Oral Tradition, 1/1 (1986): 134-150
The Alphabetic Mind:A Gift of Greece to the Modern World
Eric A. Havelock
Up until about 700 years before Christ the Greek peoples were non-literate.About that time they invented a writing system conveniently described as an“alphabet,” the Greek word for it. The use of this invention in the course of 300 to400 years after 700 B.C. had a transformational effect upon the behavior of the Greeklanguage, upon the kind of things that could be said in the language and the thingsthat could be thought as it was used. The transformation, however, did not substituteone language for another. The Greek of the Hellenistic age is recognizably closekin to the Greek of Homer. Yet the degree of transformation can be convenientlymeasured by comparing Homer at the upper end of the time-span with the languageof Aristotle at the lower end. The earlier form came into existence as an instrumentfor the preservation of oral speech through memorization. This memorized formwas not the vernacular of casual conversation but an artifi cially managed languagewith special rules for memorization, one of which was rhythm. The later form, theAristotelean one, existed and still exists as a literate instrument designed primarilyfor readers. It preserves its content not through memorization but by placing it ina visual artifact, the alphabet, where, the content can survive as long as the artifactand its copies survive also. The transformational effect made itself felt slowly inthe course of 350 years. It was a complex process. What precisely was its nature?Its complexity can be summed up variously as on the one hand, a shift from poetryto prose as the medium of preserved communication; or again as a shift in literarystyle from narrative towards exposition; or again as the creation of a new literatesyntax of defi nition which could be superimposed upon the oralTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 135syntax that described action. Or again we discern the invention of a conceptuallanguage superimposed upon a non-conceptual; or alternatively a creation of theabstract to replace the concrete, the invention of an abstract version of what hadpreviously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions.If one uses such terms as “concept” or “abstraction” to indicate the end resultof the transformation, one has to clear up some basic confusions in the use of theseterms. Critics and commentators are fond of calling attention to the presence ofwhat they call abstractions or abstract ideas in Homer. This at bottom is a mistake,the nature of which can be clarifi ed by giving an example of what the abstractiveprocess in language involves, as opposed to Homeric idiom.The poet Homer begins his Iliad by addressing his Muse: “Sing I prayyou the wrath of Achilles, the wrath that ravages, the wrath that placed on theAchaeans ten thousand affl ictions.” Suppose we render these sentiments into proseand translate them into abstract terms; they would then run somewhat as follows:“My poem’s subject is the wrath of Achilles which had disruptive effects and thesecaused deep distress for the Achaeans.” A series of acts signalled in the original byappropriate transitive verbs and performed by agents on personal objects is replacedby abstractions connected to each other by verbs indicating fi xed relationshipsbetween them. Instead of a “me” actually speaking to another person, i.e., the Muse,who in turn has to perform the act of singing aloud, we get “my subject is so andso;” an “is” statement with an abstract subject has replaced two persons connectedby an action. Instead of the image of wrath acting like a ravaging army, we getthe “effect” created by this instrument; instead of a bundle of woes being placedlike a weight on human shoulders, we get a single impersonal abstraction— “deepdistress” —connected to a previous abstraction— “disruptive effects”—by a causalrelationship—“these caused.”In a pre-alphabetic society like that of Homer, only the fi rst of these twoalternative modes of describing the same phenomenon was available. Why thiswas so I will explain later. A literate critic, that is a “literary” critic, analyzing thesubstance of the story will use terms of the second mode in order to understand thelanguage of the fi rst. Too often all he manages to do is to introduce misunderstanding.He undercuts the active, transitive, and dynamic syntax of the original which istypical of all speech in136 ERIC A. HAVELOCKsocieties of oral communication and particularly of preserved speech in suchsocieties.The second mode, which I will call the conceptual as well as the alphabetic,had to be invented, and it was the invention of literacy. Such a statement as “mysubject is the wrath” would in orality represent something to be avoided. As a typeit represents the kind of analytic discourse which does not meet the requirement ofeasy and continuous memorization.I call your attention in particular to the formal announcement: “my subjectis the wrath.” The clue to the creation of a conceptual discourse replacing the poeticone lies in the monosyllable “is.” Here is the copula as we call it, the commonestversion now of the verb “to be” familiar in daily converse, let alone refl ectivespeech, connecting two conceptual words, “subject” and “wrath.” “Wrath” is linkedto “subject” as its equivalent, but also as an alternative defi nition of what this subject“is.” To give a simpler and even more commonplace example: when in modernspeech A remarks to B “your house is beautiful,” the copula assigns a property toan object which is not abstract but which by the copula usage is attached to the“attribute” beauty (or in the new practice of analytic discourse it is “implicated”).In ancient Greek as it was spoken down to Plato’s day, the “is” would be omitted.These illustrations bring out a fundamental fact about the language of theconceptual mind: clues to its nature are not to be found by isolating mere nouns assuch and classifying them as abstract or concrete. It is the syntax in which they areembedded that betrays the difference. The word “wrath” could if you so choose beviewed as a kind of abstraction, a psychological one. But it is not a true abstractionbecause it is an agent which performs, in the course of three lines (only two ofwhich I have quoted), no less than four perfectly concrete actions: it ravages; itpicks up a burden and puts it on the shoulders of the Greeks; it catapults human livesinto Hades; it converts men into things for animals to eat.Complete “conceptuality” of discourse (if this be the appropriate word)depends not on single words treated as phenomena per se, but on their being placedin a given relationship to one another in statements which employ either a copula oran equivalent to connect them. The growth of abstractionism and conceptualism inthe Greek tongue is notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 137discoverable by a mere resort to lexicons, indexes, and glossaries, common as thispractice has become. Single words classifi able as abstract like “justice” or “strife”or “war” or “peace” can as easily be personifi ed as not. What is in question is theability of the human mind to create and manipulate theoretic statements as opposedto particular ones; to replace a performative syntax by a logical one.Homeric and oral discourse often resorts to a personifi cation of what theliterate critic is tempted to call abstractions. But considered as abstractions theyfail the syntactical test; they are always busy, performing or behaving. They are notallowed to be identifi ed categorically as terms under which the action is arrangedand classifi ed. They are never defi ned or described analytically; they are innocentof any connection with the copula which can link them to a defi nition, give them anattribute, link them to a class or kind. They never appear in what I shall call the “isstatement.”Let us revert again to Homer’s preface to his Iliad. The story is ignited soto speak by a quarrel between Achilles and his commander-in-chief. The poet asksrhetorically “and pray then which one of the gods combined these two togetherin contentious strife to fi ght?” The Homeric name for this kind of strife is eris.Later in the narrative it acquires a capital letter (to use an anachronism). It becomes“personifi ed,” as we say, as a kind of feminine principle, though again the term“principle” is wholly anachronistic. “Her” behavior is evoked in a rich variety ofimagery: “she” can be discovered “raging ceaselessly, a little wave which thenextends from earth to heaven, throwing contested feud into the throng, enlargingagony”; or again “painfully severe (a missile) discharged by Zeus, emplacing mightand strength in the heart”; or again “bewept and bewailed”; or again “keepingcompany with battle noise and ravaging fate”; or again “arising in force, rousingpeoples to rage, as the gods mingled in battle.” Nowhere is the term given eithersocial or psychological defi nition: we are told what “she” does, we are never toldwhat “it” is.A modern poet or writer of fi ction might choose imagery for his subjectwhich allowed equal freedom. But behind his imagery in the language of his culturethere lurks in parallel an alternative type of language which could be chosen todefi ne or describe analytically what he is talking about. In oral cultures, for reasonsto be explained later, no such language is available.138 ERIC A. HAVELOCKIn dealing with the history of human civilizations, the terms “Western” and“European” are used loosely to draw a defi nition of culture based on geography.The counter-cultures are those of Arabia, India, China, or sometimes the “NearEast” and the “Far East.” The geographic distinction is supported by drawing aparallel religious one, which refers to the differences between a Judaeo-Christianfaith on the one hand and Islam or Buddhism or Confucianism on the other. Thesestereotypes are in common use. The classifi cation I am proposing, one which hasmore operational meaning, is that between the alphabetic cultures and the nonalphabeticones, with the qualifi cation that in the present crisis of modernity, withtechnological man increasingly dominant over traditional man, the alphabeticculture shows increasing signs of invading the nonalphabetic ones and taking themover. That is to say, written communication world-wide, as it is used to preserve andre-use information, is tending increasingly to be alphabetized. This can be viewedas an effect of the superior military and industrial power wielded by the alphabeticcultures. But I would argue that this power itself, as it originally emerged very slowlyin antiquity, and as it has gained rapid momentum since the end of the eighteenthcentury of our era, is itself an alphabetic phenomenon. Power has been derivedfrom the mechanisms of written communication. Communication is not merely theinstrument of thought; it also creates thought. Alphabetic communication, whichmeant literate communication, brought into existence the kind of thinking whichremodels the dynamic fl ow of daily experience into “is statements,” of one sort oranother. This permits a conceptual analysis of what happens in the environment andin ourselves and creates the power not merely to reason about what happens but tocontrol it and to change what happens. This power is not available in oral cultures.Those familiar with the history of the alphabet will be aware that by alphabeticcultures I mean those that use either the original Greek form, or its common Romanadaptation which I am using at the moment, or its Cyrillic version as used by theRussian state and some other peoples.I throw out another suggestion, merely as an aside to my present argument,that one of the causes of the profound unease that exists between the Soviets andthe “West,” to use the convenient term, is not merely the result of competing socialsystems. It has some seat in the unlucky accident that theTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 139Russian Cyrillic script seems somehow alien to western habit; it constitutes an extrabarrier to be surmounted on top of the formidable one created by language. Thebarrier is of this peculiar sort that a script is something you can see, an object, notsimply a noise heard like language. Man even today does not live merely in a towerof linguistic Babel, he lives also in a Babel of competing scripts. This competitionand collision is an unnoticed element in the evolution of modern societies. Here is atheme which I predict will have to be taken up one day by historians of culture.Support for some rather sweeping affi rmations as I have made them liesoriginally in the Greek story. It was in ancient Greece that it all started. The alphabeticmind is the Greek mind as it in time became, but not as it originally was. Greececreated it, but Greece also preserved the oralist mind. The history of Greek cultureis the history of the confrontation of these two minds, or more accurately theircreative partnership as it developed over three and one-half centuries to the point oftheir amalgamation—something which has endured in the alphabetic cultures thatinherited the Greek invention.In the Greek case, the intrusion of conceptual language and thought intooral language and thought and the replacement of one by the other can most easilybe measured as it occurs in the changing Greek descriptions of human behavior,particularly what we style “moral” behavior. Moral philosophy, as understood in theWest and as usually taught in the classroom under the rubric of ethics, is a creationof alphabetic literacy which came into existence in the last half of the fi fth and thefi rst half of the fourth centuries B.C. in the city of Athens.By the term “moral philosophy” I intend to indicate any system of discourse,and by extension of thought, in which the terms right and wrong or good and badare assumed from a logical standpoint to be not only formally speaking antitheticalbut mutually exclusive of each other and from a referential standpoint to defi ne allhuman behavior as divided exhaustively into two categories, right and good andwrong and bad. Thus positioned in human discourse the terms right and wrong,good and bad supply norms by which to classify what is done or thought as right orwrong, good or bad.In popular speech these terms are frequently reinforced by substituting thewords “moral” and “immoral.” It is assumed that these denote universals which canbe used unambiguously to guide140 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchoices we have to make as between the two types of action. They provide foundationsfor moral judgments which theoretically are fi nal. Different linguistic formulashave been employed to designate the overall nature of the right or the good; onethinks of the moral imperative of Kant or the intuited indefi nable goodness of G. E.Moore or a theory of justice as proposed by John Rawls. But always the existenceof such a norm in the full formal sense of the term is assumed as fundamentalto the human condition. What I am proposing here is that the mental process weidentify as forming a moral judgment has not always been a necessary componentof the human condition but had its a historical origin in late fi fth-century Athens.Its effectiveness depended upon a prior ability of the human mind to conceptualizethe rules of behavior as moral universals, an ability which emerged only as the oralculture of Greece yielded to an alphabetic one.To test this assertion let us turn to the earliest extant discussion in Greekof the term “justice.” This occurs in a poem composed soon after Homer’s day butlong before Plato, namely, the Works and Days attributed to Hesiod. The style ofcomposition reveals the beginning of a transition from a poetry of listeners towardsa poetry which might be read—but only the beginning. One of the componentparts—the whole poem runs to over 800 lines—is a discourse of less than 100 lines,a poem within a poem, which possesses an identity of its own, addressing itselfas it does with considerable concentration to the single Greek term dikê which wenormally translate as “justice.” Let us observe the syntax in which this term ofmoral “reference,” as we normally think of it, is employed. My translation, whichselects those statements where the syntax emerges, will hew as close as possible tothe sense of the archaic original (Works and Days, 214 ff.):O Perses, I pray you: hearken to (the voice of)justice nor magnify outrage . . . justice overoutrage prevails having gotten through to thegoal. Even a fool learns from experience; forlook! Oath is running alongside crookedjustices. Uproar of justice being draggedaway where men take her—. . . she followson weeping to city and dwelling places ofpeople clothed in mist carrying evil to mankind,such as drive her out and they have notmeted her straight.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 141They who to stranger-guests and demos-dwellersgive justices (that are) straight and do notstep across out of justice at all—for themthe city fl ourishes merry and the people in itblossom . . . nor ever among men of straightjustice does famine keep company . . .O lords I pray you: Do you, even you, considerdeeply this justice. Near at hand, among mankindbeing-present, the immortals consider all who withcrooked justices infl ict attrition on each otherregarding not the awful word of gods. Presentare thrice ten thousand upon the much-nourishingearth, immortal guards of Zeus, of mortal men,who keep guard over justices and ruthless works clothedin mist going to and fro all over the earth.Present is maiden justice, of Zeus the offspringborn, both renowned and revered of the gods whotenant Olympus, and should one at any time disableher, crookedly castigating, straightway sittingbeside father Zeus the Kronian she sings thenon-just intention of men till it pay back . . .The eye of Zeus having seen all and noted allintently, even these (things) should he so wishhe is looking at nor is (it) hidden from himwhat kind of justice indeed (is) this (that) a cityconfi nes “inside . . .O Perses I pray you: cast these up in your thoughts:hearken to (the voice of) justice and let violencebe hidden from your sight. This usage for mankindthe Kronian has severally ordained, for fi sh andbeasts and winged fowl to eat each other sincejustice is not present among them, but to mankindhe gave justice which most excellent by far comes-to-be.Granted that these statements focus upon a term which in our alphabeticsociety has become central to moral philosophy, what do we learn from them aboutits nature? Surely the account of it is from a modern standpoint anomalous. Whatis one to make of a discussion which can make free, both with a “justice” in thesingular, which we might try and squeeze into the guise of a “conception” of justice,and with “justices” in the plural, intermingling and interchanging them withoutapology, as though142 ERIC A. HAVELOCKthe “concept” on the one hand, if we can call it that, and the specifi c applications ofthe concept on the other, if that is what they are, were indistinguishable? Worse still;what can we make of a term which at one time symbolizes what is straight and goodand at another can symbolize what is crooked and obviously “wrong”?The problem receives some illumination when we notice that whether inthe singular or plural this word symbolizes something which is spoken aloud,pronounced, proclaimed, declared or else listened to, heard, and remembered.Personifi ed it can scream or sing, and become the recipient of verbal abuse, andis disabled by oral testimony which is false. In this guise it becomes a procedureconducted in oral exchange. The constant imputation of crookedness probablyrefers to crookedness of speech (rather than unfair manipulation of boundary linesin property, as has been suggested).In short this is that kind of justice practiced in an oral society not defi nedby written codes. But having got this far, any further attempt to defi ne what justicereally is fails us. “She” or “it” or “they” are Protean in the shapes they take and inthe actions performed. “She” becomes a runner in a race and is then reintroduced asa girl dragged along in distress; and then becomes a girl now travelling to town indisguise before being thrown out. When transferred to Olympus, the scene revealsa personal justice complaining to Zeus that men are unjust, apparently to get himto intervene. “She” is then replaced by Zeus himself looking down on a justiceconfi ned inside a city until at last in the conclusion, “she” is given some universalcolor by being described as a gift assigned to mankind by Zeus.Let us recall the Homeric behavior of that personifi cation styled eris, thesymbol of contentious strife behaving in a similar variety of confi gurations. Here isno “concept” or “principle” of justice, no analytic defi nition, no attempt to tell uswhat justice is. Such a statement is still beyond the poet’s capacity, even though hisassemblage of instances and examples marks an attempt to mobilize the word as atopic, a chapter heading, a theme. In going this far, the poet is composing visually asa reader for readers. He is trying to break with the narrative context, the storytellingthat oral composition has required, but which his written word does not require.But his break is only partial. His justice is still something that acts or behaves orbecomes, notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 143something that “is.” The language of refl ective philosophy, let alone moralphilosophy, is not yet available.It was becoming available perhaps two centuries later, and a little later stillcan be observed at work in the written word as it is composed by Plato. Here is adocumented discourse which no longer needs to be phrased in specifi cs or in images.It can be, of course, if the composer so chooses, but it can tolerate in increasingquantity something that orally preserved speech cannot, namely, statements of “fact”or statements of “universals,” statements of “principles” rather than descriptions of“events.” That is, it can state that something always “is so and so” rather than thatsomething “was done” or “occurred” or “was in place.” In Platonism these linguisticobjectives have been achieved. They are woven into the syntax of argument,appearing there casually without exciting attention from a literate readership whichis used to using them in its own discourse. Here, for example, is how the term“justice,” after being created as a topic by Hesiod, makes its fi rst appearance in thePlatonic text which deals with it demonstratively, namely, Plato’s Republic (I. 331C):Now take precisely this (thing) namely justice:Are we to say that it is truthfulness absolutelyspeaking and giving back anything one has takenfrom somebody else or are these very (things) tobe done sometimes justly and at other timesunjustly?This sentence, occurring near the beginning of the fi rst book of the treatise, introducesthe concept with which the remaining books are to deal. The syntax which identifi esjustice as truthfulness meets a complex requirement. First, the subject is nonpersonal.Second, it receives a predicate which is non-personal. Third, the linkingverb becomes the copula “is.” In the alternative defi nition that is then posed, thesame verb “to be” is used to connect a neuter pronoun with a predicate infi nitive,an abstraction. These are characteristics of Plato’s argumentative text which wenormally take for granted.To cite another example, which is more professionally stated with profuseuse of the neuter singular to express abstraction (Euthyphro, 5 C-D):So now I implore tell me that which youinsisted just now you thoroughly knew:144 ERIC A. HAVELOCKWhat kind (of thing) do you say the pious is,and the impious, in the case of manslaughterand so on; surely the holy in all action isidentical itself with itself; whereas theunholy is completely the opposite of the holy,something always resembling itself having onespecifi c shape completely in accordance withunholiness, whatever the unholy turns out to be.This passage makes plain the kind of syntax now available and necessary for didacticargument and the particular reliance of the Platonic method upon this syntax: thesubjects have to be impersonals, the verbs must take copulative form, and thepredicates have to be impersonals.It is convenient to identify Plato as the discoverer of the necessity of thissyntax in its completed form and therefore as the writer who completed the processof linguistic emancipation from the syntax of oral storage. For good measure it ispossible to cite some less perfect examples from thinkers who preceded him, fromboth the pre-Socratic philosophers and the “sophists” as they are usually styled. Thelanguage of the fi fth century as it was employed by intellectuals exhibits a gradualacceleration of the abstractive process.It is equally to the point to notice that Plato’s relationship to orality is stillintermediate. He can use language that hovers between oral and literate discourse,that is, between the syntax of narrative and the syntax of defi nition. Thus, as Platoapproaches the task of defi ning justice in its political dimension, he indulges himselfin a passage like the following (Republic IV. 432 B-D):The time has come for us to behave like huntsmenencircling a thicket concentrating on preventingjustice from slipping through and disappearing.Evidently it is present somewhere around here.So keep looking, be ready to catch sight of it,and if you happen to sight it before I do pointit out to me—I wish I could, but you will makequite adequate use of me if, instead, you use meas a follower who can look at what is shown tohim—Then follow and let us both pray for luck.I will; you just go ahead—Well here we are;this place by the look of it is hard to getTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 145through; it is cut off from the light, it presentsitself dark in fact and scarcely to betracked through. However let’s go in—yeslet’s go—whereupon I caught sight of somethingand shouted: Glaucon, we probably are ontoa track; I don’t think (the object) will quitesucceed in getting away—That’s good news!The quarry sought is justice, but this kind of dramatic interchange is going to leadup to a quite different type of discourse in which it will be proposed what justicereally is, namely “doing one’s own thing.” It will lead up to an argument whichis analytic and conceptual. Yet one observes the continued effort to conciliate thereader who is still close to his oral inheritance. By letting the discourse relapse intoa syntax which narrates the activities of living subjects and objects we are invited tojoin a hunt in a forest for a quarry. Will it slip through the thicket? No, the huntershave spotted it. This is “Homeric,” not philosophic, prose.By way of contrast to this intermediate style of discourse occasionally adoptedby Plato—intermediate between oralism and literacy, between the pre-conceptualand the conceptual—I quote a passage taken at random from the beginning of DavidHume’s Treatise on Human Nature:I perceive therefore that though there is in general a great resemblance betwixt ourcomplex impressions and ideas, yet the rule is not universally true, that they areexact copies of each other. We may next consider, how the case stands with oursimple perceptions. After the most accurate examination of which I am capable,I venture to affi rm, that the rule here holds without any exceptions, and thatevery simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it, and every simpleimpression a correspondent idea.1The Platonic passage expresses awareness that the act of conceptualizingjustice and defi ning it axiomatically in entirely abstract terms requires from hisreader an extraordinary effort, a new order of thinking, an order of intellection. Toreach to this order, the passage reverts to the simpler language of orality: huntsmenare closing in on their quarry hidden in a thicket, ready to catch sight of it and soforth. Hume’s exposition prefers to present statements as the result of perception,consideration,146 ERIC A. HAVELOCKexamination, affi rmation. Over the 2,000 years since Plato wrote, these termshave become commonplaces of description of intellectual processes which areanalytical, the purpose of which is to construct statements which are either analyticor synthetic.The predicates in Plato’s text do not describe fi xed relationships betweenentities, but describe linkages which are achieved through action as it is performed:encircling, slipping through, “we have to get through,” “we are cut off,” “this ishard to be tracked,” “it will get away.” The corresponding linkages in Hume’s textare conveyed in statements of being, that is, of relationships which are permanent,and therefore require the copula in order to be described. “There is in general; therule is not universally true; they are exact; how the case stands; the rule here holds;every simple idea has a simple impression.” These are expressed in the presenttense—the timeless present and not the “historic” present—such “tenses” are notreally tenses at all. They do not refer to a present moment of a narrated experiencenow recalled as distinct from other moments. The verb “is” shares with the verbs“hold” and “have” the predicative function of presenting a “state of the case” asdeterminate fact, not as a fl eeting moment of action or response.This is the language which Plato himself strives after through all his writtenworks. It had to be fought for with all the strenuousness of the dialectic which heinherited from Socrates. The need he still feels to conciliate his oralist reader byreviving the epic oral syntax would not occur to Hume, still less to Kant or anymodern moralist.Hume’s discourse is that of a professional philosopher and most of us arenot philosophers. We normally avoid involving ourselves in discussion of suchabstract problems. But we can drop casually into Hume’s kind of language, inpersonal converse. Conspicuous and noticeable examples are furnished today inthe vocabularies of the bureaucracies that manage our affairs for us; not least themilitary ones. Names of actions which are specifi c and concrete, and which wouldbe described as such in oral language, are perversely translated into abstractions; tokill a group of villagers becomes a liquidation of opposition, to demand more taxmoney becomes “enhancement of revenue resources.” There now exists a wholelevel of language which is basically theoretic, and it did not become possible untilafter language became alphabetical.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 147Side by side with it, in much of our daily life, we drop back into the concreterealistic dynamism of oral converse, as we prepare to eat breakfast or get the childrenoff to school or mix a drink after a tiring day, and most of all when we make loveor quarrel or fi ght. There is a basic honesty inherent in the oral medium—Homerichonesty that calls a spade a spade—which is transcended in the conceptual versionand converted into a linguistic medium which often requires a degree of hypocrisy.It creates a distance between the oral language which simply registers and thelanguage which categorizes it.However, to point out certain disabilities which have arisen in the way weuse speech, in the course of our conversion from orality to literacy, is one thing.To focus on these as though they were central to the discussion, in the manner of aGeorge Orwell, is something else and quite misleading. We can allow for the greaterdirectness of the oral medium, and its historical importance, and its continuingpresence in our culture, whether in formal poetics or informal converse. But it is amistake to romanticize it, as though Homer represented the language of a lost Eden;a mistake also to hail its apparent revival in the voices and images of the electronicmedia (as described by Marshall McLuhan) replacing what is described as linearcommunication.The fact is that conceptual syntax (which means alphabetic syntax) supportsthe social structures which sustain Western civilization in its present form. Withoutit, the lifestyle of modernity could not exist; without it there would be no physicalscience, no industrial revolution, no scientifi c medicine replacing the superstitionsof the past, and I will add no literature or law as we know them, read them, usethem.Quite apart from its specialized use in works of philosophy, of history, ofscience, this syntax has penetrated into the idiom of narrative fi ction—precisely thatidiom which had been Homer’s peculiar province, the province of all speech as it hadbeen preserved orally within the pre-alphabetic cultures. Here is a quotation fromthe two opening paragraphs of a famous novel, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell ToArms:In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked acrossthe river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebblesand boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly movingand blue in the148 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchannels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raisedpowdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and theleaves fell early that year, and we saw troops marching along the road and thedust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching andafterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees andbeyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fi ghting in themountains and at night we could see the fl ashes from the artillery. In the dark itwas like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feelingof a storm coming?2Ernest Hemingway would not be considered a conceptual writer. Hisproven power lies in the direct simplicity of his images, the narrative force of hisdescriptions, the dynamism of his style. His style would seem to be preeminentlyin this way an oral one, and the present example is no exception. The paratactic“and” recurs eighteen times in this short excerpt. Parataxis has been rightly notedas basic to the style of orally preserved composition, basic that is to its narrativegenius, as required by mnemonic rules. The conjunction “and” is used to connecta series of visually sensitive images, themselves linked together by the resonanceof echo: house-house, river-river; trees-trees-trees; leaves-leaves-leaves; dustdust;marching-marching; plain-plain; mountains-mountains; night-night. Thevocabulary, following oral rules, is economical and repetitive.And yet, the original oral dynamism has been modifi ed and muted. Languagewhich might have described actions and events as such, as doings or happenings,has been translated into statements of “what is.” The syntax of the verb “to be” hasbecome sovereign, joining together visions which for all their sharpness are etchedin temporary immobility:In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders . . . the water was clean andswiftly moving . .. the trunks of the trees were dusty . . . The plainTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 149was rich in crops . . . there were many orchards . . the mountains were brown . . .There was fi ghting . . . it was like summer lightning.Students of Greek (or Latin) drilled in prose composition (now a lost art)learn the habit of converting such expressions back into the dynamics of the ancienttongues, a dynamics orally inspired. Verbs of action or situation have to replacedefi nitive descriptions, as in the following version:Pebbles and boulders were lying scattered in the depth of the river . . . the waterfl owed rapid and sparkling and showed the depth below . . . the trees as to theirtrunks were covered by dust . . . the plain indeed fl ourished bountifully with richcrops and many orchards, but behind appeared mountains shadowy and barren . . .and there soldiers were fi ghting with thrown spears which fl ashed in the dark likethe bolts of Zeus.The Hemingway version favors a presentation of the scene as a seriesof “facts”; the Greek, as a series of episodes. Here is a confrontation betweenthe genius of literate speech preserved visually in the alphabet, and oral speechpreserved acoustically in the memory. Narrativization of experience was not anidiom or idiosyncrasy of ancient tongues (though it was often treated as such inthe instruction I received sixty years ago). It is an essential ingredient of all speechpreserved orally in all the tongues of the world.The Greek alphabet came and took this over and remolded it to give us a newuniverse of language and of the mind; a universe of principles and relationships andlaws and sciences, and values and ideas and ideals. These now ride on top of ourimmediate sensory apparatus and on top of the orality in which this apparatus fi ndsreadiest expression. A visual architecture of language has been superimposed uponrestless acoustic fl ow of sound. This has been the fruit of the literate revolution inthe West, whether for good or for ill.3Yale University (Emeritus)150 ERIC A. HAVELOCKNotes1David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. and introduction by D. G. C. Macnabb (Cleveland:World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 47.2Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1929 et seq.), p. 3.3An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Third Axial Age Conference, held underinternational auspices, at Bad Homburg in West Germany between July 15 and 19, 1985.Oral Tradition, 1/1 (1986): 134-150The Alphabetic Mind:A Gift of Greece to the Modern WorldEric A. HavelockUp until about 700 years before Christ the Greek peoples were non-literate.About that time they invented a writing system conveniently described as an“alphabet,” the Greek word for it. The use of this invention in the course of 300 to400 years after 700 B.C. had a transformational effect upon the behavior of the Greeklanguage, upon the kind of things that could be said in the language and the thingsthat could be thought as it was used. The transformation, however, did not substituteone language for another. The Greek of the Hellenistic age is recognizably closekin to the Greek of Homer. Yet the degree of transformation can be convenientlymeasured by comparing Homer at the upper end of the time-span with the languageof Aristotle at the lower end. The earlier form came into existence as an instrumentfor the preservation of oral speech through memorization. This memorized formwas not the vernacular of casual conversation but an artifi cially managed languagewith special rules for memorization, one of which was rhythm. The later form, theAristotelean one, existed and still exists as a literate instrument designed primarilyfor readers. It preserves its content not through memorization but by placing it ina visual artifact, the alphabet, where, the content can survive as long as the artifactand its copies survive also. The transformational effect made itself felt slowly inthe course of 350 years. It was a complex process. What precisely was its nature?Its complexity can be summed up variously as on the one hand, a shift from poetryto prose as the medium of preserved communication; or again as a shift in literarystyle from narrative towards exposition; or again as the creation of a new literatesyntax of defi nition which could be superimposed upon the oralTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 135syntax that described action. Or again we discern the invention of a conceptuallanguage superimposed upon a non-conceptual; or alternatively a creation of theabstract to replace the concrete, the invention of an abstract version of what hadpreviously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions.If one uses such terms as “concept” or “abstraction” to indicate the end resultof the transformation, one has to clear up some basic confusions in the use of theseterms. Critics and commentators are fond of calling attention to the presence ofwhat they call abstractions or abstract ideas in Homer. This at bottom is a mistake,the nature of which can be clarifi ed by giving an example of what the abstractiveprocess in language involves, as opposed to Homeric idiom.The poet Homer begins his Iliad by addressing his Muse: “Sing I prayyou the wrath of Achilles, the wrath that ravages, the wrath that placed on theAchaeans ten thousand affl ictions.” Suppose we render these sentiments into proseand translate them into abstract terms; they would then run somewhat as follows:“My poem’s subject is the wrath of Achilles which had disruptive effects and thesecaused deep distress for the Achaeans.” A series of acts signalled in the original byappropriate transitive verbs and performed by agents on personal objects is replacedby abstractions connected to each other by verbs indicating fi xed relationshipsbetween them. Instead of a “me” actually speaking to another person, i.e., the Muse,who in turn has to perform the act of singing aloud, we get “my subject is so andso;” an “is” statement with an abstract subject has replaced two persons connectedby an action. Instead of the image of wrath acting like a ravaging army, we getthe “effect” created by this instrument; instead of a bundle of woes being placedlike a weight on human shoulders, we get a single impersonal abstraction— “deepdistress” —connected to a previous abstraction— “disruptive effects”—by a causalrelationship—“these caused.”In a pre-alphabetic society like that of Homer, only the fi rst of these twoalternative modes of describing the same phenomenon was available. Why thiswas so I will explain later. A literate critic, that is a “literary” critic, analyzing thesubstance of the story will use terms of the second mode in order to understand thelanguage of the fi rst. Too often all he manages to do is to introduce misunderstanding.He undercuts the active, transitive, and dynamic syntax of the original which istypical of all speech in136 ERIC A. HAVELOCKsocieties of oral communication and particularly of preserved speech in suchsocieties.The second mode, which I will call the conceptual as well as the alphabetic,had to be invented, and it was the invention of literacy. Such a statement as “mysubject is the wrath” would in orality represent something to be avoided. As a typeit represents the kind of analytic discourse which does not meet the requirement ofeasy and continuous memorization.I call your attention in particular to the formal announcement: “my subjectis the wrath.” The clue to the creation of a conceptual discourse replacing the poeticone lies in the monosyllable “is.” Here is the copula as we call it, the commonestversion now of the verb “to be” familiar in daily converse, let alone refl ectivespeech, connecting two conceptual words, “subject” and “wrath.” “Wrath” is linkedto “subject” as its equivalent, but also as an alternative defi nition of what this subject“is.” To give a simpler and even more commonplace example: when in modernspeech A remarks to B “your house is beautiful,” the copula assigns a property toan object which is not abstract but which by the copula usage is attached to the“attribute” beauty (or in the new practice of analytic discourse it is “implicated”).In ancient Greek as it was spoken down to Plato’s day, the “is” would be omitted.These illustrations bring out a fundamental fact about the language of theconceptual mind: clues to its nature are not to be found by isolating mere nouns assuch and classifying them as abstract or concrete. It is the syntax in which they areembedded that betrays the difference. The word “wrath” could if you so choose beviewed as a kind of abstraction, a psychological one. But it is not a true abstractionbecause it is an agent which performs, in the course of three lines (only two ofwhich I have quoted), no less than four perfectly concrete actions: it ravages; itpicks up a burden and puts it on the shoulders of the Greeks; it catapults human livesinto Hades; it converts men into things for animals to eat.Complete “conceptuality” of discourse (if this be the appropriate word)depends not on single words treated as phenomena per se, but on their being placedin a given relationship to one another in statements which employ either a copula oran equivalent to connect them. The growth of abstractionism and conceptualism inthe Greek tongue is notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 137discoverable by a mere resort to lexicons, indexes, and glossaries, common as thispractice has become. Single words classifi able as abstract like “justice” or “strife”or “war” or “peace” can as easily be personifi ed as not. What is in question is theability of the human mind to create and manipulate theoretic statements as opposedto particular ones; to replace a performative syntax by a logical one.Homeric and oral discourse often resorts to a personifi cation of what theliterate critic is tempted to call abstractions. But considered as abstractions theyfail the syntactical test; they are always busy, performing or behaving. They are notallowed to be identifi ed categorically as terms under which the action is arrangedand classifi ed. They are never defi ned or described analytically; they are innocentof any connection with the copula which can link them to a defi nition, give them anattribute, link them to a class or kind. They never appear in what I shall call the “isstatement.”Let us revert again to Homer’s preface to his Iliad. The story is ignited soto speak by a quarrel between Achilles and his commander-in-chief. The poet asksrhetorically “and pray then which one of the gods combined these two togetherin contentious strife to fi ght?” The Homeric name for this kind of strife is eris.Later in the narrative it acquires a capital letter (to use an anachronism). It becomes“personifi ed,” as we say, as a kind of feminine principle, though again the term“principle” is wholly anachronistic. “Her” behavior is evoked in a rich variety ofimagery: “she” can be discovered “raging ceaselessly, a little wave which thenextends from earth to heaven, throwing contested feud into the throng, enlargingagony”; or again “painfully severe (a missile) discharged by Zeus, emplacing mightand strength in the heart”; or again “bewept and bewailed”; or again “keepingcompany with battle noise and ravaging fate”; or again “arising in force, rousingpeoples to rage, as the gods mingled in battle.” Nowhere is the term given eithersocial or psychological defi nition: we are told what “she” does, we are never toldwhat “it” is.A modern poet or writer of fi ction might choose imagery for his subjectwhich allowed equal freedom. But behind his imagery in the language of his culturethere lurks in parallel an alternative type of language which could be chosen todefi ne or describe analytically what he is talking about. In oral cultures, for reasonsto be explained later, no such language is available.138 ERIC A. HAVELOCKIn dealing with the history of human civilizations, the terms “Western” and“European” are used loosely to draw a defi nition of culture based on geography.The counter-cultures are those of Arabia, India, China, or sometimes the “NearEast” and the “Far East.” The geographic distinction is supported by drawing aparallel religious one, which refers to the differences between a Judaeo-Christianfaith on the one hand and Islam or Buddhism or Confucianism on the other. Thesestereotypes are in common use. The classifi cation I am proposing, one which hasmore operational meaning, is that between the alphabetic cultures and the nonalphabeticones, with the qualifi cation that in the present crisis of modernity, withtechnological man increasingly dominant over traditional man, the alphabeticculture shows increasing signs of invading the nonalphabetic ones and taking themover. That is to say, written communication world-wide, as it is used to preserve andre-use information, is tending increasingly to be alphabetized. This can be viewedas an effect of the superior military and industrial power wielded by the alphabeticcultures. But I would argue that this power itself, as it originally emerged very slowlyin antiquity, and as it has gained rapid momentum since the end of the eighteenthcentury of our era, is itself an alphabetic phenomenon. Power has been derivedfrom the mechanisms of written communication. Communication is not merely theinstrument of thought; it also creates thought. Alphabetic communication, whichmeant literate communication, brought into existence the kind of thinking whichremodels the dynamic fl ow of daily experience into “is statements,” of one sort oranother. This permits a conceptual analysis of what happens in the environment andin ourselves and creates the power not merely to reason about what happens but tocontrol it and to change what happens. This power is not available in oral cultures.Those familiar with the history of the alphabet will be aware that by alphabeticcultures I mean those that use either the original Greek form, or its common Romanadaptation which I am using at the moment, or its Cyrillic version as used by theRussian state and some other peoples.I throw out another suggestion, merely as an aside to my present argument,that one of the causes of the profound unease that exists between the Soviets andthe “West,” to use the convenient term, is not merely the result of competing socialsystems. It has some seat in the unlucky accident that theTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 139Russian Cyrillic script seems somehow alien to western habit; it constitutes an extrabarrier to be surmounted on top of the formidable one created by language. Thebarrier is of this peculiar sort that a script is something you can see, an object, notsimply a noise heard like language. Man even today does not live merely in a towerof linguistic Babel, he lives also in a Babel of competing scripts. This competitionand collision is an unnoticed element in the evolution of modern societies. Here is atheme which I predict will have to be taken up one day by historians of culture.Support for some rather sweeping affi rmations as I have made them liesoriginally in the Greek story. It was in ancient Greece that it all started. The alphabeticmind is the Greek mind as it in time became, but not as it originally was. Greececreated it, but Greece also preserved the oralist mind. The history of Greek cultureis the history of the confrontation of these two minds, or more accurately theircreative partnership as it developed over three and one-half centuries to the point oftheir amalgamation—something which has endured in the alphabetic cultures thatinherited the Greek invention.In the Greek case, the intrusion of conceptual language and thought intooral language and thought and the replacement of one by the other can most easilybe measured as it occurs in the changing Greek descriptions of human behavior,particularly what we style “moral” behavior. Moral philosophy, as understood in theWest and as usually taught in the classroom under the rubric of ethics, is a creationof alphabetic literacy which came into existence in the last half of the fi fth and thefi rst half of the fourth centuries B.C. in the city of Athens.By the term “moral philosophy” I intend to indicate any system of discourse,and by extension of thought, in which the terms right and wrong or good and badare assumed from a logical standpoint to be not only formally speaking antitheticalbut mutually exclusive of each other and from a referential standpoint to defi ne allhuman behavior as divided exhaustively into two categories, right and good andwrong and bad. Thus positioned in human discourse the terms right and wrong,good and bad supply norms by which to classify what is done or thought as right orwrong, good or bad.In popular speech these terms are frequently reinforced by substituting thewords “moral” and “immoral.” It is assumed that these denote universals which canbe used unambiguously to guide140 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchoices we have to make as between the two types of action. They provide foundationsfor moral judgments which theoretically are fi nal. Different linguistic formulashave been employed to designate the overall nature of the right or the good; onethinks of the moral imperative of Kant or the intuited indefi nable goodness of G. E.Moore or a theory of justice as proposed by John Rawls. But always the existenceof such a norm in the full formal sense of the term is assumed as fundamentalto the human condition. What I am proposing here is that the mental process weidentify as forming a moral judgment has not always been a necessary componentof the human condition but had its a historical origin in late fi fth-century Athens.Its effectiveness depended upon a prior ability of the human mind to conceptualizethe rules of behavior as moral universals, an ability which emerged only as the oralculture of Greece yielded to an alphabetic one.To test this assertion let us turn to the earliest extant discussion in Greekof the term “justice.” This occurs in a poem composed soon after Homer’s day butlong before Plato, namely, the Works and Days attributed to Hesiod. The style ofcomposition reveals the beginning of a transition from a poetry of listeners towardsa poetry which might be read—but only the beginning. One of the componentparts—the whole poem runs to over 800 lines—is a discourse of less than 100 lines,a poem within a poem, which possesses an identity of its own, addressing itselfas it does with considerable concentration to the single Greek term dikê which wenormally translate as “justice.” Let us observe the syntax in which this term ofmoral “reference,” as we normally think of it, is employed. My translation, whichselects those statements where the syntax emerges, will hew as close as possible tothe sense of the archaic original (Works and Days, 214 ff.):O Perses, I pray you: hearken to (the voice of)justice nor magnify outrage . . . justice overoutrage prevails having gotten through to thegoal. Even a fool learns from experience; forlook! Oath is running alongside crookedjustices. Uproar of justice being draggedaway where men take her—. . . she followson weeping to city and dwelling places ofpeople clothed in mist carrying evil to mankind,such as drive her out and they have notmeted her straight.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 141They who to stranger-guests and demos-dwellersgive justices (that are) straight and do notstep across out of justice at all—for themthe city fl ourishes merry and the people in itblossom . . . nor ever among men of straightjustice does famine keep company . . .O lords I pray you: Do you, even you, considerdeeply this justice. Near at hand, among mankindbeing-present, the immortals consider all who withcrooked justices infl ict attrition on each otherregarding not the awful word of gods. Presentare thrice ten thousand upon the much-nourishingearth, immortal guards of Zeus, of mortal men,who keep guard over justices and ruthless works clothedin mist going to and fro all over the earth.Present is maiden justice, of Zeus the offspringborn, both renowned and revered of the gods whotenant Olympus, and should one at any time disableher, crookedly castigating, straightway sittingbeside father Zeus the Kronian she sings thenon-just intention of men till it pay back . . .The eye of Zeus having seen all and noted allintently, even these (things) should he so wishhe is looking at nor is (it) hidden from himwhat kind of justice indeed (is) this (that) a cityconfi nes “inside . . .O Perses I pray you: cast these up in your thoughts:hearken to (the voice of) justice and let violencebe hidden from your sight. This usage for mankindthe Kronian has severally ordained, for fi sh andbeasts and winged fowl to eat each other sincejustice is not present among them, but to mankindhe gave justice which most excellent by far comes-to-be.Granted that these statements focus upon a term which in our alphabeticsociety has become central to moral philosophy, what do we learn from them aboutits nature? Surely the account of it is from a modern standpoint anomalous. Whatis one to make of a discussion which can make free, both with a “justice” in thesingular, which we might try and squeeze into the guise of a “conception” of justice,and with “justices” in the plural, intermingling and interchanging them withoutapology, as though142 ERIC A. HAVELOCKthe “concept” on the one hand, if we can call it that, and the specifi c applications ofthe concept on the other, if that is what they are, were indistinguishable? Worse still;what can we make of a term which at one time symbolizes what is straight and goodand at another can symbolize what is crooked and obviously “wrong”?The problem receives some illumination when we notice that whether inthe singular or plural this word symbolizes something which is spoken aloud,pronounced, proclaimed, declared or else listened to, heard, and remembered.Personifi ed it can scream or sing, and become the recipient of verbal abuse, andis disabled by oral testimony which is false. In this guise it becomes a procedureconducted in oral exchange. The constant imputation of crookedness probablyrefers to crookedness of speech (rather than unfair manipulation of boundary linesin property, as has been suggested).In short this is that kind of justice practiced in an oral society not defi nedby written codes. But having got this far, any further attempt to defi ne what justicereally is fails us. “She” or “it” or “they” are Protean in the shapes they take and inthe actions performed. “She” becomes a runner in a race and is then reintroduced asa girl dragged along in distress; and then becomes a girl now travelling to town indisguise before being thrown out. When transferred to Olympus, the scene revealsa personal justice complaining to Zeus that men are unjust, apparently to get himto intervene. “She” is then replaced by Zeus himself looking down on a justiceconfi ned inside a city until at last in the conclusion, “she” is given some universalcolor by being described as a gift assigned to mankind by Zeus.Let us recall the Homeric behavior of that personifi cation styled eris, thesymbol of contentious strife behaving in a similar variety of confi gurations. Here isno “concept” or “principle” of justice, no analytic defi nition, no attempt to tell uswhat justice is. Such a statement is still beyond the poet’s capacity, even though hisassemblage of instances and examples marks an attempt to mobilize the word as atopic, a chapter heading, a theme. In going this far, the poet is composing visually asa reader for readers. He is trying to break with the narrative context, the storytellingthat oral composition has required, but which his written word does not require.But his break is only partial. His justice is still something that acts or behaves orbecomes, notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 143something that “is.” The language of refl ective philosophy, let alone moralphilosophy, is not yet available.It was becoming available perhaps two centuries later, and a little later stillcan be observed at work in the written word as it is composed by Plato. Here is adocumented discourse which no longer needs to be phrased in specifi cs or in images.It can be, of course, if the composer so chooses, but it can tolerate in increasingquantity something that orally preserved speech cannot, namely, statements of “fact”or statements of “universals,” statements of “principles” rather than descriptions of“events.” That is, it can state that something always “is so and so” rather than thatsomething “was done” or “occurred” or “was in place.” In Platonism these linguisticobjectives have been achieved. They are woven into the syntax of argument,appearing there casually without exciting attention from a literate readership whichis used to using them in its own discourse. Here, for example, is how the term“justice,” after being created as a topic by Hesiod, makes its fi rst appearance in thePlatonic text which deals with it demonstratively, namely, Plato’s Republic (I. 331C):Now take precisely this (thing) namely justice:Are we to say that it is truthfulness absolutelyspeaking and giving back anything one has takenfrom somebody else or are these very (things) tobe done sometimes justly and at other timesunjustly?This sentence, occurring near the beginning of the fi rst book of the treatise, introducesthe concept with which the remaining books are to deal. The syntax which identifi esjustice as truthfulness meets a complex requirement. First, the subject is nonpersonal.Second, it receives a predicate which is non-personal. Third, the linkingverb becomes the copula “is.” In the alternative defi nition that is then posed, thesame verb “to be” is used to connect a neuter pronoun with a predicate infi nitive,an abstraction. These are characteristics of Plato’s argumentative text which wenormally take for granted.To cite another example, which is more professionally stated with profuseuse of the neuter singular to express abstraction (Euthyphro, 5 C-D):So now I implore tell me that which youinsisted just now you thoroughly knew:144 ERIC A. HAVELOCKWhat kind (of thing) do you say the pious is,and the impious, in the case of manslaughterand so on; surely the holy in all action isidentical itself with itself; whereas theunholy is completely the opposite of the holy,something always resembling itself having onespecifi c shape completely in accordance withunholiness, whatever the unholy turns out to be.This passage makes plain the kind of syntax now available and necessary for didacticargument and the particular reliance of the Platonic method upon this syntax: thesubjects have to be impersonals, the verbs must take copulative form, and thepredicates have to be impersonals.It is convenient to identify Plato as the discoverer of the necessity of thissyntax in its completed form and therefore as the writer who completed the processof linguistic emancipation from the syntax of oral storage. For good measure it ispossible to cite some less perfect examples from thinkers who preceded him, fromboth the pre-Socratic philosophers and the “sophists” as they are usually styled. Thelanguage of the fi fth century as it was employed by intellectuals exhibits a gradualacceleration of the abstractive process.It is equally to the point to notice that Plato’s relationship to orality is stillintermediate. He can use language that hovers between oral and literate discourse,that is, between the syntax of narrative and the syntax of defi nition. Thus, as Platoapproaches the task of defi ning justice in its political dimension, he indulges himselfin a passage like the following (Republic IV. 432 B-D):The time has come for us to behave like huntsmenencircling a thicket concentrating on preventingjustice from slipping through and disappearing.Evidently it is present somewhere around here.So keep looking, be ready to catch sight of it,and if you happen to sight it before I do pointit out to me—I wish I could, but you will makequite adequate use of me if, instead, you use meas a follower who can look at what is shown tohim—Then follow and let us both pray for luck.I will; you just go ahead—Well here we are;this place by the look of it is hard to getTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 145through; it is cut off from the light, it presentsitself dark in fact and scarcely to betracked through. However let’s go in—yeslet’s go—whereupon I caught sight of somethingand shouted: Glaucon, we probably are ontoa track; I don’t think (the object) will quitesucceed in getting away—That’s good news!The quarry sought is justice, but this kind of dramatic interchange is going to leadup to a quite different type of discourse in which it will be proposed what justicereally is, namely “doing one’s own thing.” It will lead up to an argument whichis analytic and conceptual. Yet one observes the continued effort to conciliate thereader who is still close to his oral inheritance. By letting the discourse relapse intoa syntax which narrates the activities of living subjects and objects we are invited tojoin a hunt in a forest for a quarry. Will it slip through the thicket? No, the huntershave spotted it. This is “Homeric,” not philosophic, prose.By way of contrast to this intermediate style of discourse occasionally adoptedby Plato—intermediate between oralism and literacy, between the pre-conceptualand the conceptual—I quote a passage taken at random from the beginning of DavidHume’s Treatise on Human Nature:I perceive therefore that though there is in general a great resemblance betwixt ourcomplex impressions and ideas, yet the rule is not universally true, that they areexact copies of each other. We may next consider, how the case stands with oursimple perceptions. After the most accurate examination of which I am capable,I venture to affi rm, that the rule here holds without any exceptions, and thatevery simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it, and every simpleimpression a correspondent idea.1The Platonic passage expresses awareness that the act of conceptualizingjustice and defi ning it axiomatically in entirely abstract terms requires from hisreader an extraordinary effort, a new order of thinking, an order of intellection. Toreach to this order, the passage reverts to the simpler language of orality: huntsmenare closing in on their quarry hidden in a thicket, ready to catch sight of it and soforth. Hume’s exposition prefers to present statements as the result of perception,consideration,146 ERIC A. HAVELOCKexamination, affi rmation. Over the 2,000 years since Plato wrote, these termshave become commonplaces of description of intellectual processes which areanalytical, the purpose of which is to construct statements which are either analyticor synthetic.The predicates in Plato’s text do not describe fi xed relationships betweenentities, but describe linkages which are achieved through action as it is performed:encircling, slipping through, “we have to get through,” “we are cut off,” “this ishard to be tracked,” “it will get away.” The corresponding linkages in Hume’s textare conveyed in statements of being, that is, of relationships which are permanent,and therefore require the copula in order to be described. “There is in general; therule is not universally true; they are exact; how the case stands; the rule here holds;every simple idea has a simple impression.” These are expressed in the presenttense—the timeless present and not the “historic” present—such “tenses” are notreally tenses at all. They do not refer to a present moment of a narrated experiencenow recalled as distinct from other moments. The verb “is” shares with the verbs“hold” and “have” the predicative function of presenting a “state of the case” asdeterminate fact, not as a fl eeting moment of action or response.This is the language which Plato himself strives after through all his writtenworks. It had to be fought for with all the strenuousness of the dialectic which heinherited from Socrates. The need he still feels to conciliate his oralist reader byreviving the epic oral syntax would not occur to Hume, still less to Kant or anymodern moralist.Hume’s discourse is that of a professional philosopher and most of us arenot philosophers. We normally avoid involving ourselves in discussion of suchabstract problems. But we can drop casually into Hume’s kind of language, inpersonal converse. Conspicuous and noticeable examples are furnished today inthe vocabularies of the bureaucracies that manage our affairs for us; not least themilitary ones. Names of actions which are specifi c and concrete, and which wouldbe described as such in oral language, are perversely translated into abstractions; tokill a group of villagers becomes a liquidation of opposition, to demand more taxmoney becomes “enhancement of revenue resources.” There now exists a wholelevel of language which is basically theoretic, and it did not become possible untilafter language became alphabetical.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 147Side by side with it, in much of our daily life, we drop back into the concreterealistic dynamism of oral converse, as we prepare to eat breakfast or get the childrenoff to school or mix a drink after a tiring day, and most of all when we make loveor quarrel or fi ght. There is a basic honesty inherent in the oral medium—Homerichonesty that calls a spade a spade—which is transcended in the conceptual versionand converted into a linguistic medium which often requires a degree of hypocrisy.It creates a distance between the oral language which simply registers and thelanguage which categorizes it.However, to point out certain disabilities which have arisen in the way weuse speech, in the course of our conversion from orality to literacy, is one thing.To focus on these as though they were central to the discussion, in the manner of aGeorge Orwell, is something else and quite misleading. We can allow for the greaterdirectness of the oral medium, and its historical importance, and its continuingpresence in our culture, whether in formal poetics or informal converse. But it is amistake to romanticize it, as though Homer represented the language of a lost Eden;a mistake also to hail its apparent revival in the voices and images of the electronicmedia (as described by Marshall McLuhan) replacing what is described as linearcommunication.The fact is that conceptual syntax (which means alphabetic syntax) supportsthe social structures which sustain Western civilization in its present form. Withoutit, the lifestyle of modernity could not exist; without it there would be no physicalscience, no industrial revolution, no scientifi c medicine replacing the superstitionsof the past, and I will add no literature or law as we know them, read them, usethem.Quite apart from its specialized use in works of philosophy, of history, ofscience, this syntax has penetrated into the idiom of narrative fi ction—precisely thatidiom which had been Homer’s peculiar province, the province of all speech as it hadbeen preserved orally within the pre-alphabetic cultures. Here is a quotation fromthe two opening paragraphs of a famous novel, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell ToArms:In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked acrossthe river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebblesand boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly movingand blue in the148 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchannels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raisedpowdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and theleaves fell early that year, and we saw troops marching along the road and thedust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching andafterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees andbeyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fi ghting in themountains and at night we could see the fl ashes from the artillery. In the dark itwas like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feelingof a storm coming?2Ernest Hemingway would not be considered a conceptual writer. Hisproven power lies in the direct simplicity of his images, the narrative force of hisdescriptions, the dynamism of his style. His style would seem to be preeminentlyin this way an oral one, and the present example is no exception. The paratactic“and” recurs eighteen times in this short excerpt. Parataxis has been rightly notedas basic to the style of orally preserved composition, basic that is to its narrativegenius, as required by mnemonic rules. The conjunction “and” is used to connecta series of visually sensitive images, themselves linked together by the resonanceof echo: house-house, river-river; trees-trees-trees; leaves-leaves-leaves; dustdust;marching-marching; plain-plain; mountains-mountains; night-night. Thevocabulary, following oral rules, is economical and repetitive.And yet, the original oral dynamism has been modifi ed and muted. Languagewhich might have described actions and events as such, as doings or happenings,has been translated into statements of “what is.” The syntax of the verb “to be” hasbecome sovereign, joining together visions which for all their sharpness are etchedin temporary immobility:In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders . . . the water was clean andswiftly moving . .. the trunks of the trees were dusty . . . The plainTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 149was rich in crops . . . there were many orchards . . the mountains were brown . . .There was fi ghting . . . it was like summer lightning.Students of Greek (or Latin) drilled in prose composition (now a lost art)learn the habit of converting such expressions back into the dynamics of the ancienttongues, a dynamics orally inspired. Verbs of action or situation have to replacedefi nitive descriptions, as in the following version:Pebbles and boulders were lying scattered in the depth of the river . . . the waterfl owed rapid and sparkling and showed the depth below . . . the trees as to theirtrunks were covered by dust . . . the plain indeed fl ourished bountifully with richcrops and many orchards, but behind appeared mountains shadowy and barren . . .and there soldiers were fi ghting with thrown spears which fl ashed in the dark likethe bolts of Zeus.The Hemingway version favors a presentation of the scene as a seriesof “facts”; the Greek, as a series of episodes. Here is a confrontation betweenthe genius of literate speech preserved visually in the alphabet, and oral speechpreserved acoustically in the memory. Narrativization of experience was not anidiom or idiosyncrasy of ancient tongues (though it was often treated as such inthe instruction I received sixty years ago). It is an essential ingredient of all speechpreserved orally in all the tongues of the world.The Greek alphabet came and took this over and remolded it to give us a newuniverse of language and of the mind; a universe of principles and relationships andlaws and sciences, and values and ideas and ideals. These now ride on top of ourimmediate sensory apparatus and on top of the orality in which this apparatus fi ndsreadiest expression. A visual architecture of language has been superimposed uponrestless acoustic fl ow of sound. This has been the fruit of the literate revolution inthe West, whether for good or for ill.3Yale University (Emeritus)150 ERIC A. HAVELOCKNotes1David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. and introduction by D. G. C. Macnabb (Cleveland:World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 47.2Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1929 et seq.), p. 3.3An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Third Axial Age Conference, held underinternational auspices, at Bad Homburg in West Germany between July 15 and 19, 1985.Oral Tradition, 1/1 (1986): 134-150The Alphabetic Mind:A Gift of Greece to the Modern WorldEric A. HavelockUp until about 700 years before Christ the Greek peoples were non-literate.About that time they invented a writing system conveniently described as an“alphabet,” the Greek word for it. The use of this invention in the course of 300 to400 years after 700 B.C. had a transformational effect upon the behavior of the Greeklanguage, upon the kind of things that could be said in the language and the thingsthat could be thought as it was used. The transformation, however, did not substituteone language for another. The Greek of the Hellenistic age is recognizably closekin to the Greek of Homer. Yet the degree of transformation can be convenientlymeasured by comparing Homer at the upper end of the time-span with the languageof Aristotle at the lower end. The earlier form came into existence as an instrumentfor the preservation of oral speech through memorization. This memorized formwas not the vernacular of casual conversation but an artifi cially managed languagewith special rules for memorization, one of which was rhythm. The later form, theAristotelean one, existed and still exists as a literate instrument designed primarilyfor readers. It preserves its content not through memorization but by placing it ina visual artifact, the alphabet, where, the content can survive as long as the artifactand its copies survive also. The transformational effect made itself felt slowly inthe course of 350 years. It was a complex process. What precisely was its nature?Its complexity can be summed up variously as on the one hand, a shift from poetryto prose as the medium of preserved communication; or again as a shift in literarystyle from narrative towards exposition; or again as the creation of a new literatesyntax of defi nition which could be superimposed upon the oralTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 135syntax that described action. Or again we discern the invention of a conceptuallanguage superimposed upon a non-conceptual; or alternatively a creation of theabstract to replace the concrete, the invention of an abstract version of what hadpreviously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions.If one uses such terms as “concept” or “abstraction” to indicate the end resultof the transformation, one has to clear up some basic confusions in the use of theseterms. Critics and commentators are fond of calling attention to the presence ofwhat they call abstractions or abstract ideas in Homer. This at bottom is a mistake,the nature of which can be clarifi ed by giving an example of what the abstractiveprocess in language involves, as opposed to Homeric idiom.The poet Homer begins his Iliad by addressing his Muse: “Sing I prayyou the wrath of Achilles, the wrath that ravages, the wrath that placed on theAchaeans ten thousand affl ictions.” Suppose we render these sentiments into proseand translate them into abstract terms; they would then run somewhat as follows:“My poem’s subject is the wrath of Achilles which had disruptive effects and thesecaused deep distress for the Achaeans.” A series of acts signalled in the original byappropriate transitive verbs and performed by agents on personal objects is replacedby abstractions connected to each other by verbs indicating fi xed relationshipsbetween them. Instead of a “me” actually speaking to another person, i.e., the Muse,who in turn has to perform the act of singing aloud, we get “my subject is so andso;” an “is” statement with an abstract subject has replaced two persons connectedby an action. Instead of the image of wrath acting like a ravaging army, we getthe “effect” created by this instrument; instead of a bundle of woes being placedlike a weight on human shoulders, we get a single impersonal abstraction— “deepdistress” —connected to a previous abstraction— “disruptive effects”—by a causalrelationship—“these caused.”In a pre-alphabetic society like that of Homer, only the fi rst of these twoalternative modes of describing the same phenomenon was available. Why thiswas so I will explain later. A literate critic, that is a “literary” critic, analyzing thesubstance of the story will use terms of the second mode in order to understand thelanguage of the fi rst. Too often all he manages to do is to introduce misunderstanding.He undercuts the active, transitive, and dynamic syntax of the original which istypical of all speech in136 ERIC A. HAVELOCKsocieties of oral communication and particularly of preserved speech in suchsocieties.The second mode, which I will call the conceptual as well as the alphabetic,had to be invented, and it was the invention of literacy. Such a statement as “mysubject is the wrath” would in orality represent something to be avoided. As a typeit represents the kind of analytic discourse which does not meet the requirement ofeasy and continuous memorization.I call your attention in particular to the formal announcement: “my subjectis the wrath.” The clue to the creation of a conceptual discourse replacing the poeticone lies in the monosyllable “is.” Here is the copula as we call it, the commonestversion now of the verb “to be” familiar in daily converse, let alone refl ectivespeech, connecting two conceptual words, “subject” and “wrath.” “Wrath” is linkedto “subject” as its equivalent, but also as an alternative defi nition of what this subject“is.” To give a simpler and even more commonplace example: when in modernspeech A remarks to B “your house is beautiful,” the copula assigns a property toan object which is not abstract but which by the copula usage is attached to the“attribute” beauty (or in the new practice of analytic discourse it is “implicated”).In ancient Greek as it was spoken down to Plato’s day, the “is” would be omitted.These illustrations bring out a fundamental fact about the language of theconceptual mind: clues to its nature are not to be found by isolating mere nouns assuch and classifying them as abstract or concrete. It is the syntax in which they areembedded that betrays the difference. The word “wrath” could if you so choose beviewed as a kind of abstraction, a psychological one. But it is not a true abstractionbecause it is an agent which performs, in the course of three lines (only two ofwhich I have quoted), no less than four perfectly concrete actions: it ravages; itpicks up a burden and puts it on the shoulders of the Greeks; it catapults human livesinto Hades; it converts men into things for animals to eat.Complete “conceptuality” of discourse (if this be the appropriate word)depends not on single words treated as phenomena per se, but on their being placedin a given relationship to one another in statements which employ either a copula oran equivalent to connect them. The growth of abstractionism and conceptualism inthe Greek tongue is notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 137discoverable by a mere resort to lexicons, indexes, and glossaries, common as thispractice has become. Single words classifi able as abstract like “justice” or “strife”or “war” or “peace” can as easily be personifi ed as not. What is in question is theability of the human mind to create and manipulate theoretic statements as opposedto particular ones; to replace a performative syntax by a logical one.Homeric and oral discourse often resorts to a personifi cation of what theliterate critic is tempted to call abstractions. But considered as abstractions theyfail the syntactical test; they are always busy, performing or behaving. They are notallowed to be identifi ed categorically as terms under which the action is arrangedand classifi ed. They are never defi ned or described analytically; they are innocentof any connection with the copula which can link them to a defi nition, give them anattribute, link them to a class or kind. They never appear in what I shall call the “isstatement.”Let us revert again to Homer’s preface to his Iliad. The story is ignited soto speak by a quarrel between Achilles and his commander-in-chief. The poet asksrhetorically “and pray then which one of the gods combined these two togetherin contentious strife to fi ght?” The Homeric name for this kind of strife is eris.Later in the narrative it acquires a capital letter (to use an anachronism). It becomes“personifi ed,” as we say, as a kind of feminine principle, though again the term“principle” is wholly anachronistic. “Her” behavior is evoked in a rich variety ofimagery: “she” can be discovered “raging ceaselessly, a little wave which thenextends from earth to heaven, throwing contested feud into the throng, enlargingagony”; or again “painfully severe (a missile) discharged by Zeus, emplacing mightand strength in the heart”; or again “bewept and bewailed”; or again “keepingcompany with battle noise and ravaging fate”; or again “arising in force, rousingpeoples to rage, as the gods mingled in battle.” Nowhere is the term given eithersocial or psychological defi nition: we are told what “she” does, we are never toldwhat “it” is.A modern poet or writer of fi ction might choose imagery for his subjectwhich allowed equal freedom. But behind his imagery in the language of his culturethere lurks in parallel an alternative type of language which could be chosen todefi ne or describe analytically what he is talking about. In oral cultures, for reasonsto be explained later, no such language is available.138 ERIC A. HAVELOCKIn dealing with the history of human civilizations, the terms “Western” and“European” are used loosely to draw a defi nition of culture based on geography.The counter-cultures are those of Arabia, India, China, or sometimes the “NearEast” and the “Far East.” The geographic distinction is supported by drawing aparallel religious one, which refers to the differences between a Judaeo-Christianfaith on the one hand and Islam or Buddhism or Confucianism on the other. Thesestereotypes are in common use. The classifi cation I am proposing, one which hasmore operational meaning, is that between the alphabetic cultures and the nonalphabeticones, with the qualifi cation that in the present crisis of modernity, withtechnological man increasingly dominant over traditional man, the alphabeticculture shows increasing signs of invading the nonalphabetic ones and taking themover. That is to say, written communication world-wide, as it is used to preserve andre-use information, is tending increasingly to be alphabetized. This can be viewedas an effect of the superior military and industrial power wielded by the alphabeticcultures. But I would argue that this power itself, as it originally emerged very slowlyin antiquity, and as it has gained rapid momentum since the end of the eighteenthcentury of our era, is itself an alphabetic phenomenon. Power has been derivedfrom the mechanisms of written communication. Communication is not merely theinstrument of thought; it also creates thought. Alphabetic communication, whichmeant literate communication, brought into existence the kind of thinking whichremodels the dynamic fl ow of daily experience into “is statements,” of one sort oranother. This permits a conceptual analysis of what happens in the environment andin ourselves and creates the power not merely to reason about what happens but tocontrol it and to change what happens. This power is not available in oral cultures.Those familiar with the history of the alphabet will be aware that by alphabeticcultures I mean those that use either the original Greek form, or its common Romanadaptation which I am using at the moment, or its Cyrillic version as used by theRussian state and some other peoples.I throw out another suggestion, merely as an aside to my present argument,that one of the causes of the profound unease that exists between the Soviets andthe “West,” to use the convenient term, is not merely the result of competing socialsystems. It has some seat in the unlucky accident that theTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 139Russian Cyrillic script seems somehow alien to western habit; it constitutes an extrabarrier to be surmounted on top of the formidable one created by language. Thebarrier is of this peculiar sort that a script is something you can see, an object, notsimply a noise heard like language. Man even today does not live merely in a towerof linguistic Babel, he lives also in a Babel of competing scripts. This competitionand collision is an unnoticed element in the evolution of modern societies. Here is atheme which I predict will have to be taken up one day by historians of culture.Support for some rather sweeping affi rmations as I have made them liesoriginally in the Greek story. It was in ancient Greece that it all started. The alphabeticmind is the Greek mind as it in time became, but not as it originally was. Greececreated it, but Greece also preserved the oralist mind. The history of Greek cultureis the history of the confrontation of these two minds, or more accurately theircreative partnership as it developed over three and one-half centuries to the point oftheir amalgamation—something which has endured in the alphabetic cultures thatinherited the Greek invention.In the Greek case, the intrusion of conceptual language and thought intooral language and thought and the replacement of one by the other can most easilybe measured as it occurs in the changing Greek descriptions of human behavior,particularly what we style “moral” behavior. Moral philosophy, as understood in theWest and as usually taught in the classroom under the rubric of ethics, is a creationof alphabetic literacy which came into existence in the last half of the fi fth and thefi rst half of the fourth centuries B.C. in the city of Athens.By the term “moral philosophy” I intend to indicate any system of discourse,and by extension of thought, in which the terms right and wrong or good and badare assumed from a logical standpoint to be not only formally speaking antitheticalbut mutually exclusive of each other and from a referential standpoint to defi ne allhuman behavior as divided exhaustively into two categories, right and good andwrong and bad. Thus positioned in human discourse the terms right and wrong,good and bad supply norms by which to classify what is done or thought as right orwrong, good or bad.In popular speech these terms are frequently reinforced by substituting thewords “moral” and “immoral.” It is assumed that these denote universals which canbe used unambiguously to guide140 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchoices we have to make as between the two types of action. They provide foundationsfor moral judgments which theoretically are fi nal. Different linguistic formulashave been employed to designate the overall nature of the right or the good; onethinks of the moral imperative of Kant or the intuited indefi nable goodness of G. E.Moore or a theory of justice as proposed by John Rawls. But always the existenceof such a norm in the full formal sense of the term is assumed as fundamentalto the human condition. What I am proposing here is that the mental process weidentify as forming a moral judgment has not always been a necessary componentof the human condition but had its a historical origin in late fi fth-century Athens.Its effectiveness depended upon a prior ability of the human mind to conceptualizethe rules of behavior as moral universals, an ability which emerged only as the oralculture of Greece yielded to an alphabetic one.To test this assertion let us turn to the earliest extant discussion in Greekof the term “justice.” This occurs in a poem composed soon after Homer’s day butlong before Plato, namely, the Works and Days attributed to Hesiod. The style ofcomposition reveals the beginning of a transition from a poetry of listeners towardsa poetry which might be read—but only the beginning. One of the componentparts—the whole poem runs to over 800 lines—is a discourse of less than 100 lines,a poem within a poem, which possesses an identity of its own, addressing itselfas it does with considerable concentration to the single Greek term dikê which wenormally translate as “justice.” Let us observe the syntax in which this term ofmoral “reference,” as we normally think of it, is employed. My translation, whichselects those statements where the syntax emerges, will hew as close as possible tothe sense of the archaic original (Works and Days, 214 ff.):O Perses, I pray you: hearken to (the voice of)justice nor magnify outrage . . . justice overoutrage prevails having gotten through to thegoal. Even a fool learns from experience; forlook! Oath is running alongside crookedjustices. Uproar of justice being draggedaway where men take her—. . . she followson weeping to city and dwelling places ofpeople clothed in mist carrying evil to mankind,such as drive her out and they have notmeted her straight.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 141They who to stranger-guests and demos-dwellersgive justices (that are) straight and do notstep across out of justice at all—for themthe city fl ourishes merry and the people in itblossom . . . nor ever among men of straightjustice does famine keep company . . .O lords I pray you: Do you, even you, considerdeeply this justice. Near at hand, among mankindbeing-present, the immortals consider all who withcrooked justices infl ict attrition on each otherregarding not the awful word of gods. Presentare thrice ten thousand upon the much-nourishingearth, immortal guards of Zeus, of mortal men,who keep guard over justices and ruthless works clothedin mist going to and fro all over the earth.Present is maiden justice, of Zeus the offspringborn, both renowned and revered of the gods whotenant Olympus, and should one at any time disableher, crookedly castigating, straightway sittingbeside father Zeus the Kronian she sings thenon-just intention of men till it pay back . . .The eye of Zeus having seen all and noted allintently, even these (things) should he so wishhe is looking at nor is (it) hidden from himwhat kind of justice indeed (is) this (that) a cityconfi nes “inside . . .O Perses I pray you: cast these up in your thoughts:hearken to (the voice of) justice and let violencebe hidden from your sight. This usage for mankindthe Kronian has severally ordained, for fi sh andbeasts and winged fowl to eat each other sincejustice is not present among them, but to mankindhe gave justice which most excellent by far comes-to-be.Granted that these statements focus upon a term which in our alphabeticsociety has become central to moral philosophy, what do we learn from them aboutits nature? Surely the account of it is from a modern standpoint anomalous. Whatis one to make of a discussion which can make free, both with a “justice” in thesingular, which we might try and squeeze into the guise of a “conception” of justice,and with “justices” in the plural, intermingling and interchanging them withoutapology, as though142 ERIC A. HAVELOCKthe “concept” on the one hand, if we can call it that, and the specifi c applications ofthe concept on the other, if that is what they are, were indistinguishable? Worse still;what can we make of a term which at one time symbolizes what is straight and goodand at another can symbolize what is crooked and obviously “wrong”?The problem receives some illumination when we notice that whether inthe singular or plural this word symbolizes something which is spoken aloud,pronounced, proclaimed, declared or else listened to, heard, and remembered.Personifi ed it can scream or sing, and become the recipient of verbal abuse, andis disabled by oral testimony which is false. In this guise it becomes a procedureconducted in oral exchange. The constant imputation of crookedness probablyrefers to crookedness of speech (rather than unfair manipulation of boundary linesin property, as has been suggested).In short this is that kind of justice practiced in an oral society not defi nedby written codes. But having got this far, any further attempt to defi ne what justicereally is fails us. “She” or “it” or “they” are Protean in the shapes they take and inthe actions performed. “She” becomes a runner in a race and is then reintroduced asa girl dragged along in distress; and then becomes a girl now travelling to town indisguise before being thrown out. When transferred to Olympus, the scene revealsa personal justice complaining to Zeus that men are unjust, apparently to get himto intervene. “She” is then replaced by Zeus himself looking down on a justiceconfi ned inside a city until at last in the conclusion, “she” is given some universalcolor by being described as a gift assigned to mankind by Zeus.Let us recall the Homeric behavior of that personifi cation styled eris, thesymbol of contentious strife behaving in a similar variety of confi gurations. Here isno “concept” or “principle” of justice, no analytic defi nition, no attempt to tell uswhat justice is. Such a statement is still beyond the poet’s capacity, even though hisassemblage of instances and examples marks an attempt to mobilize the word as atopic, a chapter heading, a theme. In going this far, the poet is composing visually asa reader for readers. He is trying to break with the narrative context, the storytellingthat oral composition has required, but which his written word does not require.But his break is only partial. His justice is still something that acts or behaves orbecomes, notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 143something that “is.” The language of refl ective philosophy, let alone moralphilosophy, is not yet available.It was becoming available perhaps two centuries later, and a little later stillcan be observed at work in the written word as it is composed by Plato. Here is adocumented discourse which no longer needs to be phrased in specifi cs or in images.It can be, of course, if the composer so chooses, but it can tolerate in increasingquantity something that orally preserved speech cannot, namely, statements of “fact”or statements of “universals,” statements of “principles” rather than descriptions of“events.” That is, it can state that something always “is so and so” rather than thatsomething “was done” or “occurred” or “was in place.” In Platonism these linguisticobjectives have been achieved. They are woven into the syntax of argument,appearing there casually without exciting attention from a literate readership whichis used to using them in its own discourse. Here, for example, is how the term“justice,” after being created as a topic by Hesiod, makes its fi rst appearance in thePlatonic text which deals with it demonstratively, namely, Plato’s Republic (I. 331C):Now take precisely this (thing) namely justice:Are we to say that it is truthfulness absolutelyspeaking and giving back anything one has takenfrom somebody else or are these very (things) tobe done sometimes justly and at other timesunjustly?This sentence, occurring near the beginning of the fi rst book of the treatise, introducesthe concept with which the remaining books are to deal. The syntax which identifi esjustice as truthfulness meets a complex requirement. First, the subject is nonpersonal.Second, it receives a predicate which is non-personal. Third, the linkingverb becomes the copula “is.” In the alternative defi nition that is then posed, thesame verb “to be” is used to connect a neuter pronoun with a predicate infi nitive,an abstraction. These are characteristics of Plato’s argumentative text which wenormally take for granted.To cite another example, which is more professionally stated with profuseuse of the neuter singular to express abstraction (Euthyphro, 5 C-D):So now I implore tell me that which youinsisted just now you thoroughly knew:144 ERIC A. HAVELOCKWhat kind (of thing) do you say the pious is,and the impious, in the case of manslaughterand so on; surely the holy in all action isidentical itself with itself; whereas theunholy is completely the opposite of the holy,something always resembling itself having onespecifi c shape completely in accordance withunholiness, whatever the unholy turns out to be.This passage makes plain the kind of syntax now available and necessary for didacticargument and the particular reliance of the Platonic method upon this syntax: thesubjects have to be impersonals, the verbs must take copulative form, and thepredicates have to be impersonals.It is convenient to identify Plato as the discoverer of the necessity of thissyntax in its completed form and therefore as the writer who completed the processof linguistic emancipation from the syntax of oral storage. For good measure it ispossible to cite some less perfect examples from thinkers who preceded him, fromboth the pre-Socratic philosophers and the “sophists” as they are usually styled. Thelanguage of the fi fth century as it was employed by intellectuals exhibits a gradualacceleration of the abstractive process.It is equally to the point to notice that Plato’s relationship to orality is stillintermediate. He can use language that hovers between oral and literate discourse,that is, between the syntax of narrative and the syntax of defi nition. Thus, as Platoapproaches the task of defi ning justice in its political dimension, he indulges himselfin a passage like the following (Republic IV. 432 B-D):The time has come for us to behave like huntsmenencircling a thicket concentrating on preventingjustice from slipping through and disappearing.Evidently it is present somewhere around here.So keep looking, be ready to catch sight of it,and if you happen to sight it before I do pointit out to me—I wish I could, but you will makequite adequate use of me if, instead, you use meas a follower who can look at what is shown tohim—Then follow and let us both pray for luck.I will; you just go ahead—Well here we are;this place by the look of it is hard to getTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 145through; it is cut off from the light, it presentsitself dark in fact and scarcely to betracked through. However let’s go in—yeslet’s go—whereupon I caught sight of somethingand shouted: Glaucon, we probably are ontoa track; I don’t think (the object) will quitesucceed in getting away—That’s good news!The quarry sought is justice, but this kind of dramatic interchange is going to leadup to a quite different type of discourse in which it will be proposed what justicereally is, namely “doing one’s own thing.” It will lead up to an argument whichis analytic and conceptual. Yet one observes the continued effort to conciliate thereader who is still close to his oral inheritance. By letting the discourse relapse intoa syntax which narrates the activities of living subjects and objects we are invited tojoin a hunt in a forest for a quarry. Will it slip through the thicket? No, the huntershave spotted it. This is “Homeric,” not philosophic, prose.By way of contrast to this intermediate style of discourse occasionally adoptedby Plato—intermediate between oralism and literacy, between the pre-conceptualand the conceptual—I quote a passage taken at random from the beginning of DavidHume’s Treatise on Human Nature:I perceive therefore that though there is in general a great resemblance betwixt ourcomplex impressions and ideas, yet the rule is not universally true, that they areexact copies of each other. We may next consider, how the case stands with oursimple perceptions. After the most accurate examination of which I am capable,I venture to affi rm, that the rule here holds without any exceptions, and thatevery simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it, and every simpleimpression a correspondent idea.1The Platonic passage expresses awareness that the act of conceptualizingjustice and defi ning it axiomatically in entirely abstract terms requires from hisreader an extraordinary effort, a new order of thinking, an order of intellection. Toreach to this order, the passage reverts to the simpler language of orality: huntsmenare closing in on their quarry hidden in a thicket, ready to catch sight of it and soforth. Hume’s exposition prefers to present statements as the result of perception,consideration,146 ERIC A. HAVELOCKexamination, affi rmation. Over the 2,000 years since Plato wrote, these termshave become commonplaces of description of intellectual processes which areanalytical, the purpose of which is to construct statements which are either analyticor synthetic.The predicates in Plato’s text do not describe fi xed relationships betweenentities, but describe linkages which are achieved through action as it is performed:encircling, slipping through, “we have to get through,” “we are cut off,” “this ishard to be tracked,” “it will get away.” The corresponding linkages in Hume’s textare conveyed in statements of being, that is, of relationships which are permanent,and therefore require the copula in order to be described. “There is in general; therule is not universally true; they are exact; how the case stands; the rule here holds;every simple idea has a simple impression.” These are expressed in the presenttense—the timeless present and not the “historic” present—such “tenses” are notreally tenses at all. They do not refer to a present moment of a narrated experiencenow recalled as distinct from other moments. The verb “is” shares with the verbs“hold” and “have” the predicative function of presenting a “state of the case” asdeterminate fact, not as a fl eeting moment of action or response.This is the language which Plato himself strives after through all his writtenworks. It had to be fought for with all the strenuousness of the dialectic which heinherited from Socrates. The need he still feels to conciliate his oralist reader byreviving the epic oral syntax would not occur to Hume, still less to Kant or anymodern moralist.Hume’s discourse is that of a professional philosopher and most of us arenot philosophers. We normally avoid involving ourselves in discussion of suchabstract problems. But we can drop casually into Hume’s kind of language, inpersonal converse. Conspicuous and noticeable examples are furnished today inthe vocabularies of the bureaucracies that manage our affairs for us; not least themilitary ones. Names of actions which are specifi c and concrete, and which wouldbe described as such in oral language, are perversely translated into abstractions; tokill a group of villagers becomes a liquidation of opposition, to demand more taxmoney becomes “enhancement of revenue resources.” There now exists a wholelevel of language which is basically theoretic, and it did not become possible untilafter language became alphabetical.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 147Side by side with it, in much of our daily life, we drop back into the concreterealistic dynamism of oral converse, as we prepare to eat breakfast or get the childrenoff to school or mix a drink after a tiring day, and most of all when we make loveor quarrel or fi ght. There is a basic honesty inherent in the oral medium—Homerichonesty that calls a spade a spade—which is transcended in the conceptual versionand converted into a linguistic medium which often requires a degree of hypocrisy.It creates a distance between the oral language which simply registers and thelanguage which categorizes it.However, to point out certain disabilities which have arisen in the way weuse speech, in the course of our conversion from orality to literacy, is one thing.To focus on these as though they were central to the discussion, in the manner of aGeorge Orwell, is something else and quite misleading. We can allow for the greaterdirectness of the oral medium, and its historical importance, and its continuingpresence in our culture, whether in formal poetics or informal converse. But it is amistake to romanticize it, as though Homer represented the language of a lost Eden;a mistake also to hail its apparent revival in the voices and images of the electronicmedia (as described by Marshall McLuhan) replacing what is described as linearcommunication.The fact is that conceptual syntax (which means alphabetic syntax) supportsthe social structures which sustain Western civilization in its present form. Withoutit, the lifestyle of modernity could not exist; without it there would be no physicalscience, no industrial revolution, no scientifi c medicine replacing the superstitionsof the past, and I will add no literature or law as we know them, read them, usethem.Quite apart from its specialized use in works of philosophy, of history, ofscience, this syntax has penetrated into the idiom of narrative fi ction—precisely thatidiom which had been Homer’s peculiar province, the province of all speech as it hadbeen preserved orally within the pre-alphabetic cultures. Here is a quotation fromthe two opening paragraphs of a famous novel, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell ToArms:In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked acrossthe river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebblesand boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly movingand blue in the148 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchannels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raisedpowdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and theleaves fell early that year, and we saw troops marching along the road and thedust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching andafterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees andbeyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fi ghting in themountains and at night we could see the fl ashes from the artillery. In the dark itwas like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feelingof a storm coming?2Ernest Hemingway would not be considered a conceptual writer. Hisproven power lies in the direct simplicity of his images, the narrative force of hisdescriptions, the dynamism of his style. His style would seem to be preeminentlyin this way an oral one, and the present example is no exception. The paratactic“and” recurs eighteen times in this short excerpt. Parataxis has been rightly notedas basic to the style of orally preserved composition, basic that is to its narrativegenius, as required by mnemonic rules. The conjunction “and” is used to connecta series of visually sensitive images, themselves linked together by the resonanceof echo: house-house, river-river; trees-trees-trees; leaves-leaves-leaves; dustdust;marching-marching; plain-plain; mountains-mountains; night-night. Thevocabulary, following oral rules, is economical and repetitive.And yet, the original oral dynamism has been modifi ed and muted. Languagewhich might have described actions and events as such, as doings or happenings,has been translated into statements of “what is.” The syntax of the verb “to be” hasbecome sovereign, joining together visions which for all their sharpness are etchedin temporary immobility:In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders . . . the water was clean andswiftly moving . .. the trunks of the trees were dusty . . . The plainTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 149was rich in crops . . . there were many orchards . . the mountains were brown . . .There was fi ghting . . . it was like summer lightning.Students of Greek (or Latin) drilled in prose composition (now a lost art)learn the habit of converting such expressions back into the dynamics of the ancienttongues, a dynamics orally inspired. Verbs of action or situation have to replacedefi nitive descriptions, as in the following version:Pebbles and boulders were lying scattered in the depth of the river . . . the waterfl owed rapid and sparkling and showed the depth below . . . the trees as to theirtrunks were covered by dust . . . the plain indeed fl ourished bountifully with richcrops and many orchards, but behind appeared mountains shadowy and barren . . .and there soldiers were fi ghting with thrown spears which fl ashed in the dark likethe bolts of Zeus.The Hemingway version favors a presentation of the scene as a seriesof “facts”; the Greek, as a series of episodes. Here is a confrontation betweenthe genius of literate speech preserved visually in the alphabet, and oral speechpreserved acoustically in the memory. Narrativization of experience was not anidiom or idiosyncrasy of ancient tongues (though it was often treated as such inthe instruction I received sixty years ago). It is an essential ingredient of all speechpreserved orally in all the tongues of the world.The Greek alphabet came and took this over and remolded it to give us a newuniverse of language and of the mind; a universe of principles and relationships andlaws and sciences, and values and ideas and ideals. These now ride on top of ourimmediate sensory apparatus and on top of the orality in which this apparatus fi ndsreadiest expression. A visual architecture of language has been superimposed uponrestless acoustic fl ow of sound. This has been the fruit of the literate revolution inthe West, whether for good or for ill.3Yale University (Emeritus)150 ERIC A. HAVELOCKNotes1David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. and introduction by D. G. C. Macnabb (Cleveland:World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 47.2Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1929 et seq.), p. 3.3An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Third Axial Age Conference, held underinternational auspices, at Bad Homburg in West Germany between July 15 and 19, 1985.Oral Tradition, 1/1 (1986): 134-150The Alphabetic Mind:A Gift of Greece to the Modern WorldEric A. HavelockUp until about 700 years before Christ the Greek peoples were non-literate.About that time they invented a writing system conveniently described as an“alphabet,” the Greek word for it. The use of this invention in the course of 300 to400 years after 700 B.C. had a transformational effect upon the behavior of the Greeklanguage, upon the kind of things that could be said in the language and the thingsthat could be thought as it was used. The transformation, however, did not substituteone language for another. The Greek of the Hellenistic age is recognizably closekin to the Greek of Homer. Yet the degree of transformation can be convenientlymeasured by comparing Homer at the upper end of the time-span with the languageof Aristotle at the lower end. The earlier form came into existence as an instrumentfor the preservation of oral speech through memorization. This memorized formwas not the vernacular of casual conversation but an artifi cially managed languagewith special rules for memorization, one of which was rhythm. The later form, theAristotelean one, existed and still exists as a literate instrument designed primarilyfor readers. It preserves its content not through memorization but by placing it ina visual artifact, the alphabet, where, the content can survive as long as the artifactand its copies survive also. The transformational effect made itself felt slowly inthe course of 350 years. It was a complex process. What precisely was its nature?Its complexity can be summed up variously as on the one hand, a shift from poetryto prose as the medium of preserved communication; or again as a shift in literarystyle from narrative towards exposition; or again as the creation of a new literatesyntax of defi nition which could be superimposed upon the oralTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 135syntax that described action. Or again we discern the invention of a conceptuallanguage superimposed upon a non-conceptual; or alternatively a creation of theabstract to replace the concrete, the invention of an abstract version of what hadpreviously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions.If one uses such terms as “concept” or “abstraction” to indicate the end resultof the transformation, one has to clear up some basic confusions in the use of theseterms. Critics and commentators are fond of calling attention to the presence ofwhat they call abstractions or abstract ideas in Homer. This at bottom is a mistake,the nature of which can be clarifi ed by giving an example of what the abstractiveprocess in language involves, as opposed to Homeric idiom.The poet Homer begins his Iliad by addressing his Muse: “Sing I prayyou the wrath of Achilles, the wrath that ravages, the wrath that placed on theAchaeans ten thousand affl ictions.” Suppose we render these sentiments into proseand translate them into abstract terms; they would then run somewhat as follows:“My poem’s subject is the wrath of Achilles which had disruptive effects and thesecaused deep distress for the Achaeans.” A series of acts signalled in the original byappropriate transitive verbs and performed by agents on personal objects is replacedby abstractions connected to each other by verbs indicating fi xed relationshipsbetween them. Instead of a “me” actually speaking to another person, i.e., the Muse,who in turn has to perform the act of singing aloud, we get “my subject is so andso;” an “is” statement with an abstract subject has replaced two persons connectedby an action. Instead of the image of wrath acting like a ravaging army, we getthe “effect” created by this instrument; instead of a bundle of woes being placedlike a weight on human shoulders, we get a single impersonal abstraction— “deepdistress” —connected to a previous abstraction— “disruptive effects”—by a causalrelationship—“these caused.”In a pre-alphabetic society like that of Homer, only the fi rst of these twoalternative modes of describing the same phenomenon was available. Why thiswas so I will explain later. A literate critic, that is a “literary” critic, analyzing thesubstance of the story will use terms of the second mode in order to understand thelanguage of the fi rst. Too often all he manages to do is to introduce misunderstanding.He undercuts the active, transitive, and dynamic syntax of the original which istypical of all speech in136 ERIC A. HAVELOCKsocieties of oral communication and particularly of preserved speech in suchsocieties.The second mode, which I will call the conceptual as well as the alphabetic,had to be invented, and it was the invention of literacy. Such a statement as “mysubject is the wrath” would in orality represent something to be avoided. As a typeit represents the kind of analytic discourse which does not meet the requirement ofeasy and continuous memorization.I call your attention in particular to the formal announcement: “my subjectis the wrath.” The clue to the creation of a conceptual discourse replacing the poeticone lies in the monosyllable “is.” Here is the copula as we call it, the commonestversion now of the verb “to be” familiar in daily converse, let alone refl ectivespeech, connecting two conceptual words, “subject” and “wrath.” “Wrath” is linkedto “subject” as its equivalent, but also as an alternative defi nition of what this subject“is.” To give a simpler and even more commonplace example: when in modernspeech A remarks to B “your house is beautiful,” the copula assigns a property toan object which is not abstract but which by the copula usage is attached to the“attribute” beauty (or in the new practice of analytic discourse it is “implicated”).In ancient Greek as it was spoken down to Plato’s day, the “is” would be omitted.These illustrations bring out a fundamental fact about the language of theconceptual mind: clues to its nature are not to be found by isolating mere nouns assuch and classifying them as abstract or concrete. It is the syntax in which they areembedded that betrays the difference. The word “wrath” could if you so choose beviewed as a kind of abstraction, a psychological one. But it is not a true abstractionbecause it is an agent which performs, in the course of three lines (only two ofwhich I have quoted), no less than four perfectly concrete actions: it ravages; itpicks up a burden and puts it on the shoulders of the Greeks; it catapults human livesinto Hades; it converts men into things for animals to eat.Complete “conceptuality” of discourse (if this be the appropriate word)depends not on single words treated as phenomena per se, but on their being placedin a given relationship to one another in statements which employ either a copula oran equivalent to connect them. The growth of abstractionism and conceptualism inthe Greek tongue is notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 137discoverable by a mere resort to lexicons, indexes, and glossaries, common as thispractice has become. Single words classifi able as abstract like “justice” or “strife”or “war” or “peace” can as easily be personifi ed as not. What is in question is theability of the human mind to create and manipulate theoretic statements as opposedto particular ones; to replace a performative syntax by a logical one.Homeric and oral discourse often resorts to a personifi cation of what theliterate critic is tempted to call abstractions. But considered as abstractions theyfail the syntactical test; they are always busy, performing or behaving. They are notallowed to be identifi ed categorically as terms under which the action is arrangedand classifi ed. They are never defi ned or described analytically; they are innocentof any connection with the copula which can link them to a defi nition, give them anattribute, link them to a class or kind. They never appear in what I shall call the “isstatement.”Let us revert again to Homer’s preface to his Iliad. The story is ignited soto speak by a quarrel between Achilles and his commander-in-chief. The poet asksrhetorically “and pray then which one of the gods combined these two togetherin contentious strife to fi ght?” The Homeric name for this kind of strife is eris.Later in the narrative it acquires a capital letter (to use an anachronism). It becomes“personifi ed,” as we say, as a kind of feminine principle, though again the term“principle” is wholly anachronistic. “Her” behavior is evoked in a rich variety ofimagery: “she” can be discovered “raging ceaselessly, a little wave which thenextends from earth to heaven, throwing contested feud into the throng, enlargingagony”; or again “painfully severe (a missile) discharged by Zeus, emplacing mightand strength in the heart”; or again “bewept and bewailed”; or again “keepingcompany with battle noise and ravaging fate”; or again “arising in force, rousingpeoples to rage, as the gods mingled in battle.” Nowhere is the term given eithersocial or psychological defi nition: we are told what “she” does, we are never toldwhat “it” is.A modern poet or writer of fi ction might choose imagery for his subjectwhich allowed equal freedom. But behind his imagery in the language of his culturethere lurks in parallel an alternative type of language which could be chosen todefi ne or describe analytically what he is talking about. In oral cultures, for reasonsto be explained later, no such language is available.138 ERIC A. HAVELOCKIn dealing with the history of human civilizations, the terms “Western” and“European” are used loosely to draw a defi nition of culture based on geography.The counter-cultures are those of Arabia, India, China, or sometimes the “NearEast” and the “Far East.” The geographic distinction is supported by drawing aparallel religious one, which refers to the differences between a Judaeo-Christianfaith on the one hand and Islam or Buddhism or Confucianism on the other. Thesestereotypes are in common use. The classifi cation I am proposing, one which hasmore operational meaning, is that between the alphabetic cultures and the nonalphabeticones, with the qualifi cation that in the present crisis of modernity, withtechnological man increasingly dominant over traditional man, the alphabeticculture shows increasing signs of invading the nonalphabetic ones and taking themover. That is to say, written communication world-wide, as it is used to preserve andre-use information, is tending increasingly to be alphabetized. This can be viewedas an effect of the superior military and industrial power wielded by the alphabeticcultures. But I would argue that this power itself, as it originally emerged very slowlyin antiquity, and as it has gained rapid momentum since the end of the eighteenthcentury of our era, is itself an alphabetic phenomenon. Power has been derivedfrom the mechanisms of written communication. Communication is not merely theinstrument of thought; it also creates thought. Alphabetic communication, whichmeant literate communication, brought into existence the kind of thinking whichremodels the dynamic fl ow of daily experience into “is statements,” of one sort oranother. This permits a conceptual analysis of what happens in the environment andin ourselves and creates the power not merely to reason about what happens but tocontrol it and to change what happens. This power is not available in oral cultures.Those familiar with the history of the alphabet will be aware that by alphabeticcultures I mean those that use either the original Greek form, or its common Romanadaptation which I am using at the moment, or its Cyrillic version as used by theRussian state and some other peoples.I throw out another suggestion, merely as an aside to my present argument,that one of the causes of the profound unease that exists between the Soviets andthe “West,” to use the convenient term, is not merely the result of competing socialsystems. It has some seat in the unlucky accident that theTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 139Russian Cyrillic script seems somehow alien to western habit; it constitutes an extrabarrier to be surmounted on top of the formidable one created by language. Thebarrier is of this peculiar sort that a script is something you can see, an object, notsimply a noise heard like language. Man even today does not live merely in a towerof linguistic Babel, he lives also in a Babel of competing scripts. This competitionand collision is an unnoticed element in the evolution of modern societies. Here is atheme which I predict will have to be taken up one day by historians of culture.Support for some rather sweeping affi rmations as I have made them liesoriginally in the Greek story. It was in ancient Greece that it all started. The alphabeticmind is the Greek mind as it in time became, but not as it originally was. Greececreated it, but Greece also preserved the oralist mind. The history of Greek cultureis the history of the confrontation of these two minds, or more accurately theircreative partnership as it developed over three and one-half centuries to the point oftheir amalgamation—something which has endured in the alphabetic cultures thatinherited the Greek invention.In the Greek case, the intrusion of conceptual language and thought intooral language and thought and the replacement of one by the other can most easilybe measured as it occurs in the changing Greek descriptions of human behavior,particularly what we style “moral” behavior. Moral philosophy, as understood in theWest and as usually taught in the classroom under the rubric of ethics, is a creationof alphabetic literacy which came into existence in the last half of the fi fth and thefi rst half of the fourth centuries B.C. in the city of Athens.By the term “moral philosophy” I intend to indicate any system of discourse,and by extension of thought, in which the terms right and wrong or good and badare assumed from a logical standpoint to be not only formally speaking antitheticalbut mutually exclusive of each other and from a referential standpoint to defi ne allhuman behavior as divided exhaustively into two categories, right and good andwrong and bad. Thus positioned in human discourse the terms right and wrong,good and bad supply norms by which to classify what is done or thought as right orwrong, good or bad.In popular speech these terms are frequently reinforced by substituting thewords “moral” and “immoral.” It is assumed that these denote universals which canbe used unambiguously to guide140 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchoices we have to make as between the two types of action. They provide foundationsfor moral judgments which theoretically are fi nal. Different linguistic formulashave been employed to designate the overall nature of the right or the good; onethinks of the moral imperative of Kant or the intuited indefi nable goodness of G. E.Moore or a theory of justice as proposed by John Rawls. But always the existenceof such a norm in the full formal sense of the term is assumed as fundamentalto the human condition. What I am proposing here is that the mental process weidentify as forming a moral judgment has not always been a necessary componentof the human condition but had its a historical origin in late fi fth-century Athens.Its effectiveness depended upon a prior ability of the human mind to conceptualizethe rules of behavior as moral universals, an ability which emerged only as the oralculture of Greece yielded to an alphabetic one.To test this assertion let us turn to the earliest extant discussion in Greekof the term “justice.” This occurs in a poem composed soon after Homer’s day butlong before Plato, namely, the Works and Days attributed to Hesiod. The style ofcomposition reveals the beginning of a transition from a poetry of listeners towardsa poetry which might be read—but only the beginning. One of the componentparts—the whole poem runs to over 800 lines—is a discourse of less than 100 lines,a poem within a poem, which possesses an identity of its own, addressing itselfas it does with considerable concentration to the single Greek term dikê which wenormally translate as “justice.” Let us observe the syntax in which this term ofmoral “reference,” as we normally think of it, is employed. My translation, whichselects those statements where the syntax emerges, will hew as close as possible tothe sense of the archaic original (Works and Days, 214 ff.):O Perses, I pray you: hearken to (the voice of)justice nor magnify outrage . . . justice overoutrage prevails having gotten through to thegoal. Even a fool learns from experience; forlook! Oath is running alongside crookedjustices. Uproar of justice being draggedaway where men take her—. . . she followson weeping to city and dwelling places ofpeople clothed in mist carrying evil to mankind,such as drive her out and they have notmeted her straight.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 141They who to stranger-guests and demos-dwellersgive justices (that are) straight and do notstep across out of justice at all—for themthe city fl ourishes merry and the people in itblossom . . . nor ever among men of straightjustice does famine keep company . . .O lords I pray you: Do you, even you, considerdeeply this justice. Near at hand, among mankindbeing-present, the immortals consider all who withcrooked justices infl ict attrition on each otherregarding not the awful word of gods. Presentare thrice ten thousand upon the much-nourishingearth, immortal guards of Zeus, of mortal men,who keep guard over justices and ruthless works clothedin mist going to and fro all over the earth.Present is maiden justice, of Zeus the offspringborn, both renowned and revered of the gods whotenant Olympus, and should one at any time disableher, crookedly castigating, straightway sittingbeside father Zeus the Kronian she sings thenon-just intention of men till it pay back . . .The eye of Zeus having seen all and noted allintently, even these (things) should he so wishhe is looking at nor is (it) hidden from himwhat kind of justice indeed (is) this (that) a cityconfi nes “inside . . .O Perses I pray you: cast these up in your thoughts:hearken to (the voice of) justice and let violencebe hidden from your sight. This usage for mankindthe Kronian has severally ordained, for fi sh andbeasts and winged fowl to eat each other sincejustice is not present among them, but to mankindhe gave justice which most excellent by far comes-to-be.Granted that these statements focus upon a term which in our alphabeticsociety has become central to moral philosophy, what do we learn from them aboutits nature? Surely the account of it is from a modern standpoint anomalous. Whatis one to make of a discussion which can make free, both with a “justice” in thesingular, which we might try and squeeze into the guise of a “conception” of justice,and with “justices” in the plural, intermingling and interchanging them withoutapology, as though142 ERIC A. HAVELOCKthe “concept” on the one hand, if we can call it that, and the specifi c applications ofthe concept on the other, if that is what they are, were indistinguishable? Worse still;what can we make of a term which at one time symbolizes what is straight and goodand at another can symbolize what is crooked and obviously “wrong”?The problem receives some illumination when we notice that whether inthe singular or plural this word symbolizes something which is spoken aloud,pronounced, proclaimed, declared or else listened to, heard, and remembered.Personifi ed it can scream or sing, and become the recipient of verbal abuse, andis disabled by oral testimony which is false. In this guise it becomes a procedureconducted in oral exchange. The constant imputation of crookedness probablyrefers to crookedness of speech (rather than unfair manipulation of boundary linesin property, as has been suggested).In short this is that kind of justice practiced in an oral society not defi nedby written codes. But having got this far, any further attempt to defi ne what justicereally is fails us. “She” or “it” or “they” are Protean in the shapes they take and inthe actions performed. “She” becomes a runner in a race and is then reintroduced asa girl dragged along in distress; and then becomes a girl now travelling to town indisguise before being thrown out. When transferred to Olympus, the scene revealsa personal justice complaining to Zeus that men are unjust, apparently to get himto intervene. “She” is then replaced by Zeus himself looking down on a justiceconfi ned inside a city until at last in the conclusion, “she” is given some universalcolor by being described as a gift assigned to mankind by Zeus.Let us recall the Homeric behavior of that personifi cation styled eris, thesymbol of contentious strife behaving in a similar variety of confi gurations. Here isno “concept” or “principle” of justice, no analytic defi nition, no attempt to tell uswhat justice is. Such a statement is still beyond the poet’s capacity, even though hisassemblage of instances and examples marks an attempt to mobilize the word as atopic, a chapter heading, a theme. In going this far, the poet is composing visually asa reader for readers. He is trying to break with the narrative context, the storytellingthat oral composition has required, but which his written word does not require.But his break is only partial. His justice is still something that acts or behaves orbecomes, notTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 143something that “is.” The language of refl ective philosophy, let alone moralphilosophy, is not yet available.It was becoming available perhaps two centuries later, and a little later stillcan be observed at work in the written word as it is composed by Plato. Here is adocumented discourse which no longer needs to be phrased in specifi cs or in images.It can be, of course, if the composer so chooses, but it can tolerate in increasingquantity something that orally preserved speech cannot, namely, statements of “fact”or statements of “universals,” statements of “principles” rather than descriptions of“events.” That is, it can state that something always “is so and so” rather than thatsomething “was done” or “occurred” or “was in place.” In Platonism these linguisticobjectives have been achieved. They are woven into the syntax of argument,appearing there casually without exciting attention from a literate readership whichis used to using them in its own discourse. Here, for example, is how the term“justice,” after being created as a topic by Hesiod, makes its fi rst appearance in thePlatonic text which deals with it demonstratively, namely, Plato’s Republic (I. 331C):Now take precisely this (thing) namely justice:Are we to say that it is truthfulness absolutelyspeaking and giving back anything one has takenfrom somebody else or are these very (things) tobe done sometimes justly and at other timesunjustly?This sentence, occurring near the beginning of the fi rst book of the treatise, introducesthe concept with which the remaining books are to deal. The syntax which identifi esjustice as truthfulness meets a complex requirement. First, the subject is nonpersonal.Second, it receives a predicate which is non-personal. Third, the linkingverb becomes the copula “is.” In the alternative defi nition that is then posed, thesame verb “to be” is used to connect a neuter pronoun with a predicate infi nitive,an abstraction. These are characteristics of Plato’s argumentative text which wenormally take for granted.To cite another example, which is more professionally stated with profuseuse of the neuter singular to express abstraction (Euthyphro, 5 C-D):So now I implore tell me that which youinsisted just now you thoroughly knew:144 ERIC A. HAVELOCKWhat kind (of thing) do you say the pious is,and the impious, in the case of manslaughterand so on; surely the holy in all action isidentical itself with itself; whereas theunholy is completely the opposite of the holy,something always resembling itself having onespecifi c shape completely in accordance withunholiness, whatever the unholy turns out to be.This passage makes plain the kind of syntax now available and necessary for didacticargument and the particular reliance of the Platonic method upon this syntax: thesubjects have to be impersonals, the verbs must take copulative form, and thepredicates have to be impersonals.It is convenient to identify Plato as the discoverer of the necessity of thissyntax in its completed form and therefore as the writer who completed the processof linguistic emancipation from the syntax of oral storage. For good measure it ispossible to cite some less perfect examples from thinkers who preceded him, fromboth the pre-Socratic philosophers and the “sophists” as they are usually styled. Thelanguage of the fi fth century as it was employed by intellectuals exhibits a gradualacceleration of the abstractive process.It is equally to the point to notice that Plato’s relationship to orality is stillintermediate. He can use language that hovers between oral and literate discourse,that is, between the syntax of narrative and the syntax of defi nition. Thus, as Platoapproaches the task of defi ning justice in its political dimension, he indulges himselfin a passage like the following (Republic IV. 432 B-D):The time has come for us to behave like huntsmenencircling a thicket concentrating on preventingjustice from slipping through and disappearing.Evidently it is present somewhere around here.So keep looking, be ready to catch sight of it,and if you happen to sight it before I do pointit out to me—I wish I could, but you will makequite adequate use of me if, instead, you use meas a follower who can look at what is shown tohim—Then follow and let us both pray for luck.I will; you just go ahead—Well here we are;this place by the look of it is hard to getTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 145through; it is cut off from the light, it presentsitself dark in fact and scarcely to betracked through. However let’s go in—yeslet’s go—whereupon I caught sight of somethingand shouted: Glaucon, we probably are ontoa track; I don’t think (the object) will quitesucceed in getting away—That’s good news!The quarry sought is justice, but this kind of dramatic interchange is going to leadup to a quite different type of discourse in which it will be proposed what justicereally is, namely “doing one’s own thing.” It will lead up to an argument whichis analytic and conceptual. Yet one observes the continued effort to conciliate thereader who is still close to his oral inheritance. By letting the discourse relapse intoa syntax which narrates the activities of living subjects and objects we are invited tojoin a hunt in a forest for a quarry. Will it slip through the thicket? No, the huntershave spotted it. This is “Homeric,” not philosophic, prose.By way of contrast to this intermediate style of discourse occasionally adoptedby Plato—intermediate between oralism and literacy, between the pre-conceptualand the conceptual—I quote a passage taken at random from the beginning of DavidHume’s Treatise on Human Nature:I perceive therefore that though there is in general a great resemblance betwixt ourcomplex impressions and ideas, yet the rule is not universally true, that they areexact copies of each other. We may next consider, how the case stands with oursimple perceptions. After the most accurate examination of which I am capable,I venture to affi rm, that the rule here holds without any exceptions, and thatevery simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it, and every simpleimpression a correspondent idea.1The Platonic passage expresses awareness that the act of conceptualizingjustice and defi ning it axiomatically in entirely abstract terms requires from hisreader an extraordinary effort, a new order of thinking, an order of intellection. Toreach to this order, the passage reverts to the simpler language of orality: huntsmenare closing in on their quarry hidden in a thicket, ready to catch sight of it and soforth. Hume’s exposition prefers to present statements as the result of perception,consideration,146 ERIC A. HAVELOCKexamination, affi rmation. Over the 2,000 years since Plato wrote, these termshave become commonplaces of description of intellectual processes which areanalytical, the purpose of which is to construct statements which are either analyticor synthetic.The predicates in Plato’s text do not describe fi xed relationships betweenentities, but describe linkages which are achieved through action as it is performed:encircling, slipping through, “we have to get through,” “we are cut off,” “this ishard to be tracked,” “it will get away.” The corresponding linkages in Hume’s textare conveyed in statements of being, that is, of relationships which are permanent,and therefore require the copula in order to be described. “There is in general; therule is not universally true; they are exact; how the case stands; the rule here holds;every simple idea has a simple impression.” These are expressed in the presenttense—the timeless present and not the “historic” present—such “tenses” are notreally tenses at all. They do not refer to a present moment of a narrated experiencenow recalled as distinct from other moments. The verb “is” shares with the verbs“hold” and “have” the predicative function of presenting a “state of the case” asdeterminate fact, not as a fl eeting moment of action or response.This is the language which Plato himself strives after through all his writtenworks. It had to be fought for with all the strenuousness of the dialectic which heinherited from Socrates. The need he still feels to conciliate his oralist reader byreviving the epic oral syntax would not occur to Hume, still less to Kant or anymodern moralist.Hume’s discourse is that of a professional philosopher and most of us arenot philosophers. We normally avoid involving ourselves in discussion of suchabstract problems. But we can drop casually into Hume’s kind of language, inpersonal converse. Conspicuous and noticeable examples are furnished today inthe vocabularies of the bureaucracies that manage our affairs for us; not least themilitary ones. Names of actions which are specifi c and concrete, and which wouldbe described as such in oral language, are perversely translated into abstractions; tokill a group of villagers becomes a liquidation of opposition, to demand more taxmoney becomes “enhancement of revenue resources.” There now exists a wholelevel of language which is basically theoretic, and it did not become possible untilafter language became alphabetical.THE ALPHABETIC MIND 147Side by side with it, in much of our daily life, we drop back into the concreterealistic dynamism of oral converse, as we prepare to eat breakfast or get the childrenoff to school or mix a drink after a tiring day, and most of all when we make loveor quarrel or fi ght. There is a basic honesty inherent in the oral medium—Homerichonesty that calls a spade a spade—which is transcended in the conceptual versionand converted into a linguistic medium which often requires a degree of hypocrisy.It creates a distance between the oral language which simply registers and thelanguage which categorizes it.However, to point out certain disabilities which have arisen in the way weuse speech, in the course of our conversion from orality to literacy, is one thing.To focus on these as though they were central to the discussion, in the manner of aGeorge Orwell, is something else and quite misleading. We can allow for the greaterdirectness of the oral medium, and its historical importance, and its continuingpresence in our culture, whether in formal poetics or informal converse. But it is amistake to romanticize it, as though Homer represented the language of a lost Eden;a mistake also to hail its apparent revival in the voices and images of the electronicmedia (as described by Marshall McLuhan) replacing what is described as linearcommunication.The fact is that conceptual syntax (which means alphabetic syntax) supportsthe social structures which sustain Western civilization in its present form. Withoutit, the lifestyle of modernity could not exist; without it there would be no physicalscience, no industrial revolution, no scientifi c medicine replacing the superstitionsof the past, and I will add no literature or law as we know them, read them, usethem.Quite apart from its specialized use in works of philosophy, of history, ofscience, this syntax has penetrated into the idiom of narrative fi ction—precisely thatidiom which had been Homer’s peculiar province, the province of all speech as it hadbeen preserved orally within the pre-alphabetic cultures. Here is a quotation fromthe two opening paragraphs of a famous novel, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell ToArms:In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked acrossthe river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebblesand boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly movingand blue in the148 ERIC A. HAVELOCKchannels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raisedpowdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and theleaves fell early that year, and we saw troops marching along the road and thedust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching andafterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees andbeyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fi ghting in themountains and at night we could see the fl ashes from the artillery. In the dark itwas like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feelingof a storm coming?2Ernest Hemingway would not be considered a conceptual writer. Hisproven power lies in the direct simplicity of his images, the narrative force of hisdescriptions, the dynamism of his style. His style would seem to be preeminentlyin this way an oral one, and the present example is no exception. The paratactic“and” recurs eighteen times in this short excerpt. Parataxis has been rightly notedas basic to the style of orally preserved composition, basic that is to its narrativegenius, as required by mnemonic rules. The conjunction “and” is used to connecta series of visually sensitive images, themselves linked together by the resonanceof echo: house-house, river-river; trees-trees-trees; leaves-leaves-leaves; dustdust;marching-marching; plain-plain; mountains-mountains; night-night. Thevocabulary, following oral rules, is economical and repetitive.And yet, the original oral dynamism has been modifi ed and muted. Languagewhich might have described actions and events as such, as doings or happenings,has been translated into statements of “what is.” The syntax of the verb “to be” hasbecome sovereign, joining together visions which for all their sharpness are etchedin temporary immobility:In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders . . . the water was clean andswiftly moving . .. the trunks of the trees were dusty . . . The plainTHE ALPHABETIC MIND 149was rich in crops . . . there were many orchards . . the mountains were brown . . .There was fi ghting . . . it was like summer lightning.Students of Greek (or Latin) drilled in prose composition (now a lost art)learn the habit of converting such expressions back into the dynamics of the ancienttongues, a dynamics orally inspired. Verbs of action or situation have to replacedefi nitive descriptions, as in the following version:Pebbles and boulders were lying scattered in the depth of the river . . . the waterfl owed rapid and sparkling and showed the depth below . . . the trees as to theirtrunks were covered by dust . . . the plain indeed fl ourished bountifully with richcrops and many orchards, but behind appeared mountains shadowy and barren . . .and there soldiers were fi ghting with thrown spears which fl ashed in the dark likethe bolts of Zeus.The Hemingway version favors a presentation of the scene as a seriesof “facts”; the Greek, as a series of episodes. Here is a confrontation betweenthe genius of literate speech preserved visually in the alphabet, and oral speechpreserved acoustically in the memory. Narrativization of experience was not anidiom or idiosyncrasy of ancient tongues (though it was often treated as such inthe instruction I received sixty years ago). It is an essential ingredient of all speechpreserved orally in all the tongues of the world.The Greek alphabet came and took this over and remolded it to give us a newuniverse of language and of the mind; a universe of principles and relationships andlaws and sciences, and values and ideas and ideals. These now ride on top of ourimmediate sensory apparatus and on top of the orality in which this apparatus fi ndsreadiest expression. A visual architecture of language has been superimposed uponrestless acoustic fl ow of sound. This has been the fruit of the literate revolution inthe West, whether for good or for ill.3Yale University (Emeritus)150 ERIC A. HAVELOCKNotes1David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. and introduction by D. G. C. Macnabb (Cleveland:World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 47.2Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1929 et seq.), p. 3.3An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Third Axial Age Conference, held underinternational auspices, at Bad Homburg in West Germany between July 15 and 19, 1985.
