I forget everything I read: what Plato says about it

You swore you would not buy another book this year, and last month you bought six. There are passages underlined, notes, videos saved to watch later. And when someone asks what stayed from one of those books, the word is missing. This happens to almost all of us, and one thing should be said right away: it is not a lack of ability. Plato described this bookshelf in the Phaedrus more than two thousand years ago, and what he says changes the question. Instead of "why do I forget?", he asks where a person's knowledge is kept.

The bookshelf scene

Look at what the bookshelf holds. Books you bought, passages you marked, notes you made, videos you saved. All of it is yours, and all of it is outside you. If someone asked you today to speak about one of them without opening anything, only what is inside you could speak.

The source class of this article opens with that scene on purpose, and with a line from Plato that seems not to fit it: he wrote a book to say that books do not teach. It is one of the most beautiful books he wrote, and inside it there is a story about a king who refuses a gift. The gift is writing.

The king who refused writing

The story is at the end of the Phaedrus and fits in a paragraph. An Egyptian god, Theuth, the inventor of numbers, geometry and letters, shows his arts to King Thamus. About writing, he says it will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. The king replies that the one who invents an art is not the best judge of what it will cause, and that writing will produce the opposite: whoever trusts letters will stop exercising memory and will remember from outside, through signs that are not theirs, and not from within. The whole myth, with the paradox that Plato wrote precisely this, has its own article: The myth of Theuth: why Plato distrusted writing. Here we are interested in its other side, the reader's.

Memory lives in you

The king's line that matters to someone who forgets is this: you have invented an aid not for memory, but only for recollection (Phaedrus, 275a). It sounds like wordplay, and it is not.

Memory, in this sense, is what dwells in you. Recollection is the reminder that alerts you from outside. A highlight is a reminder. A note is a reminder. A saved video is a reminder that has not even been opened yet. All of them work, and none of them is knowledge. They are signs that there is something to know, placed on a surface.

The king goes on, and what he says next is uncomfortable for anyone with many books: writing will give the students "an appearance of wisdom, and not truth", because they will receive much information without instruction and will think themselves wise (Phaedrus, 275a). It is not an insult to readers. It describes a sensation nearly every reader knows: that, having gone through the book, one already feels on the other side of it.

The Greek word the king uses for the invention is phármakon, which means remedy, and also poison. For the king, writing has both sides.

Piling up turns no one around, and nothing stays

If you read the article Does Reading Many Books Help? What Plato Would Say, you will recognize the ground. There the question was the direction of the gaze: piling up books does not make anyone turn their face toward the light. The Phaedrus takes the next step, and it is this: beyond where we look, what matters is where knowledge dwells. A knowledge that lives on the shelf, in the highlights and in this year's reading list, is not yet yours. These are two different questions, and both apply to anyone who feels they read a lot and change very little.

The painting that does not answer

Socrates explains why writing fails with an image. The text, he says, resembles painting: painted figures have the bearing of living people, but if anyone questions them, they remain gravely silent (Phaedrus, 275d). A text always says the same thing. It does not know who it is speaking to, does not defend itself, does not explain.

Now go back to the question someone asked you about the book. If all you have of it is what is on the page, you are in the position of the painting: it says what it says, and when someone asks something slightly beside the point, it stays silent. The difference between the book and you is that you can have something besides the book.

The knowledge that answers

Socrates knows this other thing and calls it another writing, the legitimate one: the writing done, with knowledge, in the soul of the one who learns (Phaedrus, 276a). This is the knowledge that answers. It is what you can say with your own mouth and defend when someone disagrees.

There is a simple test inside this idea, and it requires no technique at all. Ask yourself, about a book you read: what would I say about it if someone doubted it in front of me? If the answer exists, the book has gone in. If what comes out is "I've underlined it, let me check", you have the reminder and not yet the memory. Plato offers no method for going from one to the other, and it is better not to invent one in his name. What he points to is the place where this happens.

Why the problem was never the books

That place is conversation. The paradox at the start dissolves there: Plato did write, yes, but he wrote dialogues, conversations that demand from the reader an answer and a justification. His book does not want to be a warehouse of knowledge. It wants to be the beginning of a conversation.

What holds for his book holds for the ones on your shelf. The problem was never the books. It is that they do not talk with you. What defends, what explains, what discusses is what is inside you, and that almost always happens in the presence of another person: someone who disagrees, who asks, who holds a position different from yours and forces you to say what you understood. That is why, at Nous, the experience we propose is reading together, talking, dialoguing, and hearing what each person's reading wrote in them.

What to do with the shelf

None of this is a reason to stop buying books, highlighting or taking notes. Reminders have value, and Plato, who wrote an entire work, is the last to recommend abandoning them. What changes is the place. The shelf is where knowledge begins, and the question that stays, the one from the end of the class, is this: of everything we have read, how much has already been written in us, and how much is still only on the shelf?

A note on the passages: the references in parentheses are the Stephanus numbering, which locates each passage of the Phaedrus in any edition you have at hand, and the wording may vary from one translation to another. To see the same dialogue in full, start with Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it, and for the bridge between this idea and that of Saint Paul, You are our letter: Plato, Paul and writing on the soul.

Continue: The Myth of Theuth: why Plato distrusted writing · You are our letter: Plato, Paul and writing on the soul · Plato's Phaedrus: summary and how to read it · What does "no one enters the same river twice" mean?
Source class: Fedro, de Platão