Essays in Idleness

Socrates in the Dialogues that depict him, and Plato in his Letters, give voice to the possible worthlessness of writing, two thousand years before Gutenberg, in effect, clinched the point. Yes, it is worthless, and note, always was. With the technocratic advance of printing with infinitely replaceable type, the printed word, which began as a way to preserve scripture, began deteriorating to the condition of journalism. That is to say, it became meaninglessly glib, and now it interferes with any sort of understanding, rather than accommodating it. Socrates, the worthy father of our Western dialectic, was a man who never wrote anything down. He raised philosophical conversation above the competitive prattle of the Brahmins of India, to resemble the sermons of the Gautama Buddha. Which is to say, above the cacophony of debate, to the settled tranquility of high seriousness.

But Plato was, even when he tried not to be, a poet and dramatist. He was different in kind from Socrates, who was a philosopher “by nature.” Plato wants his compositions to present themselves as sound and true; to lead securely to a place of wisdom. Whereas, Socrates is seeking truth, without the gorgeous decorations. Socrates will of course be punished for seeking truth, as is inevitable in a democracy, for the background condition of “the people” is to be fools, and the more foolish the greater the stakes. This is why I, for instance, dread the spread of democracy; for truth, to the democrat, means becoming more and more degraded.

Philosophers, in both East and West, have usually tried to escape this degradation, but fall into a trap when they write things down. The extraordinary genius of Plato was to understand why he must put things into writing, and quite ironically, if philosophy is to find a home in the world. But when once committed to writing, dialectic is displaced, and prevented, by sophistry; reasoning is quickly replaced by false rhetoric. The devil, as it were, is given words to play with.

Plato was well-placed to see why writing might be both necessary, and worthless. To comprehend the cosmos, or begin to understand what is given to man to be understood, we must devise a method for listening to God. This is much different from listening to prattle and reading journalism. Yet Christ was perfectly placed not to be a writer, for He was God.