Critique of Writing

The plato-phaedrus closes with Socrates’s critique of writing, told as the myth of Theuth and Thamus. The Egyptian god Theuth presents his invention of letters to King Thamus as a gift that will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. Thamus refuses: writing is a pharmakon — simultaneously remedy and poison — of reminding, not of memory. Men who rely on it “will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (Phaedr. 275a).

The argument’s deeper claim follows: “Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer” (Plato, Phaedrus). Discourse, Socrates insists, must be “a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet” — alive, responsive, capable of answering the question put to it.

For the Seba tradition the critique is load-bearing precisely because the tradition is a library. The written word is inert unless animated by the logos of the reader. This is the charter under which Jung’s insistence on the “living experience” of the symbol, Hillman’s insistence on the “imagining” rather than the “interpreting” of the image, and the tradition’s resistance to codified doctrine all operate. The Phaedrus protects, at the end of its own written form, the priority of the speaking soul over the inscribed letter.

Relationships

Primary sources

plato-phaedrus (Plato, 275a–278e)