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

STRAUSS ON XENOPHON 149
On page 74, he says, "wisdom for which the philosophers long is
obviously something noble . . . ." Shortly afterwards however he
raises the question, as one yet to be answered, whether "the good,
the noble, and the pleasant are the same, if not simply, at least in the
most important case " (77-78) . By " the most important case, " <strong>Strauss</strong>
almost surely means wisdom (cf. 125, "on the highest level"). What
this question means, as applied to wisdom, appears from the immediate
context. <strong>Strauss</strong> has just come close to identifying the
"beautiful" (a term he appears to use interchangeably with
"noble"-119, 167; cf. Xenophon's Socratic Discourse 121), insofar
as it is something solid, with the pleasant or reducing the beautiful
to the pleasant (77 and the reference on 120 to the textual passage
discussed on 77; cf. 85, 167); with this tentative identification in
mind, he asks whether it is necessary to retain the beautiful or noble
as a distinct category or characteristic in the case of wisdom, or
whether wisdom cannot be understood adequately in terms of the
good and pleasant alone. The promised or half-promised answer to
this question is never given as such, although it may be implied in
<strong>Strauss</strong>'s account of the coinicidence, in wisdom and its pursuit, of
"the greatest good" and "the greatest pleasure" (125; of. 114, 115),
an account which is silent on the beautiful. Later on, <strong>Strauss</strong> treats
more or less disparagingly a reference to Socrates' nobility (139);
and he insists that Socrates' losing a beauty contest to Kritoboulos is
not to be taken as due to a lack of bodily beauty alone (167); on the
other hand, he says that Xenophon, a man of "light-heartedness,
grace, and flexibility," was a lover of Socrates (171).
There are several passages-the one on pages 80-81 standing
out-in which <strong>Strauss</strong> appears to suggest that the objects of wisdom
are or belong to the beautiful or noble things (cf. 85 and 167; 104,
103; consider the repeated references to Memorabilia I1.2.3). A later
statement, however, which is his most extensive and explicit one on
the subject, distinguishes the objects of wisdom from the beautiful or
noble (as well as the good) things (118-120). Still, it is not completely
clear how` definitive this statement is meant to be, or how far it is
meant to go. The difficulty which strikes us first is that <strong>Strauss</strong> calls
here the objects of wisdom "the most excellent things" (119). In an
earlier ;passage, where he had called things akin to the examples now
given of objects of wisdom "the best things," he spoke of them as being
higher "in rank" than likenesses of things which can only be seen
(83; of. "Plato" in History of Political Philosophy, ed. <strong>Strauss</strong> and
Cropsey, 2nd edition, 51). We are reminded by this of the fact that