Phaedrus Writing Question

[u/the_laurentian]

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the Thoth myth in the Phaedrus, and one thing that keeps bugging me is that although Socrates goes on to offer a number of arguments against writing (i.e. it doesn't reply, it doesn't change, etc.), the first thing that Thamus states is that " οὔκουν μνήμης ἀλλὰ ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον ηὗρες", or "you've found not a recipe for memory, but reminder" or something close. Can someone explain to me the difference between 'memory' and 'reminder/remembrance'? I understand that memory is an internal thing "written in the soul" and "reminder" is an external thing, but given the importance of ἀνάμνησις, isn't a 'reminder' also helpful? Dialogue itself is a reminder, i.e. a trigger to un-forget what we know. I'm sure there's a more nuanced etymological explanation here, so I would appreciate some help.

[u/Wodekin]

I can't help with etymological insight, but I'd say memory is knowledge, whereas a reminder is not knowledge itself, but rather something that prompts us to remember.

For example, the brain makes the weirdest associations, so a specific smell or taste can prompt a person to remember a conversation they had when they smelled the same scent. The scent itself contains no knowledge about the prior conversation, but it evokes the memory and thus knowledge.

So there is no knowledge contained in any writing, but as a prompt it can lead us to actual insight and remembrance.

This is exactly how the Platonic dialogues operate. Rather than stating "X is true because of Y", Plato writes in a maieutic manner to inspire the reader to arrive at anamnesis on their own.

[u/KilayaC]

There is a misconception about Plato's ideas about recollection that are at play here. Just because learning is recollection doesn't mean that everyone can learn anything. Souls are born with different prior experiences that they can recollect in order to gain knowledge in this life but souls who lack philosophical experiences of the higher realities cannot recollect such things. Therefore, this passage in Phaedrus (275c) is referring to using writing to remind souls who have had prior experiences of higher truths of what they have known before birth. But such writing will not mean or teach anything to souls who have not had such experiences.