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The Misuse of Text

Towards the end of Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue central to any understanding of Plato's philosophy of love and true knowledge, Socrates tells his interlocuter a myth:

I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved.

The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."

But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
Now, a dilettante such as myself will often delight in ripping such morsels free of their context, and, in proper classical and philosophical circles, this practice is frowned upon. It's the sort of thing that has produced innumerable works of undergraduate anachronism with titles such as "Aristotle's Views on Animal Rights" and "Was Sappho a Feminist?"

However, Plato's works are replete with such modular, individual myths and tales nested within the context of a given dialogue, each one complete in itself like a small painted Russian matryoshka. In this case, I don't have much of a problem with taking Socrates' myth of the invention of writing by an Egyptian god, and using it as a lens to examine a modern phenomenon.

For the larger context, remember that to the Greek of the fifth century BC the written word was still something of a novelty. Bound books were unknown. Private libraries were the province of the extremely wealthy, and literacy itself was generally a consequence of means. Spoken words were a momentary experience of the listener, and ephemeral, like the breath that bore them. The practice of fixing those words in time and space on parchment was still new enough to warrant serious discussion about its propriety. Unlike the Semitic peoples, from whom they had adapted their alphabet around the ninth century BC, the Greeks didn't use the written word strictly for the creation of sacred texts to be revered as holy objects in themselves, recording the proclamations of kings, and preserving myths and tales. The Greeks also used their writing for recording the spoken oratory of ordinary citizens--speeches, and so forth--and for creating plays and philosophical dialogues that were meant to be performed aloud, long after the original utterances had faded into the air.

Socrates' contention is that, for the purposes of revealing or transmitting knowledge, the spoken word will always be superior to the written word:
Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.
To understand what he means, remember that for Plato's Socrates philosophy is the pursuit of truth, which is not the same as the attainment of truth, and that the best way to pursue truth is through discussion, i.e., dialogue. Often it is this method that Plato conveys in his work above all else: argument, discussion, and refinement of one's position are all tools that allow a person to approach the truth to the best of his or her ability. Plato's aporetic dialogues (from aporos, lit., "without passage") end with the primary issue unresolved. In the final passage of Lysis, a dialogue on the nature of friendship, Socrates' interlocuters depart and he laments, "These people here will go away saying that we are friends of one another...but what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out." In the course of the discussion, however, Socrates and his associates have managed to define what friendship is not, and defining what a thing is not is part of the process of approaching a definition of what a thing is.

But the written word, in and of itself, cannot be a part of this process. It permits no interaction. In the absence of its author, a speech cannot participate in the philosophical process, which for Socrates requires at least one other mind. The philosophical process is necessarily social, and it is this communal aspect of philosophy that Plato regarded as essential to the formation and maintenance of a healthy society: the truth cannot be fully approached alone, and the process of philosophical interaction among the citizenry would gird the culture, making it strong. In the absence of their author, static written words have no place in the social interaction that is philosophical discourse. The written word is merely the "image" of the "living breathing word of him who knows;" that is, of a person who has participated in the social process of approaching truth, be it metaphysical truth, aesthetic truth, ethical truth, or political truth.

Until a certain Frenchman sat down by the fire with his ball of wax and decided that he would figure it all out by himself, such interaction was, by and large, the way of philosophy.

Despite its colorful flashy trappings and the rapidity of its expansion, the Internet is primarily a textual medium. It is the latest evolution of the parchment-bound written word and, as such, falls well within the consideration of Socrates' Theban myth. Consider, for a moment, your own experience of the medium: how often have you read a seemingly well-researched post on a blog or a comment in a discussion thread that was full of linked references and quoted information, only to later discover the egregiously biased or downright false nature of the "facts" presented? How often have you, youself, done a quick and surreptitious Google search to seek out support for your own position in an online argument? I've certainly done that, and I've gotten so good at it that I can quickly spot someone else whose "knowledge" derives more from a certain facility with a search engine than from any real study. Very often, I find that it is the loudest defenders of a given position who have vast erudition which disappears when the computer is shut off. I, myself, have been a member of that group far too often for my own taste.

Consider, too, the acrimonious incivility of many of the knock-down, drag-out online debates you have witnessed, and then re-read the god Thamus' dismissal of Theuth's invention of letters:
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
We live in an age of massive textual proliferation and mass miseducation. In our public schools we are taught from textbooks produced by nameless committees we never meet, and at universities we are told of the post-modern meaninglessness of text and the absence of real context, and are given no tools with which to approach truth. These contradictory methods produce an irreconcilable cognitive dissonance that many are free to ignore, but which cripples the thinking of almost any person even remotely interested in pursuing truth in our culture with any level of real conviction. This, in turn, has created an unprecedented level of neurotic incivility among the so-called intellectual class. This strident clamor has polluted every aspect of our public discourse: instead of girding the foundations of a healthy society, the public pursuit of metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, and political truth has degenerated into a meaningless babble of confused shouting and caustic whining.

Speaking with the firm assurance of one who has identified a loathesome habit within himself and now seeks to warn others about its dangers, I will claim that this communal debasement has its roots in individual intellectual insecurity, and that this insecurity, perversely, has its roots in the textual explosion of the 20th century. We live in an Information Age, but we have not grasped that information is not knowledge. Information is not fact. When we choose to accept a chunk of information as fact, treat it as though it is knowledge we have arrived at through due consideration, and then present it as such to bolster our opinion, it offends something within us. When practiced as a matter of routine, this method produces a cumulative irritation that can be masked with stridence and the appearance of conviction. Such pseudo-certainty acts as a comforting balm, and, like most sensible creatures, we do not do what is uncomfortable. Add to this the late 20th-century cultural emphasis on feeling, as opposed to thinking, and the practice of the solitary individual's pursuit of truth that began when Descartes took his seat by the fire, and you have generations of people who are afraid to not know something, and will conceal this not-knowing by any means.

The textual soup in which we live provides these means. Granted, the Internet in particular often provides methods for quickly interracting with the author of a text, so that "when ill-treated or unjustly reviled," its "father" is sometimes available to lend it aid. But more often than not, words and text are snatched from the net's aether, pasted into place, and offered as knowledge while the offerant cowers behind bluster. None are so violent in their protestations as the guilty.

Technology and educational bureaucracy have conspired to produce the current morass, and our culture's ability to create and disseminate information has far outpaced its ability to process it. Rumor on a vast scale becomes evidence of conpiracy, and then gospel to those who are ready to believe. I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this loud mess we're in. I do suspect, however, that the more interactive our information infrastructure becomes, the more possible it will be to engage in the kind of social, communal search for truth that dirty-footed Socrates undertook in the agora and the baths of Athens. Already there are places, small corners of the web, where serious-minded people can seek refuge from the shouting tumult, to find a proper soul and sow within it discourse accompanied by knowledge. Perhaps the solution will be found within a contributor to the problem.

At the end of Phaedrus, after Socrates has summarized the artful use of speech and writing in argument (writing does have its place, after all), he offers a prayer before he and Phaedrus leave their tree by the cool-running spring:
O beloved Pan and all ye other gods of this place, grant to me that I be made beautiful in my soul within, and that all external possessions be in harmony with my inner man. May I consider the wise man rich; and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.
Too often, it seems, our information-saturated age offers riches far beyond the capacity of our unrestrained minds.

The plain result is ugliness.

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