Texas Tech University
Box 43092
Lubbock, TX 79409 3092


Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 19:48:08 -0700


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496

Subject:   Plato, writing, oral discourse (corrected version)
Oral communication and critical control

Rod:

NOTE: THIS IS A CORRECTED VERSION OF MESSAGE PREVIOUSLY SENT

Received your latest message but will respond to the content of it later. This is in response rather to the interesting discussion of the oral vs. the literate in the following SDS page:

http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/99/11/08/191947.HTM#7426

This bears of course on the meaning drift [see record on July 19, 2000] problem but it has broader implications.

It is clear that our concerns are similar, by the way, from the way in which I keep finding you discussing or alluding to the very same topics which I am already thinking of raising. In this case it has to do with understanding what Plato's concern actually was, which was poorly understood by Havelock in his Preface to Plato.

Far from it being the case that Plato was wanting to encourage writing in place of the oral, he was primarily motivated by a belief that written discourse -- which was spreading rapidly in his time -- posed a great danger for good thinking if its limitations were not understood and consciously or systematically compensated for.

He is quite explicit about that in the Phaedrus, in the passage on that topic close to the end of the dialogue. This may sound at first to be diametrically opposed to your own view, but bear with it for a minute and it may come to look rather different.

Why was he worried about the written word? Because the written word seems to stop meaning drift by making its expression permanent in the form of the inscribed word, which doesn't change so long as it exists. But it is an illusion to think that the meaning of what is said can be made permanent by resort to permanent media: the permanency of meaning is something that depends upon repeated renewal across time rather than on insulation from change and the passage of time. One must return again and again and refresh the record by a new interaction with it, in other words, instead of assuming that, once recorded, something has been fixed.

There is no security in the permanency of the medium itself. The passage of time is in itself sufficient to assure that change will occur in what you think of as permanent. Reliance on the preservational properties of the written word is like trying to save your money by burying it in the basement. No matter how well you seal it up it will be changed in value, usually for the worse, when you dig it up years later.

Here is the problem that Plato did his best to solve in his own writing. On the one hand he believed that Socrates had discovered the only way available to us to make and keep ourselves intelligent, namely, by unceasing critically controlled dialogical inquiry. This was an oral art which Socrates had discovered. On the other hand, things were changing rapidly in Greece, and the written word was coming to dominate communication more and more, with people getting less and less skillful at oral communication, with no likelihood that the Socratic art had a future as something which an individual could and would practice in the way it had been done earlier. What to do? Write dialogues in which the characters are exhibited as engaged in controlled oral discourse of the sort Socrates specialized in. This form of the written word -- drama -- is the closest that writing could come to oral discourse, but this depended, too, on it being used in that way, simply as a reminder both about what critically controlled conversation is like and about the actual content of the conversation on this topic and that. Thus Plato deliberately and explicitly deprecates the value of his own work precisely because it is written, but also tells how to compensate for that, by taking it as a reminder of what authentic communication is like.

What confused Havelock and others in what Plato was conveying is that they failed to realize that he regarded the discourse of the poets as written discourse, regardless of whether it was spoken aloud or written down. For what was important was not its actually being inscribed words on a page but rather whether one related to it INTERACTIVELY or not. Any speech, spoken or written, is what he was calling "written" IF one did not relate to it interactively but simply as something given. (A memorized speech is no different, functionally, from a speech read from a written down version of it or from the written down version itself. They are all "written", as it were.) The real contrast he has in mind, in other words, is that between unidirectional speech making and bi-directional or dialogical discourse.

As regards the poets, they thought of themselves as being beyond criticism. One was supposed to just listen to them and take it in without critical response. By "poets" what is meant in that context is not what we mean by the term now -- not artists but rather people with religious messages. They had no organized priesthood, and consequently the poets, as the source of the religious texts, were thought of as religious experts For example, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod's Works and Days, and the dramas were all religious works, as far as the Greeks were concerned, not what we think of as literary works.

Moreover, Plato regarded the poets and the Sophists as of the same general type. The Sophists were the great masters of the art of persuasion, of course, but where did they come from? It is a complex story historically but it is clear that they were in fact descended from the poetic tradition, which included performing artists called "rhapsodes" who mimed and enacted Homeric and other religious works for large audiences at religious festivals. That particular type of poet acquired skills of crowd control, and when democracy was developed in Greece -- which was when politics proper came into being -- the rhapsodes became advisors to politicians and other public figures on how to persuade large audiences.

(I understood what Plato was talking about in this respect for the first time only a few years ago when I was watching a sort of non-stop festival of evangelists on TV who had been invited to participate in the celebration of the starting up of this new religious channel. I don't know how many different ones I saw that week, but there were literally scores of them. It was really quite instructive because it was the most extravagant assemblage of masters of crowd persuasion that I ever hope to see. They all had very distinctively individual styles -- there were shouters, bible thumpers, whisperers. braggarts, very slick salesmen types, learned looking characters, silly goofball figures, beautiful women with bouffant hair-dos as high as Marge Simpson's, nags, oh I could go on and on, it was really wild! But the point is that seeing all of these persuaders I suddenly realized that these are the contemporary Sophists in their purist form, with their religious origins completely out in front. The difference between them and demogogic politicians was mainly just that they were willing to be more extravagant because they were, after all, selling religious rather political snake oil!)

Now situate Socrates in this milieu. Where does he come from? The most reasonable hypothesis for that is that he descended from a very different tradition, namely, the mathematical tradition. When the Greeks took up Egyptian geometry, they put it to very different uses and, among other things, developed the art of deduction, and being highly competitive people one form this took was the development of argumentative skills using, in particular, the reductio ad absurdem techniques of the mathematician. Now, Socrates almost certainly developed his own special critical skills by modifying the reductio argumentation of the mathematicians to create a new form which he and Plato called "dialectic", which really just meant the art of conversation. But this was critical conversation, of course.

The basic oppositional relationship that structures all of the Platonic corpus of writing is the depiction in it of the competition between the critical conversational art of Socrates and the speech-making and debating art of the Sophists, the latter being understood by Plato to include the poets, as explained above. And what is at the heart of the contrast? The question of whether or not communication is monological and unidirectional, bent on control of the person to whom the speech is directed, or dialogical and critical, bent on critical self-control of the conversational process itself rather than of persons involved in the process.

Thus Plato identifies the written word with the unidirectional monologue and the oral word with the reciprocal interactivity of critical discourse. His fear of the domination of culture by the written word was fear that it would come about that people lost all capacity to respond critically to what is said to them. And to see what that means just think of what goes on in universities right now, where genuine dialogue almost never occurs, notwithstanding all of the hype constantly being generated about the university as the place were the intellect is free.

Okay, now bringing this back to your concerns, I would say that although your characterization of communication as typically being of little or no lasting benefit, giving only the semblance of agreement and understanding, is not mistaken, but it is not because communication itself is like that but because the kind of communication which people think of as communication is really just clever monologue that involves no real interaction between the manager and others, with the manager playing the Sophist role, achieving persuasion by any means available.

The remedy is to conceive communication more authentically, in such a way that it involves critical self-control. I don't mean that the manager is to use self-control but rather that the form of the dialogue is itself a self-control model of dialogue. Just how to do that is a further question but not one which is especially difficult to implement if that is what is wanted. But it might well involve rethinking what manager-controlled meetings and conversations are really supposed to be accomplishing, and assuring that they are not simply occasions for self-defensive managerial control. This is the kind of thing that can be thought through in connection with every phase of the communication and record keeping involved.

Note, though, where your resistance is going to come from on this, namely, from people who cannot understand how things can be managed other than by top-down authoritarian methods. The idea that the manager may have to assume a position of equality in relation to those with whom he or she is communicating -- which is a part of it, to be sure -- will seem preposterous to many people, who cannot conceive of management occurring at all unless it takes a manipulative form. I think they are wrong, though, and that top-down manipulative communication is in fact essentially stupider than communication which has an egalitarian structure involving critical self-control of the process itself. I can elaborate on what that means, but I am just conveying the idea of it here.

Back with you later, with some response to your latest message.

Sincerely,

Texas Tech University
Dept of Philosophy

Joe Ransdell

Joseph Ransdell
ransdell@door.net
Joseph.Ransdell@ttu.edu
806 742-3275 Home: 806 797-2592
http://www.door.net/arisbe (Peirce Gateway website)
http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm