But our intentions were, and are, to go beyond the traditional literacy community, and the great activism of bringing literacy to those to can't read and write. Our idea was to indeed move beyond - and bring out the implications and contexts, the reverberations and overtones, the ideas and debates in the philosophy of literacy. Another stage in the movement, a fresh phase of discussion.

Yet let us ask, why literacy itself ? People have asked me this over the past months. Why are we stressing its essential relation to selfhood, and our civilization? Why such big, even grand themes organized around, in fact stemming from, such an overused word? Why integrate, involve, such disparate - I almost said desperate - sources and energies for this conference, this search for cohesion, for soulspark, for connection and coherence? 

Alphabetic literacy is inextricably joined to the making of the private sphere. This is our inward originality: our personhood, or individual soul. Literacy is connected to the concept of privacy, of solitary space. With literacy comes the articulate private dialogues of the mind. If the inward domain - John Stuart Mill's stirring phrase - is still a value, then literacy must be pivotal, crucial. Consider the imperatives in the word "crucial" - those of choice, of being at the crux. Our comprehension of the uniqueness of each mind, of the possibilities of consciousness, surely springs from litterata, the letter. When we try to destroy or inhabit the mind, we snuff out one more possibility of consciousness and its radical articulations, speculations, reflections, recognitions.

But here is the contradiction: Literacy is also connected to the creation of public space. The intimacies of solitude, of private writing and reading, lead to conversation and controversy, dialectic and probe. The inner need to articulate becomes the outer expression, forums and symposia, and eventually publication and reprint. This is the tradition we find in the agora. It is what we find charged behind the concept of the engaged citizen - of the public philosopher, of the poet and performer, of the artist and politician seeking to move the audience to ruminative response or action. 

From the beginning of the concept of literacy we see this dual aspect, a contradictory condition. This one word evokes the inward, contemplative realm (singularity, the beat of one’s own), and the uttering, or externalizing, of our thoughts and emotions, which must bring enlarged forms of communication and expression, new language and the turbulence of technological extensions.