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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 fiction
by jhbadger 7y ago
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.
- soulofmischief 7y agoYeah, I mean Socrates literally never wrote anything, everything we know about his beliefs is hearsay.
- beatgammit 7y agoWhich kind of lends credence to the idea that he was against writing, no?
- soulofmischief 7y agoNo, not really. A -> B != B -> A. In other words, you can't draw an affirmative conclusion from a negative premise. You can say that if Socrates never wrote then we would not have any surviving texts. This is logical. But you can't turn that around and conclud that the fact that we have no surviving texts attributed to Socrates means he never wrote / was against writing. This logical proposition is not closed, there are unaccounted variables for why we may not have any texts. You can only propose the contrapositive, in that if we did have surviving texts from Socrates, it means he wrote. You could even argue that I shouldn't have said "he never wrote anything", because we just can't definitely know. I was just being brief.
- slowmovintarget 7y agoPlato was bemoaning the loss of skills needed for preservation of oral tradition because of the newfangled practice of writing. Kind of like the director of Naqoykatsi using heavy special effects technology to bemoan the effects of technology on society... just, less memorably than Plato.
- Amezarak 7y agoWriting was not a newfangled practice in Socrates' and Plato's time. It had already been culturally commonplace (or at least as commonplace as it was then) for generations.
- earthboundkid 7y agoAnd literally the first thing they tell you about Socrates in Philosophy 101 is that he’s ironic. (Or at least in my class because we used Allan Bloom’s Republic which I now have mixed feelings about.)
- devnulloverflow 7y ago> 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 7y agoThere was another dude who was writing about Socrates at the time. It was Xenophon.
- devnulloverflow 7y agoYes. 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.
- ofrzeta 7y agoThere are also "Plato's unwritten doctrines" that supposedly "could not be explained in writing in a way that would be accessible to general readers, [so] their dissemination would lead to misunderstandings. Plato therefore supposedly limited himself to teaching the unwritten doctrines to his more advanced students in the Academy. The surviving evidence for the content of the unwritten doctrines is thought to derive from this oral teaching." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines
- dr_dshiv 7y agoSuch as, the idea that the basis of goodness is Oneness (source: Arstoxenus). Pretty esoteric. Shwep.net is my favourite new podcast for these histories.
- watwut 7y agoDoes the difference matter? Everything we know about Socrates of third hand.