"Greek Ways of Thinking" - Ch. I from "The Greek Philosophers" by W.K.C. Guthrie

By Stephen Alexander Beach

(982 Words) 

The author, Guthrie, mentions at the beginning of the book that he is writing this in order to help others see the foundations of European thought from the Greeks and their ancient world. 1 Even though many today may be familiar with aspects of Greek philosophy that have been picked out and applied to modern thinking, such as "atomic theory" or Plato's political theory, the milieu itself as a whole is foreign to us today. 2 

One of the first necessities in understanding an ancient culture adequately is by understanding their language, as it is in language that their ideas are embodied. "Language and thought are inextricably interwoven, and interact on one another. Words have a history and associations, which for those who use them contribute an important part of the meaning, not least because their effect is unconsciously felt rather than intellectually apprehended. Even in contemporary languages, beyond a few words for material objects, it is practically impossible to translate a word as as to give exactly the same impression to a foreigner as is given by the original to those who hear it in their own country." 3 Every language and time has their associations with ideas and words which differ from others. And so the danger is to misunderstand or read meaning into words apart from how they were originally meant. 4 Guthrie takes time to go over three examples of common words which had different meanings than we often understand them now when we read these texts: "justice", "virtue", and "God". 

Justice - Dike

The oldest meaning of dike in Greek is something like "a way or path". In so many words it referred to the normal ways in which different people or classes were likely to act. It is not necessarily implying what is the right way, but just that people have habits to their actions. 5 The word morphed a century before Plato and came to mean the path that a man should take. Of course, Plato's Republic is focused on correctly defining justice, and yet he seems to take the meaning back to its source. "At the conclusion of the attempts to define 'justice' in the Republic, after several definitions have been rejected which more or less correspond to our nations of what we mean by the word, the one which is finally accepted is this: justice, dikaiosyne, the state of the man who follows dike, is no more than 'minding your own business', doing the thing or following the way, which is properly your own, and not mixing yourself up in the ways of other people and trying to do their jobs for them." 6 

Virtue - Arete

The original meaning of virtue, Guthrie says, was that of simply being good at something, and thus the word always was attached to some type of skill. To be good at speaking, or running, or shooting, etc. 7 "It could of course be used by itself when there was no doubt of the meaning. So used it would be understood to stand for the kind of excellence most prized by a particular community. Thus among Homer's warrior-chiefs it stood for valor. Its use by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had an element of novelty. They qualified it by the adjective anthropine, 'human', thus giving it a general sense - the excellence of a man as such, efficiency in living - and surprised people by suggesting that they did not know what this was, but that it was something which must be searched for." 

There is a practicality associated with virtue, a type of doing something well and efficiently. And so the philosophers were in search of what it meant to live well in general, the general work or function of man. 8 Thus, virtue begins to take the shape we are familiar with. It is to know the best way to live and to act it out. 

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Unfortunately most of the chapter past this point is not worth recounting. There were two quotes though amidst some useless speculating about magic and pre-rational thought in Greek culture that were interesting.

The first is a great point in general to remember when doing philosophy, and that is that those ideas which philosophers argue about in their writings are not the same about those ideas which are so ubiquitous at the time that they don't even need to be explicitly mentioned. "Conford in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge remarked that philosophical discussion in any given epoch is governed to a surprising extent by a set of assumptions which are seldom or never mentioned. These assumptions are 'that groundwork of current conceptions shared by all men of any given culture and never mentioned because it is taken for granted as obvious.' He quotes Whitehead as writing: 'When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel ti necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose.'" 9 

There was one other quote which stuck out as interesting to me: "The two answers belong to the two everlastingly opposed philosophical types, which betray themselves by their replies to what Aristotle called the eternal question: 'What is reality?' This is not such an impossible question as it sounds. It simply means: in considering anything, whether it be the whole Universe or a particular object in it, what do you regard as essential to it, which you would mention at once if asked the question 'What is it?' and what do you regard as secondary and unimportant?" 10

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1 - Guthrie, W. K. C., The Greek Philosophers, From Thales to Aristotle. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1960. 1

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