Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author,
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny back script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
In short, Plato's works produce a sort of dialogue between the reader and Socrates, rather than instructing the reader or reminding them. The Phaedrus has always struck me as odd for that reason: it's a written work which purports to decry writing.
All the great books have that give and take to them. They can be read and re-read for that reason: we take them into ourselves, and give them new life, and new arguments arise each time. Because they tell us something true, we can change the way we reach that conclusion, and have new understanding of it.
But all that depends on us actually reading these books; they don't read themselves (except late at night, rustling on the shelves to one another. I finally had to separate Epictetus and Nietzsche. Each morning I'd come in and Nietzsche would be lying on the floor in despair, his spine broken in a new place). Epictetus, actually, puts it very well:
Do you then show me your improvement in these things? If I were talking to an athlete, I should say, 'Show me your shoulders'; and then he might say, 'Here are my weights.'
You and your weights look to that. I should reply, 'I wish to see the effect of the weights.'
So, when you say: 'Take the treatise on the active powers, and see how I have studied it.' I reply, 'Slave, I am not inquiring about this, but how you exercise pursuit and avoidance, desire and aversion, how your design and purpose and prepare yourself,
whether conformably to nature or not. If conformably, give me evidence of it, and I will say that you are making progress: but if not conformably, be gone, and not only expound your books, but write such books yourself; and what will you gain by it?'
We do not call a man wise because he has a large library, or even when he has read all the books of his library; he is wise when he has read, and retained, and put into action, what is contained in those books (presuming, of course, the books are worthwhile).
Now for the science fiction. Google has made me look smarter than I am on several occasions. To be able to find something so well, to have such information at one's fingertips, is a great advantage. Presume a future where we subconsciously google while we think and talk. A small internal computer, linked to the Internet, reads our thoughts and searches for the information which might interest us. We would, of course, need content-blockers to keep the pr0n to a minimum, but such things are coming along nicely. We therefore have a constant low murmur of information, which we can bring to the front of our mind at will. No longer are libraries necessary: every book ever written is available to us. We can, at a moment's notice, know all we need to know about, say, cephalopods, or whatever topic interests us.
We have gained very little, I think, although I'll be in the front of the line when such a service is available. The important information, the morality of an action, is not available online. Only reason can give that to us. And reason is not something that computers do well. Even the consensus which the Internet gives us is unsteady. I'm particularly loath to allow such a democratic process to decide my actions.
Any medium is limited by two factors: the information it conveys, and the readiness of the interpreter to absorb that information. While dialogue is clearly best, since it requires two active participants (or more, especially in the blogosphere), the great books are an excellent substitute. They're also around rather longer than any philosopher I can recall.
