Theoretical Life, Practical Life. The Philosopher and the City in the Debate between Strauss and Kojève on Xenophon’s Hiero

Abstract

Abstract. This paper traces some of the fundamental moments of the conceptual debate between Strauss and Kojève on Xenophon’s text, Hiero or Tyrannicus, with the aim of highlighting that the position that each of them defends on the relationship between philosophy and the polis responds to two different ways of thinking about the problem of truth and being: while Kojève bears the thesis that truth is time, i.e. history, and is therefore truth only insofar as it is realized in history –so that outside such Verwirklichung there is only dòxa or silence–, Strauss refuses to consider truth as a good that man can possess or realize concretely, let alone universally. Philosophy has, for him, a fundamentally zetetic character. The aim of the paper is to highlight the political and anthropological implications of both, an immanent and a transcendent conception of truth, and the dangers that such positions entail.