Introduction
In 1970, Leo Strauss concluded a lecture advertised, not without irony, as “The Problems of Socrates” with a suggestion that in order to develop an adequate response to the political and philosophic predicament posed by Martin Heidegger we should attend to Socrates’ “Odyssean” manner of speaking.Footnote 1 According to Xenophon, Socrates resembled Odysseus in speaking differently to different interlocutors; he approached those youths who contradicted him with dialectical contrariness, whereas to those who expressed agreement with him, he would reply with rhetoric that affirmed the soundness of the laws, a method which produced the greatest possible agreement. How this replies to Heidegger is not immediately clear. Strauss had indicated that Heidegger’s too narrow understanding of human existence as illuminated by Existenz might be improved by appreciating both the comic and the charitable, two dimensions of human existence conspicuous by their absence from Heidegger’s account of the human things.Footnote 2 Xenophon’s picture of Socrates, perhaps, exhibits some of the missing charity or beneficence and comedy.
One sees in Dustin Sebell’s study how the comic and beneficent dimensions of Socratic education, as portrayed by Xenophon, contribute to an awareness of the fundamental experiences and problems. The comic dimension is communicated by Xenophon’s instructive depiction of Socrates’s long discussion with Euthydemos in Book 4 of the Memorabilia. The beneficent dimension is Socrates’s practice of indicating his thoughts on justice and piety for the sake of loving those who proved to be his friends even as that practice differs from what precisely they sought from their companionship with Socrates. The question of Xenophon’s manner of writing is recurrently considered. As the volume under consideration shows, we are now several decades in to a small renaissance of Xenophon studies, inspired largely by the impetus provided by the scholarship of Strauss—if not precisely by his declared sense that this was the path to replying to the thought of Heidegger.
