But the meaning of "nature" in Strauss is an enigma: it may refer either to the "natural understanding" of commonsense, or to nature "as intended by natural science," or to "unchangeable and knowable necessity." As a student of Husserl, Strauss sought both to retrieve and radically critique both the "natural understanding" and the "naturalistic" worldview of natural science. The "nonpolitical" understood as the natural, Strauss suggests, is the "foun-dation of the political". Yet the space of the nonpolitical in Strauss remains elusive. This reading finds extensive support in Strauss's work, notably in the claim that political life leads beyond itself to contemplation and in the limits this imposes on politics. Leo Strauss has been read as the author of a paradoxically nonpolitical political philosophy.
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