Lezione di Filosofia. Platone: I dialoghi e il rapporto oralità scrittura. Il mito di Theuth.

Philosophy Lessons. Plato: The Dialogues and the Relationship between Orality and Writing. The Myth of Theuth and Thamus. Lesson #2. Plato shares with Socrates the superiority of oral tradition over written tradition, yet this does not prevent him from producing a vast body of work. Indeed, we can affirm that, despite the belief that true knowledge cannot be transmitted through writing, Plato was the greatest writer of antiquity. From a young age, he devoted himself to literature, poetry, and tragedy. How, then, was it possible to reconcile an aversion to writing with the creation of the greatest ancient works of all time? This video is part of the video lessons on the history of ideas in Western philosophy and science, curated by Professor Bernardo Croci. The text of these lessons is available on the website www.storiadelleidee.it The Myth: I have heard that in Naucratis, Egypt, there dwelt one of the ancient gods of that country, the god to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred, and whose name was Theuth. He was the inventor of numbers, calculus, geometry, and astronomy, not to mention the board game and dice, and finally the letters of the alphabet. King of the entire country at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city of Upper Egypt that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes and whose god is Amun. Theuth came to the king and revealed his arts, saying that they should be spread among all Egyptians. The king of each art asked him what use it was, and as Theuth explained, he disapproved of what seemed negative and praised what he thought was good. On each art, the story goes, Thamus had many arguments to offer Theuth, both for and against, but it would take too long to recount them. When they reached the alphabet, "This science, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and enrich their memory, for this discovery is a medicine for wisdom and memory." And the king replied: "O most ingenious Theuth, the power to create new arts is one thing, but it is another to judge what degree of harm and benefit they possess for those who will use them. And so now you, out of benevolence toward the alphabet of which you are the inventor, have exposed the opposite of its true effect. For it will engender forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it: they will cease to exercise their memory because, trusting in the written word, they will recall things to mind no longer from within themselves, but from without, through external signs: what you have discovered is not a recipe for memory but for recalling. Nor do you offer true wisdom to your students, but only the appearance of it, because, thanks to you, being able to learn many things without instruction, they will believe themselves to be very learned, while for the most part they will know nothing; it will be a pain to converse with them, stuffed with opinions instead of wisdom." (Plato, Phaedrus)