Seeming-Wise Instead of Wise
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Socrates — … πολυγνώμονες εἶναι δόξουσιν ἀγνώμονες… ὄντες, καὶ χαλεποὶ συνεῖναι, δοξόσοφοι γεγονότες ἀντὶ σοφῶν.
Phaedrus — ὦ Σώκρατες, ῥᾳδίως σὺ Αἰγυπτίους καὶ ὁποδαποὺς ἂν ἐθέλῃς λόγους ποιεῖς.
Thamus's verdict closes on a barbed piece of wordplay. Those who take their learning from written marks, he says, will 'seem to be polygnōmones' — men of many opinions, knowing-seeming — while in fact being 'agnōmones,' without judgment: the same γνώμη-root turned against itself, much opinion masking no discernment. They will be hard to live with (chalepoi syneinai) and, in the phrase that crowns the whole tale, doxosophoi gegonotes anti sophōn — 'having become seeming-wise instead of wise.' Phaedrus, tickled by the story, breaks in: you, Socrates, make up Egyptian tales — and tales of any country you like — with the greatest of ease. Socrates will answer (275b–c) that it does not matter who tells a truth or where it comes from, only whether it is so.
The king's verdict on writing reaches its sting. Those who learn from written marks will hear much and be taught nothing, and so will only seem to know: full of opinions, empty of judgment, hard company — seeming-wise instead of wise. Phaedrus, delighted, teases Socrates for manufacturing Egyptian tales at will.
The passage turns on a single manufactured word, <em>doxosophos</em>, and it is worth pausing on, because Plato built it to carry the whole warning. It fuses <em>doxa</em> — opinion, appearance, how a thing seems — with <em>sophos</em>, wise, into one adjective: 'seeming-wise,' wise in the currency of appearance and nowhere else. This is not a stray coinage but the exact diagnosis Socrates gives of himself and everyone else in the <em>Apology</em>: the politicians and poets and craftsmen who each 'seemed wise, to others and above all to themselves,' and were not — the gap between how wisdom looks and what it is being the entire object of the Socratic examination. Writing, Thamus charges, is a machine for mass-producing that gap: it hands people the tokens of knowledge, the much-having-heard, without the labor of being taught, and so fills the world with the <em>doxa</em> of wisdom in place of the thing. The <em>polygnōmōn</em> / <em>agnōmōn</em> pun sharpens it — you can be crammed with opinions (<em>poly-gnōmōn</em>) and for that very reason be without judgment (<em>a-gnōmōn</em>), because opinions collected are not the same as understanding earned. The deep irony, which Plato surely intends and Phaedrus half-names, is that this indictment of writing survives only because Plato wrote it down. Phaedrus's tease — 'you make up Egyptian stories at will' — points straight at the seam: Socrates has just delivered a myth, as spoken hearsay, whose whole burden is that written words are orphaned and cannot answer for themselves. The dialogue is quietly testing whether a piece of writing can, after all, do the living work of speech — and staking its answer on the reader's willingness to argue back.
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