Hear an idea, ponder it, question it, modify it, explore its limitations—when the idea is presented in person we can interrupt, question the idea, and build on assumptions—but when an idea comes from a book, theres no author answering back. The author does not come with the book. Socrates, our link to oral culture, identified a reading logic deficit. I wonder what Socrates would say about behavior and state today? SOCRATES: Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must really be ignorant of Ammon’s utterance, if he imagines that written words can do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned with. PHAEDRUS: Very true. SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as if they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it might be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not to address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself. PHAEDRUS: Once again you are perfectly right.
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 07:37:23 +0000
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