Monika Bahyrycz
How to Read Texts? On Leo Strauss’s Hermeneutics and Methods of Interpretation [View PDF]
ABSTRACT
Methodology in the history of political thought has been lately a subject of a deepened research in political science. Beside new theories, there are some well-known perspectives that might be still applied in the field. In the article, I would like to present one of them, but in a new, critical approach: it will concern the methods of text interpretation found in the works of Leo Strauss. I will be particularly interested in Strauss’s idea of a return to the “great books”, which is a metaphor for studies on the most acknowledged philosophers of the past centuries, and which requires to understand these thinkers as they “understood themselves”, as Strauss often repeats. In order to comprehend great minds, Strauss taught “how to read” texts and created his own school of hermeneutics. As an opponent of historicism and relativism, Strauss believed that by turning to the past, we gain a clear insight into contemporary situation, free of frameworks and intellectual limitations of our modern era. The aim of the article is therefore to reexamine the techniques of reading for which Strauss has been most famous, with careful attention to his theory of exotericism, the way philosophers would present their teachings.
Keywords: Leo Strauss, methodology, text interpretation, hermeneutics, exotericism, history of political thought