Oral-Literate Transition

The oral-literate transition names the historically specific passage, in archaic and classical Greece, from a culture whose knowledge was stored and transmitted orally — in metrical formula, performed by rhapsodes, memorized by community — to one whose knowledge could be held outside the body in alphabetic script. Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963) is the classic statement of the thesis.

The transition is not merely technological. Havelock insists that the oral mind and the literate mind are different kinds of mind. The oral mind is mimetic, participatory, formulaic; it identifies with its content rather than standing apart from it. The literate mind — or rather, the mind for which Plato is preparing the way — is analytic, reflective, capable of asking what is justice? rather than merely performing Achilles. The alphabet frees the content of thought from the medium of oral performance, and in doing so makes possible the detached self-knowledge that the Jungian tradition calls the conscious ego.

For the Lineage, the transition is load-bearing because it supplies the material history behind carl-jung‘s and erich-neumann‘s claim that consciousness emerged gradually out of an earlier participatory mind. bruno-snell‘s discovery of the Homeric vocabulary of the affective body, caroline-caswell‘s study of thumos, ruth-padel‘s work on the porous self — all describe the psyche that Havelock’s oral culture sustained. The shift Havelock describes is the external correlate of the internal shift the depth tradition inherits.

Relationships

• mnemosyne
• psyche
• homeric-plural-self
• porous-self
• discovery-of-depth

Primary sources

• havelock-preface-plato (Havelock 1963)