In The Gutenberg Galaxy (24-25) McLuhan cites Plato’s report in the Phaedrus of a mythical exchange between King Thamus of Egypt and Theuth (or Thoth)1, the Egyptian god of wisdom:
If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all of our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our eyes and ears and other senses remain the same. The interplay among our senses is perpetual save in conditions of anesthesia. But any sense when stepped up to high intensity can act as an anesthetic for other senses. The dentist can now use “audiac”— induced noise — to remove tactility. Hypnosis depends on the same principle of isolating one sense in order to anesthetize the others. The result is a break in the ratio among the senses, a kind of loss of identity. Tribal, non-literate man, living under the intense stress on auditory organization of all experience, is, as it were, entranced.
Plato, however, the scribe of Socrates2 as he seemed to the Middle Ages, could in the act of writing look back to the non-literate world and say:
“It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: 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.” [Phaedrus, 274-5]3
Plato shows no awareness here or elsewhere of how the phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks; nor did anybody else in his time or later. Before his time, the myth-makers, poised on the frontiers between the old oral world of the tribe and the new technologies of specialism and individualism, had foreseen all and said all in a few words.
This extended citation from 1962 had been preceded in McLuhan’s work by a series of shorter citations and references ten years earlier, beginning with his essay in the first issue of Explorations in 1953, ‘Culture Without Literacy’:
Faced with the consequence of writing, Plato notes in the Phaedrus:
“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner’s 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 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.”
Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world when Plato made this observation.
Then in the next year, in 1954, in his ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ lecture, McLuhan noted in passing that
Plato regarded the advent of writing as pernicious. In the Phaedrus he tells us it would cause men to rely on their memories rather than their wits.
The formulation “Plato regarded the advent of writing as pernicious” is shorthand for ‘Plato regarded Socrates regarding Thamus regarding the advent of writing as pernicious’. The endless mirroring at stake here will be discussed below; it recalls McLuhan’s dictum that the content of any medium is always another medium.
In ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’, also in 1954, McLuhan continued to stress the importance of this exchange:
Manuscript technology fostered a constellation of mental attitudes and skills of which the modern world has no memory. Plato foresaw some of them with alarm in the Phaedrus:
“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 omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Plato is speaking for the oral tradition before it was modified by literacy. He saw writing as a mainly destructive revolution. Since then we have been through enough revolutions to know that every medium of communication is a unique art form which gives salience to one set of human possibilities at the expense of another set. Each medium of expression profoundly modifies human sensibility in mainly unconscious and unpredictable ways.
Finally, still in 1954, McLuhan reverted to this same exchange in ‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’ which appeared in Commonweal Magazine:
recall that in the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worse. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialectic of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation. It was as if he foresaw the library of Alexandria and the unending exegesis upon previous exegesis of the scholiasts and grammarians.
This last passage is noteworthy in several respects. For one thing, it records a positive use of “dialectic” and a negative use of “grammarians” which should give pause to those who would characterize McLuhan as an anti-dialectician and pro-grammarian tout court. In fact he was anti-dialectic and pro-grammar only in certain senses of these terms and everything depends upon the clarification of these certain senses. For another, the phrase “unending exegesis upon previous exegesis” shows that McLuhan was fully conscious of the mirroring implications of the exchange in the Phaedrus and therefore of Derrida’s caution (mistakenly directed against McLuhan) that “instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, (…) we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing.” Lastly, in his reference to “the true dialectic of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation” McLuhan not only returned to an idea of his own going back to the 1930s (an idea that future posts will need to document and to discuss in detail), but he also returned to a fundamental idea in the work of Harold Innis with whom he worked in 1949 and began to read via Tom Easterbrook, it seems, in 1947 or 1948.
It was probably Innis who called McLuhan’s attention to the exchange between King Thamus and Theuth.4 In the ‘Preface’ to his 1946 collection of essays, Political Economy in the Modern State (which McLuhan seems to have read shortly after its publication), Innis already cited this story from the Phaedrus:
The most dangerous illusions accompany the most obvious facts including the printed and the mechanical word. Plato refused to be bound by the written words of his own books. He makes Socrates say in Phaedrus regarding the invention of writing, ‘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 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.’ Since this was written the printing press and the radio have enormously increased the difficulties of thought. The first essential task is to see and to break through the chains of modern civilization which have been created by modern science. (vii)
He then cited it again at length in Empire and Communications, 1950, which McLuhan had read by the time of his March 1951 letter to Innis (discussed here):
Greek civilization was a reflection of the power of the spoken word. Socrates in Phaedrus reports a conversation between the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of letters, and the god Amon5 in which the latter remarked that “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 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.”
Socrates continues:
“I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence, and the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.”
He continued with a plea for a better kind of word or speech and one having far greater power. “I mean an intelligent word graven6 in the soul of the learner which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.” (67-68)7
Ultimately, McLuhan (also Innis) must be understood as attempting new answers to this complex question “and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious”.
Postscript
In The Medium is the Massage (1967), in the middle of a discussion of oral and visual space, and of the revolution in Greece from the first of these to the second, McLuhan paraphrases this same passage from the Phaedrus:
The discovery of the alphabet 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. (…) You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes [!] of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing. (113)8
- One of the ads featured in the 1970 Culture is Our Business (297) is for the “Random House Sweatshirt of the English Language”. And one of the definitions from the dictionary shown in the ad as available from Eagle Shirtmakers on a sweatshirt (along with ‘drop-out’, ‘flower’, ‘lover’, ‘peace’, ‘woman power’ and ‘yin and yang’) is “Thoth: Egyptian Religion, the god of wisdom, learning, and magic, the Inventor of numbers and letters, and scribe of all the gods, represented as a man with the head either of an ibis or of a baboon: identified by the Greeks with Hermes.” ↩
- By characterizing Plato as “the scribe of Socrates”, McLuhan formulates a complicated figure in which he, McLuhan, transcribes Plato’s transcription of Socrates transcribing (or at least describing) a dialogue concerning transcription between King Thamus and the god of transcription, Thoth. Derrida’s influential discussion of this Phaedrus exchange in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ (originally in Tel Quel, 1968) may have been sparked by McLuhan, either here in the 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy and/or in McLuhan’s earlier discussion of it in 1953 in Explorations (to which Derrida seems to have subscribed). In any case, Derrida’s dismissal of McLuhan as a logocentrist (as discussed in note 7 below) is simply lazy. In fact, on McLuhan’s analysis, it is Derrida who is the logocentrist since “merger” may be effected either by final consolidation or by final deferral (aka, anti-consolidation). McLuhan, in fundamental contrast, would inquire about the natures, plural, of the gap at play between these (merger/deferral) — “the medium is the message”. ↩
- McLuhan uses the Jowett translation. ↩
- While McLuhan refers to the Phaedrus before his encounter with Innis, particularly in his 1943 PhD thesis, he does not discuss the exchange between King Thamus and Theuth. It may well be that his particular interest in it was ignited by Innis just as Innis was igniting his (McLuhan’s) interest in communications media more generally. (For discussion, see McLuhan on first meeting Innis.) But before Innis’ 1946 and 1950 citations of the Theuth story, McLuhan may well have encountered it in the “platonist” Rupert Lodge’s philosophy classes at the University of Manitoba and/or in John Ruskin’s twelfth letter from May 1, 1872, in his Fors Clavigera (‘letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain’) where it is quoted at length. (McLuhan began reading Ruskin as an undergraduate in Winnipeg and cited him extensively throughout his career beginning already with his Manitoban articles in the early 1930s.) ↩
- This should, of course, be King Thamus and not “the god Amon”. It may be that the text is corrupted here and should read “the priest of the god Amon”. Innis seems to have identified Thamus as Thutmose III, probably correctly, and says of the latter in ‘The Problem of Space’: “In the eighteenth dynasty a concern with the problem of time was accompanied by the subordination of all priestly bodies to the high priest of Amon. A priest of Amon became Thutmose III in 1501 BC and destroyed the Hyksos army at Megiddo in 1479.” ↩
- “An intelligent word graven in the soul” is a momentous phrase which the whole tradition may be thought to have been at work attempting to plumb and that yet remains unplumbed and unplumbable. Suffice it to note here that the Greek — logos gegrammenos — combines the oral and the written and that the fitting English translation of ‘graven word’ retains this combination while adding the combination of the living and the dead (through the fact that the ‘graven’, like a ‘grave’, is an excavation for a repository, the first of a meaning or image, the second of a corpse). ↩
- The phrase Innis uses here, “a better kind of word or speech”, shows that he (and the same is true of McLuhan), did not simply oppose speech and writing (as Derrida would have it) and therefore he (also McLuhan) was not forced to privilege one or the other (as Derrida would have it). Instead, both looked to a third power — “a better kind of word or speech” — a third power that McLuhan called logos or “dialogue” or “inclusion” among many other names. Through this third power, speech and writing (aka, ear and eye) might be perceived to communicate originally (“the medium is the message”). Now this perception would necessarily be a replay (retrieval, re-cognition, etc) since it would depend on the third power, not the third power on it. The great question implicated here, already posed explicitly by Plato, concerns how it is that human perception can relate to such fundamental powers (pace Derrida), aka, how it is that media do not simply mirror other media indefinitely (“the overwhelming extension of writing”), aka, how it is that a diachronic process like learning can come to understand a synchronic process, like the contest of the fundamental powers, that ‘always already’ powers it. ↩
- The last sentence here might seem to be an acute critique of McLuhan’s fellow Albertan and UT professor, Jordan Peterson. But Peterson was only 5 at the time. ↩