Some quickies: Phaedrus, craft vs. inspiration, free content

I've been in a play and am going away this weekend and haven't had time to do much of anything for a while. I managed to find the best part of an hour to finally write something, but I wound up spending the best part of the best part of that hour reading your last four posts. Sadly, your reward for your diligence is that I end up richer for having read some wonderful entries and you end up poorer for my not having time to respond in a way that's at all appropriate.

In particular, I haven't had a chance to even digest, let alone think about, what you said about Phaedrus. I'm not entirely sure I follow your point, but that could be because I don't entirely remember my own point, which you're responding to. Though I agree that it's a lot more subtle in the Phaedrus than simply a condemnation of writing in favour of speech. Surely you've read Derrida's essay on Phaedrus? I've only read the first twenty pages or so, but already there I can see the threads coming apart. One thing I've never been sure what to make of in Plato is how the suggestion that written texts are second rate is supposed to be read. Given that what we're doing is reading a written text. A soft case of the Liar Paradox?

One other little thing before I try to squeeze in a thought of my own. You defend some appeal to a distinction between craft and inspiration by comparing it to the distinction between nature and nurture, which you take to be almost analytic. I think that's a singularly bad analogy--at least to support your case--since most psychologists and biologists think the nature/nurture distinction is bogus these days. As Matt Ridley puts it in the title of a book on the topic, we're better off thinking of "nature via nurture": our environment shapes the way our genes express themselves. So there's no neat way even in principle of saying it's part nature or part nurture. And I think the same could be said for craft and inspiration: inspiration comes via craft. What kind of inspiration we have, how we express, that we're inspired at all, is shaped by the way in which we've prepared ourselves to channel our creativity. To look at inspiration and craft as two distinct entities confuses matters more than it clarifies them, I think, and that's the sense in which I called the dichotomy bogus.

I was supposed to leave the house five minutes ago, which doesn't leave me time to say what I wanted to say in a way that's all personal and spontaneous. Instead I'll do the crass thing and simply copy and paste from an e-mail I sent a friend on the same topic. Shortly after sending it, I found Leon Wieseltier had written something along similar lines in The New Republic:

It occurs to me that increasingly, it's become difficult to make a living as a producer of content. Already with music and movies, it's so easy to package into data that there's a lot of piracy and the industries have to make concessions in order to make piracy less appealing. Newspapers and magazines are suffering as people now expect their content to be available free online, and to survive as a journalist you have to do a lot of free-of-charge blogging and twittering in addition to the content you produce for money. Now that things like the Kindle and google books are taking off, books too are becoming increasingly susceptible to packaging as data and free viewing, and when people get used to that, they'll want to pay less for books too.

And I think the repercussions go beyond that. I'm keenly aware of how much worse the market is for academics than it used to be. I think part of it is a mentality that academics, as purveyors of content, should be doing more for less money, since in the age of easy access to reams of data, we expect to get more content at less cost.

What worries me is that it seems like knowledge and culture are being devalued, not just in terms of it being harder to make a living at them, but that people estimate their relative worth lower. Does any of this ring true to you or am I just talking nonsense? I worry a bit that increased access to information also risks making us crasser.

Phaedrus

Of the two short texts I'm supposed to be looking at (or long since finished looking at actually) that Blanchot wrote about Sade, one of them is called 'the madness of Sade', and on the last page of the essay he writes "[Sade's] demon was not the demon of lubricity. It is more dangerous than that. It is Socrates' demon, which Socrates always resisted and Plato would have preferred not to give into: it is the madness of writing, a movement that is infinite, interminable, incessant." There's another half a page, and then a quote from Sade explaining that, however much it leads men to shiver, the philosopher must be prepared to say everything... I'm not doing a very good job of translating, but you get the point of that last statement. As far as the demon of writing and comparisons between Socrates and Sade, before I can deal with that, I suppose I should say one or two things about Phaedrus.
Since last I wrote, I've read through the Phaedrus... I'm not sure whether I had read it before and forgotten most of it, or simply read enough about it second-hand that large sections of the argument were familiar. The most valuable thing in there might be the origin of crickets... those who were so overwhelmed when music appeared that they could no longer interest themselves in food or sleep or anything else but playing music - they would have starved to death if the gods hadn't taken pity on them and turned them into crickets, able to make music with their legs and live without sustenance. Anyway, the dialogue certainly does accord well with what you said about the platonic Socrates' relation to writing, and makes my previous position hard to defend (which doesn't mean I won't try...). Yes, as you said, Plato's Socrates distrusts writing because a written text can't defend itself. He says near the end of the dialogue that writing is a frivolous pursuit, and the only writers who can be called wise are those who are able to defend his statements when challenged and demonstrate the inferiority of his writings out of his own mouth - they must be writing as a pastime and not imagine that writing is a serious pursuit. He has nothing but contempt for those who place great value in their literary works on whose phrases they spend hours "twisting them this way and that, pasting them together and pulling them apart". There is, however, something very weird about the Egyptian myth he gives as the origin of writing... namely that it is a god who comes down and delivers writing, while it is a man who criticizes the gift this god has given him, bringing up all the objections that Socrates will seem to subscribe to afterward, saying "if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls, they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, etc." Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to know what this detail means or whether it means anything, but Socrates is generally pious, and objects to stories in which gods behave in an immoral or unfitting manner. It should also be pointed out that earlier in the dialogue, Socrates delivers a long lecture demonstrating that love is a bad thing, totally convincing Phaedrus, before he turns around, admits that he didn't mean a word of it and sets about proving the opposite. Why should we have faith in what Socrates is saying now? Particularly considering we are taking in the speech in written form, knowing that this is not simply a recording of a real dialogue that was written down after the fact, but that we are reading something which was carefully composed in writing. I realize that these are the sorts of things that us literature people quibble about, but I do think they are serious objections, precisely because Plato cannot have been unaware of this contradiction as he wrote. It should also be noted that in this dialogue it is stated with particular clarity that the art or knack of persuading people is a necessary prerequisite to teaching or philosophizing - sophistry is here neither useless or harmful, except that it must be subordinated to a higher end... sophistry is jumbled together with the composition of poetry, whether written or oral, and with every imaginable written form, including even the writing of laws. What Socrates seems to me to be speaking against is much less writing than a certain purely passive relation to writing or to the words or teaching of others. There is here a doctrine of self-reliance, a warning against epigones, and a warning against learning the conclusions that other people have come to through their though and their lives rather than looking carefully at the process by which those conclusions were reached. Just as texts shall not be used in place of memory, they shall not be used in place of thought. I also think it is noteworthy that the Symposium, being the most closely related text, centered around the same topic and keeping Phaedrus as a central character, begins with a follower of Plato acting in a spirit directly contrary to Plato - while the slavish devotion of Apollodorus (and at the end Aristodemus, who, like a dog is sleeping in the corner, but perks up when his master is about to leave and follows him out) while this devotion might be a sign merely of Socrates ability to elicit love, of being the truly erotic individual, it must be noted that Socrates always approaches the people he would speak with in what might appear as a deferent manner, respectfully telling him he is sure they would know better and he would like them to explain things to him. In the Symposium in particular, though he'll come out with some belated cutting remarks about Agathon's speech, Socrates is pure charma dn seduction, drawing men toward the truth. Apollodorus walks around abusing everyone he meets - even when they want to ask him about his favorite topic (Socrates), he still treats them abrasively. A follower necessarily betrays the thought of his teacher. It is also noteworthy how often in Plato's dialogues it is the follower of a school that Socrates argues with rather than the founder. Gorgias does very little talking in Gorgias - even in Phaedrus, Phaedrus is representing Lysias, whose speech he so admired. Though Socrates does undermine Protagorus, he treats him relatively leniently, finding a point of agreement that preserves a part of what Protagorus initially claimed. Part of what Socrates seems to attack is often the credulousness of a follower... though of course presumption and the belief that one knows more than one really does is clearly the more important target. Socrates' true followers went off and started schools of their own. Anyway, I'm drifting off subject.
The madness of writing, the willingness to say anything. Sade and Socrates were both silent because they couldn't be quiet, weren't willing to be quiet, couldn't imagine life without continuing there eternal process of negation. But that isn't the main link between them. Sade complained that if you killed a man, his suffering was soon over, the pleasure was fleeting. Every crime was flawed and imperfect, fleeting and unsatisfying. Unlike Socrates, Sade did feel that increasing these small pleasures in quantity and diversity was a worthwhile pastime, but his main interest in all of his writings is very clearly the pursuit of the ideal form of Crime (and he calls the pursuit of this ideal form philosophy). Sade's virtuous characters are punished, but so are his evil characters... the only difference is that the evil characters don't mind their punishment, as long as they are being imprisoned, tortured or killed in pursuit of Disorder and Crime. In order to commit crimes on the level of the Absolute, it is necessary for Sade's most important crimes to be virtual - unlike a theft, a rape, a murder or any ordinary act of perversity, a book that corrupts its reader (Sade, like Socrates had a great deal of faith in a speaker, teacher or statesman's ability to have a real moral effect on his audience), a book that corrupts is a crime that continues taking effect long after the death of its author. While a person can only be killed once, the number of people a book can corrupt is limitless - here we are moving away from any attempt to link Sade to Socrates, the search for ideal forms really is the one small point of intersection - well, that and the sense of compulsion, the unity of life and thought, philosophy experienced as holy quest and the figure of the philosopher as the highest form humanity could aspire to. Blanchot most often links Sade to Hegel, the links to Nietzsche are so numerous and obvious people often seem to embarrassed to bring them up except in passing - Sade could be used as a starting point to teach stoicism or Epicurianism as well. Learning philosophy with the Marquis de Sade would be a fun class to teach...

Plato and literacy

So the only other post I think I'll find time for this evening has to do with Plato, a dear friend of yours. For a reading group, I read the Phaedrus last week, and intended to read Derrida's essay on the Phaedrus as well but then ran out of time. What I read of it made it seem to me more accessible than anything else of Derrida's I've read. I think I'll give it another go in the spring when I try to write a thesis chapter on Derrida.

So instead of having lots of deep thoughts about speech and writing from my new reading of Derrida, I wound up being reminded of other thoughts I'd come across a few years ago, in Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato. Do you know it? Essentially, it's a book-length argument to the effect that Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic is the response of a literate culture trying to move beyond the confines of orality. Let me explain.

Literacy only became widespread in the Greek world toward the end of the 5th century (says Havelock--I certainly don't have the historical knowledge to question this claim), so that, even though there were written texts long before then, they played only a marginal role in what was still a predominantly oral culture. An oral culture can only preserve of itself what its members can memorize. As a result, memorization was a crucial skill in the transmission of culture (Havelock argues that the muses are better understood as spirits of memorization than of inspiration), and what was to be transmitted needed to be easily memorized. Two tricks that make for easy memorization are rhythm and emotional salience. Thus, a great deal of culture is preserved orally in the form of epic poems. Havelock calls the Homeric epics an "encyclopedia" of Greek knowledge, remarking on how Homer slips in tips about how to steer a ship, how to govern a state, how to ride a horse, and everything in between, all in the form of an engaging narrative told rhythmically, so that people would remember it easily. He also notes that it's easiest to memorize something when you don't distance yourself from it but engage with it emotionally. The mimesis of the poets that Plato disparages is their way of fully becoming the narrative that they recount in order not to forget it.

Along with widespread literacy comes a number of changes in the very nature of thought. No longer relying on emotional identification in order to memorize texts, people can step back from them and think about them, analyze them. Socrates' dialectic consists heavily of him asking his interlocutors to think about what they've just said, interrupting the flow that would be necessary for the repetition of familiar truisms. A number of other consequences follow from literacy's freeing of the mind from the act of memorization. One is that it makes possible a great deal more abstract and systematic thinking. Another is that it separates the subject from the things it thinks about, creating a notion of a self distinct from the world that it perceives.

In essence, Havelock argues, Plato's major cultural contribution is that he was the first to come squarely to grips with the fact that literacy had ushered in a new way of thinking, and that, for it to flourish, it would have to vanquish the old way. Read from our modern perspective, Plato's banishment of the poets can seem bizarre, but in the context of 4th century Athens, Havelock claims, we should see it as an attempt to establish philosophy and rational thought as the only game in town.

I don't have enough background in classical scholarship to find Havelock's argument unconvincing. For my own part, I find it fascinating. Though it does raise a couple of questions about the relationship between orality and literacy in Plato. In the context of the Phaedrus, the obvious one is how we explain the valuation of speech over writing. My best guess is that Plato's interested in establishing individual rational reflection as superior to a mythical group-think based on passing on established truths, and he thinks that kind of rational engagement requires active interlocutors. His criticism of writing is that it can't speak up for itself and defend itself: it can't engage in the dialectic necessary for rational thought. For this point to stand, it's important to note that the importance of literacy for Plato isn't based on the material importance of written texts, but rather the kind of thinking that written texts make available to us. That kind of thinking can be exhibited in oral discussion, as long as that discussion takes place between literate men.

I believe there's also some stuff in Havelock's work that I've not read about Plato's concern regarding the undifferentiated diffusion of writing and its attendant dangers, so maybe I shouldn't speculate what Havelock would say about the writing/speech thing in Phaedrus since I've not read what Havelock has said on the topic.

This, though, raised another question for me: what if Socrates never wrote anything because he himself was illiterate? Unlike Plato, he didn't come from aristocratic stock, so it seems entirely plausible that he couldn't read or write. And speaking of literacy, I wonder if calling the legendary poet Homer blind was a way of signifying his illiteracy? A blind man can't read or write, after all.