In the Phaedrus, Plato points out that writing is an often abused memory aid. He finds it troubling that once something is written down, we do not feel the need to remember it. If we want to know what was said, we look it up. This is shown, for example, when Socrates discusses a story about Theuth (Thoth) and Thamus, wherein Theuth, who believes his invention of writing is of tremendous importance, is told by Thamus of its danger. While books might appear to do one thing (support memory), they do the opposite: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be burden to their flows.”[1] Certainly we can point out how ironic it was for Plato to write these words downs, to point out the limits of writing through writing. But this is the kind of irony which philosophy is used to. Indeed, it is central for us to realize the limits of reason, and to find out that reason can be used to show them: reason can never validate its own premises. That is, reason must, in this fashion, be seen as “unreasonable.”
Plato was not only concerned with the fact that books leave our memory undeveloped, but also with the reality that relying upon them tends to leave our ability to think underdeveloped as well. We rely upon the written word too much as a philosophical crutch – that is, we can look up the answers of others, and use that to shortcut not only our own education, but also our own consideration of the questions which face us today. While truth should be discerned through the higher parts of the person, through the soul, we end up allowing others to do our own work for us in our intellectual laziness. Or, as Ficino put it, “Socrates moreover laughs at the study of writing in the person, that is, who trusts that through letters he can reveal indubitable truth to posterity. In the manner of the Pythagoreans, he affirms that the contemplation and transmission of truth occurs in rational souls rather than in books.”[2] If we can find a book which appears to answer questions we have, even if we have to take their words out of context, and change the meaning they intended for their words, we feel as if everything is now answered if we quote it to others, when in actuality we have not truly wrestled with the question at all.
Modern technology has made these problems far worse, and in ways which are not always discernable. Once, you would still have to listen to a lecture in person, but now, through video, you do not. And so what was said about the written word now can also be said about the oral word. While Plato mentioned that in a written text, the words cannot be questioned to correct misunderstandings,[3] with video, we get speakers who no longer will be able to discern the ways their audience might be misconstruing their words, and so will no longer able to correct misunderstandings. Knowing that a lecture or speech will be videotaped also makes it that an audience will not feel as if they have to pay close attention to the words they hear, because they will be able to go over them later (without the aid of the speaker interpreting their own words if a question arises). But how often does one really go back to those words, look over old lectures? If people rarely watch the films and videos the own, once they own them (as Žižek points out)[4], what are we to expect of those videos they don’t own, and have less interest in watching? Save for the most rare of individuals, it is likely that if someone records their speech, their words will become irrelevant as soon as they speak them (for no one is paying as much attention to them as they should).
This phenomenon is especially prominent with the internet. More and more resources are being put together and being made accessible to those who want to use them. Yet, the more access there is, the less they tend to be used. Notwithstanding the fact that it is much more difficult to read lengthy text online, people usually look through them as resources to mine, making it less likely, not more, that they will actually be properly read ever again (obviously, a few people will read them, but now far less will feel the need, since they don’t need to read the book now to find the nugget or two of information they want to get out of it as if the book were a resource to strip-mine).
In this way, one can say that written texts are becoming more hidden the more accessible they become. With more information easily available to the average person today than any other time in history, less real knowledge and understanding is being given out than ever before. It’s all becoming lost in the information highway. Why read a book until you have the need for its facts, and why go through the book if you can just data-mine its words for the few facts you want out of it? By removing their resources, their words, from their original surroundings, the rest of the book, it becomes even easier for the material to be abused, to be used for an ideological pretext which runs counter to the meaning the text was meant to have, and even given, in its proper context. Through the internet, proof-texting has become a greater problem than ever before (everyone can search for and find quotes which support their desired end). Authoritarian use of quotations short-circuits the need to think: so many on the internet engage debates in this fashion. Since they aren’t reasoning out their arguments, but letting the dislodged words of others make their points for them, there really is no reasoning one can do with them in return. They just search for quotes they like, pile them up next to each other, and if anyone disagrees, tell them to “take it up with the author(s) of the quotes,” while it is obvious that the editor of these lists has not done that work themselves.
While it is true that modern technology gives us the ability to search and locate vast amounts of information in short amounts of time, we must not confuse this for education, nor as any sort of intellectual activity. At best, it should be used to introduce us to new concepts and ideas to explore beyond the net, in the original sources, with whatever real time is needed to engage the material – both in reading these sources in full, but also in thinking through what one reads, discerning what is good and what is not in them. With the speed of information and how it is processed on the net, it is clear that so much is being provided and lost before it can ever be properly engaged. We need to make sure we don’t let our lives imitate what happens on the net. If want to gain wisdom, we need to slow down. We need to be able to digest what it is we examine. This might even mean, we need to reconsider how we use the net, and find better, more productive, more realistic ways to engage each other once again.
Footnotes
[1] Plato, Phaedrus in Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Pinceton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 275a-b.
[2] Marsilio Ficino, Phaedrus Commentary in Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on Plato Volume I: Phaedrus and Ion. Trans. Michael J.B. Allen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 49.
[3] “It is the same with written words; they 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 just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may 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 address the wrong.” Plato, Phaedrus, 275e.
[4] “Another strange phenomenon brings us closer to the heart of the matter: almost every VCR aficionado who compulsively records hundreds of movies (myself among them) is well aware that the immediate effect of owning a VCR is that one actually watches fewer films than in the good old days of a simple TV set without a VCR; one never has time for TV, so instead of losing a precious evening, one simply tapes the film and stores it for a future viewing (for which, of course, there is almost never time … ). So although I do not actually watch films, the very awareness that the films I love are stored in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction and, occasionally, enables me simply to relax and indulge in the exquisite art of far niente – as if the VCR is in a way watching them for me, in my place .. the VCR stands here for the ‘Big Other’, for the medium of symbolic registration,” Slajov Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso Books, 2008), 145.
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