Daily Inspiration Quote by Leo Strauss

Strauss is picking a fight with the lone-wolf fantasy of knowledge: the idea that truth can be privately possessed, sealed off from other minds, immune to challenge. “Only one” doesn’t just mean rare; it means in-principle unshareable. If I’m the only possible knower, then whatever I claim to “know” can’t be tested, taught, corrected, or even meaningfully translated into reasons. It collapses into something closer to revelation, intuition, or preference - experiences you can have, but not knowledge you can warrant.

The line is doing methodological work. Strauss is quietly insisting that knowing is social in structure even when it happens in solitude. A claim counts as knowledge because it could survive other people: their questions, rival interpretations, and alternative readings. If no second perspective could ever exist, then the difference between “I know” and “I feel certain” evaporates. This is a philosopher’s way of policing the border between argument and mysticism without having to sneer at mysticism.

In context, it also sounds like a warning shot against modern claims to finality - the expert who declares an interpretation settled, the ideologue who treats doctrine as self-authenticating, the historicist who insists a text can only mean what one era’s consciousness could see. Strauss, famous for taking old texts seriously and suspiciously, is defending the durability of inquiry: knowledge is what can be put into the open air, where more than one mind can, at least in principle, meet it.