Although Socrates himself may have been able to write little more than his own name, he made brilliant use of the new reflexive capacity introduced by the alphabet. Eric Havelock has suggested that the famed “Socratic dialectic” - which, in its simplest form, consisted in asking a speaker to explain what he has said - was primarily a method for disrupting the mimetic thought patterns of oral culture. The speaker’s original statement, if it concerned important matters of morality and social custom, would necessarily have been a memorized formula, a poetic or proverbial phrase, which presented a vivid example of the matter being discussed. By asking the speaker to explain himself or to repeat his statement in different terms, Socrates forced his interlocutors to separate themselves, for the first time, from their own words - to separate themselves, that is, from the phrases and formulas that had become habitual through the constant repetition of traditional teaching stories. Prior to this moment, spoken discourse was inseparable from the endlessly repeated stories, legends, and myths that provided many of the spoken phrases one needed in ones daily actions and interactions. To speak was to live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one’s closeness to those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed to speak through one’s own mouth. Such, as we have said, is the way culture reserves itself in the absence of written records. But Socrates interrupted all this. By continually asking his interlocutors to repeat and explain what they had said in other words, by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking, Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed. Small wonder that some Athenians complained that Socrates’ conversation had the numbing effect of a stingray’s electric shock.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
