Burns 1 Andrew Burns TRAD 104H Dr. Hogle September 15, 2009 A Refutation of Socrates Position on Writing Plato's Socrates portrays writing as a fount of forgetfulness and the propagators thereof, especially the sophists, as perpetuators of deception. His attacks on sophistry were so pointed that sophism now means an argument that, though superficially plausible, is fallacious. Regardless of whether his attacks on sophistry were valid, his attacks on writing were not. Writing preserves memories and aids educational development. Plato's Socrates chief attack on writing is that it “produce[s] forgetfulness in the souls” of its users and that people who become fond of writing enfeeble their memory skills “through lack of practice” and are forced to rely on outside “alien marks”—hypomnemata—reminders of the things they no longer naturally recall (Phaedrus 275a-a5). Solomon Shereshevskii, the famous Russian mnemonist, attempted the Phaedrus approach, hoping that “[w]riting something down [will] mean[] I'll know I won't have to remember it” (qtd. in Matussek 2). Shereshevskii, who was unable to forget anything, used writing as a tool to forget—he failed (Matussek 2). Quite on the contrary, numerous studies have found that writing provides mnemonic advantages—with a few exceptions. One study found “words that were heard and then written...were recognized much better than words that were heard only...[though there were] no consistently reliable memory benefits to writing...when words were presented visually rather than auditorily....” and a 1980 study by Durso and Johnson found that “writing improves memory traces for pictures but not for words” (Conway and Gathercole 523; Morgan 95). Clearly writing isn't the “elixir of
Burns 2 memory and wisdom” that Theuth claims it to be, but it isn't destructive like Plato's Socrates proposes either. Apart from the personal benefits of writing on human memory, writing is “an active and powerful cultural agency” (Harris 99). Before writing developed into a readily useful medium of recording history and transmitting culture, storytelling in the form of epic poetry was used to preserve the collective memory from generation to generation. Milton Parry, who studied the means by which large amounts of data was transmitted in preliterate societies, discovered that oral poetry, including epic poems, were composed “of fixed, stereotyped clichés or formulas, ranging all the way from phrases of fixed epithet to whole lines and even whole passages” (Notopoulos 471). Oral poets necessarily remembered thousands of these phrases to recount epic poems, relying on improvisation and phraseological formulary to retain the materials; Homer uses between 25,000 and 26,000 of these stock phrases in his 27,853 or so verses alone (Notopoulos 471-2). Literate societies no longer require mnemonists to serve as vessels for cultural history, but write books to store such information—books which hold vastly more information than any one person could possess (Kelder 4); the United States Library of Congress alone possesses 21 million books (1). Some researchers argue that writing does not merely represent cultural and technological advancement, but the transition to “a new mentality” (Harris 99); Walter Ong proposes that “[w]riting restructure[d] thought [and] consciousness” (qtd. in Harris 99). “They will...have acquired [from writing] the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself” says Socrates (internal quotes omitted) (Phaedrus 275b1-b5). Socrates rejects the new writing technology as a crutch—one he believes hinders abstract thinking and inhibits the seeing of “things as they are” (Tirrell 3-4). Nevertheless, time has proven Socrates wrong, for not only
Burns 3 has writing not diminished abstract thought processes, it has enabled individuals to develop “new conceptual
tools—new
labels
and
new
configurations
of
ideas—which...[have
given]...individuals control and mastery of the environment” (Kress 97). Literate cultures— writing cultures—can more easily distinguish “what is said and what is meant from the person who said it and the occasion on which it was said...[and possess] a level of verbal conceptualization which detaches words from their human sponsors” (Harris 104). Writing develops “logic, rationality, linearity, abstract thinking, and the ability to classify” (Kelder 4); it was critical in the transition from “thinking about things to thinking about representations of those things” (Olson 177). Sweet irony. The de-linking of words from their context provided the level of abstraction needed for Socrates to have developed his concept of the Forms, that is, “things as they are.” The very technology that he criticizes as harmful facilitated the creation of his philosophy and, but for this technology, no one would know his ideas. Thankfully, Plato appears to have disagreed with Socrates position, for had he not, he never would have written Phaedrus (Griswold 219).
Burns 4 Works Cited Conway, Martin A., and Susan E. Gathercole. "Writing and Long-term Memory: Evidence for a “Translation� Hypothesis." The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 42A.3 (1990): 513-27. Informaworld. Web. 17 Sept. 2009. Griswold, Charles L. Self-knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996. Print. Harris, Roy. "How Does Writing Restructure Thought?" Language & Communication 9.2-3 (1989): 99-106. Print. Kelder, Richard. "Rethinking Literacy Studies: From Past to the Present." Proc. of 1996 Conference of Literacy. Print. Kress, Gunther. Communication and Culture: An Introduction (Communication & Culture). Chicago: International Specialized Book Services, 1989. Print. Matussek, Peter. "Literature as a Technique of Recollection." Proc. of 1996 ISSEI Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Print. Morgan, Harry. Real learning a bridge to cognitive neuroscience. Lanham, MD: ScarecrowEducation, 2003. Print. Notopoulos, James A. "Mnemosyne in Oral Literature." Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 69 (1938): 465-93. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2009. Olson, David R. The World on Paper The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Plato. Phaedrus (Penguin Classics). Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. Print. Tirrell, J. Aristotle's Complex Self: A Response to Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future. Thesis.
Burns 5 Purdue University, 2009. Print. United States. Library of Congress. "About the Library." Web.