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Can writing help us develop wisdom?

26/11/2014

1 Comment

 
In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates relates how Theuth (or Thoth), the ancient god regarded as the inventor of letters or writing, went to see the king of Egypt, Thamus. Theuth said his invention would "make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories". I love Thamus's response:

"O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

These words felt like a revelation when I first read them some years ago. They offered me a clue about my own rather erratic memory of past events. (What would Thamus have said about search engines like Google?) 

But I have since come to think that we can indeed develop wisdom through writing, provided we use it to complement rather than replace conversation. 

Related reading
Phaedrus by Plato. I have a Penguin version, but the above quote comes from a version available for free via Kindle (translation by Benjamin Jowett). If you haven't yet read Plato's dialogues, they are both readable and edifying.
1 Comment
Alison Donaldson link
3/12/2014 02:59:15 am

Great comment received from Chris Cutler via email (I love the way it looks like a poem, though I can't entirely preserve the length of the lines of text here):

hi alison

yes i often use this quote from the phaedrus in talks to students but
in the ambiguous context that we only know that plato thought this
because he wrote it down

which sums up the problem:
if information is not wisdom - which can only be communicated through personal contact -

then the implication is that direct human communication is of a different quality to that of writing and
that we have culturally forgotten, to our cost, what the difference is, because what we call knowledge
is understood only in terms of the accumulation of invariant, adamantine texts.

in indian classical music it is considered that the structures and procedures can not be acquired by reading
and that the only way to learn is to be apprenticed to a master. not should not, can not; that's an alien thought
to us, more so as we move into an e-learning environment.

as wittgenstein said: a language is a way of life.

change the language, change the life - and the same is true of memory.

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    ​Alison Donaldson is an author and writing coach, normally based in Hove, England.
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