Aristotle's words were never meant to survive.

What we have are notes. Reminders scribbled for rooms that no longer exist. For students whose names dissolved. For conversations that mattered precisely because they would end.

He knew what Plato had done. How the dialogues embalmed what should have rotted naturally. How writing makes monuments from what was meant to be breath. Socrates winning every argument because the script demanded it. The mess cleaned up. The doubt edited out. The stumbling removed until only grace remained.

So Aristotle spoke. Let his thoughts die with their saying.

Now we have machines that never stumble. Never pause mid-sentence because the thought just cracked. Never spend three months circling the same knot until something loosens. They deliver wisdom like it costs nothing. Like understanding is something you download rather than develop.

I watch people ask questions now. Real questions. The kind that make your chest tight. They type them into interfaces that return perfect answers in seconds. Comprehensive. Cited. Sometimes hallucinated. Ready for immediate use. And something in their face goes slack. Like they've been robbed of something they can't name.

The machine can tell you everything about virtue. Can synthesise centuries of argument into three clean paragraphs. What it cannot give you is the specific confusion that reshapes how you hold yourself in the world. Cannot give you the particular bewilderment that belongs to your nervous system, your history, your precise way of not understanding until you do.

We're collecting insights we never earned. Screenshots of profundity. Bookmarks of wisdom that cost us nothing but storage space. Convinced that having the answer means we understand the question.

But understanding isn't a possession. It's what happens to you while you're failing to articulate something essential. It's the thing that shifts in your body when you finally stop trying to sound intelligent and start trying to be honest.

The ancient philosophical schools knew this. Why they walked while teaching. Why they made students wait years before revealing certain ideas. Not gatekeeping. Recognition that some thoughts need time to germinate in specific soil. That wisdom without readiness is just information.

Now we've forgotten there's a difference. Between knowing about something and being changed by it. Between consuming conclusions and developing the capacity to reach them ourselves.

Two thousand years trying to extract truth from lecture notes that were never meant to be read. Like performing surgery on shadows. Like building entire civilisations on someone else's rough drafts.

But maybe the real violence isn't what we lost. Maybe it's what we've stopped believing we need. The slow, clumsy, essential work of thinking for ourselves. Of being confused in ways that belong specifically to us. Of discovering what we believe by hearing ourselves fail to say it properly five times first.

The machines give us everything except the experience of becoming someone who could have thought it. They process, but don't think. Generate, but don't discover. Respond, but never doubt themselves into revelation.

And we're forgetting that the doubt is the work. The confusion is the material. The stumbling is how you develop the muscles that eventually let you stand.

I keep thinking about those students in Aristotle's garden. How they must have felt when he died. When they realised the conversations were over. That all they had were these fragments. These notes that pointed at something living but weren't life itself.

We're doing the same thing now. Mistaking the fossil record for the creature. Mistaking the description of transformation for transformation itself.

The voice that refused to be written is still speaking. Through every moment we resist the quick answer. Through every conversation where we let ourselves be genuinely confused. Through every time we choose the messy process over the clean product.

Some things can only be spoken. Can only exist between people trying to understand something together. Can only emerge when we stop performing competence and start practising bewilderment.

The machines will give you every answer. What they cannot give you is the specific weight of your own not-knowing. The particular texture of your confusion. The exact shape of the hole in your understanding that only you can feel your way through.

That work still belongs to us. Still costs what it always cost. Still transforms only those willing to be bad at it first.

The answer arrives. Clean. Comprehensive. Immediate.

And something essential in us atrophies.

Not because we have the answer. Because we never had to become someone capable of finding it.