The Father of Logos

Socrates engages in a dialogue with Phaedrus about the propriety and impropriety of writing:

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific (pharmakon) both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific (pharmakon) which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality…

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Phaedrus: That again is most true.

Socrates: Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power — a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

Phaedrus: Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?

Socrates: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.

Phaedrus: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which written word is properly no more than an image?

Socrates: Yes, of course that is what I mean.

* * * *

In “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972) Derrida (psycho)analyzes Socrates’ mythic tale. Theoth presents his invention to Thamus as a gift offered by a vassal to his lord. He extols its value as a mnemonic aid. The king doesn’t know how to write, but he doesn’t need to: he can speak. He rejects and demeans Theoth’s gift, saying that its purported benefit is actually its greatest flaw. The cure (pharmakon) is really a poison (pharmakon).

The lord is the father who speaks the word (logos), says Derrida:

Not that logos is the father, either. But the origin of logos is its father. One could say anachronously that the “speaking subject” is the father of his speech… Logos is a son, then, a son that would be destroyed in his very presence without a present attendance of his father. Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing. At least that is what is said by the one who says: it is the father’s thesis.

In speech the word comes forth from the speaker like a son from a father. The spoken logos depends on the father’s wisdom and memory as the son depends on the father. But writing cuts the logos off from the speaker, the son from the father. You could even say that writing depends on the absence of the father — in effect, writing is patricide. Logos the son, now orphaned, is free: he no longer needs to rely on the father to be brought forth as speech. The son no longer needs the father’s memory — he no longer needs to remember the father — because he has absorbed the memories of the father into himself. Logos the son becomes autonomous.

Socrates agrees with mythical king Thamus about the inferiority of written words: “if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them.” There’s a hidden threat in Socrates’ speech, like a mafia don offering his protection from a violence that he himself might inflict. But Socrates is also expressing his own fear and vulnerability. Writing is a poison, reaching back into the king’s memory and erasing it, killing the king from inside himself:

From the position of the holder of the scepter, the desire of writing is indicated, designated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion. Isn’t this pharmakon then a criminal thing, a poisoned present?

Derrida sees in Socrates’ discourse the mythic origin of the “metaphysics of presence” that has dominated Western thought ever since.

In contrast to writing, living logos is alive in that it has a living father (whereas the orphan is already half dead), a father that is present, standing near it, behind it, within it, sustaining it with his rectitude, attending it in person in his own name. Living logos, for its part, recognizes its debt, lives off that recognition, and forbids itself, thinks it can forbid itself patricide… For only the “living” discourse, only a spoken word (and not a speech’s theme, object, or subject) can have a father… the logoi are the children. Alive enough to protest on occasion and to let themselves be questioned; capable, too, in contrast to written things, of responding when their father is there. They are their father’s responsible presence.

Already half dead, says Derrida. For Socrates, writing is cut off from the speaker, from the life that animates the writing. Yet the writing still speaks and remembers even in its father’s absence, even after his death, even after the son kills the father by emptying him of his words and his memories. Speech ends and memory fails, but the written word and the archive can go on forever. Half-dead eternal killer, never really present but not absent, writing is the speaker’s uncanny double. For writing has no essence or value of its own, whether positive or negative. It plays within the simulacrum.

Socrates recounted this myth of writing in a conversation with his student Phaedrus. The king, the father of speech, has thus asserted his authority over the father of writing. Plato, another of Socrates’ students and the father of the metaphysics of presence, is also the one who kills his master and father by writing down his logoi. So the metaphysics of presence from the beginning already contains its own death.

In Derrida’s interpretation, writing is no longer an expression of the author. A text is an autonomous thing, capable of speaking for itself without remaining under its father’s protection. But, Derrida insinuates, once you make the move of detaching the writing from the author, why stop there? What about speech? The speaker is the father of logos, but no one would know the father unless the son reveals him. Why not entertain the possibility that logoi reveal themselves from the beginning, that the speaker comes into being through the words that he speaks, that the father issues forth from the son?