When I first sat down to write this book in earnest, I found myself confronted with a challenge: If I am correct that thinking is not something a person can do by herself—that when it comes to the most fundamental questions, we all have blind spots in crucial places, and need other people to show us why we are wrong—then how can the book in which I express this thought constitute thinking? And if it doesn’t, what kind of philosophy book is it? I decided that the book should begin by answering these questions, so my first written efforts, in relation to the book, were devoted to an expansive introduction that would allay all such doubts about the project. But what I wrote had the opposite effect, at least on me. So I rewrote it. And again, and again.
I spent a year caught in the Sisyphean trap of trying to undo the fact that I was writing, by writing. Socrates’ solution to this problem is simple—don’t write:
You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. (Phaedrus 275d)
Socrates is saying that written words stand to spoken words as paintings of human beings stand to real people. A man in a painting looks a lot like a real man, but unlike a real man he can’t move, or talk to you. Likewise, writing doesn’t respond to your questions: it says the same thing every time you read it. It looks like thinking, but it isn’t thinking.
Socrates compares writing down one’s ideas to planting seeds in barren soil from which nothing can grow: pointless. He understands that your mind is not my plaything. I can’t insert ideas into you; I can’t make you know anything. It is only if you are active in relation to ideas that you will be able to asses them for truth, and that means you must be a speaker in the conversation, not merely a listener. This is why Socrates recommends against writing in favor of question and answer, which “is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows” (Phaedrus 277a).
I wish I could tell you that after so much time smashing my head against this problem, and these passages, I came up with a brilliant solution. But that is not what happened. Instead, I gave up on trying to explain how the book would be possible, and simply set out to make it actual. I assumed that as I wrote the book the answer would come to me. I have now reached the end of that process, and I regretfully report that it has not. I do not have an account of how it is possible for writing to be inquisitive, and this in spite of the fact that at every moment of writing the talks that would become the drafts that would get revised into book chapters, in every conversation about how to interpret a tricky passage of Plato, in every debate about how to view the contemporary world through a Socratic lens, I have had my eye on only one goal: to produce an inquisitive text for you. To what degree I succeeded, I leave you to judge, but without a theory of inquisitive writing, I cannot claim to have offered you much help with that judgment.
I am grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge all of this. I acknowledge the existence of the problem of inquisitive writing, and that I have failed to solve this problem, and that I ought to have done so. I acknowledge my guilt. But I believe that thinking is a social process, which means that defects of this book cannot be not mine alone. I would like to acknowledge the guilt of others, as well.
My closest interlocutors, and therefore the people most directly to blame, are my husband Arnold Brooks and my ex-husband, Ben Callard. Every claim in this book was born in one of our conversations, and their passionate investment in every idea, every argument, every detail of interpretation put them in a uniquely favorable position to give me what I continue to lack. My editor Dan Gerstle, and my agent Margo Fleming, each of whom read many drafts of this book, including the ill-starred introductions just alluded to, surely bear some responsibility as well, as do the many esteemed philosophical colleagues with whom I have discussed parts of the book, especially Eric Brown, Sarah Buss, Christopher Moore, Oded Na’aman, Rory O’Connell, Christopher Roser, and Joshua Sheptow.
I have been testing the ideas presented in this book on hundreds of exceptional UChicago students for well over a decade. I consider them all culpable for not pressing me further, but I would single out: Jessica Aaron, Sarale Ben-Asher, Madeline Busse, Giacomo Cetorelli, Noah Chafets, Steven Chen, Viviana De Alba, Spencer Dembner, Su Dedehair, Cal Fawell, Ava Geenen, Olivia Gross, Joshua Fox, Henry Hopcraft, Caroline Hoskins, Jess Ip, Lucy Johnson, PK Kanoria, Allo Kerstein, Joshua Kramer, Anya Marchenko, Sarah Okayli Masaryk, Jessica Oros, Ganesh Mejia-Ospina, Anna Prisco, Ermioni Prokopaki, Ben Schall, Nur Banu Simsek, David Singer, Joshua Trubowitz, Adam Trujillo-Hanson, Charlie Wiland, Sophia Wyatt, Iris Yahi, and Karen Zhu.
In a broader way, the blame extends to my first Plato teachers at the University of Chicago: Arthur Adkins (Apology), Liz Asmis (Symposium), Eric Brown (Protagoras), Joseph Cropsey (Parmenides), Jonathan Lear (Republic), Ian Mueller (Phaedo) and Leon Kass (Meno). It was in Leon’s home, at a Passover seder in 1995, that I first raised the question about inquisitive writing. At the time, I posed it thus: why does anyone publish? Once you have an idea, why do you want other people to have it? I remember walking home that evening filled with the energy of the conversation that ensued, and the certainty that the answer would come to me before sunrise. It is a crime that three decades and several books later, it still hasn’t—a crime of which Leon is not wholly innocent. Nor is John Ferrari, with whom I went on to study at Berkeley, and who probably understands the intricacies of Platonic writing better than anyone.
If there is value to this book then all of these people deserve recognition, but I do not see how most authors make sense of dispensing credit while withholding blame. Of the two, blame is readier to hand, since one has much sharper awareness of what one has not accomplished than of what one has. And if we compare the two practices—patting ourselves on the back for what we have achieved, and lamenting what we have not—the latter is self-evidently more Socratic. Recall Socrates’ parting words in the Laches: “What I don’t advise is that we remain as we are” (Laches 201a).