Damage is the subject of this dialogue. Plato is concerned with two sorts of damage. One is the damage done by lovers in the name of desire. The other is the damage done by writing and reading in the name of communication. Why does he set these two sorts of damage beside one another? Plato appears to believe that they act on the soul in analogous ways and violate reality by the same kind of misapprehension. The action of eros does harm to the beloved when the lover takes a certain controlling attitude, an attitude whose most striking feature is its determination to freeze the beloved in time. It is not hard to see that a similar controlling attitude is available to the reader or writer, who sees in written texts the means to fix words permanently outside the stream of time. Isokrates’ remark about the immovable sameness of the written letter (Against the Sophists, 12) is an indication that this view appealed to ancient writers. Sokrates addresses the view, and its misapprehension, in the concluding section of the Phaedrus. He also comments on it indirectly throughout the dialogue by means of various maneuvers of language and staging. Let us consider first Sokrates’ explicit assessment of the value of the written word.
Toward the end of the Phaedrus he turns from specific speeches to a more general inquiry:
Οὐκοῦν, ὅπερ νῦν προνθέμεθα σκέψασθαι, τὸν λόγον, ὅπῃ καλῶς ἔχει λέγειν τε καὶ γράφειν καὶ ὅπῃ μή, σκεπτέον.
We should then examine the theory [logos] of what makes speaking or writing good, what makes them bad. (259e)
Comparison of the spoken and written word follows and writing is seen to be mainly useful as a mnemonic device:
πολλῆς ἂν εὐηθείας γέμοι καὶ τῷ ὄντι τὴν Ἄμμωνος μαντείαν ἀγνοοῖ, πλέον τι οἰόμενος εἶναι λόγους γεγραμμένους τοῦ τὸν εἰδότα ὑπομνῆσαι περὶ ὧν ἂν ᾖ τὰ γεγραμμένα.
He would be an extremely simple person who thought written words do anything more than remind someone who knows about the matter of which they are written,
says Sokrates (275d). Technicians of reading and writing see in letters a means to fix thoughts and wisdom once and for all in usable and reusable form. Sokrates denies that wisdom can be fixed. When people read books they derive
… σοφίας δὲ τοῖς μαθηταῖς δόξαν, οὐκ ἀλήθειαν πορίζεις· πολυήκοοι γάρ σοι γενόμενοι ἄνευ διδαχῆς πολυγνώμονες εἶναι δόξουσιν, ἀγνώμονες ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλῆθος ὄντες, καὶ χαλεποὶ συνεῖναι, δοξόσοφοι γεγονότες ἀντὶ σοφῶν.”
… the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (275b)
Sokrates conceives of wisdom as something alive, a “living breathing word” (ton logon zōnta kai empsychon, 276a), that happens between two people when they talk. Change is essential to it, not because wisdom changes but because people do, and must. In contrast, Sokrates emphasizes the peculiarly static nature of the written word:
Δεινὸν γάρ που, ὦ Φαῖδρε, τοῦτ᾽ ἔχει γραφή, καὶ ὡς ἀληθῶς ὅμοιον ζωγραφίᾳ. καὶ γὰρ τὰ ἐκείνης ἕκγονα ἕστηκε μὲν ὡς ζῶντα, ἐὰν δ᾽ ἀνέρῃ τι, σεμνῶς πάνυ σιγᾷ· ταὐτὸν δὲ καὶ οἱ λόγοι· δόξαις μὲν ἂν ὥς τι φρονοῦντας αὐτοὺς λέγειν, ἐὰν δέ τι ἔρῃ τῶν λεγομένων βουλόμενος μαθεῖν, ἕν τι σημαίνει μόνον ταὐτόν ἀεί.
Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange power, quite like painting in fact; for the creatures in paintings stand there like living beings, yet if you ask them anything they maintain a solemn silence. It is the same with written words. You might imagine they speak as if they were actually thinking something but if you want to find out about what they are saying and question them, they keep on giving the one same message eternally. (275d-e)
Like painting, the written word fixes living things in time and space, giving them the appearance of animation although they are abstracted from life and incapable of change. Logos in its spoken form is a living, changing, unique process of thought. It happens once and is irrecoverable. The logos written down by a writer who knows his craft will approximate this living organism in the necessary ordering and interrelation of its parts:
ὥσπερ ζῷον συνεστάναι σῶμά τι ἔχοντα αὐτόν αὑτοῦ, ὥστε μήτε ακέφαλον εἶναι μήτε ἄπουν, ἀλλὰ μέσα τε ἔχειν καὶ ἄκρα, πρέποντα ἀλλήλοις καὶ τῷ ὅλῳ γεγραμμένα.
organized like a live creature with a body of its own, not headless or footless but with middle and end fitted to one another and to the whole. (264c)
The logos of a bad writer, Lysias, for instance, does not even attempt this semblance of life, but throws words together in no order at all, perhaps beginning at the point where it should end and wholly ignorant of organic sequence. You can enter this logos at any point and find it saying the same thing. Once it is written down it continues to say that same thing forever over and over within itself, over and over in time. As communication, such a text is a dead letter.