n one of Plato’s dialogues: Phaedrus, the Greek philosopher Socrates told the myth of King Thamus. The story goes: once, the Egyptian god Theuth paid a visit to King Thamus and offered him the gift of writing. With great enthusiasm, the god claimed that this tool of writing “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory” and act as “a potion for memory and for wisdom.” The great King Thamus scratched his beard for a while and shook his head. When Theuth asked him why he’d refuse such a remarkable gift, the King explained that writing is actually not making people wiser. “In fact,” the King went on, “it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learns it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing (Plato 227a — 279c)”.

This dislike, or rather, the paranoia for writing didn’t just bother King Thamus. It essentially haunted Western philosophy for thousands of years. Aristotle later called writing defective, and treated it as mere “symbols of spoken words (Aristotle I.I6a:3)”. French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau went as far as to call it “a dangerous supplement” in his Confessions.

The key problem, according to Peter Salmon, is that writing without its ‘father’ cannot defend itself. In that sense, the speaker guarantees meaning by his or her presence (Salmon 132). So, if I want my sister to pick something up from the shops for me, it’s better to call her than to write a list. If I want to confront someone, it’s better to meet up with him in person than to argue over text. However, this endless privileging of “speech” over “writing” is not without its dangers.

efore I learned how to use a computer, the only way to research something was to ask my mom for her library card. But now when I want to look something up, my impulse is to read a short blog post or watch a YouTube video on the subject. The key difference here is the format of the information. In a library, all I had were encyclopedias and dense paragraphs. With the internet, however, it’s possible to kick back and watch someone on YouTube explain a topic to me.

Initially, it sounds somewhat favorable. We no longer need to spend hours at a library just to find out about something. But if we step back to think for a second, we’d soon realize that content from the internet functions a lot more like “speech” than “writing”. Videos and podcasts rely predominantly on a speaker to deliver content, and in the written domain, blogposts/newsletters/Tweets also assume a ‘conversational tone’ to keep your interest.

It seems to be the case that even after thousands of years of philosophy, we’re still privileging “speech” over “writing”. It’s not enough just to read a book, we have to listen to our favorite influencers’ rants/reviews of the book. It’s not just enough to read an encyclopedic entry on a subject, we have to listen to a lecture on YouTube to make sure that we’ve got it. Speech, then again, assumes more truth value than writing.

o understand the dangers of this privileging, allow me to bring back a point that I’ve made in my article: The Dangers of Romanticizing the Liberal Arts. There, I discussed a gradual shift of focus from content to personality. Aesthetic values and the charms of the presenter, in this case, overshadowed critical assessments of arguments. When we say that we want to “watch a YouTube video on a subject”, what we’re really saying is: “I want my favorite influencer to tell me what to think”. Personalities had short-circuited our ability to engage critically with information, and all we’re looking for are clear-cut answers for subjects that are supposed to be confusing.

Influencers, at the end of the day, are not necessarily experts on the subjects they preach. My own content on my YouTube channel and Medium are only my own educated guesses and speculations. And when the bulk of our informational diet is fed to us by popular blogposts, viral YouTube videos, and Instagram reels, we no longer have space in our heads to assess what we’ve read or heard. Entertainment, had in a sense, masqueraded itself as truth.

n the summer of 1965, French philosopher Jacques Derrida was on a Vaporetto with his family to Venice when a strange insight hit him. He turned to his wife Marguerite and said: “I think that something has just happened…” Shortly after the trip, the strange insight consumed Derrida completely, and what came out the other end of his pen was a gloriously bonkers book (Salmon 127): Of Grammatology. The book is not at all an easy read. Among many discussions on linguistics, the Chinese alphabet, Phenomenology, and even (I kid you not) masturbation, Derrida actively challenged the privileging of “speech” over “writing” with the concept: différance.

To explain différance in a short article is impossible, and some might argue that to define différance is already violating its integrity. Nevertheless, for the sake of argument, différance is a mode of deference; of putting off the meaning of a statement without defining it. Much of Western philosophy is thoroughly obsessed with finding a clear-cut answer without putting anything off, producing “an absolute science whose conclusions it cannot wait (Derrida 202)”. Therefore, speech is always preferred precisely because it seems to be a clearer way of communicating truth. Yet, over the course of Of Grammatology, Derrida exposed the inherent ambiguities of language and argued that sometimes even “speech” could not communicate truth directly.

A direct consequence of différance is what the Greeks coined as aporia. Merriam-Webster dictionary defined aporia as a logical impasse or a paradox. In our personal lives, aporia happens whenever our worldviews are challenged, or whenever we’re left in a situation that we don’t know how to deal with yet. In the context of learning, aporia typically happens when a new piece of information contradicts what we already know. The grounds of our understanding are disturbed, leaving us desperate to find a solid solution to our confusion.

This is the moment when most of us will run off onto the internet to find a solid explanation. We end up scrolling through Instagram and YouTube just to restore a sense of certainty, without realizing that true learning usually involves embracing this confusion willingly.

In my article Why Children are Better Philosophers, I argued that children are much better at dealing with confusion because the need for certainty isn’t that strong. For grown-ups, however, we need to exert extra effort to accept life as a stream of uncertain events, hearsays, accidents, and frustrating inconsistencies. Contrary to popular belief, humans are not at all reasonable nor rational on a daily basis. Hence, to insist that clear-cut explanations exist in our lives is like sticking our heads in the sand like an ostrich. And when applied to reading, to expect valuable reading material to not cause any confusion is like walking down the isle of knowledge with blinders on.

he paradox of confusion is that once we enter a state of not-knowing, that’s actually when we’re the most open-minded. Always trying to be certain is like pinning down a butterfly as a taxidermist. While what we have in the frame is stable, we can no longer see the movement of the wings, the breeding cycles, or the behavior of the butterfly in its natural habitat. Likewise, if we always try to reduce learning to clear-cut answers, we’re missing out on the joy of embracing ambiguities and deeper insights.

If we truly embrace confusion, then we’d be immune to the effects of mindless information on the internet. We’re able to suspend information and critically assess them before adopting them as our own. In that sense, our reason is grounded and not easily moved by non-sense. And from that place, we can still enjoy content from our favorite creators, yet we’re able to take a deeper pleasure in shades of thoughts that are a great deal subtler, reaching new insights that will allow us to live intelligently.

Notes/further readings:

Aristotle, De Interpretatione.

Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence. Routledge Classics, 2001.

Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Princeton University Press, 1961

Salmon, Peter. An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida. Verso, 2021.

Originally published in The Collector on the 11th of July, 2022.