Authority born of authorship, or authorship requiring authority

Both situations point to a serious audacity regarding speaking out and deciding.

It is known that Socrates, the great philosopher who determined the history of the philosophy we know and are familiar with today, did not write down any of his thoughts, despite all the thoughts that come from him. He maintained that philosophical truths exist within everyone, without distinguishing rich from poor, aristocrat from slave, and that these truths could be brought to light through good dialogues. By conversing even with the most ordinary people, he had them utter philosophical truths. That is why he got the name "chatterbox" (laf ebesi, literally "midwife of words"), or rather the idiom "laf ebesi" arose to name this experience of his. The idea that everyone is pregnant with truth and that what matters is to deliver the truths is attributed to him.

In line with this very thought, he himself saw no need to write down any of his ideas, indeed did not write them. How is it that someone who wrote nothing is remembered, even 2,500 years later, with ideas that have influenced the whole history of philosophy? How do these ideas reach us, and how can we be sure that those who transmitted them transmitted them correctly?

His thoughts have reached us through the dialogues Plato attributed to him, through what his contemporary Aristophanes relayed, and through the indirect accounts of Aristotle, who was born 15 years after his death, again based on what Plato related. Seen in this light, the way Socrates' speech or thought has survived as a text gives very interesting inspirations concerning the function and fortunes of writing or the text. There are contradictory ideas attributed to Socrates. Cynicism and hedonism, for example, are opposites of one another as philosophies of freedom and happiness, but both are attitudes and ideas inspired by Socrates.

What did Socrates, who took special care not to leave a written work, avoid? Whatever it was that he avoided, hasn't it, in a sense, befallen him, through the committing to writing of ideas later attributed to him, and moreover committed to writing outside his control?

Can we know whether he avoided an authority that would arise from authorship, or whether he thought he did not possess an authorial ability that would require authority?

By saying that truth belongs to everyone, we can say that he avoided such an authority, but the criticism that, with the words he drew out, he manipulated naive people toward a kind of thought he was aiming at could also easily come to mind.

Whatever he did, this alone is extremely original in terms of the experience of philosophy and deserves to go into the records under his name.

Today we can think, for example, about which, writing or oral speech, requires more authority. From what has been told so far, it appears that in terms of the relationship between authorship and authority, writing is the greater authority. Yet the "death of the author" that Roland Barthes speaks of says that from the moment writing is finished it comes under the control of the reader.

A decision displayed at the moment of writing and the authority (author) this decision requires, from the moment it passes into writing, is left to the mercy, the personality, the age, the gender, the history, the intention, the sincerity, the experience of the reader. Whatever the author was trying to convey has been cut off from the place and time it will reach. The meaning intended in the text has been postponed and deferred.

In speech, however, this deferral and postponement does not occur. Meaning is realized right then and there between the speaker and the listener. It can of course be said that this is an advantage with regard to the realization of meaning. Indeed, throughout history, all those who have compared speech and writing have said that speech is much more advantageous in this respect.

The famous French philosopher Jacques Derrida was the first person to object to this almost agreed-upon acceptance. What people convey to one another during speech is not meaning but nothing other than the shared ideologies inherent in speech or language. There, unlike in writing, the expression of ideology is imposed without deferral or postponement.

This imposition is sometimes done reciprocally in situations where the relationship is relatively equal, but equality is a very rarely realized occurrence in social relations. Generally, in social communication the authority-power of one of the parties is greater than the other's and dominates the setting, and through these small-scale powers it makes the other accept a statement that would not be acceptable on other grounds. The acceptability of a statement does not always come from the disclosure of the truth it contains; the speaker, with his social position, wealth, rhetorical, political or hierarchical superiority, the power of humor, "commands" the very truth of the statement.

Humor, for example, can make the masses embrace the most unacceptable absurdities as truth. What kind of psychology or communicative event operates there needs to be assessed separately. That a person, on the most serious matters, abandons himself to the arms of a humorous nonchalance and finds a shortcut to all his questions, that the most nonsensical ideas can be adopted one way or another, is nothing but a falsification of truth, yet this too is one of the tragedies of humankind. It is one of the afflictions he suffers from, and to be rid of this affliction he needs a much stronger vigilance.

Of course, this process does not always run smoothly. Being aware of this advantage of authority, a course of liberation against it is also possible, for those, that is, who desire it.