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in the “now,” now existing and then immediately becoming
a fact of the past that is forgotten if it is not kept in and by
memory, not retained either inadvertently or purposefully
(as is Plato’s Parmenides).
Another reason in support of writing is mentioned in
the Anonymous Prolegomena: “Plato strove to imitate the
divine, and in choosing to write he let a greater good prevail over a lesser evil. For just as god has made some parts
of his creation invisible, namely, all incorporeal beings,
angels, souls, and intellects, etc., yet some others are subject
to our perception and are visible, for instance, heavenly
bodies and the [whole] world of coming-to-be and passingaway. So Plato too has handed on some of his ideas in writing [eggraphōs] and some in an unwritten form [agraphōs],
like incorporeal entities, imperceptible to the senses, as
what he has said in his discourses [ta en synoysias]. It is a
known fact that Aristotle has written about Plato’s unwritten discourses [peri tōn agraphōn synoysiōn Platōnos].
There fore, to show his friendship with the divine even in
this, he [Plato] endeavored to imitate it, as friends will try
to imitate each other.”
1
The written thus imitates the
bodily, the unwritten (the oral) and the ideal. Since for Plato
the bodily can only imitate the ideal, and in so doing
ever misses that which it imitates, the relationship between
the written (the bodily) and the oral (the ideal) is always
already a failure.
Writing is thus an inescapable, evil betrayal of the oral
for the retension and transmission of the “what is” of being.
Writing is monoconscious and monological. Of all the written forms, however, the written dialogue is a lesser evil, insofar
as it imitates and follows oral exchange as closely as possible. For this reason the genre of the written dialogue was
chosen by Plato. Yet, it is not self-sufficient, for although
the written dialogue can be taken as a microcosm, still, its
source, its meaning and completion, nevertheless remains
outside of the written, and thus remains outside of the dialogue,
1
Anonymous prolegomena III.13; trans. mod.
81
either as a fixation, or, possibly, as a close imitation of the
live dialogical exchange. To be sure, a written dialogue can,
in turn, induce an oral and dialogical interpretation, but once
the tradition of “living speeches,” i.e., of the disciples, is lost, then
the written dialogical speech, which is incapable of “defending itself,” will never be able to tell for sure (probably, it does
not even need to) about the original concerns, intentions,
and conclusions of the initial, oral, and “ensouled” dialogue,
now bound and imitated in the written dialogue.
The purpose of writing. Plato’s conclusion, which is
articulated through the oracle of Socrates in the Phaedrus
and is supported by further arguments in the Seventh Letter,
is that the written can never adequately stand in for the
oral, and even less for an understanding of the “what is” of
being, which can hardly be grasped even in and by the oral
itself. Socrates compares writing itself to writing on water
with ink by means of a reed pen, and to sowing speeches
that are incapable of either assisting themselves in self-explanation and self-defense or of properly communicating and
1
teaching the truth.
Writing on water, of course, does produce some trace, and hence a certain memory and representation of what is said, yet such a representation is utterly
inadequate, and it is not really capable of enduring, being,
as it were, a shadow of a shadow.
But does this imply that writing should be altogether
abandoned as inadequate and eventually even impossible?
Writing can be useful as a recollection in the form of memoirs (reminiscences) and in order to preserve events from
the past. Writing can thus be useful as and for the sake of
having a reminder or hypomnēsis, and this mostly for oneself in old age when memory is overloaded and begins to
fade. This reminder thus preserves past deeds, if not in and
for being proper, then at least for being in history.
2
Besides, as Alcidamas argues, writing can still be useful,
first, in the production of an exemplary, paradigmatic
speech for the sake of those who do not (yet) know, i.e., for
1
Plato, Phaedrus 276c.
2
Plato, Phaedrus 276d–e.
82
educational purposes. Second, writing cannot be abolished,
because it is too alluring to human vanity and ambition,
inducing a futile hope for the preservation of one’s name,
that it might become famous in the memory of future
generations and as long as memory lasts.
1
The deceptive
appeal to, and hope for, a sui generis immortality in memory, is in fact so appealing to human vanity that the preservation of an imageless name is preferred over the preservation of an anonymous image; for, the name, unlike an
anonymous image of no one, can be included within
ongoing, oral discourse, and thus it can become foundational for the further development of tradition.
Writing as paidia. Above all, as both Alcidamas and Plato
agree, writing is not to be taken too seriously, but rather as
a game and an amusement, paidia.
2
Paidia, on the one hand,
should secure rest, anapaysis, whose purpose is restoration
for the sake of a serious, meaningful, and important activity.
3
On the other hand, the written game, paidia, strives to attain that which is unattainable by means of writing, i.e., it
strives to gain oral speech, logos, without ever gaining it. This
is why writing, as an amusement, should be taken lightly
and not too seriously, and why it always can, and perhaps
even should, have an ironic touch. It is to be practiced as something almost incidental (parergōs) to the end of what-
1
Alcidamas, Peri sophiston 31; cp. 19–20. Cp. also Epictetus, Dis-courses
I.19, 26–29: many people agree to assume a time consuming, but unrewarding,
office, solely in the vain hope of preserving their name for others (menei
moy to onoma). A common practice for destroying a political opponent in
antiquity, e.g., in Egypt (Amenhotep), is to obliterate his name, thus canceling
it from its being, which is in commonly preserved memory; thereby the
name is canceled into the non-being of oblivion. When Herodotus tells
about a Samian who improperly took possession of the treasures of a Persian
Sataspos, he adds: “I know his name yet I am trying to forget it” (Herodotus,
Histories IV.43).
2
The counterpart of amusement, paidia, is the comic or geloion, which is
opposed to the serious or spoydaion, and is, according to Bakhtin, the key to
an understanding not only of literature (both ancient and modern), but also
of the functioning of culture in its entirety.
3
Aristotle, Politics 1339a16. Cp. Euripides, frag. 864 (Nauck): “I like to
alternate joy with labor” (Люблю с забавою я труд чередовать); and Thucydides II.38.1.
83
ever activity is considered worth real effort. (In determining
that in which such activity consists the philosopher Plato
and the sophist Alcidamas already substantially disagree.)
The incidental and non-serious character of writing
further means that it cannot be a professional occupation,
but rather a matter for one’s free leisure. Only leisure, skholē
or otium, allows one to write such a way as to be suitable for
the exemplification and practice of one’s freedom in an
otherwise desperate attempt to approach the beauty and
sublimity of the oral logos. As such, the practice of writing is
opposed to the base amusements of symposia and the like.
Plato’s attitude toward paidia later becomes a recognized
practice within the Stoic tradition, in Seneca, Caesar, Cicero,
and Marcus Aurelius. Writing is taken as paidia with a slight
touch of vanity, which is practiced during leisure time and
is a mark of one’s privacy and personal freedom.
Plato himself hopes to find an alternative to the paidia
of the art of writing, namely in the art of dialectic, dialektikē
tekhnē, which is to provide true well-being (eydaimonein)
and real immortality.
1
One might consider, then, the writenness of his own dialogues to be his attempt at providing,
despite his awareness of the inadequacy of written speech, a
durable and paradigmatic example of dialectical reasoning
for educational purposes (also mentioned by Alcidamas).
Even so modestly considered, and within such a limited
scope, writing light and playful dialogues might also thereby
contribute to fulfilling an unexpressed desire (one which,
perhaps, is not even confessed to oneself) and an ambition
to preserve the written dialogues, to place them among
the writings that will become exemplary for generations
of disciples and followers, or at least to outlive the written
logoi of the Sophists, which were conceived by the latter
in all seriousness. But if any such serious, non-ironic attempt
at writing a dialogue will always inevitably miss its target—
a failure of which Plato is well aware, as the discussion in
the Phaedrus shows—then, perhaps against Plato’s own
1
“[A]ei athanaton parekhein” (Plato, Phaedrus 276e–277a).
84
intention and hope, even dialectic will be incapable of properly substituting for dialogue.
Compromise in writing. Since the written can never
adequately convey the meaning and overtones of the oral,
especially of the oral as it is uttered together within a dialogue,
then thought, discrete but not isolated, cannot quite be
presented as that which is woven into a single, overarching,
systematically established, and written monological text.
Rather, thought is better heard in a written dialogue, which
is an imitation of the oral one, or it is better heard in the form
of a collection of fragments, where no thought is given an
ultimate priority over the others, and which must be read.
“To read” in Greek is anagignōskō, literally, to “know again,”
to recognize that which has already been said through
something else, particularly, to recognize from characters.
1
Any knowledge so gained from the written is thus a “knowing again,” a recognition of what has already been thought
and said, of what one already knows—not from a text—
but as that which one forgot to ask or did not yet make
explicit to oneself.
Written dialogue and the fragment. An alternative to taking writing too seriously is to allow it to remain fragmentary, thus following the discreteness and incompleteness
of thoughts and expressions as they are implied in an
unfinalizable oral exchange. Such fragmentation of that
which is written was known in antiquity through the form
of short maxims from the oracle, e.g., covering the walls of
the temple of Apollo in Delphi, or the rhētra of Lycurgus.
Such fragments were also known in the form of brief definitions, as in the Platonic “definitions,” or in the form of
aphorisms, e.g., those of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Aphorisms are also found in the middle ages in Philokalia,
and in early modernity with such authors as de La Rochefoucauld and Montaigne, and again in later modernity with
1
Cp.: Aristotle, Poetics 26, 1462a12.
85
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, to name only a
few writers, all of whom intend, implicitly or explicitly, to
reject writtenness, or at least to use it in its minimal, aphoristic form. One might further mention a certain fragmentary character of the Talmudic commentaries, related to
the initial prohibition on writing down the oral Torah.
The speck which represents a fragment of thought often
becomes itself the subject matter of a written commentary
in a fragment, and thus that of writing as well. A fragment
and an aphorism reflect the whole of a thought in its discreteness and yet also in its entirety. Being mutually independent
and complete, different fragments allow for furt her interpretation to bind them together into a coherent narrative.
Such narrative, however, can be woven differently each time
in an indefinite number of ways depending on the cast of
the dialogical characters and the dialogical situation; and
thus each version becomes independent of another one,
such that each one does not follow in a strict manner from
a fragment or a collection fragments. Each fragment is primary to a consistent argument, narrative, or interpretation
that binds separate fragments together according to a certain logic that is not immanent to a given fragment. The
fragment, which exists mostly in written form, or even in
the form of an anecdote, is thus a close but still inadequate
representation of the completeness, yet unclosed nature,
of thought, which in turn is not fully accessible even to the
oral, but which instead remains unexpected and always
new; it remains unfinalizably both missed and revealed
within the oral dialogue.
Writing in History. Unwritten Law. Finally, as a reminder
or hypomnēsis, writing is of indisputable use in and for
history. Once an epic, which is essentially unwritten and
memorized, becomes strictly established and becomes a matter
of the absolute past, i.e., once it becomes the written paradigm of paideia, education and culture, the epic is incapable
of absorbing any new and contemporary historical de-tails
Instead, the epic is history in the form of a written fixa-
86
tion that can save against forgetting the minute details of
things past, details of which ancient histories are quite full.
Even if Plato’s arguments against the written, which occur
in writing, are to be taken seriously, the conclusion that written speech misses and betrays an understanding of “what is”
is of some, but not much, importance for history History
sometimes has to invent oral speeches for the characters it
describes (e.g., those of Pericles in Thucydides), or to restore,
in writing—to fill in according to the mind of the writer—certain
gaps in the understanding of other cultures (as in Herodotus).
Most importantly, however, history has to preserve, in writing, that which is sacred in history, such as genea logies
(to save the names of one’s ancestors from the nihil of oblivion is also a duty),
1
or the details and document sof past
events, and it preserves these without distinguishing between that which is important and unimportant, but rather just
saves them for and in the collective—written—memory, saving
them from their inevitable dissipation throughout the generations. The historical, written fixation of past events, especially their implicit evaluation in a text, is often biased, and
as such, is also incapable of accurately following what had
happened. Nevertheless, the details of the remote events that
are historically protected in writing, e.g., those of the Peloponnesian war, we often know better than the details of
much later and even contemporary events. Obviously, past
events are preserved primarily in historical written accounts,
and they are preserved because of tho
se accounts.
Thus, the composition of written accounts is justified
for “genealogical” history, which is represented particularly
in epics and early “histories” (historiai), which include, as
in Hecateus, descriptions of the parts of the known universe, oikoymenē. Writing down the law, however, already
meets with opposition: many peoples of antiquity, including the Greeks, for a long time did not write down their
laws. Those who do write their laws, or who begin writing
at a later time, present the law through public display,
1
Cp.: Thucydides II.36.1.
87
not only to insure that everyone knows what the law is,
but also to make sure that no one changes anything, not a
single iota, it being difficult to change that which is written
when it is public.
1
Many ancient languages, for instance
the Hittite, develop a “formula of curse,” which is included
in the text (of a law or a genealogy) for those who might
dare to change anything in it.
The concealed fear that accompanies writing and publishing the law is that, if the law is written, somebody might,
intentionally or unintentionally, change something in its
very writing, in the inscription, which might, in turn, change
the law itself. Changing the law is perceived as destroying
or irreversibly altering that which the social and political
life of the people, changing, as it were, not only their past,
but also their future well-being and prosperity of which the
law, nomos or themis, is a guarantee. The unwritten law, on
the contrary, is known to everybody who participates in
political life, and thus it cannot be missed or changed,
intentionally or unintentionally, by one single person or a
group of people. The unwritten law cannot be changed, and
if it is transformed, this only happens over time and reflects certain changes in the communal life of the people,
so that the un written law is easier adapted to new circumstances. The letter of the oral law, unlike the written law,
can more easily preserve the spirit of the law itself, whereas
the written law, as with everything written, is stiff and
inflexible, unmovable (ametakinēton), and preserves it self
in its letter above its spirit.
For this reason, Aristotle takes the unwritten laws, which
are based on custom, to be more reliable and more important than those that are written. A good ruler, then, is
the one who is as though “in between,” being better than
the inflexible, written law, yet more reliable than the unwritten law.
2
A similar attitude to law is found in Thucydides,
1
Cp.: The preserved laws from the Cretan city of Gortyn of the late archaic
to early classical period in The Law Code of Gortyn, trans. and ed. R. F. Willetts
(Berlin: Sterling, 1967).
1
Aristotle, Politics XI.6, 1287b.
88
who makes his Pericles praise the Athenian democracy,
stres-sing that its members should obey the laws out of
respect, which are the laws that insure equal rights in private
life to every-body, as well as opportunities for those who are
most merited in public affairs. Above all, however, citizens
should venerate the unwritten laws, the violation of which
is considered to be an act of disgrace and turpitude.
1
The unwritten law is also preferable to the written in that
the former, being oral, may represent a good law, which, if
it is not the best possible law, is at least adequate enough
in its normativity to guarantee the stability of a social and
political community in the turmoil of public life.
2
Reportedly, Lycurgus gave laws to Sparta in the form of short
maxims in a number of socalled rhētra, oracular sayings
brought from Delphi, which thus establish the divine authority of both the law-giver, who is more of a god than a
human, and of the laws, which are given by the deity in
and through the oracle. (Yet stressing the divine origin of
the law mightonly be a trick of the law-giver, in order to
secure due respect towards the law.)
3
One rhētra explicitly says that the law has to be unwritten.
The reason for this is that the cardinal laws act through
morals which are built into social customs and habits,
and which are based on free will, itself subject to education at a young age. And the particular auxiliary laws that
regulate the exchange of goods, pecuniary responsibilities,
fines, and the like, are also better preserved in unwritten
form, because the social, economic, and political situation
in which alone such laws are meaningful, might in fact
change (e.g., due to economic inflation, war, etc.). Therefore, the current contents of the secondary social, economic, and political law are better established by those who
have knowledge and an understanding of the correspon-
2
Thucydides II.37.3.
3
This is one of the major preoccupations of Plato as a philosopher, e.g., in
the Republic and the Laws.
4
Plutarch, Lycurgus V–VI. Cp. Plutarch, Numa IV.
89
ding matters.1 In any case, the law is better off as unwritten,
thereby preserved from corruption and better suited to
concrete situations, while at the same time remaining
common and universal. And even if the law is written,
it is better to be destroyed in its writtenness by the lawgiverhimself (as purportedly Numa does, having be queathed the written law to be buried with him after his death),
2
in
order to be restored to its oral power.
Having established the laws, Lycurgus wanted them to
be preserved forever and intact, and to that end he decided
to deceive his fellow citizens for their own benefit. He said
that he needed to leave again for Delphi, and to ask for an
oracle from Apollo; he asked the Spartans to swear under
oath that they would not change anything in the law until
he returned, and they made the oath. In Delphi, however,
Lycurgus committed suicide, his body was burnt, and his
ashes, by preliminary arrangement, were scattered over the
sea so as to make sure that his remains did not get back
to Sparta and hence to insure that he never “returned.”
3
Lycurgus thus gave up his life in order to secure the inviolability and unchangeability of the laws. Bound by the oath,
the Spartans were obliged to keep the laws intact, which were
the laws that eventually created the Lacedemonian polis,
one of the most powerful and influential in the ancient
world, and in this way justified Lycurgus’ self-sacrifice.
4
This pattern of self-sacrifice for the sake of preserving
one’s legacy as an inviolable unwritten law is easily recognized in Socrates, who might have escaped death and
execution.
5
Instead, he preferred to stay in prison in order
to leave life, as is proper for a philosopher. Socrates chose
1
Plutarch, Lycurgus XII.
2
Plutarch, Numa XXII.
3
Plutarch, Lycurgus XXIX, XXXI. Cp. Thucydides 13, 1; 29. 31, 7 sqq.; He-
rodotus I.65–6.
4
This, however, is not to say that Lycurgus’ laws are just, for in order to
establish the normative superiority of a law over others not through sheer
domination of a political community governed by this law, one has to develop
a different procedure of rational argumentative justification.
1
Cp.: Plato, Phaedo 57a–64b; 115a–118a.
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