Plato was an AI skeptic
(Maybe) But he definitely wasn't universally hostile to writing
Say it with me three times: Plato was not against writing. Plato was not against writing. Plato was not against writing.
Some of you, perhaps even most of you, may be wondering why we’ve kicked off this week with this weird incantation involving one of history’s most famous thinkers regarding his views on the most incredible human technology ever developed, namely, the written word. Well, every so often we need to cover some philosophy around these parts, and since planting myself firmly into the AI Skepticism movement, there’s been this annoying gnat of an argument buzzing about my head involving Plato’s alleged opposition to writing. It goes something like this:
(1) Skeptics of any new cognitive technology will always argue it will harm learning and understanding;
(2) For example, Plato was resistant to reading and writing, as he believed it would prevent us from remembering anything—he argued instead we must preserve the oral tradition;
(3) Plato was very smart, but he obviously was very wrong about literacy inhibiting our learning and understanding;
Therefore
(4) However smart you think you are, Mr. AI Skeptic, your concerns regarding this new technology are akin to Plato’s mistaken concerns about writing, and since he was wrong, you’re likely to be wrong too, you neo-Luddite.
Versions of this syllogism have been around for decades involving new technologies, if not longer—here’s one recent example—and they have some force. Whenever a new technology is riding the up the initial wave of the hype cycle, it can be very uncomfortable to be the person standing in intellectual opposition to it, believe you me, because there’s a nagging sense that you might, you know, be very wrong. What if AI really does portend the next great technological advance of society? As Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, sneered last year regarding the advent of electricity, “nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable.”
That’s an interesting contention regarding prosperity in the face of rising global fascism, to say the least, and soon I hope to say more about lamplighters, but let’s return to Plato. I’ve already stated the conclusion of my argument—Plato was not against writing—so now it’s time to back that up.
It all stems from Plato’s Phaedrus. The what now? No judgments here—until this week, I’d never read it myself. To summarize in a sentence, the Phaedrus contains a long dialogue between Socrates (serving as Plato’s stand-in) and one of Socrates’ students, the Athenian aristocrat named—wait for it—Phaedrus. Much of their conversation revolves around the nature and meaning of love, but sprinkled throughout is a parallel debate involving what constitutes knowledge and wisdom.1
We’ll leave love aside and instead go right to the juicy quote that people cite to show Plato’s reactionary anti-writing sentiments (my emphasis):
And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
You can see why people interpret Plato as hostile to reading and writing! Taken in isolation, it sure seems as if he’s claiming writing will “cognitively offload” the knowledge we need to learn in our heads. That’s also one hell of a zinger at the end there. (Cue Simon & Garfunkel: People hearing without listening…)
But of course we shouldn’t take that quote in isolation, because context matters. And the context is a bit confusing here. For one thing, the quote above is actually nestled in a dialogue-within-a-dialogue wherein Socrates is relaying an argument between an Egyptian god (Theuth) and Egyptian king (Thamus) regarding which “arts”—such as arithmetic, geometry, letters and, bafflingly, “draughts and dice”—should be shared with the common folk. Thamus is down for mathematics and the gambling, but when it comes to the written word aka “letters,” he’s not as keen—for all the reasons shared in the quote above.
Head spinning? Don’t worry, I got you. Or rather, Lane Wilkinson, a scholar at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, has us all covered, because he wrote a great essay that explores all this in greater detail—read it here. Importantly, what Wilkinson contends is that Plato actually had a deep appreciation for literacy as a means for conveying information. Consider the following quotes, all from Socrates’ speeches in the Phaedrus:
The writers of the present day, at whose feet you have sat, craftily conceal the nature of the soul which they know quite well. Nor, until they adopt our method of reading and writing, can we admit that they write by rules of art.
For only hold up before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica, and over the wide world.
Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing….The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
So it’s not that Plato hates writing—far from it. Instead, he’s making a more nuanced claim, that there are other aspects of knowledge that can only be cultivated through dialogue with other humans. Writing affixes ideas in a place and time, which has value, but can only take us so far on the road to deeper knowledge. As Wilkinson argues:
This, my friends, is Socrates’s real argument against the written word: typographical fixity should not be confused with dialectic. The written word, much like the painting, stands as a mute testament, incapable of explaining itself beyond the text presented. But there is nothing necessarily wrong with this. Writing, Socrates explains, is a noble pastime, creating “memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age.”
However, the good of writing pales compared to the dialectician, who proceeds through exploratory argument, defending the truth when needed and acquiescing in the face of contrary evidence. To Socrates, the problem with writing is not that it “creates forgetfulness in the learners” but that people mistakenly hold the written word up as the only path to knowledge, when in reality, books are just information and the real knowledge comes from within the reader.
Whether Plato is right about any of this is worthy of a separate conversation, but the key point here is that he’s not—repeat, not!—shitting all over writing as a technology to be generally resisted. It just has this limitation. That’s it. No biggie.
Wilkinson wrote his essay 15 years ago, and I just discovered it on Tuesday, so I was curious to get an update on his views. After recovering from his suprise at my out-of-the-blue inquiry, we had a fun conversation, and I’m grateful to him for sharing his extended thoughts. To wit:
“You can’t understand Plato’s position on writing unless you understand his broader philosophy about knowledge, and understand the context of Ancient Greece,” Wilkinson told me. “We think of knowledge as ‘justified true belief,’ but what counts as a justification? For Plato, it means more than just giving a reason for something, it also involves being able to defend your reasoning against refutation. In other words, it's not just knowing that something is the case and having solid justification for believing it, it's about knowing why something is the case and understanding how the justification provides support.”
Understood this way, knowledge cannot arise from writing unto itself. As Wilkinson explained, “Plato was fine with using writing to transmit information—writing had been around for thousands of years in Greece, after all—but he distinguished this from developing knowledge of the forms. That’s what mattered most to him.”
What are forms, you ask? That’s been the topic of 2,000-plus years of philosophic debate—Wikipedia describes them as “the timeless, absolute, non-physical, and unchangeable essences of all things”—but let’s skip over that for now. What matters is that, for Plato, knowledge of the forms—what he also called wisdom—could not arise solely from reading about something. Wilkinson again:
“The wisdom about the nature of the universe can only come from interaction and dialectic with other humans,” Wilkinson said. “If you’re addressing wisdom, Plato said, don’t write it down, but instead get in front of people, talk to them, have a conversation. That’s the path to knowledge. Reading and writing can lead to knowledge, but only dialectic can lead to wisdom.”
Here, an AI Enthusiast might interject that what makes AI cool is that you can dialogue with it—it can play the role of a “brainstorming partner,” as so many have observed. In sense that’s true, insofar as you can type things and have it spit output back at you, but does anyone really think this can cultivate wisdom? I certainly don’t. I see instead AI playing the role of a facile, unreliable, and sycophantic non-human, one devoid of the critical capicity for irony that extends our understanding of the world in new ways. I think Plato would have hated it.
In addition, while I’m certainly no classical scholar, my amateur reading of the Phaedrus suggests Plato was making an interesting pedagogical point too. Consider the following passage (which I’ve paraphrased for brevity) about the art of medicine:
Socrates Suppose a person comes to your friend Eryximachus…and says to him: "I know how to apply drugs which shall have either a heating or a cooling effect, and I can give a vomit and also a purge…and knowing all this, I claim to be a physician, and to make physicians by imparting this knowledge to others." What do you suppose that they would say?
Phaedrus They would be sure to ask him whether he knew "to whom" he would give his medicines, and "when," and "how much."
Socrates And suppose that he were to reply: "No; I know nothing of all that; I expect the patient who consults me to be able to do these things for himself"?
Phaedrus They would say in reply that he is a madman…who fancies that he is a physician because he has read something in a book, or has stumbled on a prescription or two, although he has no real understanding of the art of medicine.
In sum, reading books cannot give you real understanding of complex erudite arts. Socrates and Phaedrus go on to discuss the art of tragedy, the art of music, and the art of rhetoric, and conclude that all require some form of experiential knowledge, fostered by human interaction, to cultivate true ability. (This is true for more basic pursuits too—we don’t learn how to ride a bike by reading a book.)
Speaking of erudite, in drafting this essay I reached out to my friend Audrey Watters, who I sometimes suspect of reading everything that’s ever been written, and someone who’d flagged the Phaedrus for me many months ago as the source of the confusion around Plato’s stance on writing. After aptly noting that “Plato was a writer FFS,” she pointed me to Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, which opens with an extended discussion of the dialogue between Theuth and Thamus. So here’s something from Postman worth chewing on as I wrap this up:
We are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people Technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future. They are therefore dangerous and are to be approached cautiously.
***
New technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that a medium contains an ideological bias. And it is a fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not merely a matter of tool against tool—the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed word. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
As we sit here today, I wonder if AI represents a uniquely powerful force in human history, insofar as the ideology of AI is simultaneously attacking human literature, art, books, even video creation, waging total war against nearly every medium of human expression that presently exists. In dialectic terms: If intellectual creation across time has been humanity’s long thesis, AI is now the antithesis we confront, spurring an ideological competition between a (fading?) world-view that sees our intellectual tools as means for us to communicate our ideas to each other, as Plato wanted, versus the Technophiles today that view AI as the end point of our humanity. There is data to be harvested, thought to be automated, and human creation to be privately appropriated.
We shall see what synthesis emerges from this clash. It’s time to light some lamps.
I enjoyed appearing recently on Have You Heard, the education-focused podcast hosted by journalist Jennifer Berkshire and scholar Jack Schneider. The episode theme is, you guessed it, AI hype:
It’s the 200th episode of Have You Heard and we’ve assembled an all-star lineup to help us make sense of what the AI ‘revolution’ in education is really about. Audrey Watters, Ben Riley and John Warner view the over-heated claims being made about AI’s potential with extreme skepticism, reminding us of the long history of the ed-tech sales pitch, and the dangers of a world in which tech titans have the money, power, and influence to reshape education along reactionary lines.
When I searched for the Phaedrus in my local public library, the only hard copy book it returned was titled 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Love the Greeks.
Bro you just used AI to trick me into learning about Greek philosophy smh