To make the most of the summer, I have been rebalancing the ratio of reading and writing toward the latter, so I missed this piece. My thanks to Mike Kentz for telling me about it.
I gave a talk earlier this year about the uninvited arrival of ChatGPT into our lives as a Phaedrus moment, when a new cultural technology appears and threatens established educational norms and values.
It pleases me no end to know that you and Audrey Watters were talking about it around the same time I was working through the text, even though my reading is taking me in a different direction.
Thanks for the pointer to the Lane Wilkinson essay. Danielle Allen offers a similar take in "Why Plato Writes," but Wilkinson directly takes on the problem with those who ignore the context of the often quoted passages and, those like Walter Ong, who miss the fact that Socrates is a character in a written text whose author is communicating much more than straight forward skepticism about writing as a technology.
We agree on this: like books, chatbots do not offer wisdom. You can call it the dialectic or "a continuous process of reconstruction of experience," but wisdom is found through a human social process.
Thanks as always for the thoughtful comment Rob, even if it's unacceptably tardy (kidding, kidding). But I'm curious where we disagree? I have a hard time understanding how Plato's Phaedrus argument could be seen as commentary on writing as a "new cultural technology" given that written Greek had been around for hundreds of years at that point (and writing generally for thousands of years)?
You walked right into my trap. I'm working on a piece right now that develops the talk I gave into an argument that Phaedrus offers a lesson for those of us struggling to understand the educational value of transformer-based cultural technologies like ChatGPT. I suspect you may not agree with how far I take it, but I may be wrong. In fact, I am still not sure how far I'm going to take it.
But to answer your question, it is not so much that writing was "new" to Athens in 370 BC. It is more that the disagreements between defenders of orality, like the rhapsodes and sophists, and writers, like Plato and Aristotle, mattered in a way that was newly relevant to education. The rhapsodes and sophists were defending their livelihoods, as well as their ideas, when they pointed out the deficiencies of written text.
Similar dramas must have played out throughout the ancient world as writing was adopted and adapted by educators, but Phaedrus is the version I know, and one familiar to many. I'm not a historian of the ancient world, so I'd love for someone to point me to other examples.
Well I look forward to reading your thoughts and potentially disagreeing with them! I also am not an ancient historian, but really enjoyed my conversation with Wilkinson, so lmk if you want me to connect you with him. There are some wormholes I wanted to go down but didn't, such as Leo Strauss apparently arguing that much of what Plato wrote was intended ironically.
Wormhole is right. It will enrage anyone who is a fan of one but not the other writer to say this, but it amuses me to no end that those on the so-called right treat Strauss as the source of wise linguistic skepticism in much the same way those of the left treat Derrida as the same. To my mind, both demonstrate that a great critic can use language to make a work of literature reveal its contradictions.
Bro you just used AI to trick me into learning about Greek philosophy smh
To make the most of the summer, I have been rebalancing the ratio of reading and writing toward the latter, so I missed this piece. My thanks to Mike Kentz for telling me about it.
I gave a talk earlier this year about the uninvited arrival of ChatGPT into our lives as a Phaedrus moment, when a new cultural technology appears and threatens established educational norms and values.
It pleases me no end to know that you and Audrey Watters were talking about it around the same time I was working through the text, even though my reading is taking me in a different direction.
Thanks for the pointer to the Lane Wilkinson essay. Danielle Allen offers a similar take in "Why Plato Writes," but Wilkinson directly takes on the problem with those who ignore the context of the often quoted passages and, those like Walter Ong, who miss the fact that Socrates is a character in a written text whose author is communicating much more than straight forward skepticism about writing as a technology.
We agree on this: like books, chatbots do not offer wisdom. You can call it the dialectic or "a continuous process of reconstruction of experience," but wisdom is found through a human social process.
Thanks as always for the thoughtful comment Rob, even if it's unacceptably tardy (kidding, kidding). But I'm curious where we disagree? I have a hard time understanding how Plato's Phaedrus argument could be seen as commentary on writing as a "new cultural technology" given that written Greek had been around for hundreds of years at that point (and writing generally for thousands of years)?
You walked right into my trap. I'm working on a piece right now that develops the talk I gave into an argument that Phaedrus offers a lesson for those of us struggling to understand the educational value of transformer-based cultural technologies like ChatGPT. I suspect you may not agree with how far I take it, but I may be wrong. In fact, I am still not sure how far I'm going to take it.
But to answer your question, it is not so much that writing was "new" to Athens in 370 BC. It is more that the disagreements between defenders of orality, like the rhapsodes and sophists, and writers, like Plato and Aristotle, mattered in a way that was newly relevant to education. The rhapsodes and sophists were defending their livelihoods, as well as their ideas, when they pointed out the deficiencies of written text.
Similar dramas must have played out throughout the ancient world as writing was adopted and adapted by educators, but Phaedrus is the version I know, and one familiar to many. I'm not a historian of the ancient world, so I'd love for someone to point me to other examples.
Well I look forward to reading your thoughts and potentially disagreeing with them! I also am not an ancient historian, but really enjoyed my conversation with Wilkinson, so lmk if you want me to connect you with him. There are some wormholes I wanted to go down but didn't, such as Leo Strauss apparently arguing that much of what Plato wrote was intended ironically.
Wormhole is right. It will enrage anyone who is a fan of one but not the other writer to say this, but it amuses me to no end that those on the so-called right treat Strauss as the source of wise linguistic skepticism in much the same way those of the left treat Derrida as the same. To my mind, both demonstrate that a great critic can use language to make a work of literature reveal its contradictions.
Just sent you an email about Wilkinson.