Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 81
GREEK PHILOSOPHY that central to all the important material on him is his obsession that people do not pay proper attention to the importance of virtue and do not understand its real meaning. . The dilemma of contradiction is between the real image of Socrates and the unreal one - which is being transposed upon him and is largely responsible for the distortion of some significant terms used in the source material. Whether one such term arete really means virtue or whether it has a secular connotation, is one of the questions which needs to be addressed. In the view of. W. K. C. Guthrie: 'We know now that the word "virtue” attaches false associations to the Greek arete, which meant primarily efficiency at a particular task. "³. It is this, according to Guthrie which jarred the sensibilities of the 'practical' Athenians. The word 'practical' reveals a glaring contradiction in Guthrie's understanding of arete because if his definition is correct then it is Socrates who emerges to be the most practical man in Athens, not his critics: who were interested only in ‘political ability' and 'moral obligations'. 'One of the things about Socrates which irritated the sensible, practical Athenian was that he would insist on turning the talk to such humble and apparently irrelevant people as shoemakers and carpenters, when what they wanted to learn about was what constituted political ability or whether there was such a thing as moral obligation. 3. It is evident from this statement that in the eyes of. Guthrie, Socrates was not at all interested in ‘virtue' as a moral term. All that he was really interested in was a common artisan's know-how of his trade and a clear 81