[p.56]

Of course, misinterpretation or inadvertent interpretation is the great fear of writers who have any sense of the real world into which their language flows. Perhaps that is why so many of the key thinkers – let me call them the conscious thinkers – have feared the written word and expressed themselves through the oral. Socrates, Christ, Francis of Assisi are obvious examples. Shakespeare’s plays were almost oral, written down in bits and pieces, changed repeatedly on stage. Even many who wrote – Dante, for example, or the great figures of the Enlightenment – consciously sought to use a language polished into a simple clarity that could both evoke and be used as if it were oral.

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosopher of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

[…; p. 62]

Socrates, on the other hand, had reached 70, and his trial, full of ironic humour, questions and a terrifying consciousness. He was a force of doubt and thus of disorder from the utopians’ point of view.