Preface to Plato

"What Eric Havelock is interested in is the state of culture in Greece before Plato. It’s not so much an introductory guidebook to Plato or a classic work of Platonic scholarship. Yet it made a huge impression on me when I read it because what he argues is that you have to appreciate the depths of the role of oral culture in Mediterranean societies, and in Greek and Athenian society. It’s really only in the century or so before Plato that writing starts to become a widespread technology, and, in his own century, that you start to have widespread writing down of laws, widespread collection of tax. Up until that time, if you think about Homer and Hesiod, they’re passed on through an oral tradition — very much like the oral traditions of poetry that you still have in parts of the Balkans. People, rhapsodes, memorised them, and they passed it down orally. What we find in Plato, explicitly, is tremendous anxiety and concern about the nature of writing. Of course the great paradox is that he’s writing, he’s reflecting on the limits of writing, the challenges of writing, of this new technology, very much the way we now reflect on the Internet and social media, how is this going to change our culture? Those are the questions that Plato was asking in his own time about writing. Socrates himself just didn’t write down his philosophy. It’s not clear that he said you shouldn’t, but he didn’t. It’s hard to know how to read Plato’s depiction of Socrates , but certainly we find Plato reflecting on why would you/wouldn’t you write. One of the two places he reflects on that most is in the Statesman , which is one of the other works that I’ve chosen. There’s another Plato book which I didn’t choose but is an interesting parallel. It’s by Richard Seaford and it’s called Money and the Ancient Greek Mind. This book argues that money is this very new technology at that moment. If you think about writing and money — both so central to the way civilisation is organised — the idea that these are both new when Plato is thinking about them…You know he’s really grappling with something that is as new as the Internet is for us, or maybe not quite as new as that, but maybe as new as the telephone is, or the personal computer, in terms of its widespread penetration into his society."

"The Greeks matter because some of them, at least, recognized that they were passing through a change in how people frame the world. In their case, it was the change from the oral to the written, and this is of course the subject of one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus. In it, Socrates declares himself fully aware that human capacities can change, and that as memory is displaced or funnelled into print, a variety of changes may set in which affect not only how we know things, but also who we are as human beings. Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows that the Greeks were aware that there was some connection, perhaps even an all-embracing connection, among forms of communication, memory and thought. It’s quite fascinating to me that people should have this awareness of a sea change in their way of knowing, this self-consciousness about it. We today may also very well be in a moment when we are dimly aware that our way of touching the world, or having the world touch us, is amid a transformation. I won’t say it’s in the process of dissolving or re-forming, we’re not even sure what the right verb is at this point, but something big is going on in the way people encounter the world, and the way the world encounters them. My point is that the more you know what earlier pivotal moments felt like, maybe the better you can get your mind around what is and isn’t going on now."