Evidence 2 (in no particular order)

DRAFT

I start here with the following from Jacques Derrida.*

Hegel was already caught up in this game. On the one hand, he undoubtedly summed up the entire philosophy of the logos. He determined ontology as absolute logic; he assembled all the delimitations of philosophy as presence; he assigned to presence the eschatology of parousia, of the self-proximity of infinite subjectivity. And for the same reason he had to debase or subordinate writing. 'When he criticizes the Leibnizian characteristic, the formalism of the understanding, and mathematical symbolism, he makes the same gesture: denouncing the being-outside-of-itself of the logos in the sensible or the intellectual abstraction. Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory, of the Erinnerung that opens the history of the spirit. It is this that the Phaedrus said: writing is at once mnemotechnique and the power of forgetting. Naturally, the Hegelian critique of writing stops at the alphabet. (p. 110)

I understood this passage in the following ways, in terms of the hypothesis I am trying to refute that is.

+ Once I write it for you to read, I can forget, because I have a means, a tool to remember later, if I choose.

+ And you, you can converse with this externalized self without my being present.

+ Also by this means, I distance myself from who I am, what I think and feel now. It is out there and no longer in here. What was an _is_ (presence) is now a _was_ (my words past).

+ But since I am not always present and someday will not be, here, listen to me and respond. I believe--I value--what I have to share will be important. I trust I have done my art and artifice sufficiently that you can "converse" with the voice you hear in my text, my final word.

+ And by this means, I am my text and can be praised or condemned or ignored or unknown, just as when I speak with you in person.***

We pay homage to and comment on Plato.** He seems to be key in privileging speech-in-conversation over what is written, or a text in the form of a speech. Socrates relates this account.

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. 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.

And Socrates further comments in the Phaedrus.

He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Socrates then provides this his salient point, which in addition qualifies speech as speech-in-conversation, the necessary give and take to uncover the essential of language and meaning. "I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent."

Phaedrus echoes and synthesizes the argument in this rhetorical way. "You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which written word is properly no more than an image?"

The continued importance of the written has an answer to privileging speech, or speech-in-conversation. First in the Phaedrus, there is the performative error. We have written words to make the point that the written is less strong, effective, colorful, precise, present, etc., than the spoken. On the other hand, the written is that of speech-in-conversation. Perhaps this is an exception.

That what the speaker as writer is trying to do by writing is to leave in the reader's soul precisely that which s/he has thought and written. Where the written is seen as something less than words in presence, distant, divorced from the soul of the subject-author, the conscious intent is to leave the essence of what was thought with the reader.

The history that Derrida relates and what the Phaedrus dialogue argues all seem to come from looking at a text as a thing, a product. A first-person objective artifact, which is of less value than in-person talk and discussion and clarification. An artful and artificial creation of an author. If, on the other hand, the text is viewed as the singular and repeatable experience of the reader who reads it, its value takes on the quality of presence, that personal and intimate and soulful communication of speaker with listener, not excluding the "listener's" ability to question and seek answers from the text. The phenomenology of reading entails at least an earnest attempt to hear and comprehend what the speaker is trying to express.

Again, seen in this light, a text is not so much distant and disembodied but a living replica of what was in the author's body, mind, and soul that can be visited and revisited, or ignored/forgotten if that is its fate, and the fate of the speaker whose words once uttered have been forgotten or re- and again re-interpreted beyond the original's verbatim.

A text as instructive and informative _image_ and relying upon Google as a way to appear knowledgeable and educated without higher levels of competence and wisdom(?) provable (I allude here to Bloom and others in their taxonomies for learning and performance) must be placed into this consideration of the relative values of speech and the written. In addition, the imperative obviously being carried out ubiquitously of discussing things in print must also be considered when valuing and determining the soul-subjectivity of the word uttered. But these are not to be placed in the center of this discussion. In short, the written as representation or image of the natural word (the spoken) is dismissed.****

What is important and valuable is that the written is intended, for the most part, to be read. And in this reciprocal nexus lies the question of the text and writing as doing/being phenomenology. That phenomenology helps us unpack this nexus is or is not a fair use of this way of understanding.

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* Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

** Plato. (n.d.). Phaedrus. Retrieved October 2, 2013, from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.1b.txt

*** Compare this with Derrida, page 226.

**** The allusion here is to Derrida, page 228.