One of the reasons that it is important to study media is to gauge the effects that various technologies can have upon our everyday lives. A critical theory of media should identify the advantages and utilities that a particular medium offers us, while avoiding the temptation to simply affirm said medium without proper consideration of the ways that it might be harmful to us as individuals or to society as a whole. The possibility of exercising agency within an increasingly dense media environment is reliant upon our capacity to evade the anaesthetic properties of media that would render us docile and subservient in the face of their determinative power. Simultaneously though, it is important to recognize that anxieties over the role of new media in education and knowledge are not at all new â we can find them at least as far back as ancient Greece, the birthplace of the Western philosophical tradition. Although various forms of writing (from the pictographs of the Sumerian cuneiform through to early alphabets) have existed for many millennia, it was in Greece around the fifth century BCE that an especially pivotal medium â phonetic writing â really came into its own, beginning to demonstrate a decisive social and cultural impact, and it is at this historical juncture that we will begin our exploration into the intertwined discourses of philosophy and media.
What the early philosophers were dealing with at this time was not a plethora of media forms like we have today; rather, communication was still monopolized by the spoken word. Consequently, the popularization of literacy (i.e. reading and writing) was profound and dramatic in its effects, and the legacy of this transformation can still be seen in the philosophical tradition today. To speak of this tradition, obviously, is to speak of a genealogy that is profoundly Eurocentric â excluding the various non-Western lineages of thought that have developed over the past few millennia, and often occluding its inherent limitations and blindspots that would bring into question its pretensions to universality â and we therefore acknowledge that our discussion of the intersections between media and philosophy evince a decidedly confined viewpoint, one that cannot be straightforwardly extrapolated out to a global scale. At the same time, though, we believe that the dissymmetrical processes of globalization that we witness today, and their connection to the logic of digital computation and high-speed networking, are tied to this philosophical tradition in a manner that demands analysis. Before we arrive at this point, however, we must reflect upon the origins of this very tradition, on which the trajectory of Western thought and culture are inextricably grounded.
The âpre-Socraticâ school of philosophy
Thales (c. 624â546 BCE) is generally regarded as the first Greek philosopher and thus represents the formative point of the Western philosophical tradition as a whole. It is with Thales that philosophy, as we typically think of it, begins. Although Greek philosophy tends to be associated with the city-state of Athens â an intellectual and cultural hub of the ancient world â Thales was actually born and lived primarily in Miletus, a Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey). According to legend, he was the first to bring geometry from Egypt to the Greeks and is often regarded, albeit on the basis of purely circumstantial (and quite likely spurious) evidence, as the first true mathematician. While historical accounts are rather sketchy, it seems that Thales viewed water as the originary material out of which all things come to be. The difficulty for studying Thalesâ thought, however â and the reason that we have little ability to state with any great certainty what his ideas actually were â is that he never wrote any of it down. Living at a time when knowledge was transmitted almost entirely through the spoken word, he presumably felt little need to store and disseminate his philosophy in such a fashion. It isnât that the medium of writing didnât exist during his lifetime, but merely that it had little significance for education and enquiry in the way that it does today. Greek students learnt through the memorization and recitation of orally transmitted poems, rather than consulting written texts â the problem for us being that, as Harold Innis, one of the first scholars to directly engage with the relationship between media and the history of philosophy, notes, âwe have no history of conversation or of the oral tradition except as they are revealed darkly through the written or the printed wordâ (2008: 9), resulting in a certain distortion and bias towards these latter forms of communication within historical research. Writing, overwhelmingly, is the medium through which history itself is accessed â it constitutes the dominant medium of history.
We may presume, however, that such circumstances were rapidly changing, for Anaximander (one of Thalesâ students) did actually write his thoughts down, and while we quite possibly have only one authentic quote preserved from this work, it nonetheless marks a crucial step both in the development of philosophy as we typically understand it and in its historical preservation. Anaximanderâs use of prose âreflected a revolutionary break, an appeal to rational authority, and the influence of the logic of writingâ (Innis 2007: 67). Anaximander rejects the organic metaphor of water deployed by Thales, and instead proposes the abstract concept of the apeiron â an eternal and boundless entity â as the originary substance of the cosmos, identifying a principle of existence unattainable through sensible intuition (and thus reachable only through the pure exercise of the intellect). Anaximenes (who was in turn a disciple of Anaximander), however, reverts back to the more accessible materialism of Thales, asserting that air is the primary substance out of which the world was composed. These three thinkers compose what is commonly referred to as the âMilesian schoolâ, which is in turn part of the âIonian schoolâ, including other philosophers such as Heraclitus, Archelaus and Diogenes of Apollonia. What binds all of these philosophers is a shared interest in what we now know as âmetaphysicsâ (a term that only emerged in mediaeval scholarship) â they seek to explain what the world is made of and the basic laws of the universe. Many of them also dabble in cosmology â the study of how this universe came to be. Most notably for the time when they were working, the Ionian school sought to avoid supernatural explanations for the phenomena that they observed. Rather than explaining environmental effects away as the workings of the gods (as their peers did), they look to explanations that came from around them, contained within the nature of matter itself â air, water, fire and so on.
By contrast, Plato, who lived about a century after the Ionian school first flourished, has little interest in these forces of nature. This is not to say that he is not concerned with metaphysical argumentation, but that his focus is both a lot broader and a lot more oriented towards the concerns of human beings â a likely result of his teacher Socratesâ (c. 469â399 BCE) influence. Socrates was not the first philosopher; within the Mediterranean basin alone, he was preceded by a number of important, if oft-forgotten thinkers (some of whom we have just mentioned), not to mention the numerous figures within Babylonian, Persian, Indian and Chinese philosophy. Nevertheless, Socrates is arguably the key building block in the formation of Western philosophy as a distinct field of enquiry and is virtually unmatched in his influence upon subsequent thought. When we speak of âWestern philosophyâ as a singular discipline, we are inevitably speaking of a tradition that is grounded in the influence of this one remarkable figure.
Socrates lived in Athens, at a time when the once-great city was finding its empire crumbling under repeated attacks by the southern city-state of Sparta. Although he had once served in the Athenian army, in his later life he forsook conventional employment for a modest life of philosophical discussion and teaching. Unwilling to mindlessly follow the social or political conventions of the time in which he lived, Socrates eventually found himself on trial for two charges (impiety and corrupting the youth) and was eventually put to death. The problem with discussing Socrates, though, is that, like Thales, he left no written works of his own. Writing was still in its relative infancy at the time when he lived â the Greeks had developed the first true alphabet (before then, alphabets had included consonants but not vowels, making it far more difficult to fully record the sound of words) less than 300 years prior to his birth â and he was sceptical of its usefulness in the teaching of philosophy. He preferred instead to utilize the method of dialectics â he would debate other individuals, gradually eliminating contradictory hypotheses until something close to an unambiguous definition was found.
As a result, like all historical figures, when we speak of Socrates we do not so much speak of a person as we do a representation within othersâ writings, in particular two of his followers, Xenophon and Plato. What distinguishes Socrates from most other famous figures throughout history, however, is that Plato did not simply record the sayings and philosophies of Socrates, but rather utilized Socrates as a character within his own dialogues in order to propound his own, complex philosophical theories â hence Pierre Hadotâs (1995: 148) argument that:
Socrates pulled off his enterprise of dissimulation so well that he succeeded in definitively masking himself from history. He wrote nothing, engaging only in dialogue. All the testimonies we possess about him hide him from us more than they reveal him, precisely because Socrates has always been used as a mask by those who have spoken about him.
Socrates is, in himself, a simulacrum: a literary character in lieu of the historical figure that it represents, a copy for whom the original has been lost.
Socrates was, from what we know, an outwardly humble thinker, who chose to forgo both the overblown metaphysical speculation of his philosophical predecessors, generally referred to as the âpre-Socraticsâ, and the flashy, rhetorical gesturing of his sophist contemporaries (whom he despised). Socrates did not commit to complex theories; he did not seek to explain the nature of being, the possibility of knowledge or how the world was created, but instead focused upon more simple, worldly matters â as Plato (1997: 27) famously records, Socrates was, more than anything else, critical of the belief that âone knows what one does not knowâ. In short, Socrates was a philosopher of ethics â he sought to discover how one could lead a good life. Yet this image, even as it is recorded in Platoâs early writings, differs markedly from that which is provided by Platoâs work as a whole. In some sense, it may be said that Socratesâ importance within the history of philosophy rests in large part not so much upon his own philosophy, but upon the influence that he passed on to Plato. Fittingly, the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1978: 39) once stated that the âsafest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Platoâ. All subsequent philosophical enquiry within the Western tradition can, at least in some fashion, be understood as responding, either positively or negatively, to the problems that Plato puts forward.
Plato was, in contrast to his mentor, not terribly modest in his approach. His writings cover not only ethics, but also logic, physics, metaphysics, cosmology, aesthetics and politics. Through his establishment of the Academy, the first school dedicated to the teaching of philosophy, which would last approximately 300 years before being destroyed by the Romans, he was able to ensure that his legacy and ideas would be passed on to future generations of thinkers. Plato was, in many senses, the archetypal philosopher, a polymath who sought knowledge with an unprecedented (and for the most part unmatched) scope and breadth. Owing to both the range of his subject matter and the time in which he was writing, Plato is crucial for this bookâs purposes â he was the first of his kind to give ample consideration to the question of media. As Paul Levinson (1997: 18) observes, Plato and his contemporaries âwere among their many other pioneering pursuits the original media theoristsâ, or at the very least, âthe first that we know about in recorded historyâ. In fact, throughout the course of his dialogues, Plato establishes many of the questions that are still being asked today in studies of communications and mediation.
Platoâs critique of writing
Plato found himself in the midst of a dramatic cultural shift, one that would have inestimable effects upon the development of Western civilization. Roughly three centuries after the Greeks had first invented the fully phonetic alphabet, able to represent all the basic sounds of Greek language within 24 discrete letters, they were gradually learning to take advantage of its ability to store knowledge externally. Rather than having to memorize repetitive formulas, sayings and narratives â as occurred, for example, with the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod, which âconstituted a body of invisible writing imprinted upon the brain of the communityâ (Havelock 1963: 141) â as the means of preserving values and traditions across generations, people could now record their thoughts for posterity. This is what Walter Ong (1982) describes as the transition from an âoral cultureâ to a âliterate cultureâ. Whereas Socrates did not partake in writing, choosing to remain within the confines of orality, Plato took full advantage of this burgeoning medium, writing numerous dialogues explicating his philosophical ideas. These dialogues are a wonderfully evocative symbol of the transition from orality to literacy, in that they comprise what are essentially spoken debates, most of which feature Socrates, in written form â almost like plays. This is not to say that these were accurate recordings of historical debates â some may be inspired by real events, but the Platonic dialogue is unambiguously a genre of fiction, albeit one that often features genuine historical figures.
In one of these dialogues, the TheĂŠtetus, Plato makes an intriguing comparison between the human soul and a wax tablet (the portable, reusable writing surface that was commonly used in his day to quickly record ideas, before eventually transposing the writing to a more permanent storage medium). For Plato, the minds of those people who are skilled at learning are like a tablet that is âdeep and abundant, smooth and worked to the proper consistencyâ, whereas those who have trouble with such matters are like a tablet that âis âshaggyâ and rugged, a stony thing with earth or filth mixed all through itâ (1997: 215). Truth, Plato argues, is not something that we just encounter in the world around us â in fact, he actually suggests that such empirical observation is in most cases going to be a detriment to the acquisition of true knowledge. Instead, he proposes that truth is already written upon the wax tablet of our immortal souls and therefore it becomes the job of the philosopher to attempt to recollect these truths. This metaphor is notable because it seeks to explain a phenomenon, not using the natural, elemental metaphors of the pre-Socratics, but through the example of a human-made technology. Truth, for Plato, is a form of writing, beginning a pattern that persists even in the present day, whereby philosophers discuss the soul and body in terms of media and technics.
Ironically, in another of these dialogues, the PhĂŠdrus, Plato (1997: 551â2) appears to denounce the effects of writing upon the students of Greece. Recalling a legend regarding a conversation between the Egyptian God Theuth (who gave humanity the gift of writing) and King Thamus, he states:
Since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.
Plato, presumably echoing the arguments of Socrates (given that the latter forswore all usage of this medium in the transmission of his philosophy), suggests that although writing may allow us to record our thoughts, it also harms our memory and our thought processes in general, because it relies upon the translation of our inner thoughts into external symbols. This contention is premised upon an understanding of speech which he explores more clearly in the later dialogue Sophist (1997: 287), when he asks, âarenât thought and speech the same, except that what we call thought is speech that occurs without the voice, inside the soul in conversation with itself?â In effect, Plato assumes that speech is nothing more than an exteriorization of thought, rather than a medium in its own right; it is not a translation of thought into a different form, but âthe stream of sound from the soul that goes through the mouthâ (1997: 288). A similar argument is made by Aristotle (2001: 40) â who studied under Plato at the Academy â when he states that â[s]poken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken wordsâ.
What Plato perceives in writing, by contrast, is a chain of imitations â phantasms, to use the original Greek term, or simulacra, as is the more common Latin expression â in which the true meaning of thoughts is gradually blurred as they are copied into an abstract, mediated, representational form. Writing divorces words from the mind that created them and in doing so it transforms them into mere spectres of a truth that is perfectly inscribed within the soul. Writes Umberto Eco:
Platoâs text is, of course, ironic. Plato was writing his argument about writing. But he is putting it into the mouth of Socrates, who did not write. Therefore Plato was expressing a fear that still survived in his day. Thinking is an internal matter; the real thinker would not allow books to think in his place.
(1994: 64)
âNominating Plato as a source of communication theoryâ, writes John Durham Peters (1999: 36), âmight seem simply an act of grasping for a noble lineage if the Phaedrus were not so astoundingly relevant for understanding the age of mechanical reproduction.â In his critique of writing, Plato proffers quite possibly the first clear articulation of a media theory â the moment in which questions of mediation and the ways in which technology can both extend and restrict a personâs understanding of the world, and in turn can come to determine their behaviour â first entered the realm of philosophy. Of course, Plato himself would not have described it as such. The only time the notion of a âmediumâ (mĂ©taxy in the original Greek) appears in Platoâs work is in his discussion of the spirits who âinterpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humansâ (1997: 486). Yet even if he does not describe it in this way, Platoâs interrogation of...
