Karl Löwith e Leo Strauss sulla natura impolitica della filosofia

This article aims to bring to light the unpolitical nature of the philosophical investigation. To pursue this goal, I will focus on the disenchantment before modern conception of philosophy that led Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss to diagnose the crisis of modernity. In the first section, I will present the problem of human nature and its historicity as opening the debate on the crisis of modernity in their correspondence. In the second section, I will compare the two contrasting models they adopt for describing the disenchantment of the philosopher before the cave of modernity, namely Burckhardt for Löwith and Socrates for Strauss. In the third section, I will show that Strauss's rediscovery of a Socratian political philosophy is one with the recognition of the unpolitical origin of philosophizing. In the fourth, focusing on Löwith's interpretation of Valéry, I will argue that Löwith defends himself from Strauss's accuse of remaining in the perspective of historicism, by adopting a new form of conventionalism