Summary

Abram writes that Socrates, by asking a speaker to explain what he had said, interrupts the thought patterns of oral culture. In an oral culture, one listens to the flow and energy of the words and not necessarily the logic of the sentences. Where once a word like virtue was part of an event, now it was seen as having an independent form from the speaker, something eternal and unchanging. While Plato embedded a general critique of written language within his work—for example, people will cease to exercise memory if they have a written text—he also writes Socrates’ claim that the trees had nothing to teach him. Plato’s text is a reminder of how the community of Athens had withdrawn from the sensorial and animate world and bodiless Ideas and transcendent nature is supreme.

Abram discusses reading as the senses...