The Information by James Gleick Read Free Book Online Page A

sort of interest.
    But how was one to speak about them? The words to describe the elements of this discourse did not exist in the lexicon of Homer. The language of an oral culture had to be wrenched into new forms; thus a new vocabulary emerged. Poems were seen to have
topics
—the word previously meaning “place.” They possessed
structure
, by analogy with buildings. They were made of
plot
and
diction
. Aristotle could now see the works of the bards as “representations of life,” born of the natural impulse toward imitation that begins in childhood. But he had also to account for other writing with other purposes—the Socratic dialogues, for example, and medical or scientific treatises—and this general type of work, including, presumably, his own, “happens, up to the present day, to have no name.” ♦ Under construction was a whole realm of abstraction, forcibly divorced from the concrete. Havelock described it as cultural warfare, a new consciousness and a new language at war with the old consciousness and the old language: “Their conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all abstract thought. Body and space, matter and motion, permanence and change, quality and quantity, combination and separation, are among the counters of common currency now available.” ♦
    Aristotle himself, son of the physician to the king of Macedonia and an avid, organized thinker, was attempting to systematize knowledge. The persistence of writing made it possible to impose structure on what was known about the world and, then, on what was known about knowing. As soon as one could set words down, examine them, look at them anew the next day, and consider their meaning, one became a philosopher, and the philosopher began with a clean slate and a vast project of definition to undertake. Knowledge could begin to pull itself up by the bootstraps. For Aristotle the most basic notions were worth recording and were necessary to record:
    A
beginning
is that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but some second thing naturally exists or occurs after it. Conversely, an
end
is that which does itself naturally follow from something else, either necessarily or in general, but there is nothing else after it. A
middle
is that which itself comes after something else, and some other thing comes after it. ♦
     
     
    These are statements not about experience but about the uses of language to structure experience. In the same way, the Greeks created
categories
(this word originally meaning “accusations” or “predictions”) as a means of classifying animal species, insects, and fishes. In turn, they could then classify ideas. This was a radical, alien mode of thought. Plato had warned that it would repel most people:
    The multitude cannot accept the idea of beauty in itself rather than many beautiful things, nor anything conceived in its essence instead of the many specific things. Thus the multitude cannot be philosophic. ♦
     
     
    For “the multitude” we may understand “the preliterate.” They “lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things,” ♦ declared Plato, looking back on the oral culture that still surrounded him. They “have no vivid pattern in their souls.”
    And what vivid pattern was that? Havelock focused on the process of converting, mentally, from a “prose of narrative” to a “prose of ideas”; organizing experience in terms of categories rather than events; embracing the discipline of abstraction. He had a word in mind for this process, and the word was
thinking
. This was the discovery, not just of the self, but of the
thinking
self—in effect, the true beginning of consciousness.
    In our world of ingrained literacy, thinking and writing seem scarcely related activities. We can imagine the latter depending on the former, but surely not the other way around: everyone thinks, whether or not they write. But Havelock was