The Information by James Gleick Read Free Book Online Page B

right. The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche—
psyche
being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand. Plato, as Havelock puts it,
    is trying for the first time in history to identify this group of general mental qualities, and seeking for a term which will label them satisfactorily under a single type.… He it was who hailed the portent and correctly identified it. In so doing, he so to speak confirmed and clinched the guesses of a previous generation which had been feeling its way towards the
idea
that you could “think,” and that thinking was a very special kind of psychic activity, very uncomfortable, but also very exciting, and one which required a very novel use of Greek. ♦
     
     
    Taking the next step on the road of abstraction, Aristotle deployed categories and relationships in a regimented order to develop a symbolism of reasoning: logic—from,
logos
, the not-quite-translatable word from which so much flows, meaning “speech” or “reason” or “discourse” or, ultimately, just “word.”
    Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. ♦ Logic turnsthe act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association. There are no syllogisms in Homer. Experience is arranged in terms of events, not categories. Only with writing does narrative structure come to embody sustained rational argument. Aristotle crossed another level, by seeing the study of such argument—not just the use of argument, but its study—as a tool. His logic expresses an ongoing self-consciousness about the words in which they are composed. When Aristotle unfurls premises and conclusions—
If it is possible for no man to be a horse, it is also admissible for no horse to be a man; and if it is admissible for no garment to be white, it is also admissible for nothing white to be a garment. For if any white thing must be a garment, then some garment will necessarily be white
♦ —he neither requires nor implies any personal experience of horses, garments, or colors. He has departed that realm. Yet he claims through the manipulation of words to create knowledge anyway, and a superior brand of knowledge at that.
    “We know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing,” Walter Ong says—it is true of India and China as well—“and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible.” ♦ For evidence Ong turns to fieldwork of the Russian psychologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luria among illiterate peoples in remote Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia in the 1930s. ♦ Luria found striking differences between illiterate and even slightly literate subjects, not in what they knew, but in how they thought. Logic implicates symbolism directly: things are members of classes; they possess qualities,which are abstracted and generalized. Oral people lacked the categories that become second nature even to illiterate individuals in literate cultures: for example, for geometrical shapes. Shown drawings of circles and