The Paradox of Knowledge: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and Wisdom
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When I was in graduate school, I knew some students who believed that by making a Xerox copy of an article, they had somehow absorbed, or at least partly absorbed, its content. I suppose the contemporary version of that ‘deformation professionelle’ is the person who wanders around with a computer perpetually linked to Google and who therefore believes he knows everything. It reminds one of the old complaint about students at the elite French universities: They know everything it was said; unfortunately that is all they know.
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At the end of the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the god Theuth, who, legend has it, invented the art of writing. When Theuth presented his new invention to the king of Egypt, he promised the king that it would make his people "wiser and improve their memories". But the king disagreed, claiming that the habit of writing, far from improving memories, would "implant forgetfulness" by encouraging people to rely on external marks rather than "the living speech graven in the soul." I think of Schopenhauer"s observation about the perils of excessive reading: Just as he who always rides gradually forgets how to walk, so he who reads constantly without pausing to reflect "gradually loses the capacity for thinking". "Such is the case", said Schopenhauer, "with many scholars; they have read themselves stupid".
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Well, reading ourselves stupid is perhaps not our largest educational problem today. And in any case, none of us would wish to do without writing - or computers, come to that. Nor, I think, would Plato have wanted us to. (Though he would probably have been severe about television: That bane of intelligence could have been ordered up specially to illustrate Plato"s idea that most people inhabit a kind of existential "cave" in which they mistake flickering images for realities.) Plato"s indirect comments - through the mouth of Socrates recounting an old story he picked up somewhere - have less to do with writings (an art, after all, in which Plato excelled) than with the priority of immediate experience: the "living speech graven in the soul." Plato may have been an idealist. But here, as elsewhere, he appears as an apostle of vital, firsthand experience: a realist in the deepest sense of the term.
