulty that gods need unlimited speculative freedom, but the many who are not yet divine remain to be enlightened, a process that "is impossible without the extirpation of ignorance and superstition." The eradication of ignorance requires "a restrictive political rule, or the employment of enforced purification, with or without force of the vulgar sort, but always by means of rhetorical polemic." It seems that Rosen has not dispensed with Rousseau's insight that people must be "forced to be free." It is not for nothing that he endorses Kojève's denunciation of modern liberal democracies as "the result of the failure, not the success of the Enlightenment," uses the expression "we Maoists," and ominously warns Richard Rorty that he "is making himself a candidate for the guillotine," this perhaps being a joke that loses its humor when one contemplates the West's long history of political murder. 122 These parts of Rosen's project seem self-contradictory, too. His gods must devise a rhetoric that smooths out all the difficulties by directing an efficacious blend of weak esotericism, frankness, ad hominem verbal attacks, and outright violence at the body politic—a hard job, if not impossible. Is Strauss's public teaching adequate to the task?
Rosen does not believe that Strauss keeps all these requirements of divine rhetoric in balance. Obviously, when Strauss denies the possibility of bridging the gulf between the wise and the vulgar, he renounces the aim of creating a new race of mature men and gives rhetoric absolutely improper purposes. Rosen says: "I take Strauss's error to be this: from the correct observation that there is always and of necessity a tension or indeed conflict between philosophy and the city, Strauss draws the false inference that it is always necessary for philosophers to accommodate to the city in the style of Plato, Cicero, Al Farabi, and Maimonides." Strauss thus manifests an apparent disregard of Socrates' advice to adjust his speech to the audience. 123
