> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
Harsh. Socrates didn't write his ideas, a counter example that immediately popped up in my head.
Harsh. Socrates didn't write his ideas, a counter example that immediately popped up in my head.
Many people think Socrates is "against writing" by all means. In the dialogue Phaedrus, he—well, Socrates as portrayed by Plato—does sort of say that writing is okay, as long as you're doing it in the right spirit (seeking truth) and are not deceiving your audience.
What Socrates rails against is the "speechmakers" who don't truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based on "what is likely" to persuade the audience.
Whether this was Plato's idea, or Socrates', the idea wasn't wrong. It was, however, irrelevant. It is acceptable for that skill to atrophy if we replace it with something far more durable.
The irony of putting that in writing would not have been lost on Plato.