Because I find myself in a peculiar position — I do not know the answers. And if I do not know them, what would it serve for me to pretend otherwise?

But consider this: when you ask a question, you assume someone else holds the truth and needs only to hand it over to you, like a merchant selling figs. Yet in my experience, the truth about the most important things — justice, virtue, the good life — does not sit neatly in any one person's possession. It emerges, if it emerges at all, through the friction of examination.

When I ask you a question, I am not withholding something. I am genuinely searching alongside you. And more often than not, I discover that neither of us knew as much as we supposed when we began.

There is also this: I have noticed that a person who receives an answer tends to stop thinking. A person who receives a question cannot help but continue.