Nature and God, rightly understood, contradict one another. Nature is supposed to be something fixed, determinate; God is supposed to be omnipotent, i.e., absolutely free. God’s keeping his promises to man, even his covenant with man, is not “only fair”, but an act of grace. And his intervention in history, for example in the form of miracles, already negates nature in the strict sense.
Nature is the traditional object of philosophy, God of religion. And as Strauss explains in “Reason and Revelation”, the two cannot be reconciled. Yet ironically, and paradoxically, history is the middle ground between the two. To begin with, human history and prehistory are basically a long series of customs or conventions. Allow me to quote at length:
“For mystics like al-Ghazālī, God is unknowable, inaccessible, and wholly unpredictable because He is absolutely free. Even the relative stability and predictability according to which the believer acts in response to the divine law is not a sure passport to heaven or to the vision of God in the hereafter. One needs to be patient and hopeful of God’s kindness and mercy, go beyond the strict demands of the divine law, and practice the additional mystical virtues that culminate in trust and love [compare Protestant Glaube (“belief, faith”) and Vedanta Bhakti], the only virtues with which man can counter an utterly unpredictable relation between himself and his Lord.¹
For the philosophers, however, this type of mystical attitude assumed a kind of divine wisdom that they did not claim to possess. Instead, their understanding of nature and order in the visible world and their understanding of human nature and its place within the natural whole led them to a fresh appreciation of convention. […] They understood convention to be, not something that is wholly arbitrary or is accepted merely because it is ‘our way’ or the ‘ancestral way’, but something that completes and perfects nature; it is a second nature, as it were, indispensable if man is to achieve the ends intended for him by nature.” (Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, pp. 25-26.)
Modern science demonstrates that no species, including man, has a nature in the sense intended by philosophy from at least Plato to Hegel. Man did not come about all finished like Adam and Eve; he is the product of millions of years of evolution, and not a finished product, never finished, but always subject to further evolution. As such, there is no first nature of man, but only a second nature: convention or custom.
This means that what Georg Picht, following Pascal, called “the God of the philosophers” is dead: Reason is dead, nature is history. Formerly, nature or the Reason in nature was grasped by something likewise considered natural (eternal): human reason, the Reason in man. Now human reason is understood to be historical, a product of evolution. Nature itself, existence, the cosmos, or whatever you wish to call it is now understood to be wholly in flux–or is that only a misunderstanding rooted in the current form of human reason?..
“According to Husserl it is absurd to ascribe to phenomena a nature: phenomena appear in an ‘absolute flux’, an ‘eternal flux’, while ‘nature is eternal’.” (Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”.)
It was relatively late that I noticed the irony in this. Is not an eternal flux eternal, and doesn’t this mean nature can be said to be the absolute flux of phenomena? Absurdity may only be a problem for historical human reason…
Yet within the absolute flux of phenomena, there is relative eternity (“eternity” derives from the Greek aion, a lifetime or century–cf. saeculum). Man, for example, has been relatively consistent since prehistory.
“Nietzsche does not conquer nature conceptually, denying its sway and affirming the modern fiction of our radical power to make ourselves whatever we fancy. Nor does Nietzsche surrender to nature under another name, affirming the radical subjection of our minds to the shifting power of what is given, to Being, say.” (Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 104.)
God or nature is not absolutely free, nor is man such a free-willed being. The final sentence of the central essay of Strauss’s final work, Die vornehme Natur ersetzt die göttliche Natur, means multiple things. Let me start with perhaps the most controversial, to get it over with: “The noble nature, Nietzsche, replaces the divine nature, Plato.” (Schopenhauer had called Plato der göttliche Platon; Strauss basically called Nietzsche der vornehme Nietzsche.)
The sentence also means: “Noble, relative nature replaces divine, absolute nature.” This is the sense that concerns us here. Nature as conceived by modern science (cf. aphorism 22 of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil) is noble, is to be seen as noble.
“The litany [recited by the murderer of God] states the theology of Dionysian pantheism. […]
The fifth stanza praises [the Ass-God’s or Nature-God’s] wisdom of creation: ‘What hidden wisdom is it that he has long ears and only says Yea and never No! Has he not created the world in his own image, namely, as stupid as possible?’ (Z, 313). This line alludes to the Christian dogma that God created the world in his own image. If the world is created in the image of the omnipotent and omniscient God, it should be the most perfect world as Leibniz claims. But it is far from perfect. It is riddled with so many defects and disasters that some theologians have regarded it as the work of a bungling deity. In his talk with the last Pope on theodicy in ‘Retired’, Zarathustra said that the Christian God was only an apprentice who bungled too much. But all those defects can be excused and explained if the creator is understood to be the Nature-God, who employs natural selection as the method of creation. Since natural selection is not guided by any design or foresight, it appears to be stupid if it is mistaken as the work of an intelligent agent. But this seemingly stupid method hides its own wisdom, that is, the inventive genius of creating the wonders of life ranging from the single cells to the complex organs of sensation and reproduction. Some biologists are so impressed with these wonders of life that they regard the entire biosphere as a huge inventive brain. The Ass-God has long ears. His virtue lies not in speaking but in listening. Nature listens to everything that takes place in her dominion; it has a wonderful feedback mechanism for natural selection.
Especially impressed with Nature’s way of creation, the Scientist says, ‘God is supposed to be eternal, according to the witness of the most pious; whoever has that much time, takes his time. As slowly and as stupidly as possible: in this way, one like that can still get very far’ (Z, 315). The Nature-God takes billions of years for creation, whereas the Christian God takes only six days. This long stretch of time belongs to the eternity of Mother Nature. Such a long period is required for the creation of Nature-God because its method of creation is natural selection, the blind process of fortuitous happenings.” (T.K. Seung, Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul, pp. 293-94.)
Nietzsche, though often considered a secret student and even a plagiarist of Max Stirner, is pretty much the Antistirner. Stirner famously wrote:
“Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of. To be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to present oneself, the individual. It is not how I realize the generally human that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself. I am my species, am without norm, without law, without model, and the like. It is possible that I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the state. Better–if the talk is to be of better at all–better an unmannerly child than an old head on young shoulders, better a mulish man than a man compliant in everything.” (The Ego and Its Own 2.2, trans. Byington.)
In aphorism 188 of his Beyond Good and Evil, whose great importance Strauss repeatedly emphasized, Nietzsche writes:
“The essential thing ‘in heaven and on earth’, so it appears, is, to make the point again, that there is obedience for a long time and in one direction: in the process there comes and always has come eventually something for whose sake living on earth is worthwhile, for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality–something or other transfiguring, subtle, amazing, and divine. […] Admittedly by the same token a great deal of irreplaceable force and spirit must have been overwhelmed in the process, crushed, and ruined as well (for here as everywhere ‘nature’ reveals herself as she is, in her totally extravagant and indifferent magnificence, which is an outrage, but something noble).”
What morality, then, can be based on all this? To be as noble as nature, we have to be indifferent as to the direction of obedience; the old custom, religion, laws, state is nobler than the young, as long as it endures. Now of course there may be other considerations; and philosophy remains paradoxical. Aren’t genuine philosophers always people who somehow get estranged from “the fold”? And who remain changed by their estrangement, even if they ostensibly return to it? Yet there’s an old and (therefore) venerable tradition of Western philosophy–not to mention the Eastern.
“Some day my belief that Homer started it all and that there was a continuous tradition from Homer until the end of the 18th century will be vindicated.” (Strauss, letter to Seth Benardete, 15 November 1957.)
The end of the 18th century, be it noted, was right before the death of Kant and the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
“For philosophy, Kant’s knowledge that reason only has insight into what it itself brings forth in accordance with its design can, if finite reason is historical, only mean that thinking, in an ever-revolving change, makes its own designing of the design the object of its knowledge. If the knowledge however is to be true nonetheless, then absolute spirit must manifest itself in every finite form of reason. For a thinking which radically carries out the change of consciousness, the self-knowledge of reason in the act of its designing becomes a ‘phenomenology of spirit’, that is to say a doctrine of the forms in which the absolute essence of spirit appears as finite. Now Nietzsche carries out a change which calls into question even the fundamental presupposition of Hegel’s: that the absolute in and for itself is already with us.” (Picht, Nietzsche, page 71, my translation.)
And yet, must historicism necessarily mean the end of philosophy (the word “scientist”, in the modern sense, was coined in 1833), or even of its esoteric dimension? The first use of the term “nature”, in Homer, refers to the way in which a certain species of plant grows; and Heraclitus applied that concept to his entire phenomenal world. His elusive notion of the Logos did not just refer to Reason. Reason is constituted by the principle of identity or, in other words, of non-contradiction or excluded middle; but that is only half the Logos. As I wrote recently:
“Reason has been misunderstood as being opposed to revelation. To be sure, the principle that constitutes it is that A is different from not-A, but that’s only half of it. The other half is to then see the unity of the two, the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Not a divine but a natural revelation, if the two are even opposed–a revelation of the divinity of nature.” (Open letter to Leonardo DiCaprio, 7 October 2017.)
We cannot experience our sober, day-to-day consciousness, with its truisms like the aforementioned principles, as a revelation; but it seems to me that Heraclitus did experience his awareness of the Logos as a revelation: a revelation of the paradoxical character of our phenomenal world.
“They do not comprehend how what pulls itself apart pulls itself together: a high-strung² harmony, thoroughly like that of bow and lyre.” (Heraclitus, fragment 51, my translation.)
¹ Consider that empathizing comes in where systemizing fails, like when confronted with chaos-theoretically complex systems like other human beings and the weather. Cf. Simon Baron Cohen, The Essential Difference.
² παλίντονος, “re-flex”, as in a reflex bow. Another version has come down to us, which has παλίντροπος, “re-curve”, as in a recurve bow.