PLATO
Thinking about how our whole culture is indebted to this technology, which is the alphabet, also helps us to understand what is happening to us, with a transformation of technology.
I don't think we are all going to be informed today about what is happening in the war by reading the newspapers, but mostly by going home and turning on the television, how's it going? let's see a little bit, let's not read a little bit but let's see a little bit.
So there are two things that are extraordinary in this discourse, which are food for thought because it involves all of us.
The first, which I have already mentioned, is that the alphabet is an extraordinary tool, one of mankind's greatest technological inventions, so extraordinary that in its lifetime, now thousands of years old, it can be said that it has not changed in essence at all. Already at the time of the Greeks, in the 7th-6th centuries BC, it was almost perfect, it was born so perfect, it can be said, that we have never felt the need to change it again until today, although today things are beginning to look a little different.
That's the first extraordinary thing, you have to understand what this instrument has done, because an instrument changes things, the world view and the way people are, the way people talk. An Egyptian pharaoh could not speak like Themistocles or Plato, because he did not read, and he did not write.
But the second thing, the one we are going to talk about and for which I have so far done nothing more than make a framework for understanding the nature of the discourse we are going to make.
The second question is a very intriguing one, as some would say, intriguing why? Because we are going to refer to the greatest Greek philosopher, indeed to the one who can safely be said to have initiated philosophy, to have invented philosophy, which is Plato.
Now many of you will think of the Presocratics, yes all right, but the Presocratics are wise men who do not know that they are philosophers, who are not yet really philosophers, they will be taken on board by Plato and Aristotle as the forerunners of philosophy, as the first thinkers, even though in reality they are not but they are of the first wise men, the first sages, the first scientists even, as we would say today.
It is Plato who invents philosophy, who gives this word philosophy, which perhaps the Pythagoreans were already using, perhaps, who gives this word philosophy a meaning, a meaning that has since come down to here. And which has a cognitive, scientific but also political and social meaning.
This man, Plato, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in the entire history of mankind, some consider him to be the greatest writer we have ever had in the West, and who wrote an endless quantity of dialogues, an endless quantity, especially for the ancient world, but also for our times it would be an impressive production, thousands and thousands of pages, and to be noted it is the first written work that has remained to us, everything that was written before has not reached us.
This means that what Plato wrote was so relevant, quantitatively but above all qualitatively, that, you have to imagine it (you have to imagine concreteness when doing philosophy, not abstract ideas that are of no use), you have to imagine that for millennia, centuries and centuries, thousands of human beings transcribed manually, patiently word by word the thousands of thousands of pages that Plato had written, this happened.
Men of the most different ages, different situations, men who lived in incomparable worlds, imagine a monastery of 1000 AD rather than an Athens before Christ, 1400 years difference, completely different world, one was Christian, the others were pagans, people dying of hunger, people persecuted by the barbarians, people dying of leprosy, people dying of the plague, very difficult situations, people who lived an average of 40 years, spent their nights transcribing Plato, Plato and Aristotle of course. Huh?
There had to be something exceptional? Indeed there was something exceptional.
We, I would say, can't even open our mouths, can't even say a word on the rational plane that is not indebted to Plato and Aristotle, but to Plato in particular.
So, Plato, who was certainly one of the greatest writers in the history of mankind, said that philosophy is not done with writing, and that writing is a dangerous instrument, indeed, in one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, he tells a whole story where there is a supposed inventor of writing who presents his invention to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh says: no, look, let's leave it alone, because this instrument will corrupt men and make them all forgetful, it will be a tragedy, a catastrophe.
But how? This man who condemns writing has spent his life writing and we have spent centuries copying him, this is truly an extraordinary question, why? What did he want to say? What was there and what was behind it?
Plato condemns writing, there is no doubt about it, he says it openly, he being a writer.
Plato condemns writing, so he poses a relevant question between philosophical wisdom and writing and says there is no relationship between the two, or there is a very vague and in any case dangerous relationship.
However, since then, none of this has been spoken of.
Here is the extraordinary thing.
Aristotle, for example, doesn't give a damn about all that, he writes his treatises, his lectures, his works, and doesn't raise any issues about writing.
Everyone forgets about it, everyone just uses it and only very rarely does the question of writing re-emerge in the history of philosophy.