The Semblance of Truth
The story goes that Theuth was the inventor of many arts, and he went to the great king Thamus and showed him his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. But when they came to letters, Theuth said: "This, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit." Thamus replied: "O most ingenious Theuth, this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
, Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE)
Twenty-four centuries ago, Socrates worried about a new technology. Not machines, not automation. Writing. The simple act of marking symbols that could preserve speech across time and space. He saw in it a poison dressed as a gift.
Reading his objections now is like finding our own letters before we wrote them. “The semblance of truth” rather than truth itself. The appearance of wisdom without “the reality.” People becoming “hearers of many things” while having “learned nothing.” He describes, with uncanny precision, something we recognize: the discomfort of knowledge that passes through us without taking root.
Here is the obvious irony: we only have his warnings because Plato wrote them down. Writing didn’t destroy wisdom. We adapted, we flourished, and some would say we deepened our capacity for thought. But Socrates might counter that we’ve lost things too. Ways of remembering. Forms of presence. The weight of carrying knowledge in our own minds rather than trusting it to “external characters.”
The passage doesn’t offer resolution, and neither does history. Every transformative tool changes us, and we rarely get to choose which parts. King Thamus reminds us that when someone offers a gift that reshapes how we think, the question isn’t only whether to accept it, but what we’ll become in the accepting.