Feb 3, 2025 08:36 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 3, 2025 09:08 PM by Magical Realist.)
Some thoughts about Eric Havelock's "The Muse Learns To Write". I am fascinated with the idea of written language as essentially a technology for storing data and passing it down to future generations, which I first learned about from reading McLuhan. I like the thesis of this book that writing came to dominate and change our view of the world and of language itself in our civilization, which I agree is an essentially acoustic or sound-mediated form of communication. Even read words are still utilizing the spoken and heard qualities of oral speech. We still in this sense do not visually decipher written words so much as silently speak them to ourselves. Here's some musings by a software programmer reviewing Havelock's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Muse-Learns-Write...0300043821
"The Muse Learns to Write focuses on the transition of Greek society from orality (around 700 B.C.) to literacy (around 400 B.C.) and the impact that the adoption of writing had on the way we think. A foundation of the analysis that Havelock drives home is the point that writing, more than a communication technology, is a data storage technology. It is a method of storing and retrieving information in a way that was previously not possible. He then asserts that, before the invention of writing, there was a pre-existing storage and retrieval technology — which we might call “oral tradition” (or “orality”). The thesis is that in order for a civilization to exist there must be a mechanism for information storage as a means of preserving cultural norms for succeeding generations.
Not creativity … but recall and recollection pose the key to our civilized existence.
Prior to the invention of writing, that technology was, for lack of a better word, poetry. Rhyme and meter were error-correcting devices to ensure uncorrupted “copying” of the information. Havelock believes meter was more important than rhyme as an error-correcting technology. In addition, memory aids included movement: hand gestures and dance-like movements were part of the recitation tool-chest. Furthermore, abstract concepts were not used; in order to talk about something, it had to be “concretized”, typically by being anthropomorphized. The Greek gods, then, were not “gods” in the way we understand the concept; they were concrete embodiments of abstract concepts like “courage” or “beauty” or “duplicity” reified as people. Havelock makes another observation about orality: Poets never used the verb “to be” to ascribe a property to a person or thing. Verbs were always action verbs. The medium did not describe properties (which need be inferred); it recalled actions, which could be observed.
In fact, it was this difference between the literate style (prose) and the oral style(poetry) that leads to Plato’s animus against poetry in The Republic. Plato lived at the cusp of the transition from orality to literacy. He was railing against the old technology that was incapable of treating abstract ideas and unable to discuss properties of things; he was advocating for using this new technology (writing) which would allow the discussion of ideas that could not be addressed using the old means of communication and information storage. That was why he wanted to ban poets from his new world — they made it impossible to discuss philosophy.
As someone who comes from the world of software, this idea that one’s storage or communication technology would make certain ideas possible (or impossible) to discuss has resonance. Imagine trying to explain object-oriented programming to somebody who was only familiar with machine language. There is no way to restate the concepts into machine language². You cannot even discuss “assignment” (the programming equivalent of “to be”) in machine language. There are no variables — there are only machine locations — so one cannot say “A = 5” in machine language. The closest is “I’m going to store a 5 at memory location 512”.
Another quirk of language and thought that Havelock points out is that in a pre-literate world, one does not use the metaphor “looking at” something to mean “thinking about it.” Literacy is the storage medium where one looks at things to think about them. Orality would have to say “hearing about” something to mean “thinking about it.” This observation is at the heart of the thesis of the book:
'The conversion of an acoustic medium for communication into a visible object used for the same purpose had wide effects which at the the time they occurred were accepted unconsciously (with some exceptions); and by and large they have been so accepted ever since. As a result of technological efficiency, the conversion could become total — the only instance of this kind in human history. All language could now be thought of as written language. The text as read came to be regarded as the equivalent of the word as spoken. Since scholars and specialists deal almost exclusively with texts, the assumption has grown up that writing is identical with language — in fact, that writing is language, rather than merely a visual artifact designed to trigger the memory of a series of linguistic noises by symbolic association.'
The “technological efficiency” that Havelock refers to in the preceding quote is that although there were alphabets and writing systems prior to the Greeks, they all had letters for the consonants but none for the vowels. Writing, therefore, did not capture the “linguistic noises” effectively. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, but had fewer consonants, so they mapped the left over letters to vowels — becoming the first writing system to represent vowel sounds.
More “food for thought” from the previous quote is that if “writing” is an encoding of “linguistic noises”, then a programming language, which does not have “linguistic noises” is a different kind of literacy. It is mostly impossible to read code aloud. You can’t “hear about” code. You have to “look at it”.
There are more nuggets buried in this book. For example, Havelock ascribes the concept of “selfhood” to literacy:
'The special theory of Greek literacy also argues that the concept of selfhood and the soul, as now understood, arose at a historical point and was inspired by a technological change, as the inscribed language and thought and the person who spoke it became separated from each other, leading to a new focus on the personality of the speaker.' "-------- https://ockham.online/the-muse-learns-to...d90de8b4e1
https://www.amazon.com/Muse-Learns-Write...0300043821
"The Muse Learns to Write focuses on the transition of Greek society from orality (around 700 B.C.) to literacy (around 400 B.C.) and the impact that the adoption of writing had on the way we think. A foundation of the analysis that Havelock drives home is the point that writing, more than a communication technology, is a data storage technology. It is a method of storing and retrieving information in a way that was previously not possible. He then asserts that, before the invention of writing, there was a pre-existing storage and retrieval technology — which we might call “oral tradition” (or “orality”). The thesis is that in order for a civilization to exist there must be a mechanism for information storage as a means of preserving cultural norms for succeeding generations.
Not creativity … but recall and recollection pose the key to our civilized existence.
Prior to the invention of writing, that technology was, for lack of a better word, poetry. Rhyme and meter were error-correcting devices to ensure uncorrupted “copying” of the information. Havelock believes meter was more important than rhyme as an error-correcting technology. In addition, memory aids included movement: hand gestures and dance-like movements were part of the recitation tool-chest. Furthermore, abstract concepts were not used; in order to talk about something, it had to be “concretized”, typically by being anthropomorphized. The Greek gods, then, were not “gods” in the way we understand the concept; they were concrete embodiments of abstract concepts like “courage” or “beauty” or “duplicity” reified as people. Havelock makes another observation about orality: Poets never used the verb “to be” to ascribe a property to a person or thing. Verbs were always action verbs. The medium did not describe properties (which need be inferred); it recalled actions, which could be observed.
In fact, it was this difference between the literate style (prose) and the oral style(poetry) that leads to Plato’s animus against poetry in The Republic. Plato lived at the cusp of the transition from orality to literacy. He was railing against the old technology that was incapable of treating abstract ideas and unable to discuss properties of things; he was advocating for using this new technology (writing) which would allow the discussion of ideas that could not be addressed using the old means of communication and information storage. That was why he wanted to ban poets from his new world — they made it impossible to discuss philosophy.
As someone who comes from the world of software, this idea that one’s storage or communication technology would make certain ideas possible (or impossible) to discuss has resonance. Imagine trying to explain object-oriented programming to somebody who was only familiar with machine language. There is no way to restate the concepts into machine language². You cannot even discuss “assignment” (the programming equivalent of “to be”) in machine language. There are no variables — there are only machine locations — so one cannot say “A = 5” in machine language. The closest is “I’m going to store a 5 at memory location 512”.
Another quirk of language and thought that Havelock points out is that in a pre-literate world, one does not use the metaphor “looking at” something to mean “thinking about it.” Literacy is the storage medium where one looks at things to think about them. Orality would have to say “hearing about” something to mean “thinking about it.” This observation is at the heart of the thesis of the book:
'The conversion of an acoustic medium for communication into a visible object used for the same purpose had wide effects which at the the time they occurred were accepted unconsciously (with some exceptions); and by and large they have been so accepted ever since. As a result of technological efficiency, the conversion could become total — the only instance of this kind in human history. All language could now be thought of as written language. The text as read came to be regarded as the equivalent of the word as spoken. Since scholars and specialists deal almost exclusively with texts, the assumption has grown up that writing is identical with language — in fact, that writing is language, rather than merely a visual artifact designed to trigger the memory of a series of linguistic noises by symbolic association.'
The “technological efficiency” that Havelock refers to in the preceding quote is that although there were alphabets and writing systems prior to the Greeks, they all had letters for the consonants but none for the vowels. Writing, therefore, did not capture the “linguistic noises” effectively. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, but had fewer consonants, so they mapped the left over letters to vowels — becoming the first writing system to represent vowel sounds.
More “food for thought” from the previous quote is that if “writing” is an encoding of “linguistic noises”, then a programming language, which does not have “linguistic noises” is a different kind of literacy. It is mostly impossible to read code aloud. You can’t “hear about” code. You have to “look at it”.
There are more nuggets buried in this book. For example, Havelock ascribes the concept of “selfhood” to literacy:
'The special theory of Greek literacy also argues that the concept of selfhood and the soul, as now understood, arose at a historical point and was inspired by a technological change, as the inscribed language and thought and the person who spoke it became separated from each other, leading to a new focus on the personality of the speaker.' "-------- https://ockham.online/the-muse-learns-to...d90de8b4e1
