https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zv6Ev2QJ_ag
One of the things that I read even in college is Plato’s Phaedra. If we’re talking, you know, you and I face to face, and you don’t understand what I’m saying, you know, you can ask me and I can answer, and then we can have this kind of back and forth where we’re tuning in and we’re tuning closer to what we want. But if you read a text, that’s it. Like, that’s what you have. So on the one hand, it makes it possible for me to access the thoughts of people that I can’t meet, but it also at the same time creates that difficulty, which is that these fixed words are my vision of what it is that’s coming down to me, you know. It’s a means, let’s say, but it can become something of an idol because if you lose its connection to what it originally is, then it somehow has a life of its own, you could say. And it’s interesting because a lot of the post-modernists, that’s actually what they want to do. They want to like liberate the text from the author in some weird way, like make it have a kind of life of its own where there is no thread that goes back to the person, but rather it becomes almost something that you play with, you know, just at its own level.