The Orality of Plato’s Phaedrus

Mike J. Stasio, September 30, 2008, Reflection Essay #2, COML 509 A1 Fall
Professor Alexander Kuskis, Gonzaga University

Socrates. Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of which he is writing or speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having defined them again to divide them until they can be no longer divided, and until in like manner he is able to discern the nature of the soul, and discover the different modes of discourse which are adapted to different natures, and to arrange and dispose them in such a way that the simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler nature, and the complex and composite to the more complex nature-until he has accomplished all this, he will be unable to handle arguments according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or persuading (Plato, 370 BC., p. 31)

There are many ideas floating around in Plato’s Phaedrus that center on a basic understanding of the male species at an unconscious level—which is of the “other world” and carries the collective memories of man (Plato, 370 BC., p. 12). What struck me was this idea of knowing the whole self that includes our unconscious. To achieve this illumination man must embrace the nature and madness of love through years of dialogue and practice that leads to the ultimate madness of becoming a master philosopher of knowledge—according to Plato the noblest and highest form of madness (Plato, 370 BC., p. 12). These rare enlightened lovers of wisdom may then pass knowledge through subtle argument—the art of persuasion—and oral tradition using dialogic method.

What is involved in this ultimate pursuit in life; this pursuit of truth? Socrates says it takes a true understanding of the nature of man and a balancing of multiple forces. It takes time and practice. It takes dialogue to produce insight and test ideas. He also believes it is rare and most people are not intelligent enough to reach this level of enlightenment. Using Socrates' charioteer metaphor, it takes persistent whipping our steeds into conquered obedience to reach noble madness. In this paper I will briefly explore Socrates' claim that it is through orality and dialogue, not writing, that this level of illumination can be attained.

Socrates…to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name, befitting the serious pursuit of their life.
Phaedrus. What name would you assign to them?
Socrates. Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone—lovers of wisdom or philosophers, is their modest and befitting title (Plato, 370 BC., p. 31).

Orality of a special kind--I-Thou dialogue in a Martin Burber's sense--produces insight into a man’s soul. I agree with Father Walter Ong who describes oral speech as a natural extension of human thought. “Talk implements conscious life but it wells up into consciousness out of unconscious depths….”(Ong, 1982, p. 82). Orality allows you to discover and gain cooperative acceptance of self. In Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing is subordinate (inferior) to oration and thus only a mere image of welled up knowledge where the author may use an imagined audience, and his written words do not stand up to defend criticism (Plato, 370 BC., pp. 30-31). Ong (1982, p. 79) says of Plato’s Phaedrus that “writing is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product that destroys memory. The same of course is said of computers”. Since oral cultures have no way "to look up something", it is natural to think that they would be more connected to their third order (unconsciousness) mind (Ong, 1982, p. 31). However, in my view, writing—even transmitted through a digital medium—has the potential to be a more reflective process with less repetition if we have the oral tools and rules down through practice and knowledge. A heightened consciousness while writing with a pen or at our computers may also be welled up from the unconscious if we think of orality and writing in a cooperative unconditional way.

“Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure, restructures thought… English has accessible for use a recorded vocabulary of at least a million and a half words… oral dialect will commonly have resources of only a few thousand words… But, in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings” (Ong, 1982, pp. 7-8).

Ong goes on to say that while reading, our minds convert text to sounds, and I believe the reverse is also true. Writing requires authors to think of ideas with sounds and convert this imagined speech to text. Said another way by Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world". “Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality” (Ong, 1982, p. 8).

When you read through the following passage, your subvoice--what your mind hears from silent reading--will hear most of the words you see. So we ask—how many F’s do you hear?

Films are flicks that are produced
after years of personal effort, and
of unique knowledge frankly, out
of hard work (Wechsler, 2007, para. 10).

“Normal readers”, including “the average college graduate…hear all the words their eyes see in their mind…. They subvocalize 100% of the time when they read” (Wechsler, 2007, para. 11-12). So they hear six F’s when there are actually nine.

Plato was on track and I agree that thought naturally occurs orally, whereas writing allows our mind to slow down enough—“typically about 1/10th the speed of oral speech”—to reflect on our thinking process (Ong, 1982, p. 40). If we bring Plato’s thoughts forward 2400 years to Father Ong, we can stand on their shoulders and say that writing is a “sparsely linear” tool “artificially created” from cooperatively integrating the sounds of speech and writing (Ong, 1982, p. 40; Postman, 1992). Technology is artificial—a man-made creation. Letters and words are a set of symbols we have created to represent meanings through sounds. Therefore, writing is technology.

Back to the question of why is it so difficult for men to reach enlightenment? Sigmund Freud may agree with Plato that developing a productive self is accomplished through open dialogic reflection with others. I would add that understanding what balances our ‘whole self’ to the point of madness requires unconditional acceptance of the multiple dimensions of our collective soul, not lashing a whip of reason to dominate our steeds. If we examine how a man is created from conception, receiving both X and Y chromosomes, it makes sense that a man will go through inner struggle identifying and accepting his whole self made up of multiple masculine and feminine ancestors. Only a man receives a Y-chromosome, “if you’ve got one, you’re going to be a man” (Sykes, 2004, p. 58). He needs reality and exposure to multiple life experiences with others for discovery of the soul to unfold. Interacting with others is critical to reach total self-awareness. I believe this is why Socrates refers countless times to his soul as ‘she’, man’s inner Y-chromosome is in a power struggle with his inner feminine—the active X-chromosome. “He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible (Plato, 370 BC., p. 7). Socrates loved both men and women and understood both his masculine and feminine self. Women, on the other hand, receive two X-chromosomes and one is deactivated during conception; thus, no inner struggle to deal with. Unfortunately, examining women is beyond the scope of this essay.

I believe a person’s education is on a continuum, and truth as Plato talks about truth is elusive--to be discovered. There is no ultimate truth while we walk the earth, because it comes from a specific point of view that can always be modified by later discoveries. Mortal wisdom is knowing that knowledge can be modified. Man’s unconscious mind may develop a heightened cooperative link between speech and writing through the words of Plato’s Phaedrus and Ong’s Orality and Literacy.

References

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Plato (370 BC.). Persons of the Dialogue: Socrates, Phaedrus. Under a plane tree by the banks of the Ilissus. Translated by B. Jowett.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: A. Knopf.

Sykes, B. (2004). Adam’s Curse: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Destiny. New York: Norton & Co.

Wechsler, H. (2007). How Many F's Can You Find? [Electronic version]. Barron’s. Retrieved September 30, 2008, from
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Many-Fs-Can-You-Find?&id=580686

Virtually Seeing the Invisible

Mike J. Stasio, September 15, 2008, Essay #1, COML 509 A1 Fall

Professor Alexander Kuskis, Gonzaga University

When it comes to computers and Internet use, we are witnesses and historians of record. The Net generation, or “N-Geners” as they are sometimes labeled, grew up in the digital age. What sorts of gender differences exist among net users? And how are the gender demographics of N-Geners changing? These are two questions that preoccupied my thoughts as I read through several chapters in our Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) text. Thurlow et al. left me with the idea that even though the female gender uses the Internet, the space was primarily still male-dominated. Yet as is the case with so many things in life these days, gender demographics are fluid and ever-changing. “Gendered space refers to physical or virtual space” like “boardroom space” or “yoga/kitchen space” where activities within each space tend to associate more with a particular gender (Thurlow, 2004, p. 130). More recent statistics show girls and women are as frequent Internet users as men and the Net is no longer a male-dominated field. Just as more men are stay-at-home dads, in the kitchen cooking, and practicing yoga—more women are political shakers and movers and starting their own web-based businesses. Gender roles are blurred on the home front, at work, and in cyber space. The authors of CMC offer an interesting conceptualization of “gender and gendered space” (Thurlow, 2004, p. 130). Gender is thought of as a way to socially construct variations of “ideals and characteristics” that relate to a spectrum of categories from masculine to feminine that “should not be interchangeable with” a particular sex, “which refers to biological categories of male and female” (Thurlow, 2004, p. 130). This concept is thought to be “fluid rather than fixed” (Thurlow, 2004, p. 130). I would like to expand on this idea of a fluid concept and modify the label on any place in cyberspace.

Understanding gender behavior on the Net is a dynamic process where it is helpful, at least for me, to view findings contextually. In the web/tech world it seems the big ideas belong to the young. The N-Geners (born after 1977) grew up in the digital age and are comfortable with the technology they grew up with. It is invisible to them. Thirty and over generations are culturally different than the 20 something crowd. The over 65 group also tend to prefer the technologies they grew up with—television, land-line phones, cable television, books, and snail-mail. When we take these ideas into account, individual behavior may or may not fit the overriding dynamic for each generation. Each generational observation is a cultural snap shot of today that provides insight into how people interacted yesterday and may act tomorrow.

 
I came across a 2006 National Public Radio (NPR) Talk of The Nation report with Neal Conan and lead guest Lee Rainie on gender differences in Net use, and found some of the findings worthy of note. Mr. Rainie (2006), Founding Director of Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that men (under age 65) are attracted to masculine porn spaces, gaming or play, and sports sites that are action-driven with violence, while women tend to like feminine contextual social interaction spaces with role-playing, chat, and messaging (Tufekci & Spence, 2007). Men use email mostly for business and women interact more with interpersonal communication connecting with friends and family (Rainie, 2006; Tufekci & Spence, 2007). Women go to medical information sites, MapQuest, and educational assistance sites more often than men do, while men do more searching in general and research consumer reports (Rainie, 2006; Tufekci & Spence, 2007). Women worry about creeps in chat rooms and men are more adventurous (Rainie, 2006). Even with these preferences, mobile and high-speed technology has made Net behavior between young genders not all that different, and the single strongest predictor of whether a young adult is a Net user is whether that person is or has attended college (Rainie, 2006; Tufekci & Spence, 2007). Both young gender groups walk and drive around using the Net from PDA’s, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Treos for instant messaging (SMS), blogging, podcasts, Voice over IP, and email and these areas online have a higher percentage of young feminine users (Rainie, 2006; Tufekci & Spence, 2007).

The big story is composition has changed due in large part to the embedded nature of high-speed and mobile technology (Rainie, 2006; Tufekci & Spence, 2007). Prior to these two technologies men were the early adopters more likely to take time on dial-up to research product purchases, and where to live and find a new job, but now women have completely caught up to men in their intensity and the interest in these kinds of activities (Raines, 2006). Men, 68%, are more likely to be the techie of the family computer, where 45% of women do the same (Rainie, 2006). Both genders have unconsciously embedded the Net into their lives using broadband and mobile access mediums not necessarily as a matter of choice, but more as a matter of unconscious utility. The Net has become an invisible technology where users are no longer aware of its presence, and this is when a technology is most powerful (Rainie, 2006). Rather than turn to books/cookbooks, or newspapers and magazines, both high-speed gender groups now use a computer and/or mobile device as machines that can provide a lot of the daily information, entertainment, and social communication engagement they need (Rainie, 2006).

When we look at the over 65 crowd, women have still not caught up to men on the Net. This may be attributed to this generation’s trend with men as primary breadwinners and women as homemakers, a hunter-gatherer concept. One third of men over 65 use the Net and one fourth of women plug-in. I gave my mother, age 71, a hand-me down Apple iMac desktop over a year ago, and she still has not opened the box. Mom prefers a landline phone, snail-mail, cable television (the T.V. is never off when I visit), books, newspapers and magazines, and she recently purchased a cell phone for travel needs. How to retrieve voice-mail is still a mystery to her. Dad, age 75, worked into his mid 60’s at a company where computers were used daily for internal communication, product monitoring, and line-control, so he made a seamless transition to the Net in retirement. He limits Net use to product research, current weather, news reports, stock updates, and email with friends and family, but he spends more time watching T.V and the endless repetitive whine of CNN.

Clearly, we need to expand our understanding of CMC and gender age differences on the Net of yesterday and conceptually view it as a relatively equally shared gender medium of different interests (Rainie, 2007; Tufekci & Spence, 2007); the Net is more like an echo space. Net use today reflects society as a normal form of interaction with fluid degrees of feminine and masculine behavior. Up to one-third of our “Greatest Generation” (over age 65) has adopted the Net as a transparent technology in their lives, preferring the invisible technologies they grew up with, T.V., snail-mail, books, and landline telephone. For many college students, major projects are naturally accomplished through the Net as I have found at Gonzaga University by working on Blackboard, and the majority of what takes place on the Net today is embedded into our daily culture as a productive way to live, work, communicate, and play. I wonder what the future holds for on-line business transactions, education, and virtual living—the prospects are a mystery and perhaps fuel for a future essay.

 

References

Rainie, L. (2006, January 3). Analysis: Study Details Gender Differences in Net Use. NPR: Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan in Washington DC. Retrieved on September 12, 2008, from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5080998&sc=emaf

Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., & Tomic, A. (2004). Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet, Chapter on Women and the Internet (pp. 129- 136). London: Sage.

 
Tufekci, Z., & Spence, K. (2007, Aug). Online Social Network Sites: A Gendered Inflection Point in the Increasingly Social Web? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, TBA, New York, NY. Retrieved on September 12, 2008, from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p182984_index.html