Rubber Ducks and Writing

Daniel Gibboney

What does it mean ‘to reverse Platonism’?...the formula seems to mean the abolition of the world of essences and of the world of appearances.

-Giles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

Plato’s Phaedrus is about two men out for a summer stroll. The dialogue recounts an exchange between Phaedrus and Socrates as they “walk along [Illissus’s] shallow bed with their feet in the water” (Wright, 5). During this midday amble, the pair discussed a great many things – beauty, Egypt, madness, Ideas, drugs, what’s under Phaedrus’ cloak, Lysias, cost/benefit analyses of “companionship and management of a lover,” speech acts, eros, Beauty and the like.

Socrates speaks at length how a “soul which has never seen the truth at all can never enter into the human form” and that knowledge is “nothing more nor less than a recollection of those things which in time past our soul beheld when it travelled with a god…lifted up its head into the region of eternal essence” (Plato, 41). Phaedrus responds. His rejoinders are mostly brief– often a few questions, far more frequently short affirmations. If nothing else, Phaedrus is pithy.

Eventually, the duo come upon the matter of writing. Or, more specifically, why Plato’s old teacher objects to it. Towards the end of the colloquy, Socrates tells a story about writings Egyptians origins. In this “ancient” myth, there “lived one of the ancient gods…[who] first invented numbers and arithmetic, and geometry and astronomy…and dice, and, above all, letters” (Plato, 77). The enterprising deity’s name was Theuth. Impressed by his handiwork, Theuth petitioned the Egyptian king for universal literacy. The plucky divine claimed writing would make the Egyptian people “wiser, and better able to remember…a medicine…for memory and wisdom” (Plato, 77). The god of writing is, after all, “a subordinate character…a technocrat with power of decision, an engineer, a clever, ingenious servant” (Derrida, 86). And, like any good servile technocrats dolefully unable to do much.

The king was far less bullish - “this invention…will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, causing them to neglect their memory…you are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality” (Plato, 77-8). The phrase “without any reality” bears much weight. Writing impedes an individual’s recollection “of those things….(their) soul beheld when it travelled with a god” (Plato, 41). Knowledge of “eternal essence” was already implanted in the soul and only requires remembrance. Written texts atrophy memories and impair remembrance. At least according to the king.

Socrates shared these protestations - only a fool “suppose(s)…written words can do something more than recall the thing” (Plato, 78). To this specific grievance, Socrates adds a host of others. He described how “the evil of writing…closely resembles painting…(as both) stand before you as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question…say not a word ” (Plato, 78). Socrates continues a written text is potentially like a baseball or an axe - “every discourse, once written,” can be physically thrown about willy-nilly “from hand to hand, equally among those who understand it, and those for whom it is nowise fitted” (Plato, 78). Pressing his case further, Socrates claims “no discourse worthy of serious attention has ever, either in verse or prose, been written or spoken” (Plato, 81-2). Far “nobler,” in Socrates’ schema, “is a man’s work” (Plato, 80). Works not writings, that’s the Socratic good stuff.

Nonetheless, the real “evil of writing” isn’t a text’s throwability or inability to defend itself. The written word’s Socratic foulness is metaphysical. Or, more specifically, its essential obscurantism. Written texts convey one’s thoughts; they mediate the world of Ideas. In a Platonic schema, one’s best thoughts are “a recollection of those things…our soul beheld when it travelled with a god…into the region of eternal essence” (Plato, 41). Speech is a conveyance of thought. And, writing is speech in physically codified form. Hierarchically, writing is at best third in the pecking order – underneath speech, beneath thought, and woefully far from anything essential. The Platonic ethic is to “distinguish essence from appearance, intelligible from sensible, Idea from image” (Deleuze, 256b). Here one might think of “Nietzsche’s [definition of]… Greek metaphysics as [the] distinction between essence and appearance, and the extraction of essence out of appearance” (Deleuze, 163a).

Writing is a remembrance of a remembrance of a remembrance. Plato has a word for this layered confusion – simulacra. Recalling Socrates' conflation of writing and painting, simulacra are “a copy of a copy, an infinitely degraded icon, an infinitely loose resemblance” (Deleuze, 257b). The image of a recollection of an image of an essence. This, according to Plato, is debauched – “copies are secondary possessors…built upon a dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion” (Deleuze, 256b). The further from essence, the more wantonness increases and goodness fleets.

If Socrates is right, writing is quite like a rubber duck. Similar to a book, rubber ducks can be thrown. They don’t usually talk back or verbally respond. Rubber ducks aren’t flesh and feather actual birds. They aren’t even an image of a mallard. Rubber ducks are floatable bath toys - replicas of an image of a material embodiment of an essence. Oh, the depravity.

Writing isn’t a thought. Nor is it a speech act. Writing is the codification of a speech act, which itself is an utterance of an idea. Socratic-ally, such corrupted communication can only lead astray. If Plato is right, rubber ducks are not proper playthings. Nor are books proper to children. Perhaps then, Mr. Weasley asks Harry Potter the most Platonic question in film history, “what, exactly, is the function of a rubber duck?” (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

Yet, rubber ducks aren’t debauched. And, conceivably, writing isn’t mere technological alienation of the Good or Beautiful. Children should read books. Giles Deleuze takes up the matter of writing in the 1981 seminar course entitled “On Painting” at Vincennes-St. Denis. Elsewhere, and around the same time, Deleuze offers the “task of the philosophy of the future” to be “revers(ing) Platonism” (Deleuze, 253b). This post-Nietzschean chore defends writing.

Writing’s most haunting predicament isn’t “my god, how am I going to fill this page?” (Deleuze, 32a). It’s the opposite. The Deleuze-ian conundrum of writing is one of whittling away. Whereas Plato peddled in scarcity, Deleuze sees excess. Deleuze asks and answers, “what is on the page before I start writing? An infinite world…the act of painting, just like the act of writing…involve(s) a series of subtractions and deletions” (Deleuze, 33-5a). Writing, in other words, “is a fantastic act of elimination, of purging” (Deleuze, 33a). Plato saw layering and distraction, Deleuze imagines cleansing and temperance – “this sort of search for sobriety, for an ever-greater simplicity, what Beckett has achieved in literature: making something increasingly sober [is]…all the more striking, all the more overwhelming…this is what capturing forces means” (Deleuze, 58a).

Writing is an active capturing of forces. In Deleuze’s eyes, Socrates wrongfully contrasts works and writings. Writing is a practice, a physical action. A blank “canvas [or page for that matter] is already…full of everything that is most awful…the problem will be to remove these things, however invisible…that have already taken hold… Evil is already there…the (page) is already filled with clichés” (Deleuze, 34a). Writing confronts evil and scrubs away cliché. For Deleuze, maybe the two aren’t entirely different, scrubbing and confronting.

To my mind, reversing Platonism involves taking a bath. Writing is concerned with bathing essentials. But it’s not just rubber ducks. No. It’s also water – “the act of writing…the constant necessity to clean the (page)” (Deleuze, 35a). In the Phaedrus Socrates soaks his feet. While doing so, he compares wordsmiths to a farmer sowing seeds. Surely, Socrates says the writer “will not seriously set himself to write them in water, sowing them with ink by means of a pen…and unable adequately to teach the truth” (Plato, 79). Like a foolish husbandman casting groundless seeds, texts should be composed aquatically. Then, we’ll see how much rubber ducks, paintings, and books can teach us. Socrates can have his ideas; I’ll take a bath.

WORKS CITED

Deleuze, Giles. On Painting – Courses, March-June 1981 (ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. C.J. Stivale). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2025. (a)

Deleuze, Giles. The Logic of Sense (trans. M. Lester; ed. C.V. Boundas). New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. (b)

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination (trans. B. Johnson). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Directed by Chris Columbus, Warner Bros., 2002.

Plato. “Phaedrus” in Plato’s Dialogues, Translated (trans. J. Wright). New York: A.L. Burt Company, Publishers.