What Remains: The Propriety of Writing
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Socrates — οὐκοῦν τὸ μὲν τέχνης τε καὶ ἀτεχνίας λόγων πέρι ἱκανῶς ἐχέτω·… τὸ δʼ εὐπρεπείας δὴ γραφῆς πέρι καὶ ἀπρεπείας, πῇ γιγνόμενον καλῶς ἂν ἔχοι καὶ ὅπῃ ἀπρεπῶς, λοιπόν.
With the analogy to medicine and tragedy complete, Socrates draws a line under the whole inquiry into rhetoric. The question of technē and atechnia — of what is and is not a real art in the making of speeches — 'may be taken as sufficiently covered,' hikanōs echetō. What is left, he says, is a different question altogether: the euprepeia and aprepeia of writing itself, its 'seemliness and unseemliness' — in what way a written thing comes out finely, and in what way unbecomingly. The dialogue pivots here from spoken rhetoric to the written word, the theme that carries it to the end: the Egyptian myth of Theuth and Thamus, the charge that writing erodes memory, and the final ranking of living speech above the silent letter.
Socrates has finished dismantling the handbook-writers' claim to a real art of rhetoric. Here he draws a line under that whole inquiry and names the one topic left — not whether writing is an art, but whether it is done becomingly. The move launches the dialogue's final movement, the myth of writing's invention.
The hinge of the sentence is a change of vocabulary that is easy to miss. For pages Socrates has judged rhetoric by whether it is a <em>technē</em> — a real art with knowledge behind it — or mere <em>atechnia</em>, a knack with no science. Now, turning to writing, he does not ask whether writing is an art at all; he asks after its <em>euprepeia</em> and <em>aprepeia</em>, its 'seemliness' and 'unseemliness,' whether it is practiced in a becoming way. The measure quietly shifts from knowledge to fitness — to the <em>prepon</em>, the 'fitting,' the same root that gave the tragedians their composition 'fitted to one another and to the whole' a page earlier (268d). What is becoming here is not a matter of getting the facts right but of using the written word in a way that suits what it is and what it can do. It is the category Roman rhetoric would later name <em>decorum</em>. There is a second charge already loaded in the word <em>graphē</em>: in Greek it means both 'writing' and 'drawing,' and Socrates is about to exploit exactly that, comparing written words to painted figures that stand there looking alive but fall silent the moment you question them (275d). The propriety of writing will turn out to be bound up with its strange, picture-like helplessness — it cannot defend itself, cannot choose its readers, cannot answer back. By framing the last movement of the <em>Phaedrus</em> as a question of what befits writing rather than what writing knows, Socrates prepares the verdict that living, spoken dialectic — speech that can respond — stands above the beautiful but mute artifact of the page.
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