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

150 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
although he remains silent on the beautiful, in his account of
the coincidence in wisdom of the greatest good and the greatest
pleasure, <strong>Strauss</strong> speaks there of what the good and the pleasant are
"on the highest level" (125; cf. 81). Moreover, on a closer look at the
statement now before us, we see that while he says in one part of it
that the good and noble things "are" not the objects of wisdom
(119-120), he says in a slightly earlier part merely that "it would
seem that wisdom is not concerned with the good and beautiful
things as such" (119).
To try to find a way through these difficulties, we turn to the context
of the remarks, in the two passages we have been looking at
(80-81 and 118-120), bearing on the question of the objects of
wisdom. This means that we turn to the question that <strong>Strauss</strong> was
concerned with in making those remarks. According to the later
statement, "The good and noble things are the objects, not of sophia
(wisdom), but of phronesis (good sense) (cf. IV.8.11). The Socrates
of the bulk of the Memorabilia is phronimon but not sophos: the
concealment of Socrates' sophia is the defense of Socrates"
(119-120). As it happens, the reference to the concealment of
Socrates' wisdom picks up and makes more explicit a comment in the
first of our passages:
The use of "reasonable" here may remind us of the fact, deliberately left obscure
in the preceding discussion, that the wisdom (sophia) spoken of there is in fact
reasonableness (phronesis) (cf. IV.8.11). The Socratic denial of the difference
between reasonableness and wisdom follows from the denial of the difference
between the good and the beautiful or noble things, among the latter the objects
of sight standing out (II.2.3) (80-81).
This earlier comment suggests that the denial of the difference between
the good and the beautiful or noble things deprives wisdom of
its proper objects-which are the beautiful or noble things. By
depriving wisdom of its proper objects, that denial deprives it of its
distinct existence and in this way contributes to its concealment.
Wisdom becomes indistinguishable from phronesis, reasonableness
or good sense, which looks at everything, including the beautiful,
from the perspective of utility, or reduces the beautiful to the useful
(74-77, 119-120). Now, when it is asserted in the later statement that
wisdom is not concerned with the noble (or the good) things, the
identification of the beautiful with the useful is in fact tacitly
understood (cf. 120). The contradiction between the two statements
is thus only apparent: the later statement does no more than reaf-