Episode 122 - Writing

Transcript

David: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Overthink. The

Ellie: 0:17

podcast where two philosophers, professors, friends, and writers talk about what our discipline has to offer all number of discussion topics.

David: 0:25

I'm David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:27

And I'm Ellie Anderson. For centuries, writing, especially essay writing, has been a key feature of Western educational systems. Students are asked what they think about a particular topic, right, and then they write about it in an essay. But a lot of people in our profession these days worry that this is going away thanks to a new technology, ChatGPT. I've been seeing op eds like, the end of the essay, forums where professors talk to each other about best teaching methods are worrying a lot about the future of essay writing in classes. And this is coming from the fact that the new technology of ChatGPT is leading many students simply not to do one of the things that schools are meant to teach them to do, which is write.

David: 1:13

And for those who work in education, the problem is really difficult to navigate because on the one hand, we obviously want to give students all the tools and resources that they might need to succeed. And that could include teaching them how to use these generative AI technologies that write for them. On the other hand, we're also noticing a very clear breakdown in the expectations that teachers and students bring to the classroom, where teachers expect students to write, but nowadays more and more students expect not to have to write their own thoughts because now they have this very tempting technology at their fingertips.

Ellie: 1:51

Yeah, absolutely and I think that means a breakdown of trust, right? Where it's really hard to catch students using generative AI. And I just feel like we're living through this really weird moment where there's just like a cosmic shift. And that cosmic shift has to do with writing. And specifically, because you mentioned David, the tools, like we want to give our students tools for sure. But I think the worry is that students using ChaGPT to write essays that's actually depriving them of tools for success, right? It's depriving them of learning how to express themselves in words to integrate and digest information and convey it in the written form, which is like a very important form of human expression and that means that they're actually not getting taught what they need to get taught.

David: 2:37

So I think you're right, and I really like thinking about it in terms of trust specifically, because I think there is a breakdown of trust in connection to multiple players in this situation. There is, of course, the lack of trust that we have in the technology. Like, I don't trust ChatGPT to give me interesting stuff that I want to read and that I want to devote my time to. I also cannot trust the AI detector tools like the NT ChatGPT AI to really be reliable at catching what is human generated versus AI generated. I found myself also not trusting students in their assignments. As a kind of default, which I really, really hate that it shifted my relationship with my students. But also more importantly, I would say as a professor, I found that I was not trusting myself because I was falling into a policing mentality that I have always been very critical of. And on top of this, of course, we can't trust our universities to give us clear policies about how to deal with this, right? Like, there's a lot of ambiguity about that.

Ellie: 3:40

Yeah

David: 3:41

Even plagiarism, is it something that you can fail a student for, or is it something completely different for which we don't have any regulations at the moment.

Ellie: 3:49

And I think too, you mentioned at the beginning of what you were saying, this like lack of trust in ChatGPT as well. And I feel like one of the big problems is that students are trusting ChatGPT way too much. As we know, ChatGPT makes up citations for things, like it'll cite articles that are not real,

David: 4:09

Hallucinated journals altogether.

Ellie: 4:12

It's so easy for me to go in so many different directions on this. Let's keep our eyes on the prize because this is an episode about writing, of course. So David, why as like a college instructor, would you say that it is important for students to learn how to write and to write well, to write philosophy even?

David: 4:29

Yeah. I think there is a lot of misconceptions about what it is that professors value about writing. Because often a lot of students will say things like, Oh, I don't need to learn to write sophisticated prose to get a job in whatever engineering or to open my own business. But I think the real value of writing is that writing is a technique for organizing thinking and for exploring modes of thought that we don't typically explore in speech, right? When you have to sit down and really think about what you want to say, it introduces a pause into your thinking that allows you to reflect on what it is that you want to think in the first place before you say it. So I do think that we think better, more sophisticated, more complex, longer thoughts in writing than in the course of a normal, everyday conversation that is spoken,

Ellie: 5:26

Okay. I mean, I certainly feel like writing helps me organize my thoughts and I develop ideas that I wouldn't be able to develop in other media. I mean, even as podcasters, I feel like I'm way more subtle in writing than I am on show. But I think part of that is because of the time that writing takes, like when you prompt chatGPT for something, it comes out automatically, but actually writing is a pretty agonizing process because of the time, energy, and effort that it takes, and we'll talk a little bit later about what is agonizing about writing, but I'm curious in this context about what's different about this than maybe previous technological changes because for her. Millenia, humans wrote by longhand, and now it's pretty recently that we've developed technology around typing. And when typing was first developed, people were worried that, well, this isn't going to give us the time and space to develop ideas, like, because it's so rapid. But I also think for me, the idea of writing a book longhand seems impossible. And so, I mean, there's also obviously the angle of the fact that whether you're typing or you're writing longhand, you are still generating the ideas and that is not the case with ChatGPT, but I'm sort of curious about whether at least to some extent there might be a bit of similarity in the way that we're thinking about the temporality of typing versus longhand writing.

David: 6:47

I would say yes, actually, because this is something that I've mentioned before. I longhand wrote my dissertation. I wrote it by hand in these very long sheets of paper. And yeah it was a very. slow, tortuous process because it would take me 10 times as long to write the same paragraph by hand than it would have taken me to just type it. And I am a decently fast typer. But the reason that I went to longhand and I still go to longhand in many writing projects is precisely because I know that it forces me to slow down. And in slowing me down, it gives my thinking time to take shape, mature, develop, and unfold. And I'm always happier with the result, even though in the moment, I always have this temptation of maybe I should just go to typing because it's going to be faster. But we do fall into certain habits of how to type certain sentence structures that we just rely on. And because it's easy, quick, and fast. They prevent us from exploring new domains of expression.

Ellie: 7:51

Okay, so maybe typing can in some ways like limit the creativity of our writing. And that leads me to think, David, about how we have been talking about creative writing in a broadly construed way, not like writing fiction you know, we're talking about writing philosophy, but I think that ChatGPT is amazing for forms of writing that are really just boilerplate. So, for instance, I would have loved to have ChatGPT when I was on the job market writing cover letters, because cover letters are very formulaic. All you have to do is change a number of sentences to fit the specific college or university that, in my case, I was applying to be a professor at, and it's like, I actually don't think that there's an ethical problem with having an assist from something like ChatGPT, because what I was doing when I was writing cover letters was basically reducing myself to a machine anyway, you know, like. That was requiring a complete removal of my individual self expression in order to fit the standard form. So, I think we can also think about different kinds of writing, where some really require that development of ideas that you were talking about, whereas others basically require that we treat ourselves as a form of ChatGPT, in which case, like, why not offload that to a machine?

David: 9:04

Yeah, and I think the trick in those cases is really knowing the difference and trusting, going back to that theme, trusting oneself to know the difference in the moment. Because given the agonizing nature of writing, when we face up to a writing project, it might be that in the moment we feel like, hey, this is one of those projects in which I need a little help just because I'm feeling stuck or I'm not seeing the writing project develop as fast as I want. And so I think that's the predicament that many students are facing, that they think of the writing that they're asked to do for the classroom as the kind of writing that should be mechanizable or automated. And that's precisely the problem, and maybe it speaks to a larger problem in education, which is that we have taught students to see all writing as mechanizable.

Ellie: 9:56

Today, we are talking about writing.

David: 9:59

Why is writing so challenging, yet so enticing?

Ellie: 10:03

Is writing merely a recorded form of speech? Or might the two have a more complicated relationship?

David: 10:09

And why does the philosopher Jacques Derrida think that writing is so significant that it should lead us to question the entire history of metaphysics?

Ellie: 10:20

Now it's time to talk about what makes writing agonizing. Writing of the sort that we're talking about, not the cover letter writing, but the writing a book or an essay writing, is a notoriously difficult act because it involves us in a process of creation. David, as professors, I think most of our listeners probably know that we, as do most professors, write. That's like, especially if you're a humanities professor, but also if you're in the sciences, you also have to write too. Professors write a lot. Like our primary job is not necessarily teaching. Research is just as big a part of many of our jobs as teaching is, if not more so. And so I feel like David, you and I have a long relationship with our own writing practices. And so I'd love for us just to start by thinking a little bit about what is agonizing about writing for us and how we deal with that.

David: 11:13

Yeah, and I mean, I can talk about what makes writing agonizing for me specifically because it's an agony that yes, I experience on a regular basis. So for example, I rewrite a lot as part of my writing process. I never feel like my writing is finished. So there's always this sense of a Sisyphean effort that never ends when I have words on the page. And in practical terms, that translates into me playing with words and sentences a lot, like a cat endlessly playing with a, yarn ball that's unraveling in all kinds of directions. And psychologically, that does make me feel like my writing is sometimes my enemy and

Ellie: 11:56

one

David: 11:56

an enemy that I cannot vanquish. And so that endless rewriting is very much part of the agony for me, as well as the waiting for inspiration. You know, I'm very critical of the notion that writers have to wait for enthusiasmos in the classical Greek sense of being visited by the muses. But I actually do write as if that were the case. I have to wait for a moment of inspiration, and often I write in bouts.

Ellie: 12:23

I think one thing that I have struggled a lot with is that question of whether you should write when the mood strikes you versus having a habitual practice. And I feel like I've kind of ended up splitting the difference. I used to be more right when the mood strikes you. And then I would end up procrastinating on essays through undergrad and even a little bit into grad school. I was on the procrastinating side of things. And I thought to myself, well, inspiration strikes me at the 11th hour. And so I'll just wait until then. And David, you might've heard me use this metaphor before. The way that I have often thought about writing, at least in that earlier phase, was in terms of digestion. If you eat the right foods, you wait long enough for the digestion process to occur, what comes out the other end

David: 13:14

It's a piece of shit.

Ellie: 13:19

Okay, um, yes, but, true, let's leave that out of it for now. Because there are different pieces of shit, right? And some of them are well formed, flush easily, and, you know, you feel much better afterward. Whereas, anybody who thought I was like, on the ladylike side of things, because I'm a bit femme, is getting disabused very quickly of their illusions. Whereas, if you like, try too early, you're gonna be very uncomfortable for a long time and not get a lot of output. If you like, wait too long, also not going to be pleasant. And so anyway, this is how I used to think about the writing process. And that also meant that I didn't actually edit much. I would just like kind of wait until I felt ready, write something, and then turn it in after some minimal edits. That has changed a lot in recent years, in part because I have developed a much more steady writing practice, and that's for the better. So I don't place output requirements on myself, like I don't say today I need to write 2, 000 words or whatever it is, but I do have a very regimented and diligent approach to, now I know that writing first thing in the morning is the best time for me and so I'll just like open my computer first thing in the morning if I'm working on a writing project and whatever comes out, comes out. Often it's not exactly nice and so like I have ended up, as I've gotten into a more regimented writing practice, implementing a lot more of an editing process. To the point that I know I'm kind of getting close to being done with a writing project when I have far exceeded the word count that I want to achieve because then I have to cut a lot, cull a lot, et cetera. And I do think my writing is better for that, but it is also maybe not the most efficient process. And I do think it's a little bit different from what you're describing in terms of endless editing because I do have a very strong sense of, okay, even though I'm doing a lot more editing than I used to when I was in grad school, adhering to this like weird poop metaphor. I do have a sense of when something is done.

David: 15:22

And that finalism is something that I yearn for and that I envy in others because my anxiety about my work being inherently always unfinished comes from my status as an ESL scholar. You know, I am writing in a language that is not my native tongue and I don't have the sense for the flow of English in the same way that I do have it for Spanish and honestly, even French a little bit more just because they're both Latin languages. Sometimes I feel like I have a sense of the beauty of language better in a Romance language than in a Germanic language like English. And so in my case, to push the metaphor of digestion a little further, what ends up happening with me is that I masticate and masticate and masticate because I'm afraid that I'm going to choke on the food and that it's going to cause indigestion and that other people are going to know that I'm not used to eating this kind of food. So there's always this fear that other people will see through my ESL status, which in itself is not something that I try to hide or that I am ashamed of, but maybe it's because I'm trying to write to a standard of English that maybe is not appropriate to an ESL person and that may be forever out of reach.

Ellie: 16:36

What you think you want to just have like lower expectations for yourself because you're an English language learner?

David: 16:42

not lower expectations in terms of quality

Ellie: 16:44

Yeah. Okay. I was like, that seems like a strange conclusion, David.

David: 16:48

No, no, no. It would be more realistic expectations about what my relationship to this language that I acquired when I was a teenager will be, and that I will never have the kind of mastery that I maybe compare myself to in other writers who are native speakers.

Ellie: 17:05

Yeah. Or that you might not necessarily perceive that you have that mastery. Because this is also a tricky part of things. Like sometimes when I'm like, Oh my God, that was awesome. I'm done. Then I get a peer review report and it's like, Oh wait, actually there's like a lot that needs to be improved. And so it turns out that it wasn't done, but I think that subjective perception of this is done doesn't always necessarily map on to whether something is where it needs to be. And that's like. a bit of where the difficulty arises, especially because writing is such a solitary act. So I have recently, after writing my first book now for the past year and a half or so, started to share it with one of my close friends. Our friend from grad school, Roshni Patel. We've been doing like a writing exchange. She's also a philosophy professor. And that has been so helpful, even though I felt so bad because I'm giving her things. I'm like, I'm sorry, this is a chapter that probably should be 10, 000 words, but it's 20, 000 words and completely disorganized. It feels like I'm offloading a burden onto somebody else, but having her perspective on here's what's working and what's not working is so immensely helpful. But that can kind of only come once you've drafted something. Like most of the writing process is extremely solitary. Even if you're sitting at the library or a coffee shop with other friends, and I find that to be one of the most challenging parts of it. Like you can't get away from your own psychological demons when you're sitting in front of the computer. And I think that's why something like ChatGPT is appealing to so many students, especially when you're like a young person, you haven't figured out your way of dealing with psychological obstacles. Having to create something from nothing is really, really scary.

David: 18:43

Yeah, and that's why at least I experience as cathartic not only having other people give me feedback on my writing, but also reading other writers talking about the pains of their own writing process because it reminds me that even though it is a solitary activity, it is a solitary activity that many people do, so you're not alone, even when you are writing in solitude. And so it does give me a sense of belonging to a community of writers, especially when people are candid about the anxieties of writing, about the pathologies that it creates in us as thinkers, because it does. I mean, it is a highly unnatural thing, right, to write, to make markings that express ideas.

Ellie: 19:26

Yeah, there's this book called The War of Art that was super helpful to me when I was in my 20s. It's basically just like, yeah, this is hard. Keep going. Would recommend.

David: 19:35

Well, you know, one, piece that I can recommend in relation to this is Joan Didion's, short essay, Why I Write, where she dispels one of the myths that I think I have often fallen victim to in connection to writing, which is that you write things that are already clear in your mind, and she says, look, If ideas were already clear to me in my mind, I wouldn't need to write it because I would already know and have the thought and the pleasure associated with it. And she talks about there being these vague, shimmering, glistening images in her mind that then through the act of writing, you get to clarify to yourself while recognizing that that is a very difficult process of self challenging and self discovery.

Ellie: 20:19

Yeah. Yeah, and that takes me to a different act of writing, which is journaling. And journaling, as real Overthink listeners will know, has been a big part of my life. And I think journaling sits at an interesting intersection for me between that process of clarification that you're talking about Didion writing about, and recording. Like, so some people journal to record what they did, and historically that has been important. Like, some people did it through letter writing some people did it through just writing to themselves, but going back to ancient times, obviously for the privileged literate classes, writing down records of your days has been key. Now we don't have so much of a need for that anymore, right? Because most of our record keeping comes through photo taking, or maybe through calendar apps. Like, it's all much more digitized now, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. How convenient is it for me that instead of writing today, I did this on my trip. I can just like go back and look at a photo album. But what hasn't changed is the need for writing down your feelings, your perspectives, et cetera. Those clarificatory processes that Didion is talking about, whether it's like in an actual physical journal or I've been experimenting lately with audio journaling, just on my commute, like talking to my voice notes app, and also people love the Notes app, like I feel like all young people, yeah, it's like young people use the Notes app as their journal, which I think is really cool.

David: 21:54

Yeah. No, I mean, us young people do love the notes app.

Ellie: 21:58

No, but I'm talking especially, people younger than us, I feel like I see a lot of memes about Notes app poetry and Notes app journaling. I'm still writing in physical journals when I'm not audio journaling.

David: 22:10

But this is a new thing for me because when I have a thought, I will quickly note it into my notes app and sometimes I will speak to it with the voice to text function of my phone. And so now I have this running incoherent, inchoate magma of thoughts, ideas, feelings that then I go back to when I am writing by longhand to get inspiration from these moments from my past that have been recorded. But I think what you said, Ellie, really speaks to the many reasons that there are for writing, right? We write to clarify our thoughts to ourselves. We write to record things that happened to us. But there are still other reasons to write. George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, also wrote an essay by the same title as the one by Joan Didion called Why I Write, where he reflects on the meaning of being a writer. Doesn't

Ellie: 23:04

Didion say she explicitly got the title from Orwell because Orwell's essay is like really classic?

David: 23:09

Yes, yeah, so first came the Orwell piece, and then Joan Didion did her own take, and it's a response and an engagement with Orwell. And Orwell says that there are many motives that drive individuals. to pursue writing as a vocation, and two that I really like that he talks about are what he calls sheer egoism and political purpose. By sheer egoism, he literally means an inflated sense of self importance on the part of people who call themselves writers, right? Like,

Ellie: 23:38

Marked guilty.

David: 23:40

Yeah, like, you know, like we're motivated by wanting to be seen as smart, by wanting to be remembered by posterity you know, sometimes we want to prove that we're better than the people around us in some conscious or unconscious way. And so those are definitely part of the psychology of writing, according to Orwell. But on the other end of the spectrum, writers can also be driven by a deep sense of political purpose. And that's not mutually exclusive with the egoism. Those two things can be together.

Ellie: 24:11

Like, I would own that. I have a little bit of the first one, but I also want to say I definitely have this one.

David: 24:16

Yeah, no, and I mean, Orwell himself says that he has both of them and many others that he talks about. But this sense of political purpose, he means political in a very broad sense as the desire to make a difference in the world to push the world in a certain direction or another. So it really means influencing others through your thoughts. And he says that the sense of political purpose always stems from our historical and political situation. So in his case, for example, he talks about his own experience in the 1920s as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Force in Burma, nowadays Myanmar, which was the influence for his novel Burmese Days. And of course, he talks about being influenced by the Spanish Civil War, by Hitler's ascent to power, and says that all of his writings after those events are inspired by them and by the politics that followed. And so Animal Farm, which is obviously his most famous work of satire, is explicitly political. But he says all of his writing is, even though it's also utterly, utterly egoistic. Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly Zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay student assistants a fair wage. The traditional story we tell about the origins of writing identifies cuneiform as the first human writing system in history. Cuneiform is a form of writing that was first developed by the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, around 3, 200 BCE. It consists of a series of marks made traditionally on clay tablets using a wooden stick called a stylus. If you look at the marks, they look like lines and triangles that go in all sorts of directions. They're like little wedges that you make with a wooden stick in a soft clay surface. And when these marks were discovered in the modern period, in the 1600s, people didn't know what they were looking at. Some people thought they were just ancient decorations, maybe that would go on buildings or houses. And others even hypothesized that they were marks left by birds walking on wet clay that then hardened over time. And it was not until much later that people realized that what they were looking at was in fact a formal system of writing with order, meaning, and structure.

Ellie: 27:08

Leave it to humans to either like totally overvalue our contributions or undervalue them. Like we see these marks and we're just like, um, they must be bird footprints.

David: 27:20

Yeah, yes. Well, and once those marks were recognized as belonging to a full blown writing system, they allowed us to revisit our interpretation of the culture that they belong to. Because one of the things that we know from the history, the archaeology, and the anthropology of writing is that with a writing system comes the possibility of many other things that might be very difficult without it, such as complex economic record keeping, historical documentation of important social events, and even artistic and philosophical achievements that, again, are tied to the written text itself.

Ellie: 28:03

And I really think there's no way to overestimate how integral writing has been to the development of human civilizations. Of course, okay, I don't want to play into this old, like, colonialist philosophy trope that says that history only begins with writing and like human civilization only begins with writing because that view, which you see, for instance, in Hegel ends up becoming a way to completely exclude oral cultures that didn't use writing from, like, the course of human history and progress. However, I think we can completely respect oral cultures while also acknowledging that the kind of vast communication, dissemination of information that writing brings about, whether it's through this, like, initial record keeping in ancient civilizations or post printing press, like, dissemination of tracts, like, political ideas, et cetera, et cetera, is something we have I really cannot even imagine the absence of like, we would not have the sort of globalized human culture that we have without writing. I don't know. I'm saying that as though it's like a revolutionary thing to say as opposed to just like the most basic thing you can say.

David: 29:11

Writing matters!

Ellie: 29:12

But there's a book by Walter Ong called Orality and Literacy, which I randomly came across in like a free book trade in college, see Dissemination of the Written and that book argues that the shift from orality to written text completely changes not only our modes of communication and like the possibilities of communication, but also the way that people think, feel, and understand the world. And so writing is a technological revolution, even in terms of like our own hearts and minds.

David: 29:42

Yeah, a revolution in experience and perception. And I think you see this in the case of Mesopotamia with cuneiform. Because if you look at some of the earliest inscriptions of cuneiform, of these wedge like markings on clay, they were very basic and pictographic. They were images of animals. Often they were thought to be a way of keeping track of debts, right? Like I lent five goats to such and such. And so you would just mark five goats by drawing them over time, the wedges themselves reflecting the evolution in the logic of human experience and human perception and human thinking that they enabled. So over time, the wedges start conveying more abstract ideas, more abstract meanings, and they make possible the expression of more and more complex thoughts on clay. And so now it is thanks to Cuneiform that we have important records like the Hammurabi Code, right? This originary founding legal document. And so writing enables history, literally by allowing people to write down their own narratives of who they are and allowing those records to survive into the future.

Ellie: 30:55

Okay, so you do think that history only begins with written communication. Thanks Hegel.

David: 31:00

No, I think, I think it's easier to do history retroactively because it does preserve information, but I do not believe that history begins with writing.

Ellie: 31:11

Well, one thing that's fascinating to me is just how recent the invention of writing really is. Because I mean, according to the timeline that you alluded to, it's a latecomer in human history.

David: 31:22

Oh yeah, I mean, 5, 000 years ago. That's very recent. And according to the dominant narrative, that's just the invention of writing, not the dissemination of writing. For that, you have to wait until like the 1400s or 1300s, depending on which account you're looking at.

Ellie: 31:38

And then we get to 2025 where writing has been completely destroyed by chat GPT. Maybe we'll have to wait until 2030 for that one.

David: 31:47

It's so disseminated that the machines are writing for us.

Ellie: 31:51

Derrida would have a field day, but we'll, I get ahead of myself.

David: 31:55

But I think that recency is really important for us to think about because it does feed a specific narrative that we have about writing and its relationship to speech. And that narrative is that speech is superior to writing because it comes first, right? So humans first develop speech, like in our ancient evolutionary past, and then much later, only 5000 years ago, develop a technology for recording that speech and making it quote unquote eternal and there are evolutionary and developmental versions of that narrative developmentally, we know that babies learn to speak before they learn to write and from an evolutionary perspective, we tend to believe that writing emerged 5,000 years ago, but speech evolved 150,000 years ago.

Ellie: 32:49

This idea that speech is primary relative to writing leads us to a view that writing is just a tool that preserves speech, whether for future generations or like a future time. Here, writing is conceived of as a technique for protecting speech from the fact that speech is limited to the present. But this in turn made a number of ancient philosophers worry about the inherent dangers of writing. And the most famous example of this is Plato's dialogue, The Phaedrus. Fascinatingly, though, the scene of the dialogue in which Socrates and Phaedrus are speaking starts with Socrates asking Phaedrus to recount a conversation that Phaedrus had with Lycius. And that conversation was about love. And Phaedrus is like, sorry bro, I don't really remember the conversation. And Socrates is like, well, what's that little scroll in your pocket? Phaedrus pulls it out and it's a recorded version of his conversation with Lycius about love. So, Phaedrus doesn't remember what he and Lycius talked about offhand, but he does have it recorded on a papyrus.

David: 33:56

Hey, Phaedrus, is that a rolled up papyrus in your pocket, or are you just really happy to see me?

Ellie: 34:05

Okay, low hanging fruit, but also a good one. In any case, Socrates, while benefiting from the fact that Phaedrus has written down his conversation with Lycius so that he can now recount it to Socrates, has this diatribe towards the end of the dialogue against writing. And one of his worries is that writing will lead to the atrophy of memory. Because if people rely on writing, then they won't memorize important information. And you can actually see this in Phaedrus's inability to remember the specifics of the conversation with Lycius without recourse to the papyrus.

David: 34:40

Yeah, and I think it's important to keep in mind that this is happening at the time that writing is being introduced into Greek life through the importation and the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. And so Socrates is largely talking shit about what he perceives to be a new dangerous and largely, I would say, foreign technology that represents a threat to the largely oral culture that he belonged to. And so the worry about memory for him really is that if everybody is writing things down, they won't need to commit things to memory. And when you have people with atrophied memories, you cannot have say, the bards that memorize and recite amazing epics since Homeric times. So something very essential about Greek life, Greek art, Greek culture is being lost, and that's orality.

Ellie: 35:37

Sounds like Socrates was living in a time of transformative technology comparable to our own, at least in certain ways. And in addition to this worry about the atrophying of memory, another worry that Socrates expresses is that speech requires the presence of the author and guarantees the possibility of dialogue, whereas a piece of writing is independent of the author. And that also means that it can be read in many ways by readers because there's no living present author to explain the meaning of the text. It's like the way that we worry that text messages lose the tone that we would have on the phone, like the same is true of speech versus writing in general. You lack initial context, and then you also can't ask for clarification.

David: 36:22

And that's what in the Phaedrus, Socrates calls the magnificent silence of the written text. And the worry really there is that if you are confused about the meaning of the text, if something is not clear to you, you won't have a way to fix the meaning and pin it down because the text is not a living author. It won't answer your questions, right? You cannot have a Socratic dialogue with a rolled up or unrolled papyrus. And so it's really about the impossibility of dialoguing Yeah

Ellie: 36:56

the text is dead.

David: 36:57

and flat. That's a joke.

Ellie: 37:02

Oh, David, it took me way too long to realize that was a joke.

David: 37:06

Anyways, a joke well or poorly received. Behind Socrates's worry is the common refrain that we often find in linguistics and in philosophy, which is that speech, again, is primary, more natural, maybe even more biological than writing, which is secondary, technological, and purely cultural. And in his recent book, The Entanglement, How Art and Philosophy Make Us Who We Are, the philosopher Alva Noe argues that it might be time finally to let go of this old refrain. According to Noe, We have certain tendencies as human beings that are totally natural. We could even call them biological. But because we are also cultural beings through and through, namely cultural beings who create objects, who use language, who produce tools, the cultural objects that we produce ultimately loop back and shape how we experience our own natural tendencies. And so he makes the argument that our biology and our culture are inherently entangled, hence the title of his book. And he says that this is what happens with the technology of writing.

Ellie: 38:24

Okay, this book has been on my list. I love Noe's work, but I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet. So tell us, at risk of spoilers, tell us how he thinks they're entangled.

David: 38:33

Well, they are entangled in the sense that you cannot say that writing is just derivative of speech and that it was created exclusively to mark down our thoughts. And he begins by talking about how, in fact, not all writing is even linguistic in the first place. So you cannot say that it is derivative of language. So if you think about, for example

Ellie: 38:56

emojis. I'm Just kidding. Sorry.

David: 39:00

Yeah. I mean

Ellie: 39:00

Our emojis writing, next

David: 39:02

he doesn't, he does not talk about emojis. But if you think about musical notation and mathematical notation, it doesn't refer to thoughts or necessarily to sounds beyond that. He says that if we limit our definition of writing to the earliest writing systems that are formalized and structured like cuneiform, yes, it will be the case that it's a latecomer in human history. But that's an arbitrary way of defining writing because writing is just about making marks in the world, right? People were writing in a much broader sense for a very long time before Mesopotamia. There are mark making, picture making activities that we find in the archaeological record. Think about the ancient paintings in the caves at Lascaux. Think about various marks that our ancestors made even with clothing. According to Noe, all of that is a kind of writing. And so, it is not that from an evolutionary perspective, we first developed speech and then magically waited 145,000 years to write it down with the development of these wedges. He says, rather from the very beginning, sound making and mark making are co-emerging in various forms, making both of them as old as the hills. That's how he puts it in his book. And so we need to abandon this idea that one precedes the other.

Ellie: 40:40

As old as the hills can refer to 5,000 years ago or 150,000 years ago. All short in the span of human history. But Noe's argument reminds me here a little bit of David Abram, who wrote this book, The Spell of the Sensuous, which you and I have talked about in previous episodes. And Abram too encourages us to think about writing systems as developing out of more ancient forms of quote unquote writing, which would include things like markings that we would make while hunting to remember our path, marks that we would leave with our bodies for others to interpret like footprints.

David: 41:13

Well, and actually he points out that the Greek root graphene originally didn't refer to what we now consider the act of writing. It originally referred to the mark that an arrow leaves in the body after penetrating it. So the original mark is actually a scarification through violence. Yeah, I didn't know that. It's so good. But either way, his main point in this book is that you cannot. disentangle speech and writing because both are cultural expressions that emerged in their broadest sense possible roughly around the same time. And yes, surely we can say that our writing depends on our conventions around speech, but you can turn that argument around and come to the conclusion that speech is itself dependent on writing.

Ellie: 42:30

We've just seen that Noe talks about speech as being dependent on writing and vice versa, kind of disrupting the traditional narrative that writing is a derivative of speech. Well, the philosopher Jacques Derrida takes that argument, I would say, even a lot further. And the conclusions that Derrida comes to will actually lead him to suggest that writing causes us to rethink the entire system of Western metaphysics. Categories like subjectivity, truth, universality, all transform when we think about writing. So let's get into that.

David: 43:06

A place where we can begin is by recognizing that just as Noe challenges the privileging of speech over writing, sort of looking at the history of our evolution as a species, Derrida makes a similar claim by looking at the history of philosophy. According to the dominant discourse in Western philosophy, and you see this view articulated by such heavy hitters as Aristotle and Rousseau, there is a hierarchy between thought, speech, and writing, so spoken words are symbols of mental experiences, thoughts, feelings, and so they are at one remove from that source. And written words are symbols of spoken words, which means that the written sign is twice removed from that source of truth, which is our mental experience or our inner thoughts. And so you have thought that is foundational. Then you have speech that is at one remove from thought. And finally, writing that is secondary to speech, which is itself secondary to thinking. So a tripartite hierarchy.

Ellie: 44:18

And this hierarchy means for Derrida that writing is a mere supplement to speech. A sort of optional add on, right? That's the way that it's usually conceived of in this traditional narrative. And if you know anything about deconstruction, which is Derrida's way of thinking about things, you'll know that its first target is always going to be hierarchical binaries like this. In this case, this binary between speech and writing. If the history of philosophy privileges speech over writing, well then deconstruction is going to show that writing is actually necessary for speech. And that means that writing is primary relative to speech. So that is to say the first step of deconstruction is always going to be the overturning of a binary. Which means a privileging of the traditionally underprivileged term. That's not the whole story to deconstruction, but that is like an important first step. The ultimate goal of which is to, by reversing the binary, going to be to topple the binary altogether and to destroy its hierarchy as well as like its very existence as a binary.

David: 45:19

Which sounds, you know, fun and subversive, but in practice, it actually requires a lot of patient, detailed argumentation on Derrida's part. So, let's think about how he justifies this idea that speech is actually dependent on writing.

Ellie: 45:35

Yeah, so he does this in a ton of different places, a ton of different ways in his vast amount of writings. This was a man who loved writing and did a hell of a lot of it.

David: 45:46

No anxieties on his side.

Ellie: 45:48

Oh my God, I don't know what was going on, but I've spent a lot of time in the Derrida archives in Normandy and yeah, there's just a lot there. Anyway, we'll just focus on a few of his writings here about writing. So let's start with some of the things that can make writing different from speech. Derrida points out that, I can never be assured that someone is correctly understanding my message when I write because there's no tone or ability to reply in the moment. In addition to that, writing also lasts a lot longer than speech. It has a kind of permanence to it that speaking in the moment does not. And on top of that, one of the really interesting things for Derrida is that writing is repeatable, or iterable. It uses words that in principle could be used by anyone, right? Words that can be copied, reprinted, rearranged, and so forth, whether or not the person copying and reprinting them understands them or not. And so writing frees meaning from the present and from a subject uttering it, as well as from a subject receiving it. One cool aspect of that is that it means for Derrida that ideal objects, like concepts, for instance, are possible only due to writing. We have to have that removal from the here and now present of an individual subject speaking and an individual subject receiving in order to get ideal objects, like concepts.

David: 47:12

Yeah, and I mean, at the same time, according to Derrida, writing depends on the possibility of absence, which is a central term in his writings. Because when somebody speaks to me, they are there, right? They are in the moment. Speech depends on presence. It presupposes it. But the moment when I read what somebody else has written is always a separate moment from the time that they wrote it, right? So there is a differentiation between the production and the consumption or the reading of the text. It could be that it happens a minute later, it could be a century later, but it always comes after the moment of creation. And so writing is always based on what Derrida would call a deferral. In time, it depends on this kind of absence.

Ellie: 48:03

And that also means that it depends on the necessary possibility that the writer and the person to whom the writing is addressed are absent from one another. For Derrida, my mortality is inscribed in everything that I write because I could always be dead when someone reads what I've written. Morbid thought, but one that he thinks is very interesting. And this also means that writing carries with it a lot of potential uncertainty around authorship. The signatory of the written word could turn out not to be the person who actually wrote it. Like, forgery, plagiarism, ChatGPT essays, are always possible. The attribution of a piece of writing is falsifiable, you know, fundamentally so. And so not only can we misunderstand what is written, we can also misattribute what is written. And for Derrida, these aren't just contingent features of what happens when writing doesn't reach its destination, but instead these features are built into the very structure of writing itself.

David: 49:01

Yeah, and these are the same features that made writing so unattractive and even threatening for people like Socrates and Plato.

Ellie: 49:10

Exactly, and I'm drawing some of this stuff from my former professor in grad school, dissertation committee member, Geoffrey Bennington, just like the best Derrida scholar, so reliable, there's a lot of bad stuff on Derrida, he writes stuff that is not bad, so as, as Bennington puts it, writing is, quote, the bastard or even parasital son of the Logos. And here's where things get interesting. Having pointed out these features of writing, Derrida argues that all of them are not just true of writing, but also of speech. They're true of language in general. So, the absence, the risk of loss, the death characteristic of writing. What Derrida calls dissemination also haunts speech. There's also some really good stuff on this in the Peter Salmon biography of Derrida. Writing enables the transfer of words and concepts, right, as we said, it's like what allows ideal objects to emerge for Derrida. And allowing that transfer of words means that writing also grounds speech. Writing is not the only kind of language that is repeatable or iterable. Actually, any language must be capable of being repeated. It has these fixed signs, these words that are in principle universally usable by anyone, and thus it is necessarily possible that language deviates from its intended meaning. So it's not just writing that can be cut off from its intended meaning, it's also speech. It's any form of language. Plus, speech is necessarily disentangled from presence in the moment. You know, there's like a gap between the moment of somebody uttering a word and the moment that it is received by the person, even if it's like so minuscule we can barely even register it. Writing, Derrida thinks, names the functioning of language in general. It's not derivative. It is actually foundational.

David: 50:59

Well, and that point I think is worth underlining because Derrida then concludes from his temporary privileging of writing over speech as a way of toppling over that binary, that writing grounds all language across the board. It is a sort of groundless ground that is at the origin. And that's what he calls RK writing. It's an original form of language that is prior to the separation of speech and writing. And I think this notion of The RK writing that at the origin or at the beginning, there is writing as the spacing deferral of meaning. It's the meaning behind the deconstructionist motto, there is nothing outside the text. You often hear people saying that as a way of summarizing deconstruction, there is nothing outside the text. And what I take him to mean when he says that is that when it comes to meaning and language and signification, it is writing all the way down. There is never a presence or a positive origin to begin with.

Ellie: 52:03

I might quibble with the phrase deconstructionist motto. Geoff Bennington would not be very happy about that. A, because deconstruction is not an ism and B, because like it doesn't have mottos. Maybe the word idiom would be okay. We can say an idiom of deconstruction. Derrida sure likes that.

David: 52:22

Rallying cry. Rallying cry. I'm going the other

Ellie: 52:25

way. Yeah, no, Derrida would not like that. He definitely wouldn't like motto. But anyway, okay. Of course though, As you can tell, I spent a lot of time in what's sometimes known as the Derrida High Church. Sorry to anyone in that if you are listening. Lots of respect. Anyway, Derrida's arguments, however, have not always been welcomed by everyone, and in particular, he had a really entertaining debate with the analytic philosopher John Searle. And it's way beyond the scope of this segment to go into that in detail, but I do want to mention one thing here, which is Searle's claim In response to Derrida, that writing doesn't function with the necessarily possible absence of its receiver. Searle takes issue with this idea from Derrida. He's like, look, Derrida, you're saying it's necessarily possible for the writer and receiver to be absent from one another, but that's not actually the case. And Searle says, for instance, Making a shopping list for myself means that the receiver is present during the act of writing. That's a case where it's not necessarily possible for the writer and receiver to be absent from one another. I think that's a pretty thin argument in part because it only says, it, it would only say that it's not necessary for the writer and receiver to be absent from one another. It doesn't actually even reach the category of the quote necessarily possible. But Derrida has maybe even a simpler reply to that, which is I wouldn't bother writing a shopping list if the I that writes is the same I that opens it in the shopping aisle. When I wrote the grocery list, I was writing it to an absent future self.

David: 53:59

Yeah, God knows I don't trust my future self not to write a shopping list.

Ellie: 54:03

Oh yeah, this is why we have to write everything in our notes apps. And the reminders, oh my god, I have so many unread reminders right now.

David: 54:12

But I think this indicates at least one of the ways that Derrida thinks writing disrupts standard metaphysical categories, in this case, that of the self or the subject, because for Derrida, and I'm taking this quote from his essay on Freud and the scene of writing, writing is a scene in which, as he puts it, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found, end quote. And so with the case of the shopping list, you see that, right? Like it's not as if the self is a point in time and in space that is always the same. The reason we need to write the shopping list in the first place is because there are multiple selves and they are distanced and deferred from one another. And writing helps us kind of mediate those differences and play with them. And interact across them.

Ellie: 55:04

Yeah, and I'll say for my part, I don't actually find this deconstruction of the subject that interesting. This was like more or less what I wrote my dissertation on. My dissertation was a Derridian concept of self, and what I have concluded now, almost a decade later, is that this idea of the classical subject that is punctual, self present, etc. actually doesn't really exist anywhere in the history of philosophy. It's mostly just like a straw man idea, and so this idea that if all language has these characteristics of writing, then there is no longer an intact, like, classical notion of subjectivity. It's just a wrong conclusion to draw because, like, there was never a punctual, self present subject that had no absence in it, in anywhere, to be found in the history of philosophy. So I take the writing point to be interesting, but I think I shy away from the conclusion that it deconstructs from the notion of subjectivity because I think the interesting thing about subjectivity is that it's like kind of always already deconstructed. This is not, not a plug for the book of mine that should be coming out in within the next couple of years where I really like take, I take Derrida to task on this point.

David: 56:15

Yeah, but I mean, I take your word for it about the subject, right? But Derrida is also worried about other terms in the history of philosophy that play that function of being a center or a ground. And I'm here reminded of that very early essay that he wrote in 1966 called Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the human sciences, where he says that we tend to think of any structure as having a point at the center that kind of holds it in play and that enables the elements of the structure to move and to play with one another. But the central point itself does not move and it doesn't change. And he says many concepts in the history of philosophy have played the role of that pin or that nail at the center of the structure, the subject is one of them, but he also says that the concept of essence, the concept of existence, substance, truth, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and others.

Ellie: 57:17

I'm seeing you reading from a book here. Where was that list coming from?

David: 57:21

So that list is coming from that essay, which is included in Derrida's writing and difference.

Ellie: 57:27

Which essay? Freud in the Scene of Writing?

David: 57:29

No, structure, sign, and play.

Ellie: 57:31

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, Derrida talks, I can't remember if it's there and or elsewhere, but it's certainly elsewhere at minimum, about the deconstruction of logocentrism. Logocentrism being this primacy, this centrality of the logos, which is speech or word in Greek, but also can refer to like logic, like the logical organization of things, all kinds of different meanings of the word logos in philosophy, and how logocentrism is tied to phonocentrism, the primacy of speech.

David: 58:02

Yeah. And one thing I'll say about my own relationship to Derrida is that what I have always kind of resisted about Derrida is his anti-historicism, because in that essay, he says, look, this thing that I'm talking about, this conception of writing, it doesn't refer to a historical period. It's not a movement in philosophy that I am inaugurating. This notion of archaic writing has always already been happening. And so he makes. A transhistorical claim about what this RK writing is such that, as you said Ellie, everything is always already RK writing from the get go.

Ellie: 58:44

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our Overthink community on Patreon for bonus content, Zoom meetings, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 58:54

To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one time tax deductible donations, please check out our website, overthinkpodcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel, as well as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at overthink_ pod.

Ellie: 59:09

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants, Bayarmaa Batt-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.