This famous image captures two figures of Western history, Plato and Aristotle, who are said to be gesturing to their different conceptions of the world.
Plato, on the left, gestures up to the heavens, pointing to the ethereal, timeless forms, which he believes everything we see to be imperfect manifestations of. Aristotle instead wanted to found knowledge on empirical observations and experience.
In the historical record, both have overshadowed their predecessor, Socrates. Most of our understanding of him comes from writings by Plato, for he did not leave any writings on his philosophies; indeed, we do know that he wasn't fond of writing and literacy. In their place he championed oral communication, as he felt the dependence on physical recordings would damage our memories.
From personal experience, we know that he had a point. If you have a phone book, or keep numbers recorded on your cell-phone, it will probably weaken your recall of phone numbers.
Many others don't see a problem here. They usually say that this leaves room for our mind to focus on more important problems.
Before sharing my own thoughts, I must preface them by saying that I haven't read widely on Socrates, and also acknowledge that we must always be careful to extrapolate from our limited understanding of past figures.
I can at least say that I hope we have been misunderstanding him.
I hope he wasn't that short-sighted.
Because we not only lose the fidelity of our memories; we also begin to forget to appreciate their adaptiveness. By championing oral communication, he - implicitly, at least - valued the changes and challenges of the present more highly than those of the past or future.
Any human-made physical recording, not just writings, pictures, photographs and audiovisual recordings but also buildings and monuments all bring a lasting quality to human activities that would be beyond our reach without those technologies. They capture moments in time, and make them timeless, they give them a degree of permanence.
We tend to like permanence. It has given rulers a sense of immortality, while those less fortunate are at least left with one of stability and predictability; as long as they remain in the ruler's favour, anyway.
There's a familiar saying that "nothing lasts forever." Perhaps Socrates just wished for people to take that idea more seriously.
Unfortunately, Western philosophical tradition hasn't. In asking "What Is?" it strives for the Platonic Form; it seeks a constant identity in the shifting shadows of the world. Written into the doctrines of Christianity is the permanence of death, in contrast to Eastern religions with ideas of reincarnation and the cycles of degeneration. I don't support either, I just wish to highlight the divergence of views; the West would gain by embracing a more Eastern acceptance of change.
Otherwise, we run into meaningless debates of whether, for example - since most of the cells in our bodies are completely replaced in a six month period - we are the same people now as six months ago. Definitions presume stability; defining something like who we are presumes constants that aren't there. Physicists have identified a few; human nature isn't one of them.
I attended a talk recently that had the premise of founding human behaviour on reciprocity and interdependence. Unfortunately, I had heard a quote from Gandhi earlier in the day:
Although I have no doubt that the qualities of reciprocity and interdependence are essential to a community, they are not enough. Gandhi shares the more subtle view that sometimes our past experiences can lead us to wall ourselves off from others, regardless of those individual's circumstances at the time, and how they - and ourselves - may have changed since.The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
The Africans have a concept of 'Ubuntu,' which is usually translated as "I am, because we are." It not only conceives of our nature on an unstable basis - the security of our local or global community - it is a far more broad-minded and potentially much less selfish view than the bare notions of 'reciprocity' and 'interdependence.'
To the weak, all change is a potential insecurity, strength enables us to stand tall and confront it.
The importance that Socrates places on memory also supports - again, at least implicitly - a sense of personal value. Human-made recordings, once they arise from the mind of their creator, are social goods. Oral communication is also social, but it fosters a sense of community because only the immediate parties to it can benefit from it. Because of the ability to replicate and transmit recordings broadly, especially in the age of the Internet, they can easily be separated from their context and lose the meaning a community depends on.
When people invest themselves in the past as captured in a physical, human-made 'recording', they become vulnerable to the changes that others can inflict on those embodiments of an idea. Although there's no issue here in a society with a strong sense of community and values like ubuntu and reciprocity, when the individual becomes isolated they become further open to all sorts of abuse.
A capitalist economy can easily compound the problems. Depending on whether people place their values in other individuals or in services or material goods, different 'communities' are formed. If a community is founded more on material goods than individuals, then all of the individuals that are party in some way to those material goods are potential victims of those goods.
If the value of some physical recordings to a community, for example, is perceived by even a single individual to have become tarnished by the presence or actions of another person - possibly the original creator of the works - then that person could conceivably become more valuable dead than alive to the individual.
What is even worse, is that this individual's perceptions may be reinforced by the unwitting interests of consumers, expressing these interests through the anonymous media of markets and money. They don't pull the trigger, but they do pay for the gun.
The true value of memories is their capacity for helping build the future. There is worth in the broad dissemination that recordings afford, but only with the understanding that not all ideas can be transplanted without changing to meet the nature of their new time or place.
Traveling down the memory lane in our heads is far less riddled with potholes, but if we venture down it in any manner to hide from the changes of the present, we'll find that most of the paths end in ruin anyway.
