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Aus: "It's easy for the privileged and wealthy people on our planet to consider their own pleasure over the health and lives of others." Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution" The implication being that dedicating one's existence to the purely mechanical at the expense of the aesthetic, pleasurable or edifying makes one robotic or animalistically inhuman - like a thing, rather than a person. In essence you're advocating puritanism at best and slavery at worst.
Interesting debate this one - particularly because it's a reductio ad absurdum. Don't know whether we'd want this kind of debate going on all the time though, because it could get quite dull after a while, particularly as it's based on assertion rather than argument.
Still, I am reading a stunning book on orality and literacy by Walter J Ong at the moment that should present a couple of interesting insights into this debate. I shall now quote at length... (this might be a useful subject for a separate Head Shop topic at some point - obviously if approached a little more seriosuly)...
On writing Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. Thirdly a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get back nothing but the same, often stupid, words which called for your question in the first place. Fourthly, in keeping with the agonistic mentatlity of oral cultures, Plato's Socrates also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken world can: real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons. Writing is passive, out of it, in an unreal, unnatural world
On print Hieronimo Squarciafico, who in fact promoted the printing of the Latin classics, also argued in 1477 that already 'abundance of books makes men less studious': it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work, downgrading the wise man and wise woman in favor of the pocket compendium.
But interestingly in response One weakness in Plato's position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing. Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologising the word. One the word is technologised, there is no effective way to criticise what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato's philosophically analytic thought, including his critique of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes. In fact, as Havelock has beautifully shown (1993) Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeblood of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow in his Republic).
There's something for everyone to chew on... |
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However, I'm more likely to use