Page 132 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

for his entire life without writing, and it was left to Plato to record Soc- rates’s teachings for the world; thus the dialogues are a blend of Socratic and Platonic thought. In Phaedrus 274 Socrates says that “writing will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of them- selves . . . “ He stated that writing represented “not truth but only the sem- blance of truth.” Written words “seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing forever.” Even worse, once something is put in writing it “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 address the wrong.” While documenting Socrates’s viewpoint—aspects of which may have been widely shared at the time—Plato clearly recog- nized the importance of writing both for its mnemonic value, and for creat- ing, preserving, and distributing complex expositions such as his dialogues. Works of such extreme literary elegance and subtlety could not have been preserved in a strictly oral culture. Plato and others in ancient Greece argued that all the sons and daughters of Greek citizens should receive education in letters; however, as far as we know, no city acted on this recommendation.68
. . .the reputation of the written word in classical Greece was by no means entirely positive. Even among the educated it of- ten seems to have generated suspicion: Greeks quite frequently perceived letters and other documents as instruments of deceit. Together with the sort of reasoned criticism of the use of writing which is put forward in the Phaedrus (for which admittedly we have no close parallel), such views may have operated on a con- scious or unconscious plane to inhibit the conversion away from oral culture (Harris, Ancient Literacy [1989], pp. 324-25).
68 Harris, op. cit,, 324
132