Socrates again?

Mark Liberman:

For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in  how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article’s sub-head is “It is not the road to serfdom that awaits — but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt”.

Although I mostly agree with the article’s content, I find the reference to ancient Egypt ironic, given how Socrates frames his argument against reading and writing in education.

And then comes the inevitable quotation from the Phaedrus. References to this passage annoy me about as much, and as often, as claims that in the Areopagitica Milton defends freedom of the press. Points to be kept in mind:

Socrates says in dialogue after dialogue that the only way truly to know something is through the process of dialectical disputation, the famous “Socratic method.” The problem with poetry, as he illustrates in the Republic, is that it’s anepistemic: it’s knowledge-free, it’s just empty storytelling. But he introduces his anecdote about Thoth and Thamus by saying “I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know.” So he explicitly says that he doesn’t know whether the story bears truth; and in any case as a story it cannot bear truth into the soul of the inquirer.

Thus his later comment, which Liberman also quotes:

… 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. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

So Socrates’ argument is not really a critique of writing or books as such: it is an epistemic critique of anything — written, spoken, painted, whatever — that is not dialectics.

And finally: How do we know that Socrates had this view? Because Plato wrote it down and put it in a book. Maybe Plato would side with Niall Ferguson on this question.

By the way, the best thing ever written on the complexities of this passage in the Phaedrus is the chapter called “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Derrida’s Dissemination. I don’t suppose there’s any essay in criticism that I more fervently wish I had written.