When Emily Dickinson announced that “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away,” her point was that while both boat and book can transport passengers, the power of the book, relatively speaking, is superior to that of the frigate. Why readers might be in need of transport, where they are headed, and what they bring with them or leave behind, are all second-order questions.
Analogies such as Dickinson’s between books and pieces of technology are not hard to find in the nineteenth century; one may think, for example, of Dickens’s account of his books as clockworks or Melville’s rueful and witty comparison, in “The Happy Failure,” between his books and a failed “Great Hydraulic-Hydrostatic Apparatus for draining swamps and marshes.” In the twentieth century, the identification of books as technology spread more broadly to scholarship and criticism. Writers such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Lewis Mumford showed how the invention of the printing press and the resulting abundance of books served to transform the world, and how the codex and the printing press rendered knowledge more portable and reproducible. For Mumford, as for Walter Ong, S.J., Marshall McLuhan and others, books work not so much as to carry souls away to unspecified lands via figurative frigates, as Dickinson would have it, but rather to reshape consciousness through such phenomena as the externalization of memory and the homogenization of culture.
By the mid twentieth century, the “machinization” of literature, as with art and architecture, had advanced to the point that announcements that such-and-such was a machine or that it issued forth from or amounted to one had become routine. If everything now is or is akin to a computer, everything was a machine of sorts, whether one geared towards thinking, communication, or information storage and retrieval. But something happened between the mid twentieth century and today such that, outside academia and certain spheres of criticism, the notion of books as technology became obscured. A peculiar amnesia set in.
Today, in some spheres, books are often imagined to be counter technological. A dehumanizing technological onslaught is thought to be menacing the world of books, which is tacitly conceived of as a homey yet elevated sphere analogous perhaps to Tolkien’s Shire. Thus, people sometimes call for schools to get rid of technology (meaning, in this instance, computers and AI) and to return to pencils and paper and books, as if these were not also technological.
How did books become what Joel Miller calls “the forgotten technology”? And what difference would it make to our understanding of modernity and of ourselves if we remembered? His excellent new book, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future, is motivated by two closely related problems. First, because books have become so familiar, we have forgotten to recognize “the book for what it is: a remarkably potent information technology, an idea machine.” Second, we have failed to appreciate the extent to which books served “as one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of the modern world.”
Miller makes this argument via a dazzlingly wide survey of texts ranging from fourth-century BCE Greece to the present moment. The book is addressed to the educated general reader rather than a narrow audience of book historians or historians of technology. Miller, an author of four prior books as well as a former editor and publisher who writes about books for Miller’s Book Review, has written an eloquent and often illuminating love letter to the book. He seeks to call attention to the beloved, to praise it, to understand it better, and to catalogue its virtues, as in this compendious definition:
The book is a portable collection of written ideas, designed to elevate the human mind beyond its natural limits of experience, memory, distance, and time; it’s a vessel for numbers, narratives, laws, and lyrics; it facilitates history, politics, philosophy, religion, science, and self-discovery; it enshrines traditions while providing direction as they shift and grow; it informs the ignorant, reminds the learned, travels far, and cheats death.
This expansive, quasi-normative definition sets the tone for the book as a whole. The emphasis is on continuity and the accretion of capacity relative to the formative, positive influence of the book upon the human mind over time. The framework is linear but historically elastic, in that it is punctuated with short sections of “marginalia” that present theories and information pertaining to but not strictly governed by the sequence.
Miller posits the existence of a generic “book form” of which both codex and scroll are variants; this move enables him to refer to the scrolls referenced in the works of Plato and Xenophon as books. He starts in ancient Greece, puts forth a general theory of how ideas are transmitted across time, and later provides a brief excursus into the Ancient Near East, where writing emerged not to convey ideas per se but rather to keep track of goods, labor, and transactions.
“The path to now,” Miller says, “is paved with books.” For him, books are to be understood as hybrid ideological-material entities that transcend the divide between existence and essence. Since Miller identifies books as drivers of historical change, his account of causality in this context is neither solely ideological nor material. Here, I will call attention to but one key thread in the argument, which ranges over the course of sixteen chapters. The reason that I have chosen this particular thread, which follows what Miller calls “Socrates’ complaint” is that he returns to it throughout the book and engages with it to develop his own argument. It starts off in Chapter 1, with an account of Socrates’ apparent antipathy toward writing and books as displayed in the Phaedrus. In writing of the Platonic Socrates, Miller retells his story of the dialogue between Theuth, the Egyptian inventor of writing (along with much else), and King Thamus, also of Egypt. In discussing writing, Socrates has the character of Thamus express the fear that writing will cause people’s memory to deteriorate, as it will, in effect, do the remembering for them. People will rely on “marks made by others” rather than remembering by themselves. Books (in the form of scrolls) will similarly deceive people about their own powers because they will create the impression of knowledge rather than enabling the possession of it.
Written things, Socrates indicates, may be misunderstood, and they cannot, in and of themselves, correct those misunderstandings. They just keep saying the same thing over and over. As such, “they require support from vested authorities to ensure that they are properly understood.” Further, books don’t necessarily make their readers wise, and they “can easily end up in the hands of unintended or unlearned readers who misunderstand and abuse them.”
But Miller points out that there are ample reasons in Plato and Xenophon alike why Socrates’ criticism of books should itself be criticized, “not least the fact that they preserved his opinions in books, and we’re busy discussing them now.” He concludes that while Socrates’ complaint about books persists, so too does his tacit acknowledgements of their value. He suggests that the tension in Socrates’ thought concerning the deleterious and beneficial effects of books upon the mind drives the drama that unfolds throughout the rest of the book.
The reader does not have to wait too long to hear the next installment of Miller’s engagement with the dialogues. In Chapter 2, which concerns compositional techniques, Miller argues that writing and editing and re-writing texts entails thinking and rethinking one’s thoughts. Here, composing and editing are said to entail “critical, analytical, constructive thought—something Socrates tacitly acknowledged in his own behaviors, if not in his words.”
This sort of thought depends upon writing to a considerable extent, for as Miller points out, “writing allows you to review what you have thought, [and] to retain what you have thought long enough to review it,” and that allows for iterative improvement, or so one hopes. Miller mentions the famous description of Plato’s drafting process by Dionysus of Halicarnassus and concludes that “knowingly or not, Plato availed himself of all the cognitive gains writing made possible.”
The impression of a Plato whose habits defied the possible objections of his teacher are reinforced in Chapter 3, where Miller sets up what he takes to be an unexpected contrast between Plato and the Platonic Socrates, noting that “despite his teacher Socrates’ ambivalence about books, Plato was a surprisingly eager user” of them.
By the time that Miller gets to Chapter 4, Socrates’ complaint about the limitations of writing explicitly resurfaces. First, he provides an account of the discovery of the Book of the Law amidst the Josianic reforms of the seventh century BCE as depicted in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible. He then expands the discussion to include a description of the challenge faced by the priest Ezra in the post-exilic book of Nehemiah. There, Ezra positions priests in the crowd gathered to hear the Torah read out loud. “Without their aid,” he says, “the people would have been lost.”
Miller uses these brief episodes to suggest that since books don’t speak for themselves, they “all require interpretation and explanation.” He connects this phenomenon to the argument of his own book by adding that this “need to explain a book is an integral feature of the technology, which is ultimately responsible for several key developments in the story of the idea machine.” More specifically, if books are to serve their intended purpose, they need an attendant apparatus comprising personnel, institutions, conventions, myths, and norms. That intended purpose, in Miller’s account, is to explain reality. “People use myth, law, history, drama, and poetry to communicate something they regard as true about the world and how it works.”
For Miller, “Thinking of Josiah and Ezra’s challenge takes us back to the problem Socrates raised in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates complained that a book was only able to articulate its message as formulated. . . . Books say what they say and can’t take questions. The only way to clarify what’s inside the book is to go outside the book.” Readers, then, appeal to “the head of a reading community,” and “these authorities confirm the message or application of the book. In other words, there’s what the book says and what they say it says.” He argues that “Contrary to Socrates’ view, however, this need for explanation is a feature of the technology, not a bug. The fact that a book can say one thing and we can read another in it means we can use the book to leap beyond the book.” It would seem that the aim here is to defend the book against Socrates’ critique through recourse to the argument that the functionality of the book-as-technology is to prompt the deployment of external resources.
The next time that the Socratic complaint surfaces in the book, we are far from antiquity, specifically, in the late Middle Ages, by which point the grammatical and textual innovations of monks and Carolingian reformers had made books much more accessible, thereby opening them up to a wider audience of lay readers. But, notes Miller, we must “jump back to the exchange between Theuth and Thamus: here we are again. Socrates’ concern about untutored readers, never fully quieted, would sound loud again. Books of every kind would begin hobnobbing with readers of every kind, and those readers would interpret them however they chose. “Eventually,” he says, “widespread personal reading would transform society.” Miller glances back to the Phaedrus to keep the conversation with Socrates going and to note the continued need for extra-bookish discussions and institutions, even when books were becoming more widespread.
In the “marginalia” appended to Chapter 10, which addresses the democratization of knowledge and interpretation allowed for by printing, Socrates’ complaint about writing resurfaces in a brief discussion of the fifteenth-century ban on printing by the Shaykh al-Islam—whom, it should be noted, was Sunni and, as such, did not represent a pan-Islamic perspective. Here, Miller finds the Sunni rejection of printing to be remarkable. He mentions the worry about the potential of printing “to undermine Islam’s oral literary culture (which hand-copied books were seen to support rather than to subvert) and fears that printing would erode traditional forms of intellectual authority, not only religious but secular.”
As Miller would have it, “these concerns echo Socrates’ complaint eighteen centuries before.” But since that complaint was about writing, and the Shaykh al-Islam had no equivalent objections, the echo is hard to hear. It is not clear why printed books would be any worse than hand-copied books, since both presuppose writing. One might wonder if the theological-political and, secondarily, the socio-economic complaints about printing were more dispositive in this context than were Socrates’ particular complaints. Here, however, that complaint is simply merged with the “same worry intuited by the Muslim authorities.”
In the final mentions of Socrates’ complaint in Chapters 13 and 16, a shift occurs, such that Miller, in mentioning the former slave James Pennington’s education by books, without any teachers, openly addresses his interlocutor, saying parenthetically, “Take that, Socrates.” And finally, on the last page of the main text, he concludes that “The history of the book encourages optimism, not pessimism. If it didn’t, we’d find ourselves back in the debate between Socrates and Phaedrus, Theuth and Thamus. Socrates may have won the argument, but we’ve done just fine ignoring the conclusion.”
One might note the absence of Plato, who constructed those arguments about writing in writing, from this formulation, and, in particular, recall Alfarabi’s distinction between what he called “the way of Socrates” and “the way of Plato.” The art and craft of writing is what allows for Plato to make both “ways” perceptible to his readers. He stages the quarrel between Socrates and Homer to lend dramatic structure to the dialogue and to sharpen the contrast between the emergent practice of philosophy and the older poetic tradition. He has Socrates put forth outlandish ideas such as the communism of women and children for the guardian class while finding a way to hint that those ideas, if realized, would entail a reduction of the guardians to dogs rather than an elevation of human aims. The more diplomatic and guarded “way of Plato,” then, takes into account the demands of piety and popular opinion, while being willing to engage radical philosophical ideas.
With respect to Socrates’ various complaints about writing in the Phaedrus, is it possible that Plato was using the dramatic resources of the written dialogue to stage the conflict about writing in such a way as to allow for participation and the taking of sides? Upon contemplation, does it afford a glimpse into the staged nature of the agon and a willingness to adjudicate between perspectives? What happens if Socrates is not primarily viewed as a transparent delivery vehicle for ideas but also or rather as a character in a dialogue in which the principle underlying the overall argument—the logos—rather than any one myth or opinion has the last say? For Nietzsche, of course, faith in and deference to the logos was a sign of Socrates’ culpably optimistic belief in the power of rational argument—a belief which Miller shares, judging from this book.
For the purposes of this book, Socrates serves the purpose of a pessimistic, perhaps unknowing foil, which is somewhat ironic, given that if anyone ever attempted to compensate for the limitations of writing through the resources of characterization and plot, it would seem to have been Plato. If anything, he was arguably a victim of his own success, since the dialogues are often read for their ideas rather than their drama, in which ideas are couched in the words of particular characters in highly-crafted literary contexts with specific interlocutors.
At points in The Idea Machine, Miller discusses the role of books in the context of conversations, where they serve to support goals that they cannot fulfill in and of themselves. For example, in his discussion of the Phaedrus, he observes that Socrates “requests that Phaedrus read from the speech to interact with it. The portable, physical artifact aids the work of criticism just as it serves the purpose of recall.” Yet criticism is perhaps best understood as secondary in importance to the logos—the process of reasoned discourse in which they are both engaged, which instantiates and allows for participation in the search for truth. Plato represents this search as being conducted between persons in person, although it may have recourse to texts and, on occasion, be supplemented by moments of solitary thinking prior to and following conversations. On the perilous, winding path to truth, the logos leads its participants through deceptive rhetoric, such as that of Lysias, incomplete arguments, and bad ideas that are intermingled with their more promising counterparts, with a view toward the partial transcendence of the former.
Elsewhere in the book, Miller’s own account of how language works in the context of books downplays the extent to which books provide grist for a more encompassing mill in favor of emphasizing the capacity of books to allow “well-formed ideas to persist through time.” Here, books are envisioned as “ever-rising cultural reservoirs or interest-compounding societal savings accounts” that allow for the accumulation and expansion of ideas. The primary task is to pile up and spread these implicitly well-formed ideas rather than to refine and, if need be, reject them in the process of seeking the truth beyond words.
Every part of this book holds significant rewards. Despite the vast scope and density of detail, Miller writes with consistent verve, and he eloquently defends the book against those who would dismiss it as being of historical interest. I wonder, though, if Miller’s real dispute lies more with Nietzsche—who is only mentioned once in passing—rather than the Platonic Socrates.
At the end of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggests that by the time that we regard something that someone thought as truth, it is because it is no longer living. And yet a poor dead written thing may have to suffice if nothing living is at hand. “Alas, what are you after all, my painted and written thoughts!” he exclaims. “You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull!” What is written is “only what is on the verge of withering.” Since Nietzsche is not around, we have only his books to consult for the truth about the incommunicability of truth, which can itself never be fully communicated. To this ultimate destination, books cannot, as Dickinson would have it, serve as frigates to bear the human soul. “We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer—only weary and mellow things!”
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