In the acknowledgements at the end of her new book, Open Socrates, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes: “Socrates compares writing down one’s ideas to planting seeds in barren soil from which nothing can grow: pointless.”
“Socrates says in a couple of places in late dialogues: thinking is like having a conversation with yourself,” Callard told me when we met at her hotel in London’s Marylebone. “Fundamentally there’s conversation, and then thinking is an imitation of that. And we can get some way through that imitation.” Writing, too, is an (ultimately inadequate) imitation of conversation.
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