
Socrates Was Against Writing (2011) - simonebrunozzi
http://apt46.net/2011/05/18/socrates-was-against-writing/
======
BucketSort
He was against writing... in 370 BC. Although, having seen the blank faces of
students in lecture halls mindlessly taking notes, I know there's some truth
to it. When a good professor lectures, there's a lot of information expressed
as pace, stress, and so on. It's like when I read Shakespeare's plays for the
first time and thought the world was really crazy to put such high value on
seemingly nonsensical words, but then I saw an actor speak them and the
performance added the additional emotional overtones which decoded how the
words were meant to be understood. That extra layer on top of words is
surprisingly neglected.

~~~
roenxi
The central dynamic when someone is lecturing is that there is some sort of
audience learning from the lecture. Hopefully willingly :)

Listening to a lecturer is very helpful if the listener already has a fair
grasp of a topic and uses it as an opportunity to critique and refine their
own opinions. I've been to lots of lectures in my time and I found it very
counterintuitive that I got more out of lectures when I already had a deep
understanding of the topic. They are much better used to figure out what a
smart person's perspective is rather than for picking up facts (better done
from a reference manual or other book).

I might have a bias towards technical lectures with a few equations on the
board, but most students in a lecture hall that I've seen don't understand the
subject well enough to get much out of the lecture. It becomes more a process
of reading the slides to them rather than anything that a lecturer is needed
for. There will be three types of students in the hall, in order of best to
worst performance; not taking notes because they already understand the topic;
taking notes to aid them in private study, and not taking notes because
although they don't understand the lecture they also don't know how to use
notes in private study later on.

~~~
cgriswald
I take notes because it’s part of my process. It’s like thinking out loud
without bothering the people around me. If I’m new to the topic it helps me
absorb it (even if I’ve come having already read up on the topic). If I’m not
it helps me absorb the lecturers ideas/opinions. I’m writing down my points of
agreement/disagreement or things to research or things I want to prove or
disprove, or a wild tangent, or a possible connection to another topic... etc

------
jhbadger
What annoys me about the whole "Socrates was against writing" is the follows:

1) Even within the narrative, Socrates isn't "speaking". He is creating a
fictional narrative set in Ancient Egypt where he believed writing originated
(wrongly, but that isn't the point). 2) On a second level, Socrates didn't
even write this. This is part of Plato's work. Plato was a student of
Socrates, and maybe is describing something Socrates really said. Or maybe
not. He may be simply giving his _own_ opinion and attributing it to Socrates,
who had a higher reputation.

~~~
devnulloverflow
> He may be simply giving his own opinion and attributing it to Socrates, who
> had a higher reputation.

We'll never really know how much the human Socrates matches Plato's literary
character. But the reason for that is that Socrates never _did_ write down his
teachings, whereas Plato did.

It would be a funny old world in which Socrates had no objection to writing,
but never wrote anything, but Plato did have a an objection to writing, but
wrote lots of stuff, including lies about Socrates objecting to writing.

But then again, this _is_ a funny old world.

~~~
abjKT26nO8
There was another dude who was writing about Socrates at the time. It was
Xenophon.

~~~
devnulloverflow
Yes.

And there's also _The Clouds_ by Aristophanes
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds)).
And in my sometimes I suspect it might be the most accurate portrayal. But
we'll never know.

------
dr_dshiv
Pythagoras, a hundred years earlier -- and Plato's biggest philosophical
influence next to Socrates -- was also against writing. Now, we don't know why
he or his followers were against writing, but here is a possibility:

Pythagorean mathematics and science were developing rapidly, alongside
spiritual doctrines about harmony in numbers and the cosmos. Even today,
Pythagorean ideas are incredibly predictive (e.g., small integer ratios
constituting consonance and dissonance). However, even then, there were limits
to the ideas. For instance, a triangle with the side of 1 has a hypotenuse of
the square root of 2. They may have thought there was more to learn and
committing the ideas (which had spiritual meanings) to words may have created
non-empirical doctrines. For instance, Pythagoras was familiar with many
religious traditions and saw the role of books in creating unbreakable
doctrines.

If Pythagoras had committed his ideas to writing, he could have been wrong or
incomplete about his knowledge. Since he didn't do this, all of his
influential concepts remain completely commensurable with modern science and
mathematics. That's huge. As a result, those who wish to can still take
spiritual inspiration from Pythagorean ideas about cosmic harmony without
violating empirical reality.

------
xamuel
OP quotes Socrates in Phaed _rus_ talking about the evils of writing. But in
Phaed _o_ (yes, a totally different dialog with almost the exact same name),
we hear quite the opposite. Phaedo takes place on Socrates' deathbed so might
be considered more representative of the philosopher's final opinions.

"'Tell him the truth, then, Cebes,' he [Socrates] said: 'I made them [poems
and a hymn], not because I wanted to compete with him [Aesop] or his verses! I
knew that wouldn't be easy-but because I was trying to find out the meaning of
certain dreams and fulfil a sacred duty, in case perhaps it was that kind of
art they were ordering me to make. They were like this, you see: often in my
past life the same dream had visited me, now in one guise, now in another, but
always saying the same thing: "Socrates," it said, "make art and practise it."
Now in earlier times I used to assume that the dream was urging and telling me
to do exactly what I was doing: as people shout encouragement to runners, so
the dream was telling me to do the very thing that I was doing, to make art,
since philosophy is a very high art form, and that was what I was making. But
now that the trial was over and the festival of the god was preventing my
death, I thought that in case it was art in the popular sense that the dream
was commanding me to make, I ought not to disobey it, but should make it; as
it was safer not to go off before I'd fulfilled a sacred duty, by making
verses and thus obeying the dream.'"

~~~
sdrothrock
> Phaedo takes place on Socrates' deathbed so might be considered more
> representative of the philosopher's final opinions.

One distinction that I do want to make (that was made to me as an undergrad
studying both Classics and Philosophy) is that we do want to remember that
Phaedo is essentially third-hand information. It is written by Plato based on
his understanding and editing of conversations he had with students of
Socrates.

My professors always made this very clear and stressed that while it is common
to consider things in the Platonic dialogues as Socratic canon, they were not,
in fact, written by Socrates at all or in his immediate time period; as I
recall, they were written a few decades after his death.

~~~
coldtea
It's not really relevant what Socrate's actual cannon was.

The philosophic Socrates is what Plato made.

A few others (Xenophon etc) also wrote of Socrates, but the philosopher
Socrates is 99% Plato's writings.

It's like the question of whether X or Y was the real Shakespeare.

Even if so, the only thing we care about Shakespeare is his plays, and those
don't change if the real name of the person who wrote them was another (Borges
makes that point somewhere, iirc -- actually Shakespeare himself makes it too:
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet").

"Socrates" people read / care about for 2 millennia -> what Plato wrote.

"Shakespeare" people read / watch / care about for several centuries -> the
plays and poems themselves

------
wisty
Before writing was commonplace, students would memorise works like the Odyssey
and Iliad.

Before calculators, students would memorise times tables.

Before Google, students would need to learn about the world.

Before Siri, students would need to learn how to write well enough for Google
to interpret their questions.

A few more iterations and no-one will need to think, we can just be shipped
around in mobility scooters like in Wall-E. If a machine can make better
decisions, why should we even have the right to decide anything?

Sure, that's an extreme position, but this is partly where the concern over
writing came from - as new ways of processing, storing, and exchanging
information arise we lose some of the old (and more human) ways.

~~~
ConfusedDog
\- "A few more iterations and no-one will need to think"

I disagree. A few more iterations people would think more about how to think
and improve thinking, and focus more on the root problem rather than nitty-
gritty problems along the way.

~~~
xamuel
I used to think that way until I actually read The Odyssey. I used to suffer
under the delusion that all things advance like technology. Thus, I thought,
surely a work like The Odyssey must be extremely primitive, as compared to
novels written in the 21st century. But in actuality, The Odyssey is jam-
packed with narrative twists and turns. It has recursive unreliable narrators,
it presents stories out of chronological order, it's full of deep meaning in
almost every line. We have NOT improved since the days when bards memorized
stories. We have gotten worse.

"Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse, not
better"\--Homer, The Odyssey

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
You do realize that the version you read isn't by any means the original, and
is going to be the result of millennia of narrative drift? I'm not saying that
it couldn't have been complex, but whatever you read isn't going to be how
Homer told it.

~~~
xamuel
Makes me wonder if the original was even more better :)

------
motohagiography
No surprise he thought mere book-learning was inferior.

"Real knowledge, Socrates said, can only be gathered via dialog: a give and
take of questions and answers where ideas are interrogated until the knowledge
is truly understood. But with a book, that cannot be done unless one has
access to the author."

What I have finally been able to articulate for myself is that education is
not information, it is the effect of a relationship and practice.

When you isolate information in the dynamic, it describes how ostensibly
educated people can be starkly ignorant of facts, and how autodidacts aren't
reliable no matter what truths they might be in possession of. The internet
gives us unlimited information, with only some means to practice it if you
code, and it simulates relationships that do not materially exist. It is
making us stupid in a way we can't readily appreciate, which is perhaps what
being stupid itself means.

The perspective doesn't matter much other than to give some mental respite
from the nonsense of echo chambers and social hall of mirrors most people seem
to be preoccupied with, but then again, that is the comfort philosophy was
meant to provide, so YMMV.

------
ken
I absolutely see the primary effect. As a modern example, people who use GPS
all the time don't seem to know where anything is.

Unfortunately, I almost never see the secondary effect. With all the time
people save from using computers, we're not doing all the things we complained
we didn't have time for. We're just able to waste more of it, in new ways.

------
winchling
We don't know what Socrates said because it wasn't written down.

He relied on his followers to improve on his ideas and transmit those improved
versions, and perhaps they did. However knowledge _does_ get lost (e.g. how to
read Cretan Hieroglyphics). It's good to insure against that.

There are advantages to live discussion but it doesn't preclude making
occasional records in the form of books. Why not do both?

Contra the article, books do contain knowledge. It's knowledge in the form of
'know that' rather than 'know how to'. Yet if we could somehow obtain science
textbooks from the future, we could use those books to _recreate_ advances in
knowledge in a much shorter space of time, i.e. we could bridge the gap to
_know-how_. So books do have value beyond entertainment and recording
historical facts.

------
ken
> In other words, if a child grew up alone with a Kindle containing all of the
> books in the Library of Congress, could he gain the same kind of knowledge
> which a normal person gains via social interaction? Or more pragmatically,
> could you understand the true, intended and complete meaning of the words
> you are now reading if we didn’t share the same knowledge?

Even if you understand the words completely, in every field there's a
distinction between "yeah that's the proper way the book says to do it" and
"this is what we do in real life".

For example, my car's owner manual says you should let the engine idle for 5
minutes after driving to let it cool down, and my state driver's manual says I
need to do an inspection (all lights, etc) before each drive -- but come on.

------
mc32
He wasn’t completely wrong. When we read what others have written we give them
our own interpretation —which of course is unavoidable, but it lacks context
and the “here and now” of the speech or conversation. The simplest example is
the need for emoticons and tags to express figurative and emotional aspects in
the writing. But there is no give and take or asides, exploration and further
explanation, etc as happens in face-to-face discourse.

However, those are small drawbacks and are overwhelmed by the benefits.

~~~
mannykannot
Reasonably well-written dialog needs neither emoticons nor tags -- really! ;)

~~~
onemoresoop
It is still missing context. And even if you are given some context with it,
it is very likely that some of it being missing or got lost.

~~~
mannykannot
To the extent that is an issue, it is an issue with language, not the medium.
Verbal communication is more likely to be misunderstood, which is one of the
reasons why, when it matters, we want to "get it in writing." Anyone finding
it "very likely" that whatever they write will be substantively misunderstood
could improve their style.

Furthermore, the existence of the problem does not mean emoticons and tags are
necessary for its solution. The existence of a rich literature prior to their
introduction strongly suggests they are not.

~~~
mc32
Wanting things in writing is tangential. It has to do with proof. We still
argue over legislation, so “in writing” isn’t more illuminating. What writing
(basically time shifting) can’t do is be in the moment and give you the
ability to diverge and learn on the fly.

Now conversations aren’t perfect either, it’s up to us to direct and ask
questions when we seek better understanding. However writing doesn’t give us
that ability. On the other hand with writing, given our laziness in forming
thought, we can ponder and distill thoughts till they are worthy of committing
to record. Speech can also be well thought out and meticulous though (ex.
Vidal vs Buckley), so it’s not confined to writing, but we are more used to it
in writing because debating is not prominent whereas writing is.

~~~
mannykannot
This has moved on quite a bit from the proposition that emoticons and tags are
necessary.

Just because written language can be argued over, that does not make spoken
and written communication equivalent in that regard.

Writing does far more than just time-shifting. Handling complexity is one
important benefit. Disseminating information accurately is another.

Debating is not prominent partly because it is not efficient (even in law, the
amount of verbal debate is dwarfed by the amount of written communication,
which is necessary in its own right as well as necessary to support what
verbal debate does happen.)

The modern world is inconceivable without near-universal literacy, and it
seems very odd to have to defend that point on HN.

~~~
mc32
Emoticons were never a position. They served as support of a claim.

More importantly the claim wasn’t that Socrates was absolutely right, it was
that he had a legit point when he argued that there are inferior aspects. I
however acknowledge these drawbacks are dwarfed by the benefits conferred by
writing. So yes writing is great, no doubt, but it does lose something while
gaining us a lot more in return.

Never the less, I admire his steadfast refusal to write even while
acknowledging we are poorer for not having his thoughts first hand. Yet, he
nor anyone else owed or owes it to us.

------
spodek
I'm against writing too when the first sentence includes an affectation like
"wait for it":

> _... an excerpt from The Phaedrus, a dialog between Socrates and someone
> named — wait for it — Phaedrus..._

------
i_am_proteus
This is straight out of _The Seventh Function of Language_ , by Laurent Binet.

The only reason we know that Socrates was against writing is because Plato (et
al.) wrote those thoughts down.

------
inflatableDodo
Alternatively, given Plato knew damn well what he was writing down, it is one
of the earliest surviving examples of a postmodern joke.

Also, the dialog is not against writing, it merely states that dialog is
superior for presenting and exploring ideas or knowing what someone is about.

It also says that writing is something you can do as a pastime in later years,
but it is not the serious pursuit of one's life, which I also suspect is Plato
commenting upon himself from the text.

------
toss1
Like any tool, it is all in how you use it.

The map is not the territory.

Even Socrates was recognizing this, that you couldn't really know the topic of
a writing without having been there, done that, yet writing could help recall.

And there are plenty of examples of 'book knowlege' being essentially
ignorance, e.g., passing a certification exam is a far cry from being able to
reliably sort out the issues in the field. So, we must not expect to rely on
writing (& other media) exclusively.

That said, (good & valid) writing and other forms of stored information can of
course both before encountering a situation to truly learn it more quickly,
and afterwards to help recall detail.

Similarly, GPS can be used as a crutch to allow people to get anywhere without
developing even so much as a clue as which direction is North, or can be used
to enhance the precision and speed of expert navigators.

So, even though the Map is not the Territory, that does not mean that maps are
useless, only that they need to be used properly, and with mindfulness of how
you curate your own knowledge and skills.

------
ukj
There is an interesting question to ask here. Do you learn more effectively by
reading or by interacting?

My bias is towards the latter.

Real-time communication offers an opportunity for error detection/error
correction in transmission, thus - better understanding. This mechanism is
lost with written text.

------
Causality1
>"they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will
be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

What a fantastically prescient depiction of social media.

------
EGreg
Just like in every generation, we are skeptical about the latest technology
destroying the old ways, and haven’t yet come to appreciate the new
possibilities.

“Don’t quote from Wikipedia”

“The telephone is going to destroy face to face communication”

And now, in my generation, kids hardly know how to read cursive, write and
spell (by hand). The art of 19th and 20th century rhetoric and wordplay is
dead. But, maybe we didn’t really need it? Many people are typing more than
ever and debating economics and stuff, with SMH and TLDR and their emoji game
is strong.

~~~
heavenlyblue
>> The art of 19th and 20th century rhetoric and wordplay is dead.

What are you on about? With YouTube/Instagram/Snapchat the rhetoric is even
more valuable because whatever you say on record is going to be multiplied
another million times.

In the 19th and 20th century the chance was that whatever you said would never
reach anybody past you closest friends and family.

~~~
EGreg
That’s completely different. People didn’t joke around to make it available
for millions of people on replay. They did it for fun!

Today we get fun from watching porn and speaking in quick bursts amid our
increasingly hectic lives. The apps you mentioned just feed us entertainment
like the TV did back in the day, and send endless notifications. Most people’s
speech isn’t like it was 100 years ago because back then that’s how they
entertained themselves back then. For the same reason people don’t play piano
as much.

------
exBarrelSpoiler
Julian Jaynes didn't even think that Socrates had a unicameral mind, so it's
not as if he was operating with the same psychology as modern man:

[http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg.tcl?msg_id=...](http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg.tcl?msg_id=00C0TF)

[https://www.julianjaynes.org/jjsforum/viewtopic.php?t=346](https://www.julianjaynes.org/jjsforum/viewtopic.php?t=346)

~~~
handedness
It's far more likely that Socrates operated with a psychology that would be
recognizable to modern man (inasmuch as human psychology can differ wildly
across societies and eras) than it is that Julian Jaynes's theory of
bicameralism was anywhere close to correct.

------
Karto
Reminds me of a friend of mine who's a lot into horses. She once told me "We
say that books about horses and riding can only teach you the things that you
already know."

------
tunesmith
What is it that is so special about dialog? I understand its interactive
value, in that you can ask enough clarifying questions to fully understand
someone else's point of view or argument. And that having questions asked of
you can lead you to further challenge and refine your own point of view and
argument. But that can all also be done with other communication modalities.
Is there something else about dialog that is uniquely valuable with respect to
developing knowledge and wisdom?

~~~
dredmorbius
What is the sound of one hand clapping?

~~~
tunesmith
On the one hand, that's a response given to indicate there is no valuable
answer to be found. On the other hand, there is no sound of one hand clapping,
which could indicate you believe there is no value to dialog. I'm afraid I
have no idea what your point is.

~~~
mjburgess
Learning is a social process. It requires more than one person.

What you are doing alone is maybe "silently pondering" but it is just, at
best, a tidying up of what you have gained socially.

The kind of thinking we manage to internalise and perform individually is an
impoverished kind, and lacks the ability to do a lot for us.

All psychological growth is therapeutic, requiring a therapist (educator,
coach, peer, friend, ...) to serve as a foil to push you past the cycles of
your current safe state.

------
00N8
I'm pretty sure Einstein didn't agree with quantum physics either.

Clearly you can do foundational work in a field & still go on to misunderstand
its basic principles! :)

~~~
marcosdumay
Funny thing that he helped creating it. His early career fame was nearly all
due to saying "the evidence says X is true, therefore, let's make X true in
our theories" on the face of older, important people.

Then, after becoming older and important people he throws something like "God
doesn't play dice" into the world. Fortunately, he had very few of those
moments, but makes one wonder if that kind of thing is inevitable.

------
JoeAltmaier
This seems facetious. So, write down a dialog. Then distill that into what was
learned from the dialog. Now you have written down a thorough understanding of
the material.

No? Then the dialog wasn't enough either. One way or the other, a written
account can be the best representation of an idea. Because it has all the
dialog has. Even better: it can be organized and sensible, not a random walk
thru the idea as a dialog often is.

------
peter303
This essay is revived for every new technology which might seem to weaken our
mental faculties. In Socrates time writing might weaken memory and rhetoric.
In my lifetime it was movies, television, video games, cellphones and social
media doing the same.

On the contrary, if used properly and moderately, new technology can
strengthen our mental abilities.

~~~
seventhtiger
It's not just traditionalism. It has some merit.

Let's use a computation metaphor. All external but easily accessible
information is in the HDD. Nowadays it contains almost all human knowledge.

But the things that are in your mind to be retrieved instantaneously are in
cache. A bigger and more utilized cache is better, but for humans it takes a
lot of effort to move things into cache, and our HDDs are expanding ever
larger, so now people keep their cache empty and unused.

Reading a poem will give you some joy and perhaps insight, but memorizing the
poem will make it a part of you. It's only function is not just reciting and
recalling. It makes your mind more beautiful because it has beautiful things
in it. It's not about the poem. It's about you as a person.

Which take me to the memory palace or method of loci. It's a mnemonic device
described by the Romans where you memorize information by visualizing it as a
walk through a palace with many rooms and locations. I think it was more than
just a mnemonic device because embedded in that metaphor is the implication
that what you memorize exists physically in your mind.

If the ancient peoples tried to beautify and decorate their minds with
beautiful knowledge, then the modern people have industrialized their minds
and kept them brutally empty.

------
peterwwillis
Really what Socrates is saying here is that the Socratic method is superior to
book-learning. So even if he did say it, his reason wasn't totally unbiased.

There are many ways we learn things and they all have pros and cons. I can't
believe someone as intelligent as Socrates would genuinely believe one
shouldn't write or read to learn.

------
rayrrr
The excerpt on Miami U's website, linked early in the article, is worth
reading. A tale of Egyptian Gods and Kings...but if not for Plato's writing,
we wouldn't know these days that Socrates was with King Thamus on this one
back then. Or do we really know any of that? Thanks for the paradox,
philosophers.

------
9wzYQbTYsAIc
Best quote: “And if alive today, Socrates would probably be a prolific email,
IM, forum, Facebook, and Twitter user.”

~~~
mavsman
I disagree with this conclusion pretty strongly (not sure if it's satire or
not). Though social media could be considered dialog, I think Socrates was
likely talking about face to face interaction being the pinnacle of knowledge
sharing: nonverbal signals, back and forth, tone, etc all being key parts of
this.

~~~
wahern
When Socrates and other ancient philosophers criticize writing, it's not
because of the lack of in-person, non-verbal signals--at least, not directly.
It's because they had peculiar beliefs about the origin and nature of
knowledge. As alluded to in the post, in their epistemologies memory isn't
just a way to recall facts, but often considered the very _seat_ of knowledge
and even reality itself. Plato takes this to an extreme with his Platonic
forms, which exist and are slowly revealed as _memories_. Suffice it to say
the contention of the anti-writing crowd was that writing as a medium
conflicted with the nature and/or embodiment of knowledge. This conflation of
knowledge and memory persisted up to at least Augustine.

Note that not all these philosophers were anti-writing, just that you can't
understand the debate without understanding the premises. Would Socrates be
cool with electronic Socratic dialogue? I know enough to know that I don't
know enough to be able to say one way or another. As far as I understand,
Plato had different theories about knowledge and memory than Socrates, though
both (in keeping with the era) emphasized their interrelationship. So we
should be skeptical that Plato accurately conveys the essence of Socrates'
epistemic theories.

------
stephc_int13
Socrates was probably also rumbling about the millennials of his time.

Ah, those kids...

And he was right, it is close to impossible to preserve knowledge between
generations, there is always huge losses, unfortunately, but still he was
wrong, obviously, because books scales much better than talk.

~~~
mapcars
>because books scales much better than talk

What scales is exactly superficial knowledge but not the wisdom, to me he was
right.

------
kylek
All we are is dust in the wind, dude

------
mannykannot
you can't beat a good teacher for teaching, but only a fraction of what I know
has come from classes -- there are whole fields that I know something about
without ever having taken a class in them, and I imagine the same is for you.

What happened was that good authors learned to effectively have a dialog with
their readers, anticipating their readers' expanding knowledge, what they have
probably overlooked, and the questions that would be puzzling them.

I doubt Socrates -- or Plato, for that matter -- ever imagined an almost
entirely literate society, let alone what powers that would unleash.

------
RocketSyntax
Maybe he didn't know how to write well? Writing could have been really
dogmatic back in the day? Maybe he thought writing took away the beauty of
argumentative logic?

------
butchlugrod
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0)

