Coetzee's "Age of Iron": The Legacy of Socrates

Western thought--is it a dead end? And shouldn't it be: Human thought. Anyway, this passage reminded me a bit of Heidegger's Holzwege: How will we find our way forward? Is forward even the right word? And isn't it always a fumbling in the dark?
He is a teacher, I thought: that is why he speaks so well. What he is doing to me he has practiced  in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one's own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as  it was in Athens.

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