Leo Strauss and the not so Enlightened Lessing

a way into Nathan the Wise

Abstract

Leo Strauss suggests that Lessing was one of the most decisive and influential thinkers in his life. However, we barely have some writings where he is mentioned and only one where Strauss approaches him in the frames of exotericism. The other access to the German poet is through Strauss’s early works on Mendelssohn, and besides that, through unpublished writings kept in his Papers-Archive. The unpublished notes for a lecture on Nathan the Wise appear then as an opportunity to understand, from the tolerant and enlightened drama par excellence, a not so enlightened Lessing, the genuine Lessing whom Strauss alluded. We intend in this paper to trace a path to this lecture through two decisive moments of Lessing’s life (the fragments of Reimarus and the confessed Spinozism) and the reflections that these awakened in Strauss.