Writing as Pharmakon
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Theuth — τοῦτο δέ, ὦ βασιλεῦ, τὸ μάθημα σοφωτέρους Αἰγυπτίους καὶ· μνήμης τε γὰρ καὶ σοφίας φάρμακον ηὑρέθη
Theuth offers writing to the king as a gift, and names it a <em>phármakon</em> — a remedy — for the two great failings of the mind: forgetting, and ignorance. Learn to write, he promises, and the Egyptians will remember more and know more. It sounds like pure benefit. The king will answer that the god has it exactly backwards.
Near the dialogue's end, Socrates tells an Egyptian tale. The god Theuth, inventor of writing, presents it to King Thamus as a gift — a cure for the failings of memory and wisdom.
The whole quarrel of the Phaedrus condenses into one word. <em>phármakon</em> means both remedy and poison — the same word, undecidably — so the moment Theuth calls writing a cure, Greek has already whispered that it may be the opposite. Thamus will make the reversal explicit: writing produces <em>forgetting</em>, not memory, because we lean on outside marks instead of the living recollection within; and it gives the mere <em>seeming</em> of <em>sophía</em>, wisdom, not the thing itself. The deepest irony is that Plato mounts this attack on writing <em>in writing</em> — the poison that carries the warning is the same drug it warns against. He seems to mean the word to stay unsettled: writing is the medicine we cannot trust and cannot do without.
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