Unrecorded knowledge is fleeting knowledge—anyone who has ever lost their notes before an exam knows this very well. However, while recognizing the merits of writing, we should also acknowledge that human experience extends far beyond the confines of written language.
If we were to rank the various inventions that have been crucial to the rise of civilizations, writing would likely take the top spot. Writing has provided communities that use it with a substantial edge over those that do not. From the earliest pictographic records to early cuneiform and hieroglyphic systems, to the alphabetic and ideographic scripts used today—successive types and methods of writing have facilitated the effective and precise transfer of accumulated knowledge and experience to subsequent generations, to an extent that cultures relying on oral transmission could only dream of. Writing, therefore, serves as humanity’s great collective “external memory.” Without this tool, our species would not differ very significantly from other mammals. We would be unable to accumulate, over centuries and millennia, information about the world, about our practices and technologies, or about ourselves: our ideas, thoughts, dreams, our deepest fears and nightmares.
The Close Circle of the Literati
Such laudatory odes to writing could easily be extended. Nonetheless, that should not imply that writing has exclusively been beneficial to humanity. Up until the twentieth century, literate individuals were a minority within their communities, a reality that persists in some parts of the world even today. For centuries, literacy served as a key criterion and instrument for social stratification and segregation. Consequently, the dissemination of non-observable knowledge—knowledge that cannot be seen or experienced firsthand—remained confined to a select group of literate individuals. These learned scribes, particularly those engaged in composing scientific or artistic texts, often viewed the entire world through the lens of their written medium. This perspective fostered one of the most profound cultural misconceptions in our civilization: the notion that only what is committed to writing warrants attention, and that the written word encompasses the entirety of human existence.
The exclusive, sometimes even very narrow, group of ancient literati saw itself as the epitome of knowledge. This view had profound implications for our societies, promoting a heightened deference for knowledge derived from written sources while simultaneously devaluing knowledge of different provenance. This partly explains why for centuries, cultural and social elites have undervalued practitioners of the performing arts—actors, musicians, and jugglers—whose skills are honed through practical exercise rather than derived from texts. The age-old debate between “book” knowledge versus “practical” knowledge also stems from the longstanding overemphasis on textual communication.
Another equally significant problem arising from the written transmission of information is the detachment of content from concrete situational contexts, resulting in the theorization and abstraction of textual knowledge. Every student who has ever bemoaned the tedium of textbook learning and been forced to memorize for tests and exams, is a victim of this process. Only the most eloquent wordsmiths have been able to depict reality in such a way that it springs to life within their text. For the majority of writers, the pinnacle of achievement has been to distill certain aspects of reality and present them in a literary or scientific text in a purely communicative manner.
Thus, the price we have paid for this remarkable tool has been the alienation of our minds from a sensually experienced, ever-flowing, and varied reality, in favor of interaction with static, lifeless symbols. Plato was among the first figures in Europe to recognize this problem. The well-known legend of Theuth and Thamus, recounted by Socrates in the Phaedrus dialog, explores this issue. Although Plato used writing masterfully—enabling us to engage with his ideas even after twenty-five centuries—he nevertheless distrusted it. He criticized writing, as voiced by Thamus, for its detrimental effect on human memory, which he saw not just as a repository of recollections and knowledge within the consciousness and psyche of individuals, but also as the capacity to experience reality through the senses.
It is also worth mentioning that the origin of writing, like that of articulated speech (the language it visually represents) remains a mystery to us. In the last two hundred years, hundreds of hypotheses have been proposed to explain their beginnings, but none have been wholly persuasive. The mystery of language’s origin, especially its remarkable diversity, likely relates to genetic changes in early Homo sapiens populations coupled with the development of prehistoric communities. These early humans needed to communicate increasingly complex ideas in order to collaborate in various situations, which likely spurred the development of speech. The genesis of writing, however, is probably tied to the emergence of palace-temple administration and bureaucracy in the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Writing was not initially employed for recording grand, universal narratives; rather, for centuries during its early history, it was primarily used for inventory-taking and record-keeping. The decipherment of the Minoan Linear B script—one of the earliest records of the language of ancient Greeks—led to significant disappointment among researchers and enthusiasts of ancient Greece. Contrary to expectations of uncovering the oldest versions of Homeric epics and religious poems, the Linear B inscriptions turned out to predominantly contain mundane data about the material resources of temples and palaces, as well as commercial correspondence. To date, not a single fragment in this script has been discovered that remotely resembles what we might consider “literature.”
Gaps Speak Volumes
But let us revisit the notion—prevalent among writers and others engaged in textual work—that existence is confined to what has been documented. There is some truth in this. How can we know about the past or events we have not personally witnessed if not through written records? (This, of course, applies to the era before the advent of audiovisual and electronic media). This brings us but one step away from concluding that what hasn’t been documented simply never existed or, at least, existed only momentarily in a certain place and time before fading into oblivion. This, too, holds some truth. Consider our current era, where a billion or two people snap photos of their morning coffee and share them on social media, yet at the same time, at least as many morning coffees go unphotographed and thus, disappear forever into the past after being drunk. Countless events, billions and trillions of them, slip through the annals of human history without ever leaving a mark. Such is the natural order of things, primarily because most of these occurrences matter to no one except for those directly involved. A problem emerges, however, when we start to believe that some of these events weren’t recorded because someone intentionally chose not to preserve them for the general public.
This suspicion is where many conspiracy theories take root. What remains unrecorded (or not captured on any medium) begins to take on the status of a profound mystery, accessible only to a select few. This sense of being excluded from esoteric knowledge fuels the curiosity of the masses, leading them to concoct the most elaborate and fantastical theories. For example, one theory posits that JFK was assassinated because he intended to disclose the truth about the Roswell incident, while another suggests the opposite—that he was killed precisely because he chose not to reveal it. The notion that he was murdered by a lone, frustrated individual, who was very soon thereafter killed by another such individual, seems too improbable for many to believe. They prefer the idea that there is some hidden, covert story, one that is documented somewhere but that evidence remains nearly inaccessible to the public. This widespread human craving for sensational stories is amplified by the belief in the immense power of documented events.
Similar psychological and intellectual predispositions also lead to the belief that if someone, particularly a renowned and brilliant author, states they haven’t written anything about a certain topic, that implies they have instead conveyed their knowledge about it orally, in secret, only to a select few. After all, a distinguished writer must be capable of expressing something. Such a person can write about anything, and their written word (especially theirs), can encompass anything that exists. Therefore, if they claim not to have written about something, it doesn’t suggest an inability to do so. Rather, it hints at a deliberate choice not to write, for reasons known only to them.
What Plato Left Unsaid
A notable example of such reasoning is the concept of Plato’s “unwritten teachings” (agrapha dogmata), known to scholars of ancient philosophy. This theory posits that Plato’s extant writings contain the various truths, ideas, and viewpoints he intended for future generations—but beyond those, he also taught other truths which he deemed unsuitable for general dissemination for some reason, sharing them solely through oral instruction with select students sworn to secrecy. While this may not be the juiciest, most scandalous conspiracy theory one can think of, for philologists, for whom the text—or rather, the Text—constitutes the very core and essence of reality, it poses quite a significant challenge.
This notion isn’t entirely disconnected from reality. First, when it comes to ancient authors, we can never be sure that what has survived them represents the entirety of their work in all its aspects. This uncertainty applies not just to those whose writings we know only from fragments and paraphrases (like the Pre-Socratics) but even to authors like Plato and Aristotle, whose texts have largely survived in complete form. Secondly, we know that some ancient thinkers, such as Socrates and Pythagoras, did predominantly impart their philosophies orally. Therefore, even with a quite “literate” philosopher like Plato, it’s very plausible that some of his teachings were never written down. The problem arises, however, when researchers who attribute some unknown teachings to Plato maintain that these were definitely special and exceptional teachings. Towards the end of the last century, the “Tübingen School”—as this group of scholars is called, because many of them worked at the University of Tübingen in Germany —cast a mystical veil over these purported unrecorded teachings. However, since these teachings of Plato are unwritten and presumed to be different from the well-known, written ones, they remain speculative, allowing for boundless conjecture. And so here we have a group of philologists who, in a sophisticated way, have betrayed the basic principles of their very discipline, shifting their focus from text to the absence of text.
This entire concept is based upon a passage from Plato’s Seventh Letter (in addition to a marginal remark by Aristotle in his Physics and a mention which Aristoxenus makes of a public lecture by Plato on the subject of good, the content of which remains unknown to us). The Seventh Letter states: “There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself” (trans. J. Harward).
These words suggest that not all aspects of human intellectual and existential experience can be encapsulated in verbal instructions or confined to purely textual forms; some insights in the realm of thoughtful understanding are accessible only through personal experience, not merely by reading another’s text, no matter how insightful or eloquently expressed. This is akin to the impossibility of learning to swim just by reading a manual or to dance merely by standing against the wall and observing others. In this passage, Plato demonstrates the prudence of a wise sage who, while adopting the new medium of writing, maintained a healthy skepticism about its efficacy, at least in certain respects. The above-cited legend of Theuth and Thamus implies that Plato recognized that writing is not unbiased, that it is imperfect as a tool for transmitting thoughts between people who do not see and hear each other in real-time. Thus, the reference to concepts that do not “admit of exposition,” that remain beyond the scope of words, which has so captured the imagination of some erudite philologists, does not imply Plato secretly imparted some kind of extraordinary truths. Instead, it suggests that the deepest understanding of the world lies within each individual, and we should approach all externally transmitted knowledge with a measured degree of skepticism. It’s a pity that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have not read Plato. Or perhaps they have—but have chosen to keep his wisdom to themselves?
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