Why write? I can't speak for anyone else, but for me writing is a form of thinking. Although I often have vague notions floating around in my head, they don't crystallize until I formulate them in black and white. Before words can inform, they must be formed.
The best examples from my own practice are the short books I write to set down my encounters with great thinkers like Nietzsche, Thoreau, and now Aristotle. For instance, as I've worked through Aristotle's philosophy over the last five years I've probably read 50,000 pages by and about him - his complete works, the dialogues of Plato, and countless books and papers from the scholarly literature. Yet that was just the beginning, since the reading itself has been followed by copying thousands of marked-up passages into the digital equivalent of an old-fashioned commonplace book (still in progress), noticing connections among these passages, making integrations across Aristotle's works from metaphysics to biology to ethics to aesthetics, consulting the original Greek texts, figuring out my preferred (often novel) renderings for key philosophical terms, posing questions to myself, spelling out my provisional conclusions about those questions either in private notes or public blog posts, comparing Aristotle's views with those of more modern thinkers, identifying situations in my own life where I can apply what I've learned, and in general pondering the meaning of it all. And that's all before putting pen to paper in a definitive manner!
Indeed, I realized recently (upon reading a post on writing by my friend Betsy Mikel) that I'm not necessarily even wedded to writing a book about Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment - except it's only by doing so that I'll actually understand what he said and how I can put his insights to work in my own efforts to do a better job at living.
This sketch of my writing/thinking process illustrates my I'm so skeptical about prompting "artificial intelligence" software for "the answers" to the most enduring perplexities of human existence. As Hannah Arendt described years ago in her magisterial book The Life of the Mind, the purpose of this kind of deep thinking (as opposed to problem-solving, goal-oriented cognition) isn't to obtain "the answers" at all. Instead, deep thinking is an end in itself. Aristotle put it by saying that human fulfillment extends as far as awareness [theoria] does, but the idea was more memorably captured by Socrates when he declared in his courtroom defense that the unthinking life is not worth living for a human being.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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