The Living, Ensouled Word
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — ὃς μετʼ ἐπιστήμης γράφεται ἐν τῇ μανθάνοντος ψυχῇ, δυνατὸς μὲν ἀμῦναι ἑαυτῷ, ἐπιστήμων δὲ λέγειν τε καὶ σιγᾶν πρὸς οὓς δεῖ.
Phaedrus — τὸν τοῦ εἰδότος λόγον λέγεις ζῶντα καὶ ἔμψυχον, οὗ ὁ γεγραμμένος εἴδωλον ἄν τι λέγοιτο δικαίως.
It is the word written with knowledge in the soul of the learner — able to defend itself, and knowing before whom to speak and before whom to keep silent. … You mean the living, ensouled word of the one who knows, of which the written word would justly be called a mere image.
Against the written word — mute, defenseless, saying the same thing forever — Socrates sets its 'legitimate brother': the word planted alive in a soul. Phaedrus, at last, understands.
Here, at last, is the positive term the whole critique of writing has been reaching for — and Phaedrus, who began the dialogue dazzled by the mere <em>diction</em> of Lysias's speech (234c), is the one who names it. Against the written word — mute, defenseless, repeating itself forever (275d), a garden of quick-dying greens (276b) — Socrates sets its 'legitimate brother': the word 'written with knowledge in the soul' of a learner. Note that he does not abandon the metaphor of writing; he relocates it. The true writing is done not on papyrus but on a <em>soul</em>, planted (the verb a few lines earlier is <em>phyteúō</em>, to sow) by living dialogue into a mind prepared to receive it. And this inner word has exactly the powers the outer one lacks: it can 'defend itself' (<em>amŷnai</em>, the warrior's verb — it can stand up in an argument and fight its own corner), and it is <em>epistḗmōn</em>, 'knowing' — it understands 'before whom to speak and before whom to keep silent,' the discernment of the right hearer and the right moment (<em>kairós</em>) that no book can have.<br><br>Then Phaedrus supplies the phrase that has echoed for two and a half millennia: the <em>living and ensouled</em> word — <em>zôn kaì émpsychon</em>. That second adjective is the whole doctrine in a word. <em>Émpsychos</em> means 'with a soul in it,' and since for Plato the soul is the principle of life and self-motion (245c), the living word is one that moves itself, answers, adapts — alive from within, as a person is and a portrait is not. And Phaedrus draws the exact conclusion: the written word is, at best, an <em>eídōlon</em> — an 'image,' the very word Homer used for the bloodless ghosts of the dead — of this living one. The whole architecture of the dialogue's ending stands revealed: speech spoken soul-to-soul is the living original; writing is its phantom double. Which leaves the deliberate, dizzying irony intact to the last — you are reading Plato's case for the living word in a written one, an <em>eídōlon</em> by its own account, a ghost pointing at the life it cannot be. Plato writes the ghost so well precisely to make you go find the living thing: close the book, and talk.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 276a in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 276a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/276a/