Princeton University Press

Chapter Title: Damage to the Living

Book Title: Eros the Bittersweet

Book Subtitle: An Essay
Book Author(s): Anne Carson
Published by: Princeton University Press. (1986)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv117.28

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the Bittersweet

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 Damage to the Living

Damage is the subject of this dialogue. Plato is concerned

with two sorts of damage. One is the damage done by
lovers in the name of desire. The other is the damage
done by writing and reading in the name of communi­
cation. Why does he set these two sorts of damage beside
one another? Plato appears to believe that they act on the
soul in analogous ways and violate reality by the same
kind of misapprehension. The action of eros does harm
to the beloved when the lover takes a certain controlling
attitude, an attitude whose most striking feature is its de­
termination to freeze the beloved in time. It is not hard to
see that a similar controlling attitude is available to the
reader or writer, who sees in written texts the means to
fix words permanently outside the stream of time. Iso-
krates' remark about the immovable sameness of the
written letter (Against the Sophists, 12) is an indication
that this view appealed to ancient writers. Sokrates ad­
dresses the view, and its misapprehension, in the con­
cluding section of the Phaedrus. He also comments on it
indirectly throughout the dialogue by means of various
maneuvers of language and staging. Let us consider first
Sokrates' explicit assessment of the value of the written
word.
Toward the end of the Phaedrus he turns from specific
speeches to a more general inquiry:
Ονκονν, 'όπερ vvv προνθέμεθα σκέψασθαυ, τον λό-
γον όπχι καλώς έχει, λέγειν τε και γράφειν και δπτ) μή,
σκεπτέον.

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 Damage to the Living

We should then examine the theory [logos] of what

makes speaking or writing good, what makes them
bad. (259e)
Comparison of the spoken and written word follows and
writing is seen to be mainly useful as a mnemonic device:
πολλή? αν εύηθείας γέμοι και τω οντι την "Αμμωνος
μαντείαν άγνοοϊ, πλέον τι οΐόμενος είναι λόγους
γεγραμμένους τον τον είδότα ϋπομνησαι περί ων
αν η τά γεγραμμένα.
He would be an extremely simple person who
thought written words do anything more than re­
mind someone who knows about the matter of
which they are written,

says Sokrates (275 d). Technicians of reading and writing

see in letters a means to fix thoughts and wisdom once
and for all in usable and reusable form. Sokrates denies
that wisdom can be fixed. When people read books they
derive

. . . σοφίας δε τοίς μαθηταΐς δόξαν, ουκ αλήθειαν

πορίζεις· πολυήκοοι yap σοι γενόμενοι άνευ δι­
δαχή? πολυγνώμονες είναι, δόξουσιν, αγνώμονες ως
επί το πλήθος όντες, και χαλεποί σννεΐναι, δοξό-
σοφοι γεγονότες αντί σοφών."

. . . the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for

they will read many things without instruction and
will therefore seem to know many things, when they
are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along
with, since they are not wise, but only appear
wise. (275b)

Sokrates conceives of wisdom as something alive, a "liv­

ing breathing word" {ton logon zonta kai empsychon,
276a), that happens between two people when they talk.
Change is essential to it, not because wisdom changes but

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 Damage to the Living

because people do, and must. In contrast, Sokrates em­

phasizes the peculiarly static nature of the written word:
Αεινόν γάρ που, ώ Φαιδρέ, τοϋτ' έχει γραφή, και ώς
αληθώς ομοιον ζωγραφιά, και γαρ τά εκείνης έκγονα
εσττ/κε μεν ώς ζώντα, εάν δ' άνέρτ/ τι, σεμνώς πάνυ
σίγα· ταντόν δε καϊ οι λόγοι· δόξαις μεν αν ως τι
φρονοϋντας αυτούς λέγειν, εάν δέ τι ερτ/ των λεγο­
μένων βονλόμενος μαθεϊν, εν τι σημαίνει μόνον
ταντόν αεί.

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange power, quite like

painting in fact; for the creatures in paintings stand
there like living beings, yet if you ask them anything
they maintain a solemn silence. It is the same with
written words. You might imagine they speak as if
they were actually thinking something but if you
want to find out about what they are saying and
question them, they keep on giving the one same
message eternally. (275d-e)

Like painting, the written word fixes living things in

time and space, giving them the appearance of animation
although they are abstracted from life and incapable of
change. Logos in its spoken form is a living, changing,
unique process of thought. It happens once and is irre­
coverable. The logos written down by a writer who
knows his craft will approximate this living organism in
the necessary ordering and interrelation of its parts:
ώσπερ ζώον σννεστάναι σώμα τι έχοντα αυτόν αυ­
τόν, ώστε μήτε άκέφαλον είναι μήτε άττονν, αλλά
μέσα τε έχειν και άκρα, πρέποντα άλλήλοις και τώ
δλψ γεγραμμένα.
organized like a live creature with a body of its own,
not headless or footless but with middle and end fit­
ted to one another and to the whole. (264c)
The logos of a bad writer, Lysias, for instance, does not
even attempt this semblance of life, but throws words to-

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 Damage to the Living

gether in no order at all, perhaps beginning at the point

where it should end and wholly ignorant of organic se-
quence. You can enter this logos at any point and find it
saying the same thing. Once it is written down it contin-
ues to say that same thing forever over and over within
itself, over and over in time. As communication, such a
text is a dead letter.

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