READING: Is Writing → Dialoguing :: Grunt-Programming → Vibe-Coding?
Programming secrets of Hellenic intellectuals from 2500 years ago; an extended passage from Phaidros by Platon of the Athenai that I want to park where I can immediately find it...
As is so often the case, it is fruitful to enter a modern moral-philosophical and social-scientific tag-team debate by treating it as a footnote to the writings between the year -400 and the -345 of Aristokles son of Ariston and Periktione, nicknamed Platon.
In this case, I am thinking about the ongoing tag-team discussion about how to use MAMLM—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning—technologies as front-end word-processing tools for us. Who is this “us” here? This “us” is composed of those who serve as calculation and output nodes of the real ASI we East African Plains Apes have constructed over the past 5000 years since the invention of writing: the Anthology Super-Intelligence of humanities collective mind.
You see, I noticed John Anderson here:
Josh Anderson: I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right <https://leadershiplighthouse.substack.com/p/i-went-all-in-on-ai-the-mit-study>: ‘I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months…. It worked. I was proud…. Then… I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it…. Twenty-five years of software engineering experience, and I’d managed to degrade my skills to the point where I felt helpless looking at code I’d directed an AI to write. I’d become a passenger…. 100% [AI] looks like… failure. Not immediate[ly, but]… three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built…. Bob Galen… called it perfectly…. “Who owns that product, Josh? You or Claude Code?” The answer was Claude Code. I’d abdicated ownership while telling myself I was being innovative…. [There is a] gap between who you are and who you’ve been pretending AI makes you. You can close that gap by developing your actual skills, using AI as a training partner rather than a replacement. Or you can keep abdicating…
And here we have, once again, what the character King Thamus tells the character god Theuth in the story told by the character Sokrates in Platon’s Phaidros about people who try to learn by reading rather than by discussion:
Platon: Phaidros <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636>: ‘Sokrates: “[That will] introduce forgetfulness… [for] they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external…instead of trying to remember from the inside…. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality… and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing…”
This is, of course, both right and wrong.
For one thing, we teachers have all had students who are very good at reciting quotations from books we have assigned them, who can even ace written exams set by professors who set the question “agree with this quotation from my forthcoming book” (as The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life put it back in the day), but who cannot think with the tools and perspectives we had wanted them to acquire.
On the other hand, we only know of this argument against learning-by-reading because Platon wrote it down in a book that people have been reading since. And, yes, Platon thinks that he has found a workaround by writing books that are not treatises but rather dialogues and so of a different order. But almost every person who regularly engages in deep, active, productive reading thinks Platon was wrong—that his dialogue format is not an important part of the package.
At any event, it struck me that I had never set the full Phaidros down anywhere where I could immediately put my hands on it. So here it is:
Platon: Phaidros <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636>: ‘Sokrates…[:] “Thamus… replied: ‘O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are.
‘“‘In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.
‘“‘You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.’”
‘Phaidros: “Sokrates, you’re very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want!”…
‘Sokrates: “You know, Phaidros, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same e thing forever.
‘“When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.”
‘Phaidros: “You are absolutely right about that, too. “
‘Sokrates: “Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?”
‘Phaidros: “Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?”
‘Sokrates: “It is a discourse that is engraved down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.”
‘Phaidros: “You mean the living, breathing discourse of the man who knows, of which the written one can be fairly called an image.”
‘Sokrates: “Absolutely right. And tell me this. Would a sensible farmer, b who cared about his seeds and wanted them to yield fruit, plant them in all seriousness in the gardens of Adonis in the middle of the summer and enjoy watching them bear fruit within seven days? Or would he do this as an amusement and in honor of the holiday, if he did it at all? Wouldn’t he use his knowledge of farming to plant the seeds he cared for when it was appropriate and be content if they bore fruit seven months later?”
‘Phaidros: “That’s how he would handle those he was serious about, Sokrates, quite differently from the others, as you say.
‘Sokrates: “Now what about the man who knows what is just, noble, and good? Shall we say that he is less sensible with his seeds than the farmer is with his?”
‘Phaidros: “Certainly not.”
‘Sokrates: “Therefore, he won’t be serious about writing them in ink, sowing them, through a pen, with words that are as incapable of speaking in their own defense as they are of teaching the truth adequately.”
‘Phaidros: “That wouldn’t be likely.”
‘Sokrates: “Certainly not. When he writes, it’s likely he will sow gardens of letters for the sake of amusing himself, storing up reminders for himself ‘when he reaches forgetful old age’ and for everyone who wants to follow in his footsteps, and will enjoy seeing them sweetly blooming. And when others turn to different amusements, watering themselves with drinking parties and everything else that goes along with them, he will rather spend his time amusing himself with the things I have just described.”
‘Phaidros: “Sokrates, you are contrasting a vulgar amusement with the e very noblest—with the amusement of a man who can while away his time telling stories of justice and the other matters you mentioned.”
‘Sokrates: “That’s just how it is, Phaidros. But it is much nobler to be serious about these matters, and use the art of dialectic. The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal, and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be”
‘Phaidros: “What you describe is really much nobler still.”
‘Sokrates: “And now that we have agreed about this, Phaidros, we are finally able to decide the issue.”
‘Phaidros: “What issue is that?”
‘Sokrates: “The issue which brought us to this point in the first place: We wanted to examine the attack made on Lysias on account of his writing speeches, and to ask which speeches are written artfully and which not. Now, I think that we have answered that question clearly enough.”
‘Phaidros: “So it seemed; but remind me again how we did it.”
‘Sokrates: “First, you must know the truth concerning everything you are speaking or writing about; you must learn how to define each thing in itself; and, having defined it, you must know how to divide it into kinds until you reach something indivisible. Second, you must understand the nature of the soul, along the same lines; you must determine which kind c of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul, prepare and arrange your speech accordingly, and offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one. Then, and only then, will you be able to use speech artfully, to the extent that its nature allows it to be used that way, either in order to teach or in order to persuade. This is the whole point of the argument we have been making.”
‘Phaidros: “Absolutely. That is exactly how it seemed to us.”
‘Sokrates: “Now how about whether it’s noble or shameful to give or write a speech—when it could be fairly said to be grounds for reproach, and when not? Didn’t what we said just a little while ago make it clear—”
‘Phaidros: “What was that?“
‘Sokrates: “That if Lysias or anybody else ever did or ever does write— privately or for the public, in the course of proposing some law—a political document which he believes to embody clear knowledge of lasting importance, then this writer deserves reproach, whether anyone says so or not. For to be unaware of the difference between a dream-image and the reality of what is just and unjust, good and bad, must truly be grounds for reproach even if the crowd praises it with one voice.”
‘Phaidros: “: It certainly must be.”
‘Sokrates: “On the other hand, take a man who thinks that a written discourse on any subject can only be a great amusement, that no discourse worth serious attention has ever been written in verse or prose, and that those that are recited in public without questioning and explanation, in the manner of the rhapsodes, are given only in order to produce conviction. He believes that at their very best these can only serve as reminders to those who already know. And he also thinks that only what is said for the sake of understanding and learning, what is truly written in the soul concerning what is just, noble, and good can be clear, perfect, and worth serious attention: Such discourses should be called his own legitimate children, first the discourse he may have discovered already within himself and then its sons and brothers who may have grown naturally in other souls insofar as these are worthy; to the rest, he turns his back. Such a man, Phaedrus, would be just what you and I both would pray to become.”
‘Phaidros: “wish and pray for things to be just as you say.”
‘Sokrates: “Well, then: our playful amusement regarding discourse is complete. Now you go and tell Lysias that we came to the spring which is sacred to the Nymphs and heard words charging us to deliver a message to Lysias and anyone else who composes speeches, as well as to Homer and anyone else who has composed poetry either spoken or sung, and third, to Solon and anyone else who writes political documents that he calls laws: If any one of you has composed these things with a knowledge of the truth, if you can defend your writing when you are challenged, and if you can yourself make the argument that your writing is of little worth, then you must be called by a name derived not from these writings but d rather from those things that you are seriously pursuing.”
‘Phaidros: “What name, then, would you give such a man?”
‘Sokrates: “To call him wise, Phaidros, seems to me too much, and proper only for a god. To call him wisdom’s lover—a philosopher—or something similar would fit him better and be more seemly…”
References:
Anderson, Josh. 2025. “I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right”. The Leadership Lighthouse. October 22. <https://leadershiplighthouse.substack.com/p/i-went-all-in-on-ai-the-mit-study>.
Harvard Lampoon. 1978. The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1873798.Big_Book_of_College_Life>.
Platon. -365. Phaidros. Athenai. <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636>
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. Process & Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Gifford Lectures. <https://archive.org/details/processrealityes0000alfr>.
I should also park here all the places on my SubStack so far where I have found myself gnawing away at this: