Thinking Partners
It is no mere chance that the accounts we have of Socrates are in dialogue form. One reason that can explain this is that he sought out thinking partners to think with like a dance, creating beautiful ideas still read today. The dialogue allows proposals and critiques, questions to deepen and to problematize, exchanges of perspectives and new ideas, exploration and provocation. Composing ideas happens through language, so it makes sense that something innate in human instinct is to share ideas. And in sharing ideas, Socrates and his interlocutor were able to enrich their ideas and their own thinking abilities.
Thinking partners are essential to thinkers and writers. Thinking partners establish a ritual of sending thinking gifts to each other. A thinking partner generally has a similar or complementary intellectual interest so that dialogues are joyful and fruitful for both sides. A thinking partner is available for constant communication, which means the conversation is only paused, not stopped and started with usual pleasantries, and there is a flowing of ideas and questions when there is a free moment without the need to explain or apologize. Life momentarily interrupts the dialogue between thinking partners, not the other way around. From “what is the word that means…” to “will you look at this draft?”, there is a mutual exchange of building arguments and providing notes to improve or sharpen.
Comments from the other are plentiful in constructive criticism, yet there is no suspicion of moral or malicious judgment. The feedback is honest, authentic instead of sincere, genuine instead of flattering. Ideas are offered in order to share in the inspiration, to deepen, to challenge, to improve. Ideas are received in openness, with the vulnerability of being seen and the desire to be greater than the autonomous self. Any compliments are unnecessary to vocalize, since being engaged together as thinking partners, sharing ideas, being vulnerable, and collaborating to make something beautiful is a more genuine and meaningful expression of connection.
There is a natural incentive and accountability inherent in the thinking partnership. In the exchange of ideas, both feel an interest and obligation to the other to create and critique. Even if one individual is in a thinking or writing slump, the dialogue continues from the other and brings both to the dialogue level naturally. The usual bad habits of writers are avoided when the thinking partner asks about progress routinely, takes interest that can discourage the writer’s frustration that the work is less than perfect, and prompts the writer to conclude and publish when the text is finished.
“We never think entirely alone: we think in company, in a vast collaboration; we work with the workers of the past and of the present. The whole intellectual world can be compared, thanks to reading, to a great editorial or mercantile office, where each one finds in those about him the initiation, help, verification, information, encouragement, that he needs. It is therefore a primordial necessity for the man of study to know how to read and to utilize his reading, and would to heaven that people were not habitually oblivious of the fact!”
-A.G. Sertillanges
Philosophers have thinking partners of two main natures available to claim: the philosophers of the text, who are from various times and yet timeless, although unable to answer back, and then their philosophical friends. Philosophy is uniquely beautiful in that we can dialogue with Nietzsche by reading Zarathustra, taking the time to mull and ponder the ideas he expressed. Yet philosophers can neglect or undervalue seeking out thinking dialogue with philosophical friends by getting lost in their own book stacks. A thinking partnership with a philosophical friend lessens the divide between philosophical scholarship and philosophical living. Stoic philosophy is named after the porch columns the Stoics sat under to exchange their ideas communally. What a nice idea to strive for—routinely thinking philosophically with friends over a bottle of wine in the garden—and living the philosophical life!