…who lived before printing... But not before writing. By the way, there's a wonderful book by... Eric Haberlock called Preface to Plato, in which he just mentions in passing that what Socrates' great contribution was to the dialectic was the ability to say,…

…classifying of data and experience by ideas. You mean that the that sight has become the preeminent sense as it was for Plato and it went on being so in so-called civilized as opposed to limited... Increasingly so. It reached a climax with the invention…

…literate, or the effects of anything on anybody. Now, this, as I say, is a unique thing in this case. Aristotle and Plato never studied the effects of anything on anybody. Would you list The Mechanical Bride and The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media…

…barbaric anarchy of the tribal and the auditory culture of the old pre-literate sort of world. Eric Havelock in his book Preface to Plato really does a study of why Plato was so opposed to poets. He points out that the poets in Plato's day meant the…

…culture of the old pre-literate sort of world. Eric Havelock in his book Preface to Plato really does a study of why Plato was so opposed to poets. He points out that the poets in Plato's day meant the educational establishment represented by Homer, the…

…has been put aside. But with the arrival of Euclid and visual space, you've got a very strange possibility which Plato seized upon. And Plato developed his highly systematized philosophy, even more systematized later by Aristotle, his philosophy of the ideas…

…But with the arrival of Euclid and visual space, you've got a very strange possibility which Plato seized upon. And Plato developed his highly systematized philosophy, even more systematized later by Aristotle, his philosophy of the ideas and the idea of…

…of the acoustic epic, the tribal encyclopedia of memorized wisdom, which Eric Havelock has reported so ably in his preface to Plato, the Homeric epics were part of this acoustic wisdom that preceded literacy and which were phased out by literacy. Homer was…

…it to his guitar or harp and perform it in public. He was a gentleman and a free man. Along came the phonetic alphabet, and Plato seized upon it and said, let us abandon Homer and go for rational education. Plato's war on the poets was not a war on…

…has a book on this subject called Art and Illusion. So it's always, and Eric Cavillog similarly, a book called Preface to Plato in which the same problem is thoroughly explored. But let's explain it right here and now. Well, you have in the visual…

…that it might as well be a thousand years. I assume that's what you were doing in a sense. That's what we're doing. But Plato, for example, was unable to do this for his own time. And all the people we're talking about regarded the discoveries they had…

…as far as I know, literate man is unique. He holds that distinction. It was he who said, one sense and one sense only. Plato proclaimed the hierarchy of senses with sight at the top and all other senses at the bottom. He said he placed touch at the…

…one is continuous and connected. That's why that quote from the opening of Aristotle on the physics is so important. Remember Plato wrote over the door of his university, let nobody interfere who has not studied geometry. He meant this new discovery of…

…of human history. And they prefer to look in the rearview mirror. You feel safer back one age. This is just as true of Plato as it was of Shakespeare. And Shakespeare was a medievalist in his work. Plato was very much devoted to the old primitive and…

…safer back one age. This is just as true of Plato as it was of Shakespeare. And Shakespeare was a medievalist in his work. Plato was very much devoted to the old primitive and integral order of tribal man behind him. And Bonanza is a nice example of…

…about coming up to that point again from another point of view. Eric Havelock has a wonderful book called Preface to Plato in which he describes the transition from the Homeric world of teaching. Homer was the teaching establishment in the sixth century…

…discusses the transition to the Platonic world where ideas and classified data took over from Homeric gestalt. The reason that Plato, it becomes perfectly plain, the reason that Plato was opposed to the poets was they represented the educational establishment…

…ideas and classified data took over from Homeric gestalt. The reason that Plato, it becomes perfectly plain, the reason that Plato was opposed to the poets was they represented the educational establishment and had been for many centuries. It wasn't just…

…man, a detached, fragmented, separate person out of the tribe, a man instructed in classified data, visually ordered experience. What Plato did was to discover the techniques of applying visual classification to the world of the mind. These are called the…

…mode of learning from the Homeric Gestalt, which was very involved. Everybody memorized him. to the classified idea world of Plato. Now, that Western education followed that course with some little variations right on through past Gutenberg to the present.…

…forms. I just wanted to draw your attention to this aspect, that the work of people like Innocent Havelock, Havelock's preface to Plato sort of volume, and the work of Barfield, in a book called Saving the Appearances, have drawn attention to the fact…

…impressive way The stages by which the Greeks moved out of the world of Homer, the auditory poetic world, into the world of Plato and the visual classification of ideas and data. This is now presumably a tape that is being played backwards. We are now…

…presumably a tape that is being played backwards. We are now rapidly, thanks to electronic technology, moving from the world of Plato back to the world of Homer. From the world of intense visual classification back to the world of intense auditory…

…medium, as with silence or whatnot on TV. Do you say it always is? Always, yes. I don't know of any exceptions. See, when Plato began to write down words for the first time, he wrote down the old oral tradition. He wrote down the words of Socrates,…

…medium, as with silence or whatnot on TV. Do you say it always is? Always, yes. I don't know of any exceptions. See, when Plato began to write down words for the first time, he wrote down the old oral tradition. He wrote down the words of Socrates,…

…barbaric anarchy of the tribal and the auditory culture of the old pre-literate sort of world. Eric Havelock in his book Preface to Plato really does a study of why Plato was so opposed to poets. He points out that the poets in Plato's day meant the…

…culture of the old pre-literate sort of world. Eric Havelock in his book Preface to Plato really does a study of why Plato was so opposed to poets. He points out that the poets in Plato's day meant the educational establishment represented by Homer, the…

…this always using the rearview mirror every time we encounter any situation is an age-old human habit. And you see, even with Plato, the first... content of the written word was the old oral tradition, the Socratic one. And this happens with print, that…

…be involved in the world he lives in. Detachment. Objectivity. And Barfield is ably seconded by Eric Havelock in his preface to Plato. Havelock does this wonderful study of how tribal man moved over into the platonic world of the ideas and of detachment…