Your response: THE WRITTEN WORD weakens the human mind....Y? N?

by Terry 23 Replies latest jw friends

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  Terry

  What reaction do you have--what ideas and responses to what Socrates was trying to say?

  Has the written word created a weakening in the human mind?

  Does relying on books and the thoughts of others cripple our freedom and originality of thought?

  Is it actually ignorance to refuse to read?

  Where can there reside a balance? Or is one needed?

  Read this brief description in Wiki:

  Socratesagainst writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts to turn living thoughts dwelling in the human mind into mere objects in the physical world. By causing people to rely on what is written rather than what they are able to think, it weakens the powers of the mind and of memory. True knowledge can only emerge from a relationship between active human minds. And unlike a person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will just keep saying the same thing over and over again, no matter how often it is refuted
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  tec

  I agree that it CAN. Not necessarily that it DOES.

  Just taking others' word for something, I agree, weakens the mind. How do you know what you might have come to on your own, without the 'authority' of the written word telling you what to think.

  At the same time, the ideas of some in the past and present that are written so that others might read them as well... can also open things up to a person that their experiences might not have exposed them to consider.

  The written word can both open worlds, and close them.

  Depends, I guess, on how much of your self that you give over to another person's thinking.

  Peace,

  tammy
• 

  Satanus

  Intersting thought. I think it does, cuz once you write something down, you don't need to put in effort to remember, anymore. You can relax. As well, those searching for facts need simply to aquire the writen material and read it at their liesure. That is much sumpler than finding the storyholder and getting him to tell the story and trying to catch it all at one go.

  How would this relate to 'prehistory'? It is called prehistory, exactly cuz they didn't write stuff down or if they did, it didn't survive. It's interesting that the big success of the jews is that they wrote down stuff, ergo the bible. Perhaps, writing forces the mind to organize stuff into a more rational form, even though it may not be more truthful, it makes it end up looking that way. Perhaps, writing down stories which became history, was a novel idea, at the time, a revolutionary idea in human evolution.

  Oral history that can change very easily, whereas writen, not so easily.

  S
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  transhuman68

  LOL, there is nothing wrong with reading and written words. It is only a problem when a piece of writing is seen as the ultimate authority- such as the sentence: "All Scripture is inspired and blah blah blah...".

  But when we study writing from multiple sources we sort the resulting thoughts in our minds; coming to logical concusions and rejecting information that doesn't fit in the puzzle- then what we know may be greater than the sum of the parts we have studied.
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  jgnat

  The written word definitely changes the human mind.

  Education in Socrates' time consisted, besides rhetoric and the "socratic" method of question and answer, to rote memorization. These would have been the legends of Homer and the gods. Written texts by nature were expensive and rare. Now, we have the printing press.

  The written word I would say, has allowed knowledge to surpass generations and borders in ways that Socrates could not have imagined. Modern civilization is built on successive layers of knowlege from investigators long dead. This would not have been possible without the written word. I recall randomly picking up a technical manual in the library, illustrating the crystalline structure of various steels and how heat and other impurities in the steel changes that structure. It came to me that our entire industry is dependent on manuals like this, to reliably pass on the knowledge.

  Because I have books, I do not memorize as they did in Socrates day. Rather, I keep an index of sources. This has only gotten worse with google. Now I merely retain practiced technique of searching. I cannot help this, as the brain is an expensive organ to operate, and I must make best use of its resources. Check out some of the findings from Neuroeconomics. Check out Gary Greenberg's image of a nerve cell in our brain. Our memories and recollection are not static, but are rather reinforced or die.

  We are irretrievably changed with the inclusion of solid sources like the written word, photographs. I would not give up this change for the alternative.
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  fakesmile

  if you mean the bible, yes. not that it is a bad collection of morality if read as such.

  books in general, no. as long as they are credible or marked as fiction. reading is something only humans can do.
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  transhuman68

  I was interested in what Bart Ehrman had to say about literacy in the ancient world- that even Athens at the time of it's greatness, had very few people who could read- and even fewer who could write. All over the ancient world, people were expected to listen to what was read to them; and memorize it. They had no way to respond, as they were illiterate, and since writing was expensive, laborious and a skill restricted to the 'elites', people probably believed everything that was written down.
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  Midget-Sasquatch

  I can see his point in how it may be an excuse for some people not to exert themselves mentally. Why bother to memorize anything if the answer can be found, in the moment, by a google search? The irony though is that all that knowledge had to be presevered, primarily as written text.

  For the most part though, I too, disagree with Socrates. Different kinds of writing, be it fiction, prose, or philosophy can introduce us to, or even confront us with, new ideas and viewpoints. The key is to try reading new material.
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  Finkelstein

  Does relying on books and the thoughts of others cripple our freedom and originality of thought ?

  It all depends in how one perceives internally what is being read and if its being interpreted as fact or fiction.

  When fiction is being accepted as non-fiction, thats where and when trouble for the individual ensues.
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  ziddina

  Oh, for the love of....

  I am fond of saying that the invention of writing increased the collective human mentality thousandsfold, for no one human being could learn and remember ALL of the information availble to ALL humans at any one point in the history of human civilization.

  I take it that Socrates was a fan of learning by rote and memorization??? ... Eh, jgnat answered my question - and it was as I suspected.

  What on earth could have made Socrates think that MEMORIZATION would somehow IMPROVE the human mind? Memorization LOCKS the human MIND into certain patterns - having to remember precisely what was memorized; while writing sets one free to move BEYOND that which is written...

  The written word 'remembers' where we were 'before', so we are free to move BEYOND that . Just take a look at the progression - evolution - of science textbooks down through the centuries...