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History and writing go together. One of the reviewers of the manuscript of this book wrote that “writing is a technological achievement, while talk is a human achievement.” This is quite beautifully put, and I wish I had thought of it myself. I live in the exclusively human world, and hence I think of myself as a member of historical humanity, and God is not part of it. History began with writing, and this technology was invented by human beings. It made language available. It made it historical. In learning to talk, a child is not learning to write. That is what school is for; a later thing, where we learn our ABC. The skills of literacy have, for quite a while, been the basic infrastructure of the lengthy formal process of education. Mothers, or first carers, are mostly not professional teachers, and learning to talk is an informal process. Why would we let someone without any special training teach the speechless infant to talk? Because, as I see it, the mother is an expert in one crucial way: she is a usual adult and, as such, a usual human being. She is teaching her child not language, but how to communicate with adult others like herself. Learning to talk is a quite extraordinary skill, and it is ultimately about learning to connect with others.

Wittgenstein thought that talk was a primitive thing (Kerr 1997: 114); I think he’s right that human talk is earlier than writing. But that does not mean that it is primitive in comparison with writing. Writing’s telos is not communication in the first place. It is the first and greatest system of record, an archive that gives birth to history as we know it. It is a quite extraordinary human invention, a supervening necessity, as Brian Winston (1998) would say. Men began to make history when they invented writing. Systems of inscription made civilization possible if, like me, you follow Harold Innis (1964 [1951]). It made the language of talk analyzable and made analytic philosophy and linguistics possible. And philosophy as we know it began with Plato’s writings.