I found this book by Eric A. Havelock at a used bookstore last week. It’s turning out to be more interesting than I expected. Specifically, there are some fascinating comparisons to the changes in our own media and cultural landscape.
Preface to Plato (1963) focuses on the great philosopher’s attack on poetry — trying to work out a better sense of what that attack was actually about.
Plato famously banned poetry from the curriculum in his Republic (or at least the character Socrates did), causing no lack of discomfort and confusion among people who teach and study philosophy — precisely the same type of people who are likely to promote the humanities, including poetry, in our modern curriculum.
But our notions of poetry, politics, education, philosophy, etc, are quite different from the Hellenic realities Plato addressed.
According to Havelock, the world Plato grew up in was going through a transition from oral to written preservation of ideas. Technically, the transition to written preservation had been made before Plato, but in practice, people’s attitudes and habits had yet to fully adjust.
Their culture was equipped based on assumptions that everything was to be memorized. Consider the importance we place on reading and mathematics today; imagine in Athens, most of that energy being placed on memorizing poetry — and everything was turned into poetry (Havelock calls it “the Homeric encyclopedia”).
Even many of Plato’s own dialogues are documents of that culture. Many (most?) of the dialogues are framed entirely as recollections. E.g., two characters bump into each other, one asks the other about an earlier discussion and convinces him to stay and tell the whole thing. The Republic itself is like this — a narration by Socrates of the events from a day prior.
Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s interesting to note the ways these framing devices differ between Plato’s dialogues, and what they illustrate about the shift from oral to written culture.
Based on some very brief consideration, it seems that written accounts initially developed merely to assist memorization, not as permanent, self-sufficient documents. I can’t think of any time that writing and reading are mentioned without directly relating to memorization.
It’s like email being conceived as “mail on the computer,” e-commerce being conceived as “shopping on the computer,” or online news as “newspapers online.” The pre-existing habits and ideas prevent people from seeing what the new opportunities really are.
Phaedrus opens with an exchange over the title character’s efforts to memorize someone else’s speech about love. He coyly sells himself short by saying he wasn’t able to memorize the speech but will try to give Socrates a summary of the main points and general sense, only to have Socrates call him out for having a copy of it hidden under his cloak.
And Theaetetus, one of the later dialogues, is presented by someone who didn’t even witness the original discussion but heard it from Socrates, decades earlier:
I made some notes of it at the time, as soon as I got home; then afterwards I recalled at my leisure and wrote it out, and whenever I went to Athens, I used to ask Socrates about the points I couldn’t remember, and correct my version when I got home. The result is that I have pretty well the whole discussion in writing.
[M. J. Levett translation, revised by Myles Burnyeat]
That description conveys a sense that the practice being described is unconventional — or at least uncommon enough to be worth remarking. In fact, it reminds me of something I read last year in 2007 by a blogger Ed Boydon at MIT Technology Review [which I can't believe I found!] about a practice he developed with new digital resources:
I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving.
It’s hard to imagine that at one time, notions as basic as history and drama were just as new as our notions of the social, semantic, and real-time web are today.
The changes happening now have the potential to go way beyond “to print, or not to print.” The Athenian example demonstrates how profound the changes can be in extraordinary times.
Plato was born within decades of the invention of history by Herodotus and Thucydides — the pregenitors of modern journalism. He himself invented philosophy and higher education, and laid the groundwork for Aristotle to invent science. All of that was done in the span of only a few generations, propelled by shifts in the way knowledge was managed.
Memorization became a little less important, the written word became a little more common, and whole new kind of civilization developed as a result.
Now memorization is becoming still less important. The written word is becoming less important too. Data is on the rise. Assumptions and conventions are changing.
New formats and models are emerging — not just new literary genres and business models, but totally new means of communication, education, and exchange are on the horizon…
Are we in another Axial Age?
Pingback: The Raw Feed of History | brianfrank.ca
Pingback: From the Agora to the Blogosphere, and Beyond | brianfrank.ca
Pingback: Update On That Project Provisionally Called A Book | brianfrank.ca