Redeem the Time

If we take “learning” in a general sense, it is true to say that we learn more from other people than we do from books.

Yet it is easy to forget this fact, most likely because it is so much a part of our daily lives. We cannot forget this, lest we fall into needless despair and hatred of our own kind.

Books are essential to the intellectual life because they allow for people to transmit their thoughts to others over great periods of time. Great books are like noble statutes, forever pointing to what truly is, forever spurring us onward and upward. They are written, explained, and pondered by people.

The rational, political animal, possessed of an eternal soul, is alive. Books are his lifeless product. Most of what one needs to know to understand books comes from what we learned from others.

Wisdom means loving people more than books, because truth is actually and properly in people—and only potentially and accidentally in books.

Consider that in the sense that the Son of God is a person, and the truth itself, this not only pertains to the second great commandment, but the first.

See also here, here, and here.

Read Xenophon’s description of Socrates and Euthydemus—a youth who “had formed a large collection of the works of celebrated poets and professors, and therefore supposed himself to be a prodigy of wisdom for his age, and was confident of surpassing all competitors in power of speech and action.”

Read also the second half of the Phaedrus:

…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.

***

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

***

Soc. Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power-a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

Phaedr. Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?

Soc. 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.

Phaedr. You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which written word is properly no more than an image?

***

…even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man’s own and his legitimate offspring;-being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his others;-and who cares for them and no others-this is the right sort of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him.