TRAGIC AUTONOMY: THE QUEST FOR THE ONTOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN NATURE IN THE LEGACY OF LEO STRAUSS

Abstract

The article examines the reception of Leo Strauss’s political philosophy as a critical theoretical overcoming of Thomas Hobbes’s modern political project. The foundational conflict of the study is articulated through the sharp opposition between the classical Telos, understood as the immanent logic of the good life, and the Hobbesian Archē, which is reductively rooted in the primary psychological fear of violent death. Human nature is systematically conceptualized merely as a fixed biological mechanism, but as a dynamic "betweenness" (metaxy) sustained by the perpetual tension between rational contemplation (Logos) and the non-reducible volitional impulses of Thymos and Eros. Special attention is devoted to the structural antagonism between radical philosophical inquiry and the necessary civic legal order (Nomos), which actualizes the tragic tension between the relative virtue of a good citizen and the absolute, unchanging virtue of a good human being. This inherent friction inevitably necessitates esoteric pedagogy, Socratic irony, and the strategic concealment of philosophical truth to protect the vulnerable thinker within the hostile political community (Polis), while the fundamental dual root of Western civilization concerning Athens and Jerusalem remains the ultimate secret of its historical vitality. Furthermore, the genealogy of nihilism, traced meticulously through Strauss’s analytical framework of the "three waves of modernity," exposes the internal destructive logic governing the collapse of classical ontological norms, the eradication of the distinction between facts and values, and the subsequent rise of historicism. This comprehensive theoretical trajectory provides the necessary foundation for the concluding concept of the individual's "tragic autonomy" within an indifferent, post-cosmological universe, where modern scientific rationalism strips the cosmos of any inherent teleological meaning. Ultimately, natural right is reinterpreted as a volitional, heroic act of resisting ontological chaos through the creative deployment of the "noble lie" and the persistent preservation of human dignity under an empty sky.