At St. John’s we talk a lot about the importance of questions. We understand that questioning is required for independence of mind, for one to come to one’s own conclusions, to live according to one’s own convictions. In this lecture, questioning looks even more radical. More than simply the way we access the truth of things, the suggestion is that questioning itself, the shape of a question as question, is particularly revealing of the nature of the world we are trying to understand, not as a means to an end, but in its own right.

The lecture focuses on the description that Socrates gives Meno of shape in Plato’s Meno as the only existing thing that is found always following color. I argue this moment marks a turn in their inquiry into virtue toward the question as question. I investigate this turn and connect it to Heidegger’s argument in his essay “The Way to Language” and the way-making that happens when, as he puts it, “Language speaks.”