Strauss on Xenophon's Socrates Xenophon's Socratic Discourse: An ...

120 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
in the discussion of Chapter VI). Perhaps then the explicit statement
on dialectics is not meant to be complete.
With a view to the similarity pointed out between Ischomachos's
activity and Socrates' separating the being according to kinds,
<strong>Strauss</strong> raises the question "whether Ischomachos' separating his indoor
things according to tribes is not the model for the peculiarly
Socratic philosophizing" (148). In raising this question, <strong>Strauss</strong>
underlines the link between the question of the completeness of the
account of Socratic philosophizing he explicitly provides here and
the question of what Socrates learned from Ischomachos: if Socrates
learned from Ischomachos something more or other than "order,"
then precisely if his meeting with Ischomachos was of fundamental
importance to him, if it "made an epoch in his life" (161), there must
be more to the "peculiarly Socratic philosophizing" than dialectics
in this sense. Now the whole subject of order arose without any doing
on Socrates' part (140) : it was not then the knowledge or information
he was looking for from Ischomachos in seeking a meeting
with him. In addition, while Ischomachos apparently intended his
discussion of order "to educate even Socrates" (142-148), Socrates,
who on the whole remains silent during that discussion (152 and
142-143), shows almost no sign of interest in it (153). What he does
show interest in consistently, in this discussion and throughout the
whole section on the wife, is Ischomachos's education of his wife and
the wife's reaction to that education (146, 152, 140, 153-154, 156)!
In a roundabout way, <strong>Strauss</strong> brings out the problematic
character of the suggestion that "Ischomachos's separating his indoor
things according to tribes is . . . the model for the peculiarly
Socratic philosophizing" in his very defense of it. He begins by
speaking of the "human things":
We recall that Socrates approached Ischomachos in order to learn from him
what perfect gentlemanship is .... The question regarding the perfect
gentleman may be said to comprise all the questions regarding human things
which Socrates was always raising, like What is pious? What is impious? What
is noble? What is base? and so on; these questions call for separating, for instance,
what is pious from what is noble (148).
In the discussion of an earlier chapter, <strong>Strauss</strong> had said, "as we
know, Socrates was exclusively concerned with ethics and politics,
with virtue and the city, and `perfect gentlemanship' includes in a
manner all ethical and political themes" (129; cf. 83). But now
<strong>Strauss</strong> admits and even stresses that "Socrates' most comprehensive
teaching . . . transcends the human things" (148), that "Socrates
did not limit his inquiry to the human things" (150), that he was