The center of Strauss's reflection is the extraordinary nature of philosophical questioning, whose radicality he contrasted with the moderation required by political action. "The virtue of the philosopher's thought is a certain kind of mania, while the virtue of the philosopher's public speech is sophrosune." [...]
Philosophy necessarily begins with reflection on particulars that lead to awareness of the universal but are never wholly derivable from the universal. No instance of the philosophic life is strictly speaking repeatable, given that it is always a particular life, engaged with particular circumstances, in erotic quest for the universal. Löwith's formulation "repetition of antiquity at the peak of modernity"* spoke to Strauss since it brings forward the essential novelty of what seems to be only a recurrence of the same. The boldness of repetition involves the daring of unorthodox readings. "Who can dare to say that Plato's doctrine of ideas as he intimated it, or Aristotle's doctrine of the nous that does nothing but think itself and is essentially related to the eternal visible universe, is the true teaching?"
Richard Velkley. Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting. Chicago University Press (2011) P11&163
* Frase que Karl Löwith usa para se referir a Nietzsche.
