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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

What annoys me about the whole "Socrates was against writing" is the follows:

1) Even within the narrative, Socrates isn't "speaking". He is creating a fictional narrative set in Ancient Egypt where he believed writing originated (wrongly, but that isn't the point). 2) On a second level, Socrates didn't even write this. This is part of Plato's work. Plato was a student of Socrates, and maybe is describing something Socrates really said. Or maybe not. He may be simply giving his own opinion and attributing it to Socrates, who had a higher reputation.

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> He may be simply giving his own opinion and attributing it to Socrates, who had a higher reputation.

We'll never really know how much the human Socrates matches Plato's literary character. But the reason for that is that Socrates never did write down his teachings, whereas Plato did.

It would be a funny old world in which Socrates had no objection to writing, but never wrote anything, but Plato did have a an objection to writing, but wrote lots of stuff, including lies about Socrates objecting to writing.

But then again, this is a funny old world.

There was another dude who was writing about Socrates at the time. It was Xenophon.

Yes.

And there's also The Clouds by Aristophanes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds). And in my sometimes I suspect it might be the most accurate portrayal. But we'll never know.

Plato was bemoaning the loss of skills needed for preservation of oral tradition because of the newfangled practice of writing. Kind of like the director of Naqoykatsi using heavy special effects technology to bemoan the effects of technology on society... just, less memorably than Plato.

Writing was not a newfangled practice in Socrates' and Plato's time. It had already been culturally commonplace (or at least as commonplace as it was then) for generations.

Yeah, I mean Socrates literally never wrote anything, everything we know about his beliefs is hearsay.

Which kind of lends credence to the idea that he was against writing, no?

No, not really.

A -> B != B -> A. In other words, you can't draw an affirmative conclusion from a negative premise.

You can say that if Socrates never wrote then we would not have any surviving texts. This is logical. But you can't turn that around and conclud that the fact that we have no surviving texts attributed to Socrates means he never wrote / was against writing. This logical proposition is not closed, there are unaccounted variables for why we may not have any texts. You can only propose the contrapositive, in that if we did have surviving texts from Socrates, it means he wrote.

You could even argue that I shouldn't have said "he never wrote anything", because we just can't definitely know. I was just being brief.

There are also "Plato's unwritten doctrines" that supposedly "could not be explained in writing in a way that would be accessible to general readers, [so] their dissemination would lead to misunderstandings. Plato therefore supposedly limited himself to teaching the unwritten doctrines to his more advanced students in the Academy. The surviving evidence for the content of the unwritten doctrines is thought to derive from this oral teaching."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

Such as, the idea that the basis of goodness is Oneness (source: Arstoxenus). Pretty esoteric. Shwep.net is my favourite new podcast for these histories.

And literally the first thing they tell you about Socrates in Philosophy 101 is that he’s ironic. (Or at least in my class because we used Allan Bloom’s Republic which I now have mixed feelings about.)

Does the difference matter? Everything we know about Socrates of third hand.

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