Hmm …

… 'n 1' Editor Mark Greif’s Brilliant Contribution to the History of Ideas – Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The question of man was asked over and over again, Greif shows, usually in similar terms. Writers on the subject lamented the decline of Enlightenment ideals, asked where society had gone wrong, and often found the culprit in technology. They called for what Greif calls “re-enlightenment,” a return to the ideals of freedom, reason, and individualism that modern Europe seemed to have abandoned.Yet he finds this discourse generally unimpressive, lacking originality and profundity. The best way to understand it, Greif argues, is as “maieutics.” The word comes from the Greek for “midwife,” and a maieutic argument like the crisis-of-man discourse is less concerned with establishing truth than with eliciting certain responses in the audience. By talking about man, in other words, these mid-century writers hoped to will him into being, at a time when he seemed about to disappear.

That's not what maieutics meant back when I was studying Plato. In the Platonic sense, the teacher is the midwife helping the pupil to give birth to authentic thought. We learn by means of encounter — with our teacher, and with experience.