The most annoying person in history!
- Thread starter Perfection
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Rambuchan
The Funky President
This Diogenes character is very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for the links. I thought writing books was not widely practised because most intellectual material was conveyed by oral means; symposia, fora and so forth. Not just the preserve of the doggies. But I'm not sure. What was the extent to which thoughts were committed in writing in these times?Verbose said:Linky:
http://www.benbest.com/philo/diogenes.html
...to Some Guy who seems to have collected most of the anecdotes I've heard.
Since writing books wasn't very "doggy", D. here didn't commit anything to paper.
But here' Wikipedias entry on a later cynic philosopher who did take the trouble of writing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dio_Chrysostom
BTW, it was Aristotle who nicknamed him "The Dog", but Diogenes seems to have thought it fit nicely.
Darkness
Shadow creature
George W Bush comes to mind.........
Verbose
Deity
That changed.Rambuchan said:
The ancient Athenians sort of straddled a being mainly oral society and a literate one.
Plato's Socrates at times illustrates how the Greek traditionally felt about writing - the act of reading is an act of submission. Instead of engaging is the cut and thrust of public argument you passively allow yourself to be influenced by HIS words to alone.
Needless to say Socrates is seen rebelling against the authority of the author (yep they're related) in the narrative. And just as paradoxicallt Plato, unlike Socrates, really liked the dialogue form.
But it isn't Plato that has been called "the worlds first bookworm", it's Aristotle.
This is by virtue of the fact the Aristotle it seems would engage with the entire prior Greek tradition of philosophy, which in turn meant he was putting in considerable man hours of just reading their texts or texts about them.
Technically it seem the authors were there well before they had any readers.
And there seems to have been a parallel process in history writing:
Herodotus has been described as also being part of the transition from pre-literate to fully literate society.
What he did was present the best verisions of a lot of competing narratives and differently formed narratives about past events - something referred to as "fighting stories".
I.e. in an oral society memory is short. If you come up with a great literary competition, it's survival will depend on its ability to blow all previous accounts of the same (or similar) events out of the water.
Only when the art of writing books has been perfected will you get people "writing for posterity". Prior to that all literary composition is aimed at the contemporary audience, designed to be committed to memory and usually performed/read in public - like Herodotus' "Histories" seems to have been.
And of course just a few short decades after Herodotus, if that, up popped Thucydides with his "War Between Sparta and Athens", which is quite explicitly written with an eye to eternity.
"It doesn't matter who reads it now, in time it will be read." Which is a kind of confidence you can only have in a literary society where reading a book is an everyday occurrence.
Rambuchan
The Funky President
Great stuff Verbose, thanks a lot.
So, if I'm reading you right, it seems like posterity and self pride were the dominating factors that made folk like Thucydides commit their thoughts to the written word. It seems like there was no apparent political advantage in doing so, as was evident in say French written history vs. Iroquois oral history. It seems like the oral public debate and the written book held equal importance and sway. So is it fair to say that it was simply a matter of preference as to what format they chose for those living between the lifetimes of Herodotus and Thucydides? And what was the political stimulus to finally 'go literate'?
So, if I'm reading you right, it seems like posterity and self pride were the dominating factors that made folk like Thucydides commit their thoughts to the written word. It seems like there was no apparent political advantage in doing so, as was evident in say French written history vs. Iroquois oral history. It seems like the oral public debate and the written book held equal importance and sway. So is it fair to say that it was simply a matter of preference as to what format they chose for those living between the lifetimes of Herodotus and Thucydides? And what was the political stimulus to finally 'go literate'?
jonatas
tropicalista
Verbose said:That changed.
The ancient Athenians sort of straddled a being mainly oral society and a literate one.
Plato's Socrates at times illustrates how the Greek traditionally felt about writing - the act of reading is an act of submission. Instead of engaging is the cut and thrust of public argument you passively allow yourself to be influenced by HIS words to alone.
Needless to say Socrates is seen rebelling against the authority of the author (yep they're related) in the narrative. And just as paradoxicallt Plato, unlike Socrates, really liked the dialogue form.
But it isn't Plato that has been called "the worlds first bookworm", it's Aristotle.
This is by virtue of the fact the Aristotle it seems would engage with the entire prior Greek tradition of philosophy, which in turn meant he was putting in considerable man hours of just reading their texts or texts about them.
Technically it seem the authors were there well before they had any readers.
.....
I.e. in an oral society memory is short. If you come up with a great literary competition, it's survival will depend on its ability to blow all previous accounts of the same (or similar) events out of the water.
Only when the art of writing books has been perfected will you get people "writing for posterity". Prior to that all literary composition is aimed at the contemporary audience, designed to be committed to memory and usually performed/read in public - like Herodotus' "Histories" seems to have been.
.
At the same time as you have emergence of a literate society, you have the teachers of virtue (sophists), something which relates to the idea of reading as an act of submission (Can virtue be taught?). The older, oral society is that of the Homeric heros. Strong, powerful, honor among equals, action etc.... Plato's Socrates and Plato are reactionaries in 5th Athens who look back despairingly to this golden age, while surrounded by Sophists and a decaying society, in their eyes. As Verbose brings out, the paradox is that Plato is in many ways is the master of literary form... I vaguely remember a quote paraphrased as "Plato wrote Greek like the gods would have...". But, was Plato a Sophist?
It seems that Plato was very elusive about setting down his ideas in any case. He just liked writing the dialogues, which weren't exact philosophical treatises.
Another interesting point is that for almost all Greeks, whatever the time period, the greatest literature was Homer's, produced in an oral society. The level of sophistication is unmatched by the literates
They could only look at it and wonder. Part of this is due to the extreme attention paid to the language, and the ability to improvise within a set framework, with recurring themes. There is a level of sophistication to that kind of language, which allows for improvisation while respecting an overarching structure, that produces a high degree of aesthetic pleasure. It's more akin to performance. It's so real.... The written word was undoubtedly viewed as secondary. The brilliance is not just the stories that are told, but how they are told in the Ancient Greek.The classic contrast would be between Homer and the later Hellenistic "bookworms". These later guys were literally librarians and scholars, while Homer was a visionary bard. So, in terms of art, I would not assume that a literate society was necessarily an improvement over a pre-literate. The word can hold a kind of magical power in pre-literate societies, which even we marvel at.
Rambuchan
The Funky President
Very interesting!
Perfection
The Great Head.
You really can't I'm just using it as a central idea to explore the topic.Phlegmak said:
jonatas
tropicalista
Rambuchan said:
Remember Greece was a culture of the Agora. Public debate > the written word. Idiotes (yes, people were calling each other idiots thousands of years ago) meant "private person", someone who didn't go out and mix with everyone. In art, Homer and the dramatists (again, meant to be performed) represented the apex of literary expression.
Verbose
Deity
I think the advantage might rather have been existential.Rambuchan said:
Art and literary composition were long established forms of making a mark. The Greek quest for the only kind of immortality allowed humans led them to try literary composition as a good way of ensuring a lasting memory.
Homer (whoever he/they was/were) was a model in that regard.
And they did gradually work themselves up to a situation where books and reading had become commonplace, inventing most literary genres we still recognise along the way.
Got to think some more about the social-political-economic ramifications here...
And yet, I think, most of the philosophers of the generations following Aristotle would have written books - it's simply that their texts don't survive. Note that this also goes for many of the pre-Socratics. Empedocles, for example, and Heraclitus, wrote lots, but it doesn't survive. So much of this material has been lost. Why, we only have one fifth of Aristotle's works (namely, his personal notes - for some reason, they have survived when the books he wrote for general circulation have perished). Plato is an exception in that we appear to have everything he wrote.
Verbose
Deity
They certainly were writing well before the Athenian Golden Age. I think that's just a fact.Plotinus said:
The way I've undertood it the tricky part was "educating" a readership. Or in the case of Aristotle, coming up with a way of reading that allowed him to deal with authors on a more equal basis then the traditional Greek model for reading texts would have it.
I also think we can assume that after Aristotle, at least among philosophers et al. (historians, medical writers), we won't have any trouble finding this "active" model of reading we still recognise.
Tank_Guy#3
Lion of Lehistan
Fran Drescher. Don't you just hate that voice?
Or perhaps Hugo Chavez or Pat Robertson.
Or perhaps Hugo Chavez or Pat Robertson.
Andu Indorin
Retired Druid
Speaking as member of the "Druid" community, I suppose that just about any Roman general would qualify as "annoying." Are there any of them still around ...
You know who is really annoying? The sort of person who gets into a long pointless discussion on writing and Greek philosophy in the middle of a thread about annoying people. The only worse kind of person than that would be someone who complains about it later.
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