Great Naivety: An Art Left in Ink
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Socrates — οὐκοῦν ὁ τέχνην οἰόμενος ἐν γράμμασι καταλιπεῖν, καὶ αὖ ὁ παραδεχόμενος ὥς τι σαφὲς καὶ βέβαιον ἐκ γραμμάτων ἐσόμενον, πολλῆς ἂν εὐηθείας γέμοι καὶ τῷ ὄντι τὴν Ἄμμωνος μαντείαν ἀγνοοῖ.
The moral of the myth is now stated flat. Anyone who imagines he can 'leave an art behind in written words' (technēn en grammasi katalipein), and anyone who in turn 'receives' those words as if something clear and firm — saphes kai bebaion — could be got out of writing, is, Socrates says, brimming with 'great naivety,' pollēs euētheias, and has genuinely failed to understand the oracle of Ammon. The point is not that writing is worthless but that it cannot do what its enthusiasts claim: it cannot contain or transmit a technē, cannot deposit secure knowledge in a reader who does not already have it. The written word is at best a hypomnēsis, a reminder — the theme the next lines make explicit — for one who already knows the things the writing is about.
Socrates has just told the Egyptian tale. He presses its point — it does not matter who told the story or from what country, only whether it is true — and Phaedrus concedes the rebuke. Then Socrates states the conclusion the whole myth was built toward: to believe a real art, something clear and firm, can be deposited in written marks is great foolishness.
The hinge word is one Plato uses with careful double edge: <em>euētheia</em>. Built from <em>eu</em> ('well') and <em>ēthos</em> ('character'), it means, at root, good-naturedness — an honest, guileless simplicity — and it slides, in exactly this innocent way, into naivety, the credulity of someone too good-hearted to suspect he is being sold something hollow. To think a book can hand you an art is not wickedness; it is a kind of innocence, and that is what makes it dangerous. The person taken in by writing is not a fool in the harsh sense but a <em>trusting</em> one, mistaking the outward tokens of knowledge — the clear-looking, firm-looking marks on the page — for the thing itself. This is the same gap the previous lines named with <em>doxosophos</em>: the appearance of knowing standing in for knowing. Behind it lies the distinction the dialogue is driving toward and will name outright — between <em>mnēmē</em>, genuine memory held in a living soul, and <em>hypomnēsis</em>, the external reminder a written mark can supply. Writing traffics only in the second and pretends to the first. There is a well-known and slightly vertiginous consequence: Plato thought this seriously enough that, in the Seventh Letter, he denied ever having written down his deepest teaching at all, insisting that what matters most 'is in no way a spoken or written thing' but kindles only in the give-and-take of two souls at work together. And Socrates dignifies the whole verdict by calling Thamus's judgment a <em>manteia</em>, an oracle — folding the critique of writing back into the dialogue's governing theme of divine, unpremeditated speech (the prophetic <em>mania</em> of 244b), as if the truth about the written word were itself something one must be inspired, not merely informed, to grasp.
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