Video Abstract
It is unthinkable to analyze in detail the timing of the invention of language, which engaged several hominid species over a very long time span in the Paleolithic, certainly hundreds of thousands of years.
The invention of writing also took several thousand years, and resulted in various pictographic, ideographic, syllabic and phonetic forms.
However, we want to dwell with our reflection on a single writing technique, the alphabetic one, both because its advent is historically identifiable and because it has a particularly profound mental impact and manifests several aspects analogous to the current emergence of Artificial Intelligence: for example, its extreme ease of use, its application in all spheres of knowledge, and its rapid mass diffusion throughout the population.
While we read and write every day, we do not realize the profound mental impact of the alphabetic technique, in many ways more radical than modern AI technologies. Reading means seeing an image (a letter), however, which we do not recognize as a visual sign, but as a sound, which in turn is not heard by the ears. Phonetic writing is thus a mental abstraction, allowing our central nervous system to conceptually “think” words and speech, forcing our main senses (sight and hearing) not to perceive images or hear sounds, but to read letters.
This a-sensory characteristic of the alphabet has enabled the human mind in Western civilization to make intellectual evolution in various directions, for example in being able to conceive of a single invisible God speaking to us through writing, but also in the construction of the most refined conceptualizations of philosophical thought. However, these intellectual mutations were not automatic: the alphabet was adopted by many peoples, including the Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Romans. Yet it was only among the Hebrews of Moses and the Greeks of pre-Socratic and classical philosophy that this cognitive technology was able to express its most profound potential in the extension of human intelligence, and this was thus thanks to the genius of individual protagonists or groups of intellectuals.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida writes, “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history.”
In the evolutionary line of Western thought, the alphabet is originally Semitic, while philosophy from its origin speaks Greek.
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