One thought on online instruction: an element of distance (abstraction) has long been built in education as in all of culture and human life. The question is the nature of that abstraction. We have writing systems which from the beginning conceal a contradiction. They purport to convey the numinous and divine quality of the word delivered from on high, yet the more those hieroglyphs fall from heavens, the more they sap and erode the transcendence they claim to get power from. Is that why we bring up so quickly the socratic method (but via the written and recopied Plato)? It would be a dreamed up access to an original voice, the unseen, storied Mantinean oracle? Books, including Plato’s, seem to need little defense. They are marvellous repositories: products of long, reflective work at their best, long-lasting, widely available thanks to public libraries and borrowing systems, easy to use, and demanding effort. Yet, aren’t they too distant? Cold? Less exciting than a live webcam? And indeed, I have been surprised to discover in conferences (which I don’t care for) and colloquia (which I find much more appealing), that to meet authors of books or articles, hear their voice, see them in person, in other words have a glimpse of their conatus, of what drives them, not only helped me read their own writings as extensions or reverberations of that voice, but had a positive effect on all of my reading, even when I didn’t care for the voice or the personality. In other words, having access to the person, the voice, the hesitations and enthusiasms, was sometimes peeking into the dynamics of something that looked like thought unfolding and discovering that the fragility of the articulation, its daring perhaps, its circuitous ways sometimes, its failures, permitted or even invited others to enter and share a questioning which I take to be at the heart of understanding the world. It is having access to the grain of salt (or sand) that so often gets things going. But it was the real person up there on the podium, and sometimes around a sandwich or a cup of coffee…. Not an image. So, should I conclude: no online courses? No online courses, precisely because they purport to bring the voice and picture of an original saying, an authority from on high, worth paying higher tuition fees for, when this voice and picture are an image of an image. No online courses because they lie even more boldly than the present university structures? No to them, because in agreement with Plotinus I say: no images of images, only images without visible models.