Background and Suggestions for Taking Notes as you Read
You will be reading for this unit one of the major anti-technological,
humanist treatises, Walden by American transcendentalist author
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). In the chapters emphasized here ("Economy," "Where
I Lived, and What I Lived For," "Reading," "Sounds" ), Thoreau attacks
technology, the new train system built in Massachusetts during his
time being his prime example. Sometimes, it seems, Thoreau may be faulting
technology and commerce for the fact that "the mass of men lead lives of
quiet desperation" (Dover ed., 4). As you read through the novel, write
down what's wrong with those things, in Thoreau's view. To what does he
oppose them? That is, how does his life at Walden pond differ from the
life immersed in technology and commerce, the desperate life? Jot down
everything that Walden symbolizes. Having these notes will help you do
your assignment.
Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus is also opposed to technology,
as is Thoreau. But for him the evil new technology is not the train --
it is writing itself!! Plato was a Greek philosopher (427?-347 B.C.) who
wrote down what his famous teacher taught him and others, capturing Socrates
in his favorite method of teaching, face-to-face conversation or dialogue.
It has been remarked that the two people who have had the greatest impact
on Western history, Socrates and Jesus, never wrote a word. However, we
should notice -- and I'm sure that Plato was just as aware of this as we
are when he was writing -- that we may in fact owe our knowledge of them
to the fact that others wrote down their teachings. Socrates and Plato,
the recorder/writer of Socratic dialogues, lived at a time when Greek culture
was being transformed from oral to literate: older than Plato, Socrates
saw the change differently (perhaps) than he did.
It may seem strange to think of writing as a technology, but think as
you read Plato and Goody about the differences between literate and nonliterate
societies. NB: to call someone "illiterate" presupposes that literacy is
possible, that they are missing something valuable; to call oral cultures
nonliterate is a less value-laden, less derogatory way of speaking. As
you read, jot down all of the differences for Socrates and for Goody between
nonliterate (or preliterate) and literate cultures.