Writing about Plato (part 1)

Plato’s ideas in the excerpt of The Phaedrus that we are studying might lead us to think carefully about objects (books) and tasks (reading and writing) we probably take for granted.  Did you take nay notes today?  Write a text message or status update? Read anything?  Can you imagine your day without using the ‘drug’ of writing?

Given Plato’s critique of writing as only a pale representation of real, embodied truth and knowledge, it seems that I shouldn’t even assign a written essay, but ask everyone to talk their argument through for 6 minutes or so.  Does that seem much scarier to you than writing it?  It does to me!

And, it wouldn’t quite be in keeping with my job to let you give a speech rather than a written essay.  After all, how can I justify my grades to you if I don’t have that piece of paper that proves how well you did?  But that’s another conversation . . .

This one is, briefly, about writing about Plato.  For your essay, and for the prelim due Friday, I am asking you to work with some of Plato’s exact words—to show, in other words, how you get from Plato’s ideas to your own. This is partly about mechanics (where do quotations marks and so on go), but more importantly about understanding.  If you can write a clear sentence quoting someone else, you are on your way to a deeper understanding of the ideas you are working with.

The passage we spent the most time on today (you’ll look back on these slow-moving discussions with fondness in a few weeks!) was this:

 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. (Jowett translation 1-2)

That’s only two sentences, but a chunk o’ text. Your job as a writer is to break this down and explain it for your readers—but to do so in way that is also helping you to explain your own ideas. For the purposes of this post and the next, I’m going to pretend that I have an argument to make about education and about whether written things like tests or essays prove what students know. Of course, your argument will be different.

When working with a text you need to ask yourself a few questions(you’ll find these questions in the packet as well):

1. What does a reader need to know before you can talk about the passage? What is the CONTEXT of this quotation? Or, where in the world of all the possible texts are we? And, in that text, where are we?  

2. What does it mean? 

3. What do I really NEED to quote from this passage? (Editing, chopping, incorporating the words into a sentence of your own.)

4. What is important about this quotation? (Extend the idea.  Use the idea.  Show how it fits with your argument. Blend.)

 I’m going to work with questions 1 and 3 today.  I’ll come back to 2 and 4 later in the week.

1. Context: Context often takes the form of brief summary. You'll need to do more of this early on and less as your reader gets oriented.

In the Phaedrus, Plato explains the invention of writing through a dialogue between Theuth, the inventor, and Thamus, the king who is skeptical of writing.

3. What do I need? I can’t talk about the whole passage, so I’m going to choose one part:

“they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.” This seems like it could work with my argument.

One aspect of this criticism is that people who use written letters “will be hearers of many things . . .[but they] will have learned nothing” (Jowett 1).

Notice that I added ‘people who use written letters’ to remind the reader of who 'they' refers to; that wouldn't be so clear if I left it like this:

One aspect of this criticism is that “they will be hearers of many things . . .[but they] will have learned nothing” (Jowett 1).
I also changed ‘and’ to ‘but’ to show that Thamus is comparing these qualities.  That comparison is clear in the original long passage, but not so clear when I start chopping down the quotation. The changes, I made within the quotation, including repeating 'they' to make the sentence easier to understand, go in brackets; I indicate that I eliminated a word--'and'-- by using an ellipsis (. . . ).  Notice that my changes do not change the original meaning of the phrase. 

What I end up with is:

In the Phaedrus, Plato explains the invention of writing through a dialogue between Theuth, the inventor, and Thamus, the king who is skeptical of writing .  One aspect of this criticism is that people who use written letters “will be hearers of many things . . .[but they] will have learned nothing” (Jowett 1).

So, I’ve pinned Plato down a bit and now I’m ready to say something about hearing, learning nothing, and learning something. Notice that I've written two sentences and haven't really started in on MY IDEAS.  But my reader can, at least, locate where I'm coming from (so to speak).