Jon Westwood, illustrator from Ontario.
We can ask ourselves later why the fanatic specialism of the Phoenicians,
which hacked the alphabet out of the hieroglyphic culture, did not release any further intellectual or artistic activity in them.
Meantime, it is relevant to note that Cicero, the encyclopedic synthesizer of the Roman world, when surveying the Greek world, reproves Socrates for having been the first to make a split between mind and heart.
The pre-Socratics were still mainly in a non-literate culture. Socrates stood on the border between that oral world and the visual and literate culture. But be wrote nothing. The Middle Ages regarded Plato as the mere scribe or amanuensis of Socrates. And Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord committed their teaching to writing because the kind of interplay of minds that is in teaching is not possible by means of writing.
M.M.
3 hearts
