The Eclipse of Thinking

1 The Eclipse of Thinking1 Sean J. McGrath For Ray Hart. What is beginning in our time is a movement of such immeasurable significance for the future of humanity that only the most dramatic comparisons are adequate. It is one of two or three really big paradigm shifts in the evolution of consciousness. It is a new Axial Age. It is a second Copernican revolution. As did the invention of writing some 5000 years ago, datafication, the digital transformation of information into new forms of value,2 will change everything we do. The excessive significance of this moment renders its meaning obscure to us who are its first witnesses. So it has always been: the significance of pivot moments in history always eludes those contemporaneous with them. They axial shifts are for future thinkers to interpret. Parmenides, Siddhartha Gautama, and Zhuang Zhu knew nothing of the first Axial Age of which they are now recognized to be the chief representatives.3 The first experiments in writing in Mesopotamia were not alarmist propositions by thinkers conscious that a new era of human development was beginning; they were tallies of grain on cuneiform tablets. And still, philosophy always begins with what is on the table, as John Rist once said of Plato in a seminar I attended at the University of Toronto. I shall attempt to speak here of the danger implicit in the great socio-political transformation which is beginning in our time and which will leave no human traditions unchanged, from how we work, to how we play, to how we speak and relate to one another. We are at ground zero in a crisis of language, more specifically a crisis of understanding what exactly we are doing when we do that most characteristic human act, symbolically expressing the sense of our lives as we experience it. I will risk sounding like an irrelevant voice from the recent past and say that the greatest threat AI poses to us today concerns human self-understanding. I am not worried about the socalled singularity because I do not believe we have come anywhere close to producing genuine intelligence in a machine (the “artificial” qualifier in AI being the key term).4 I will not waste 1 A first version of this essay will appear under the title, “Datafication and the Enframing of Natural Intelligence,” in Satya Das, ed., Language and the World: Essays in Honor of Franson Manjali (Springer, 2025). The current version is revised and significantly expanded. See Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger, The Rise of Big Data: “Datafication is not the same as digitization, which takes analog content—books, films, photographs—and converts it into digital information, a sequence of ones and zeros that computers can read. Datafication is a far broader activity: taking all aspects of life and turning them into data ... Once we datafy things, we can transform their purpose and turn the information into new forms of value”. 2 See Jaspers, Origin and Goal of History; Gauchet, Disenchantment of the World, 47-66; Taylor, Secular Age, 146-158. 3 4 For singularity hype, see Tegmark, Life 3.0; Bostrom, Superintelligence. 2 time contributing to the anxiety generated by the fantasy of the anticipated moment when AI will become “sentient” and in becoming sentient, acquire the intentionality and creativity necessary to replace its creator as a tool maker. Such anxieties seem to me misplaced, not because they speak of an impossibility—who knows what another millennium of cultural evolution shall bring —but because they conceal from us the real and present danger posed by our surrendering to AI more and more of what is distinctively human activity. I am deeply concerned about our readiness to surrender political agency to tech corporations who are hoovering up our data to better manipulate us with advertisement and propaganda. But I will not speak of the political here. Others are doing so, better than I can.5 Everyone agrees that machine learning is developing faster than our capacity to understand its impact on us.6 But what is most disturbing to me about the hyper-accelerated development of AI is not the pressing political problems associated with the rise of global algocracy. My worries are anthropological. AI seems to me to be the coup de grâce to the human, the death blow delivered to us by the hyper-positivism that began in the late 20th century with the rise of neuroscience and the mapping of the genome and has only increased steadily and largely unopposed since then. With the advent of machine learning we are forgetting what makes us human and in so forgetting becoming ourselves inhuman, to each other and to the non-humans with whom we share this planet. The threat is not that the machine will surpass us and render us obsolete or even exterminate us purposefully: the real danger lies in our exterminating our own humanity by measuring ourselves in comparison to AI, and, finding ourselves lacking, demanding that we should be remade in the image and likeness of our machines. At the centre of this crisis lies a profound forgetting of what makes language the quintessentially human act. An Eclipse at the Dawn of the Digital Age Two intimately connected, traditional philosophical assumptions motivate the following remarks. Both go back to the Greeks and were until recently accepted by the majority of modern philosophers. Both have become unpopular at the dawn of the digital age. It is not difficult to see why. Both assumptions challenge the ideology of AI, the fantasy of replacement or the advent of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence which will ostensibly render us evolutionarily obsolete by doing better what what we, until now, have done exclusively: invent tools. The first assumption is that language and thought are inseparable. From Parmenides and Heraclitus, to Plato and Aristotle, there is no thinking without a medium of words or a sustaining basis of proto-language: images, symbols or phantasmata. The reverse is also true: where there is language, there is thought. The Greek assumption (if language then thought) was largely 5 See Rosengrün, “On the Relevance of Algorythms”. Let us not forget the moment, shortly after the public launch of the Large Language Models (LLMs: ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc.), when the tech giants themselves called for a pause in the production of AI. They who had the most to profit from an information race saw, for a moment (now gone it seems), the dangers of unregulated AI production. See Castaldo, “Prominent tech leaders call for temporary pause on AI development”. 6 3 unquestioned in the Middle Ages and even into the modern period was endorsed by a huge diversity of thinkers who otherwise agree on little, including Kant, Herder, Hegel, Pierce, Saussure, Cassirer, Heidegger, Gadamer, Lonergan, Wittgenstein. But now, with the rise of the spectre of the speaking machine, we are everywhere confronted by that which appears to disprove the Greek claim: speech without thought. Of course, language always subsists as an object once thought has completed its course, as a series of signs, marks on paper, magnetic tape, or silicon. In this trivial sense, language is separable from thought. But until now such material signs were regarded as the residue of language. The signs were not in and of themselves language but were rendered so through signification—that I take to be the salvageable point from the Saussurian signifier/signified dyad. If the signifier is arbitrary what makes it significant is the intention that binds it to the signified. Language that is not intentionally spoken or written is not language.7 With the rise of machines that appear to speak, language and thinking are now severed. To be sure, intentionality is at the origin of the 0s and 1s that machines depend upon to process data, as it is at the origin of all culture, but the AI-generated signs now proliferate and recombine without any human design. Language is now possible, it seems, in the absence of thought, that is, in the absence of intentionality and reflection. And since thought has always been more difficult to define than language, all that is left is the remains of language, reified language, language as a thing, an object to be manipulated as information or data. Datafication is eclipsing thinking, and no one seems to be particularly concerned. We are spending billions on AI research, setting up centres for AI ethics all over the world, and yet one is hard-pressed to find philosophical Imagine a series of repeating, similar marks on a rock that appear at first to be deliberate but on closer inspection are revealed to be accidental. We would at first think, “language and therefore thought,” and only later see our error. The reverse process led to the conclusion that Homo Erectus could probably speak: the 2014 discovery of non-random figures inscribed on a 500,000 year-old sea shell. Callaway, “Homo erectus made world’s oldest doodle”. 7 4 discussions about the nature of specifically human intelligence in these institutes.8 The consensus seems to be that it does not exist. But do we agree that our machines are truly speaking? Or do we deal here with simulacra of speech? The best writers on AI are not so foolish as to assume that there is intentional thought in the machine that is currently producing much of the language of our world. There is nothing that it is like to be ChatGPT.9 The “dead internet” is the spectre of the internet become through AI a bottomless pool of recycled tropes which might have originated in thought but have now been broken apart and recombined in so many ways without thinking that it is devoid of originality. Still, the popular imagination is spooked. Recall the hype created by the Facebook technician who claimed he overheard chatbots speaking to one another in a language he could not understand. The whole thing was declared a hoax but not before making every headline.10 Why are we so interested in this fantasy of sentient machines? There is more to it than technological advance. The fantasy has something religious about it. Are we looking for new gods after Christianity? My question to trans-humanists enthusiastic to build sentient devices: Why would we want to replicate what humans do with their clumsy organic neuro-networks when the machines can do everything we do better than us without thinking? Functional replacement of human intelligence rather than essential replication has been the goal of AI research since Turing. The strongest anti-positivists studies of language and thought in the 20th century always underscored the impracticality of human speaking.11 We seem to speak and write mostly not to get things done but simply to enjoy the manifestation of sense arising between us. There is evidence to There are exceptions. See the work of Brian Cantwell Smith, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. See in particular Smith, On the Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment, xiii: “Neither deep learning, nor other forms of second-wave AI, nor any proposals yet advanced for third-wave, will lead to genuine intelligence. Systems currently being imagined will achieve formidable reckoning prowess, but human-level intelligence and judgment, honed over millennia, is of a different order. It requires “getting up out” of internal representations and being committed to the world as world, in all its unutterable richness. Only with existential commitment, genuine stakes, and passionate resolve to hold things accountable to being in the world can a system (human or machine) genuinely refer to an object, assess ontological schemes, distinguish truth from falsity, respond appropriately to context, and shoulder responsibility”. Smith’s book is an effort to update and expand, with insights from analytical philosophy and computer science, the argument made by the Heideggerian John Haugeland in the first AI debates of the 70s and 80s. See Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence. See also Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do. 8 9 A play on Nagel’s famous argument for animal intentionality: Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” For AGI skepticism, in addition to the work of Smith previously cited, see Fjelland, “Why General Artificial Intelligence Will Note Be Realized”. 10 Griffin, “Facebook’s artificial intelligence robots shut down”. 11 See, for example, Cassirer, “Language and Myth”. 5 suggest that language is more of a Palaeolithic pastime than a tool.12 For a central, if minority tradition in 20th-century philosophy of language, human thought and language are primarily contemplative and only secondarily, practical.13 With the ubiquity of machine-generated language and its increasingly dominant role in daily life, we are not so much threatened by the reality of a thinking machine as we are by the eclipse of thinking. We are beginning to believe that thinking is a figure of speech. If there can be language without thinking, perhaps there was never anything called thinking in the first place. The second assumption I have treated elsewhere and will only flag here: we are and have always been, the only animal that speaks, the zôon logon echon.14 This specific difference explains, for Aristotle our political lives and our capacity for cooperation. In this Aristotelian line, to which I belong, human speech is something other than animal reaction or emotional signalling; it is first the expression of meaning and second, of judgment. Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.15 I am not alone in remaining committed to this old idea, however unpopular it has become in the post/trans-humanist age. The human is the political animal, Aristotles says, because he is the animal symbolicum,16 the “language animal,”17 and therefore the homo cooperans. The language animal is the worlding animal, the animal who, since the so-called cognitive revolution of the See Wynn and Coolidge, How to Think Like a Neanderthal, 112-113; Tamascello, Why We Cooperate. 12 On the essentially non-instrumental nature of human thought, see McGrath, “In Defence of the Human Difference”; “AI and the Human Difference”. The minority tradition is expressivism, from the early Romantics to Cassirer, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. More on this school below. 13 14 See McGrath, Thinking Nature. 15 Aristotle, Politics, I, 2, 1253a, Jowett translation. On this point, see Langer, New Key, 26-78. She follows Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms quite closely but makes certain advances on him. See Cassirer’s popular restatement of his concept of symbol, published two years after Langer’s, Cassirer, Essay on Man, 23-41. 16 Cassirer, Essay on Man, 27. 17 Taylor, Langauge Animal. 6 Palaeolithic age has substituted for a natural environment a world of meaning, a “referential totality” (Verweisungsganzheit) constituted by speech and related symbolic activities, especially ritual, and art.18 A world is essentially shared, a place we build, explore, and dwell in with others. Primatology has come to recognize our capacity to cooperate as extraordinary in the animal kingdom. Our closest relative, the chimpanzee, is nowhere near our match in this regard.19 We may be the only worlding animal. But we are no longer the only creature that speaks. We have created speaking machines and delivered over to them the responsibility to inform us, archive our cultures, entertain us, order our activities, and increasingly, govern us. Now, after over 40,000 years of worlding, we appear to have outsourced speaking to our machines.20 Increasingly the silicon chip produces the world in which we live, move, and have our being. AI generates our images, texts, and music, as it does our news, science, and policies. Soon it may generate our religion. This is more than a new development in mass culture; it is the beginning of a new era in cultural evolution. I believe, with others, that the digital age will come to be remembered as the beginning of history. The last 5000 years, which will have left little more than fragments in the archive, will be regarded as proto-history. Steve Jobs holding up the Iphone will be the iconic beginning of history proper. Whatever traces of 5000 years of human-produced text, art, and science remain will have been uploaded, translated into code, patterns of 0s and 1s. From this point on, humans become at best collaborators in the production of science, technology, and art, no longer the primary content authors. For most applications—hit movies, pop music, undergraduate classes in anthropology—humans are no longer necessary. The whole of recorded history is data for artificial, digital worlding. Once again, the qualifier, “artificial” is crucial. Worlding presumes a being structured by 21 care, that is, a being for whom being is an issue, all of whose ways of being are expressions of concern. AI has no concerns and cares about nothing and therefore is no more “in’ the world in the existential sense indicated in the phrase “being-in-the-world” than is the table at which I am sitting. But AI functionally does what we have exclusively done until now: it produces a simulacrum of the world. As it does so, a false impression comes to prevail about what is necessary for worlding in the first place: not interests, projects, and a being toward the future, but hyper-efficient data processing. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 99. Cf. Cassirer, Essay on Man, 27-41. Tomascello (Why We Cooperate) is the authority on this point, Harari (Sapiens), the popularizer. 19 40,000 years is the date of the oldest discovered palaeolithic art, the cave paintings at Chauvet. But homo sapiens are far older (as old as 300,000 years) and presumably have been worlding since they walked out of Africa. 20 Heidegger, Being and Time, 83-4. The absence of a care structure in computers was the central argument made by Dreyfus in the first wave of AI debate. It has not to my mind been refuted. See Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t do. 21 7 Datafication abstracts from all content to define the rule for information transfer: if, in the lived world, y generally follows x in context z, then, in the digital world, y will always follow x in context z. What was variable, contingent and vulnerable to human creativity becomes invariant, necessary, and monotonous. Datafication is more than digitally uploading the textual and visual material produced in the Holocene; it is the production of humanly unsurveyable but economically calculable quantities of information through the recording of every human keyboard click. With our home computers and cell phones, we are producing an archive that we ourselves could never manage. We feed the machine the data it needs to give us back the symbolic order, in which we live. It starts as mimesis and perhaps is destined to remain so—the jury is out on this question. Post-humanists expect AI mimesis to accelerate into novelty. AIgenerated text, imagery and music is at the moment easily detected because it is banal, generic, and obviously imitative of human texts, imagery and music. But the technology is less than a decade old. Wait until an AI-generated film becomes a blockbuster, perhaps even wins an Oscar —the moment is coming. Even the most skeptical expect AI to develop the capacity to innovate. Hence Harari’s fear, that soon, AI will be revered as a deity: drawing on a data pool so vast it might as well be considered infinite, AI-produced content will be revelations to us.22 Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 60s that all technological achievements come at the atrophy of certain natural abilities. With the advent of writing 5000 years ago, our capacity for orally preserving cultural memory atrophied. With the invention of the printing press, our capacity for visually encoding information (see the stain glass windows of Chartres Cathedral) atrophied. Now, with the invention of machines that appear to speak, our capacity for thought itself atrophies. Not that we have ceased to think on some base level. Nor has language ceased to be the medium of thinking. But no longer understand what it is to think. When we ask ourselves now, What is thought? the image that comes to mind is a machine. We think of ourselves as “neural networks,” beta versions or organic prototypes of the machines we have made which have perfected what we assume to be the essential function of thinking: producing and correlating data. But here is the terrible irony: the machines are not thinking at all. Human thought, if it is even acknowledged as such, is regarded as nothing other than neurological encoding and communication of information according to conventionally agreed-upon rules, which silicon-based LLMs are now doing better than we can.23 Thought itself disappears. And with the disappearance of thought, we disappear. “As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve … he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing- 22 Harari, Homo Deus, 429-462. See the recent New Yorker interview with Geoffrey Hinton, The Godfather of AI who in complete innocence confuses what he calls “intuition” with mastery of conventions. Without a scrap of malevolence, he describes the New Yorker journalist interviewing him, Joshua Rothman, as a sophisticated bio-neurological auto-complete machine. The dogmatic certainty in his view of the identity between human cognition and machine learning, which is typical in this field, has to be heard. The New Yorker Radio Hour, 23 November 2023: 7:00 -9:39. 23 8 reserve”.24 Heidegger hereby defines the being “enframed” (gestellt) characteristic of modern consciousness. It was 1954. Heidegger was thinking of things like atomic weapons and university administrations. But how can we not think of AI, of CRISPR, and of the prospect of digital immortality25? Modern technology was never merely a development in the tool usage which has characterized our genus since it first appeared in Africa 2 million years ago. Still, something decisively changed in the late medieval/early modern period. Thinking itself was reduced to a tool. Rationality became instrumental, that is, aimless. The culmination of this turn, Heidegger predicts, will occur when the human itself becomes, a resource, a “standing reserve” (Bestand), like the minerals violently extracted from the earth, or the fish farmed in vats in the sea, to be used as desired. Nothing will then exist but the will to power. As long as language remained our domain, the “house of being,” Heidegger could still be hopeful that a new era was coming when the unconcealment of being that destines us shall become once again unconcealed for us, and we will remember what it means to “dwell” on the earth. Notice how the cautiously optimistic conclusions of Heidegger’s late essays, for example, the final page of “The Question Concerning Technology,”26 or the closing passages of “What Calls for Thinking”27 return to art and poetry as the essence of speech. Language remains for Heidegger the site of truth that is still open for us in the technological era. “The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes. The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.28 I return to these over-cited lines to draw attention to the darkness of our time. Today poiesis itself is outsourced to technology. Does questioning then cease to be possible? Can the saving power still shine in such obscurity? The Origin of Thinking: Intensive Signification What might human thinking be if it is not beta binary coding? For an answer to this question, I want to return to a wave of 20th-century philosophy of language that is almost forgotten today. This line of thought reached a high water mark in the 50s and 60s with the work of the late Heidegger, Gadamer, and the early Ricoeur, but it goes back to early 19th-century German and British Romanticism. The claim is that language is not a tool but the ground of thought. It is not so much something we use to communicate thought as that which makes thought possible and without which there can be no thought.29 This thesis was formulated in different ways by 24 Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” Basic Writings, 332. 25 Menon, “AI can bring your loved ones back from the dead to aid grief, says scientists”. 26 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 340-1. 27 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 390-1. 28 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 341. See Heidegger, “On the Way to Language,” Basic Writings; Gadamer, Truth and Method, Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, Freud and Philosophy, and The Rule of Metaphor. 29 9 Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt in opposition to the Lockean and Humean associationism that eventually prevailed. The position percolated in late Romanticism until it came to a new, more sophisticated expression in 20th-century semiotics and hermeneutics.30 After this brief midcentury resurgence, the position was abandoned. I shall borrow from Charles Taylor’s late contribution to this tradition and call the Romantic/hermeneutic position, “expressivism.”31 Expressivism is best understood in terms of its opposite, the “designative” or associationist school. On the associationist line, language is a complex form of animal signalling that builds up a lexicon of signs by naming recurring patterns of sensory associations. Names are thought of as convenient fictions, hypostasizing subjective meaning for the sake of more efficient practical communication. Expressivism by contrast considers language as an open system of meaning production, which is always already operative before anything can be named, and which is as dependent on objects as it is on the intentional acts of subjects. Expressivism was once near enough to the mainstream for one of its chief spokespersons to refer to it as philosophy’s “new key”.32 Pushing back against a calculative reduction of human culture to technique, expressivism emphasized the primacy of poetry in the evolution of language, the mythic roots of science, the participatory nature of so-called ‘primitive’ speech, and the ongoing role of metaphor in the creation of meaning. In addition to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, prominent 20th-century expressivists include Ernst Cassirer, Owen Barfield, Michael Polanyi, and lesser-known, Susanne K. Langer, Philip Wheelwright, “Language is the eternally self-repeating labor of spirit to make articulated sound capable of being an expression of thought.” Humboldt, cited in Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” 403. 30 31 Taylor, Language Animal, 29. 32 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key. 10 Ray Hart, and Erazim Kohak.33 In some cases, these authors read each other; in other instances, they arrived at similar conclusions independently of one another.34 Expressivism combines Romantic insights into language with anthropology, paleontology, and primatology to re-actualize the 19th-century view that language is reflective and expressive, not reactive and instrumental. It has an under-thematized relationship to older philosophies of language, especially Platonic realism, although the metaphysics necessary for developing this connection are somewhat lacking to the school, which labours under the moratorium on metaphysics common to 19th and 20th century philosophy. Human speech is related to other forms of animal signalling, but unlike animal sounds, it is first aesthetic, and only In addition to Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1928), see his classic, Saving the Appearances (1957). See also Cassirer’s Essay on Man (1944), Wheelwright’s Metaphor and Reality (1962), Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor (1975), Polanyi’s Meaning (1975). Less known but equally worth scholarly scrutiny, and an important influence on this essay, are Hart’s Unfinished Man and the Imagination (1968) and Kohák’s, The Embers and the Stars (1987), especially pp. 47-66, “The Gift of the Word”. 33 Langer commented that passages of Barfield’s Poetic Diction could have been written by Cassirer although Barfield knew nothing of the latter’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the first volume of which had been published five years earlier. Langer, Feeling and Form, 239; Barfield, “Afterword,” Poetic Diction, 214-215. Part of the reason for the synchronicity is the roots of English expressivism in the German-influenced Coleridge. On Coleridge’s philosophy of imagination, see his 1817 Biographia Literaria. For commentary see Hedley, Coleridge. Coleridge’s dependence on Schelling is well known. For Schelling’s late approach to mythic consciousness, which anticipates much of what is said by 20th-century expressivists, see his Historical Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. 34 11 secondarily instrumental.35 But expression should not be understood in an individualist sense. Language is inherently collective and holistic, always already socially operative as a system of sense, however simple or limited the system, and never built up piecemeal by individual innovators. To use Heidegger’s term, language is the “referential totality” (Verweisungsganzheit) which constitutes a properly human environment.36 It is not built up by discursive acts of picking out and naming recurring configurations of sense data in a pre-existent order of nature; rather, language constitutes human reality as such. Just as an animal is coincident with the environment it needs to thrive, producing it as much as being produced by it, so too is the human coincident with language. As soon as the human is there, so is language, and vice versa. Language worlds the human environment: it is not a human overlay on a pre-existing order of things: it is the primordial order of things, and outside of it, there is no order, at least none that a human being could understand. Expressivism insists on the ideality of nature—which is first and foremost an order constituted by our thinking and speaking about it. But this is not subjective idealism. With the objective idealists of early Romanticism (notably Schelling), expressivism insists on the nonsubjective origins of ideality. We do not so much construct meaning as participate in it through speech. While expressivism renders human intelligence the antecedent of the world, the intelligible relations revealed in language and which only exist for language just as much determine intelligence as are determined by it. The human/world relationship is reciprocally Pan, “Herder, the Origin of Language,” 14: “For Herder the development of words is shaped by feelings and passions, and the origin of language is an aesthetic process that replaces the animal’s instinctual process of relating to the world.” Cf. Langer, New Key, 43: “The fact that the human brain is constantly carrying on a process of symbolic transformation of the experiential data that come to it causes it to be a veritable fountain of more or less spontaneous ideas. As all registered experience tends to terminate in action, it is only natural that a typically human function should require a typically human form of overt activity; and that is just what we find in the sheer expression of ideas. This is the activity of which beasts appear to have no need. And it accounts for just those traits in man which he does not hold in common with the other animals— ritual, art, laughter, weeping, speech, superstition, and scientific genius. Only a part—howbeit a very important part—of our behavior is practical. Only some of our expressions are signs, indicative or mnemonic, and belong to the heightened animal wisdom called common sense; and only a small and relatively unimportant part are immediate signs of feeling. The remainder serves simply to express ideas that the organism yearns to express, i.e., to act upon, without practical purpose, without any view to satisfying other needs than the need of completing in overt action the brain’s symbolic process. How else shall we account for man’s love of talk?” 35 Heidegger, Being and Time, 160: “We have interpreted worldhood as that referential totality which constitutes significance”. 36 12 determinative. What we mean by reality is now inseparable from mind even if it pre-existed mind in some unimaginable sense.37 Phenomenologically the point is that meaning happens to us; we don’t create it. It is something that befalls us before it becomes something we deliberately participate in through expressive activities (ritual, myth, art, science). We first find the world meaningful and only then give expression to what we have found. We express new meaning, to be sure, and add to reality as we find it, but we do not experience ourselves as ‘making’ meaning (hence the inaccuracy of that contemporary phenomenological trope: “sense-making activities”). Poets have always known this. “Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal. These relations exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker.”38 The original forms of expression are not theoretical statements detached from the context of speaking and indifferent to the experience of the speaker; they are what Husserl calls “essentially occasional.”39 We express our experience of the world lighting up meaningfully for us because we wish to share the experience with others. Expression for the sake of sharing sense is the quintessentially human linguistic act. Not that thought and speech begin private, quite the reverse. But we want to add our bit to the collective experience. We want to talk to one another about the world as we find it and make our small contribution to elaborating and developing what he have found. This elaboration is much more than mere reportage: as Schelling says that to speak about nature is to create nature, to develop the meanings incohate in the world is to create the world. Crucial to understanding the stages in the development of expression, from the context dependent and metaphoric to the abstract and univocal, is a distinction, which is prevalent in expressivist theories of language, between two forms of signification: extension and intension.40 Extension universalizes, intension concretizes. An inverse relation obtains between these two, irreplaceable forms of signification.41 The more universal the speech, the less contextual sense it participates, and vice versa: the more contextual the sense the less universal the applicability of the expression. Extension abstracts from presence and increases our knowledge; intension presences, immersing the speaker in an excess of deep intelligibility. Extension catches more The point is Schellingian but it is also central to the early Heidegger (see Being and Time, 269-70) and to Cassirer. Without any relation to continental philosophy, Barfield makes the strongest argument in favour of it in Saving the Appearances. 37 38 Barfield, Poetic Diction, 86. Cf. Kohak, The Embers and the Stars, 47-66. 39 Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, § 26–27. 40 See Hart, Unfinished Man; Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality; Barfield, Poetic Diction. See Hart, Unfinished Man, 63: “Any interpretable datum will have extension beyond its immediate presence and intension beyond the power of the mind to know … The more we have of a datum’s immediate presence (its internal unity), the less we have of its character (whatness) in relation to the field in which it is presented (its external range)”. 41 13 things in its reach but at the cost of lived context and the subtle nuances in the upsurge of momentary, primordial sense. Intension evokes primordial sense but at the cost of universal application and broad communication. Intension requires interpretation; it awaken the hermeneutical intelligence, unique to homos sapiens. Extension is a modification of the hermeneutical situation. It minimizes the need for interpretation by delimiting the reach of the play of signifiers. While both are essential to language, they are serially ordered. Speech is intensively significative before it becomes extensively significative; it is concrete, personal, and poetic first, and only later, through a process of hermeneutical discipline, abstract, universal, and scientific. The distinction requires a theory of intentionality for it does not so much concern the what of the signifier as it does the how of the speaker and interpreter. We look in vain for objective marks of extension or intension in the symbol as such: any signifier can be either extensive or intensive depending on the intentio of the speaker. In extension the speaker abstracts to generality and catches as many singulars as possible under a universal term, thereby transforming things into particulars or instances of a class. In intension the speaker does exactly the opposite, narrows the range of signification to a concrete, contextually unmappable but tacitly understood, individual situation. The extensive speaker aims at universal, directly communicable knowledge; the intensive speaker does not aim at knowledge so much as understanding. The former defines an object or an objective state of affairs and sets it free from the personal context so that, for example, as in medieval logic, it has enough univocity to function as the middle term in a syllogism.42 Progress in knowledge requires that language which begins concrete, vivid, personal and responsive to an unveiling of being for us must become generic, abstract, and indifferent to origin for further application by anyone.43 At the same time that extension expands the reach of our concepts, it diminishes the intensity of our experience.44 Extension is rational, and categorial, and creates a certain Apollonian composure in the consciousness of the speaker, who becomes a theorein in the speech act, a detached observer. Intensive signification is Dionysian. The speaker does not safely demarcate herself over and against a categorial object but quite literally loses herself in the “Logical contemplation always has to be carefully directed toward the extension of concepts; classical syllogistic logic is ultimately nothing but a system of rules for combining, subsuming and superimposing concepts. But the conceptions embodied in language and myth must be taken not in extension, but in intension; not quantitatively nut qualitatively.” Cassirer, Language and Myth, 91. 42 There is no space here to discuss the role of intensive signification in mythology and poetry save to say that for the expressive school, just as original speech is intensive before it is extensive, human language is mytho-poetic before it becomes scientific. Metaphor is a residue of mythic consciousness in an era no longer dominated by mythos. The point is common to Barfield, Cassirer, Wheelwright, and Langer. 43 44 See Kohak, Embers and the Stars, 33. 14 expression. She cannot separate herself from the expression and does not mean to for what she expresses is herself. She participates in the meaning expressed. The inverse relation between the two should not be misconstrued to mean that intension is subjective. The modern epistemological binary, objective/subjective, does not map onto extension and intension. While Apollonian extension is certainly objective, intention is not therefore subjective. A curious dispossession occurs in the intensively signified expression. The locus of sense is not “I mean” but “it means.” One understands oneself to be determined by what is meant not the other way around. The speaker no longer knows exactly what she means because the meant exceeds her meaning and yet it is not other than what she intends. The speaker is, to use a Schelling phrase, in an ecstasy of reason, outside of herself, in the world, amidst the many things which are luminous with sense.45 The speaker becomes a poet, or rather, experiences the world as the poet experiences it: for an immeasurable moment—not so much an instant of clock time as an ingression of eternity into time—the world is lit up from within by primordial meaning.46 Imagine a conversation a man has with his best friend about troubles with his marriage. His friend asks him why, given all the difficulties at home, he does not leave his wife. The man responds with passion, “But I love her!” The statement, “I love her” conjoins three linguistic signs: a personal pronoun, a verb, and an accusative object. There is nothing in the statement which precludes its translation into extensive communication. It would then be taken as a piece of information and could be datafied, reduced to 0s and 1s and commodified. X says he loves Y at T1. But notice what is lost in translation! The situation of the speaker, which is not objectively defined but tacitly present as the referential totality of the intention, not to mention the speaker himself, who declares himself in the speech act.47 The speaker is not defining an objective situation but expressing the truth of his life at that moment. Informationally he says something that his best friend presumably already knows—hence the “but.” The act of expression is not redundant because the point is not communication of information. The speaker declares himself, repeats a declaration already made and recommits himself to a promise he has made in the past. He participates in what he says: he cannot separate himself from the said because what he says is himself.48 Closely related to the metaphoric language of poetry, and even more directly to the imagery of dreams, intensive symbols are pictorial—not necessarily a picture but always an image of an undefined whole. Intension sees the whole in the part and takes the part as a symbol 45 Schelling, Erlanger Vorträge (1821), Sämtliche Werke 9, 230. Readers of the early Heidegger will recognize the logic of formal indication. See Kisiel, The Genesis of Being and Time, 146-170. 46 See Robert Sokolowski’s distinction between informative and declarative language in his Phenomenology of the Human Person, 10-14. 47 48 As in Hopkins’s “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”: “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: /Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; /Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.” 15 of the whole (pars pro toto).49 This renders the intention inherently ambiguous: the thing thought is profiled by an aura of vague, even contradictory meanings which overdetermine it and exceed it. Language cannot remain in the intensive mode. A world in which people only spoke in poetry to one another would be a world without science and technology, even at a basic level. The wildly polysemous and productively vague symbols of intensive signification must be tamed. Meaning must be de-personalized, de-contextualized, and restricted in sense for knowledge to grow.50 If one wanted to situate the digital age in a history of language (a speculative-mythic reconstruction, to be sure), one could say that speech begins in poetry and mythology, develops into science and knowledge, and comes to a certain end in datafication. Thought Can Be Eclipsed But Not Eradicated To the question, with which we began this meditation, What changes when the machines learn all our well-rehearsed patterns of signification, mimics them, and takes over the work of worlding?51 The sad answer is, for most people, not much. The mass of human beings are consumers not producers of culture. They will flock to a new movie that contains all the elements of the movie they last liked, with a few surface alterations, and enjoy it as much as the first without noticing the formula. AI ‘knows’ what kinds of pop songs the greatest number of a certain class of listeners like with an accuracy that is beyond human calculative capacities and so can reproduce exactly that, with enough variation to deceive the listener into feeling that they are hearing something new. One might even make the cynical case that the popular consumer of culture is elevated to the status of a producer by having his keyboard clicks incorporated into the algorithms of production. We could conclude, then, that when AI worlds the world for us, we will simply see more of what has been going on since the beginning of mass media. AI is merely “Two logical concepts, subsumed under the next highest category, as their genus proximum, retain their distinctive characters despite the relationships into which they have been brought. In mythico-linguistic thought, however, exactly the opposite tendency prevails. Here we find in operation a law which might actually be called the law of levelling and extinction of specific differences. Every part of a whole is the whole itself.” Cassirer, Language and Myth, 91-92. Cf. Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 39: “A definite whole is never the whole.” 49 See Cassirer, Language and Myth, 89-93. It is a good question to ask whether in the Middle Dialogues, Plato’s forms are extensively or intensively signified. It seems to me that the whole history of misreading Plato hinges on this point. The trend in mainstream Plato interpretation is to render the form the direct ancestor of the universals of medieval logic. It may, in fact, be the reverse that is true: the forms are intensively signified, therefore, they are primordial symbols, archetypes, and only through a process of Socratic abstraction (definition, deduction, and distinction) are they transformed into universals. 50 See “Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation”. The Economist, 28 April 2023. 51 16 following through on trends that have been firmly in place for a century, if not for longer. Other existing trends will continue and accelerate: the steady decline in literacy coincident with mass culture, the deterioration of political intelligence, and the increasing manipulability of populations. My concern in the paper has not been these disturbing political consequences of algocracy but the less obvious intellectual consequences of datafication. When the human mind is misjudged to be a beta neural network that has been bested by its computer, we are more deeply incapable of understanding ourselves than we have been at any point in human history. And yet, language remains the milieu of thinking, even if the language is AI-generated. We can expect resistance. “Man, the user of language, is alive, and according as he lives more intensely his thoughts and utterances require language that can express their living form.”52 The possibility of a re-awakening of spirit at some not-so-distant point in the future always remains and will always remain so long as we remain the speaking animal. Two centuries ago, Humboldt wrote, “Whenever the feeling truly awakens in the soul that language is not merely a medium of exchange for the sake of mutual understanding, but a true world, which spirit must posit between itself and objects by the inner labor of its own force, then it is on the true way to finding more and more in language and to investing more and more in it.”53 We can paraphrase and slightly revise this sentence for the dawn of the digital age: Whenever the feeling truly awakens in the soul that language is not merely data but a true spirit-posited world, then we are on the way to (re)discovering the human essence. Appendix: Aphorisms on the History of Language (Remarks and Citations that Did Not Make the Final Cut of this Essay) 1. 2. Expressivism is more or less absent in mainstream philosophy of mind. But neglect and indifference are not the same thing as refutation. It seems to me that when some of the better-known names associated with expressivism are mentioned, such as Cassirer, a false assumption prevails that no one reads him anymore because his philosophy has been somehow or other disproven. When one looks into it, the matter is much more ambiguous: the expressivists, who enjoyed a brief renaissance in the middle of the 20th century, were not refuted so much as rejected as out of step with the trends taking hold of philosophy, both analytic and continental, in the second half of the last century: on the one hand, existential quantification and nominalism, on the other, post-structuralism and nominalism. The expressivists were unabashed late-to-arrive humanists with a realist bent. They named with some precision the ideology taking hold of philosophy and culture after the First World War. They understood that this was no innocent position but was connected to other more obviously de-humanizing moves, in anthropology, politics, and metaphysics. The sign does not determine the mode of signification, but the other way around. The signifying act determines not what but how the sign means. I can use CO2 as a scientific sign and then it means nothing other than one molecule of carbon and two molecules of 52 Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 17. 53 Humboldt, cited in Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” 404. 17 3. 4. 5. oxygen. I can also run a bar through it and carry it on a placard at a climate change rally. Then it means many things at once, invoking multiple, contextually active senses: Stop greenhouse gas emissions! Zero growth! Transition! Save the planet! I stand with Greta! The signifier, CO2, in a lab report is extensively signified. The CO2 with a bar through it carried on a placard at a climate change rally is intensively signified. In the former example, the univocity of the signification (its extensivity) is key to what is communicated: one precise sense unambiguously communicated to an anonymous and indeterminate range of recipients. In the latter, the opposite is at work: deliberate plurivocity, metaphoricity, overdetermination of sense to expressively indicate a situation and evoke a concrete application of sense in varying, individual contexts. See Cassirer’s account of Helen Keller’s transition from her dark, mute, animal isolation into the human community through her acquisition of speech: “The decisive step leading from the use of signs and pantomime to the use of words, that is, of symbols, could scarcely be described in a more striking manner. What was the child's real discovery at this moment? Helen Keller had previously learned to combine a certain thing or event with a certain sign of the manual alphabet. A fixed association had been established between these things and certain tactile impressions. But a series of such associations even if they are repeated and amplified, still does not imply an understanding of what human speech is and means. In order to arrive at such an understanding the child had to make a new and much more significant discovery. It had to understand that everything has a name—that the symbolic function is not restricted to particular cases but is a principle of universal applicability which encompasses the whole field of human thought. In the case of Helen Keller this discovery came as a sudden shock. She was a girl seven years of age who, with the exception of defects in the use of certain sense organs, was in an excellent state of health and possessed of a highly developed mind. By the neglect of her education she had been very much retarded. Then, suddenly, the crucial development takes place. It works like an intellectual revolution. The child begins to see the world in a new light. It has learned the use of words not merely as mechanical signs or signals but as an entirely new instrument of thought. A new horizon is opened up, and henceforth the child will roam at will in this incomparably wider and freer area” (Cassirer, Essay on Man, 34-5). A word on critical realism. An idealist, whether subjectivst, objectivist, or absolutist, holds that reality is produced by mind. A realist, naive or critical, holds that mind is the product of non-mental reality. Where the critical realist differs from the naive realist is on the nature of this production. For a naive realist, it is a one-sided causality: matter precedes mind, gives rise to it and continues to subsist independently of it. For a critical realist, the causality is reciprocal. Here the early Heidegger’s concept of idle talk offers us a clue to “finding more and more in language and to investing more and more in it” (Heidegger, “On the Way to Language,” 404). We remember how Being and Time begins with a distinction between two modalities of speech: the logos of the proposition, which can correspond or fail to correspond to facts, and the logos that does not correspond but shows or “formally indicates” the unconcealed, the primordially true, and first makes correspondence possible. This is the logos apophansis, which Heidegger takes as the primordial sense of logos in Aristotle. The propositional logos 18 is conventional and locks us into patterns of the already thought; the apophantic logos is primordial and calls for an enactment (Vollzug) of the intention which can only be personal and experiential. As with all of Heidegger’s retrievals of the history of philosophy, the question is not, Is this a plausible interpretation of Aristotle? I think it is, but nothing depends on Heidegger’s fidelity to Aristotle. Rather the question is: What advance has Heidegger made with the retrieval? And here I think Heidegger has made a lasting contribution, and not only to the field of Continental Philosophy. Prior to the truth that has falsehood as its opposite is the truth that is not opposed by falsehood but by hiddenness or concealment. Primordial truth is aletheia, literally the lifting of a veil, or revelation. Dasein dwells in a place and time determined by revelatory experiences. These experiences may be repressed but they cannot be abolished for Dasein is the opening in being that is the condition for unconcealment: Dasein is the medium of revelation. Most of the time we live in a world in which the truth of things is concealed to us, so hidden from view that we do not even know it is hidden. The veils are psychological, ideological, or more innocuously, everyday conventions and habits of thought. We see only what others have already pointed out to us. We think of things in the terms that others think of them. We deal on a day-to-day basis with conventional meanings and widely accepted claims and so experience the world, not “authentically,” as it is disclosed and can only be disclosed to each of us in our incommunicably singular existence, but as it has been set up for public inspection, mapped, evaluated and defined by others. This is the function of idle talk in human society (Gerrede): to lighten our load as thrown into existence (Geworfenheit) and unburden us of the trauma of primordial truth. Truth interferes with our daily business. It disrupts our habitual ways of seeing, thinking, and acting. “Truth is less something I seek than something I cannot evade” (Caputo, The Weakness of God, 286-7). Idle talk holds truth at bay so that we can get along with our work and play untroubled by the real. The phenomenon is so common as to go unnoticed: small talk about the weather or local politics, everyday exchanges among neighbours and colleagues, and commonplace judgments about current events. Idle talk characterizes academic exchanges at conference receptions. We might be talking about things of the utmost importance: about the realist-nominalist debate, about justice for Palestine, the demise of truth in American politics, or the hopelessness of life in the Anthropocene. But we speak about these matters in such as way as to guarantee that the unveiling of the matter itself will not spoil the social exchange, which has its aim, not truth but an agreeable encounter with others. We speak, not to reveal but to conceal because our aim is not truth but acceptance by others. We speak to network, to make friends perhaps, or at the very least to show the educated crowd, whose approval and inclusion we crave, that we know how to talk the talk. I sometimes get the disturbing impression that the formal academic training of a philosophy student involves taming the primordial experiences of truth characteristic of the undergraduate and replacing them with the conventional symbols of professional philosophy. By the time the student graduates, PhD in hand, not much is left of the wide-eyed wonder with which she began her journey. In its place is a professional who is far less vulnerable to being displaced in her basic stance by a new thought. 19 6. 7. 8. There is always the possibility that our speech will not rehearse conventional meanings. There is inherent in the logos itself the possibility that an unveiling of meaning shall occur among us, a genuine communication which will not repeat what is always already known but rather bring us face to face with the repressed, the forgotten, or the radically new. Such an experience of revelation is never entirely wordless or unmediated. But the mediation, the symbols deployed do not in this case hide the truth behind the already known; rather the symbols show the truth in its unveiledness. Revelatory symbols cannot be objectified or translated into propositions. But neither are they subjective, mere expressions of ways of thinking. The weakness in Taylor’s term, “expressivism” is that it misses the transcendental realism in primordial signification. In the context of Biblical theology, Ray Hart calls intensively signified symbols “master images.” They are not things known but, like Platonic eidei, the forms through which things are known. See Unfinished Man, 304: “A master image is not an id quod cogniscitur (that which is known) but rather an id quo cognoscitur (that by which is known). Without ever become the direct object of knowledge, it is the nondiscursive form or horizon through and in which things are known. Master images are ‘insights’ in Max Scheler’s sense: they are not bodies of completed vision, but rather they furnish the delimited form in or through which the mind sees. The mind is thereby not so much informed by an inflexible context as it is endowed with the form of perception and thinking. What is given with the master images is a way of reckoning with the world’s givenness.” With regard to the place of the community in the construction of symbols, a second 20thcentury debate emerged. The two camps are the structuralists and the realists. In the first group we have the majority tradition from Saussure, through Derrida, Lacan, Butler, etc. In the second group, a minority tradition that includes Cassirer and Whitehead but also Pierceans, Idealists, Hermeneuticians and Platonists. According to the structuralists, symbols are communally stipulated in such a way as to render the notion of a primordial experience of truth—intensive signification— a fantasy. We experience the world as others do because consciousness is entirely mediated by conventional symbolic associations. We see what we say and we say what others say. The realists maintain at least the possibility of something non-subjective in the sudden flare-up of sense, the direct experience of the intelligible (what Lonergan calls “insight”) whose ancestor is the momentary gods of mythic consciousness. Nietzsche's distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian aesthetics is helpful in understanding the dramatic differences between the intellectual experience mediated by the two forms of ideation. Because of “the essential identity between the word and that which it denotes” in the word magic typical of mythic consciousness (Cassirer, “Language and Myth,” 173), mythic ideation is Dionysian: the mind loses itself in the image. Scientific ideation by contrast is Apollonian: clarity of reference and univocity of sense allows the subject to define not only the object but also itself and distinguish its own presuppositions and emotional evaluations over and against the object. To deploy a phrase from the anthropologist Lévi-Bruhl, a phrase which is only remembered today because of its place in Jungian or archetypal psychology, mythic ideation is a participation mystique of the subject in the object meant: the subject loses his or herself in the experience of truth, which 20 overwhelms the mind with an excess of possible sense. Scientific ideation by contrast is controlled, with the subject holding her ground so to speak, maintaining a clear sense of her own thoughts on the matter and the shared thinking or objectivity of the sense being expressed. 9. On extension / intension, see Wheelwright’s distinction between “steno language” and “tensive language.” Steno language is “block language,” “meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general by all persons using the same language” (Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 33). Tensive language, of which the poetic metaphor is the most familiar example, is “language that is alive” and “fluid” (ibid., 20). “The logician demands of his symbols, at least in principle, that they shall have a public exactitude, an uncompromising identity of reference for all who use them correctly. Such symbols, which may be called ‘stenosymbols,’ are indispensable to science, and their frequent utility needs no demonstration. There are also steno-symbols of a more casual sort, where a metaphor has become rigid not through stipulation but through human inertia. Most of our common words or their synonyms in older languages have probably originated in this way, and in some of them the metaphoric origin can be seen or readily traced. Tensive symbolizing, on the other hand, is alive and does not proceed by stipulation even though human choice and discrimination contribute to it; nor is it ever perfectly exact—although it may, under favorable conditions, achieve a high precision. Let us look at these two characteristic differences of tensive symbols separately. The tensive symbol cannot be entirely stipulative, inasmuch as its essential tension draws life from a multiplicity of associations, subtly and for the most part subconsciously interrelated, with which the symbol, or something like it and suggested by it, has been joined in the past, so that there is a stored up potential of semantic energy and significance which the symbol; when adroitly used, can tap.” (Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, p. 94) “The tensive symbol cannot be altogether exact. The meaning of π has to be exact absolutely and on all mathematical occasions. But the meaning of a tensive symbol allows to some degree both soft focus and contextual variability. Because of the nutritive darkness of proto-semantic experience in which it has taken root, and also because of its aim, which is to represent and evoke something of the richness and wonder and mystery of the world, a tensive symbol will allow some degree (preferably not too much) both of obscurity and of variation in the responses of awareness that it calls forth. Carlyle is speaking about tensive symbols when he writes that ‘in a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation’” (Ibid, 95, bold mine). 10. Expressivism is, or ought to be, grounded in a post-critical realism, one that does not deny the communal nature of symbolization. The illumination is always the result of a communicative act or the effect of prior communication for there is no thought without language of some kind and no language without a community. It is quite incorrect then to describe cognition as a direct encounter between a solitary spiritual being and immaterial forms floating before his gaze. Rather critical realism only insists that the symbol passed between us is of something real, if immaterial, regardless of the communal nature of its definition. All symbols are communal, realists and structuralists agree, but not all that is communal is merely conventional the critical realist adds. The primordial is as collectively mediated as the conventional. It is not private or immediate. The difference is that intensive 21 symbols are disruptively related to the collective, if still dependent upon it. They can only disrupt because they presupposes collective sense. Primordial symbols can be disruptively or better, eruptively meaningful because language has always already framed experience in the pre-thought, the familiar and already defined. The contrast between what is expected and what is shown is essential to the experience of primordial truth. 11. The assumption that symbol formation and thus the development of consciousness begins in solitude is a Cartesian fallacy. Both structuralists and realists, if they are critical, abjure it. Primordial does not mean subjective or private. See Hölderlin: “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind / und hören von einander” (Versöhnender der du nimmergeglaubt”). But neither, the critical realist adds, should we fall prey to the structuralist anti-Cartesian alternative, the assumption common to many followers of 20th century French thought, that the individual is nothing but the vanishing mediator of the community, that primordial experience of meaning, what Heidegger calls authentic thought is not possible. That the community grants me the consciousness with which I think does not mean that I can only think what the community thinks or has already thought. 12. It is a common motif from Schelling to Cassirer that mythic and scientific symbols are genetically related; the former is the ancestor of the latter, and the move from the one to the other is understood as a cultural progress from “primitive” to “scientific” thinking. Before we criticize the position, which we will, it is worth recognizing the advance made on Enlightenment dismissals of mythic thinking as hopeless fantasy and the product of superstition. The Schelling-Cassirer argument is that mythic thinking is the ground out of which scientific meaning develops; science depends upon myth in a certain way and cannot erase its dependence even if it achieves a mastery of nature which myth never could. Early humans told stories and the mythic experience constituted by those stories first organized the environment into a world. Crucial here is the worlding function of language from its earliest origins. Words were not coined to pick out particular elements in the physical environment. Rather the mythic experience of the cosmos mediated by the system of symbols deployed to narrate it constitutes the environment for human flourishing. As soon as language was on the scene, the hominid no longer inhabited a merely natural environment, whether that occurred 40,000 years ago, with the oldest artistic expressions of homo sapiens, or 225,000 years ago with the first evidence of symbolic activity by Homo Erectus. “For, our purpose, set out from the beginning, is to grasp language and myth as spiritual functions, which do not presuppose a world of given objects divided according to fixed and finished ‘characteristics’ but actually produce this organization and make this positing of characteristics possible” (Cassirer, Language and Myth, 186-187). The original organization of the world, Schelling, Müller, Cassier, etc., are saying, is not scientific but mythic. The original intelligible relations of things to one another are magical; the original experience of meaning is mystical. The original way symbols mean is akin to metaphor: the part symbolizes the whole, which overwhelms thought with unsurveyable oscillation of possible sense. 13. A disputed question emerges in this literature which underscores the radicality of Cassirer’s position. Granted that mythic ideation precedes scientific ideation, what of the practical thinking which our hominid ancestors shared with other animals? For presumably we did 22 not rise to the top of the food chain by telling stories. Communication is also crucial to hunter-gather collaboration and such communication is pragmatic not mythic. So what comes first: the pragmatic use of language or the mythic? Do we ostensively define the things in our world before we produce the metaphors of mythic thought? Or is it rather the case that thought begins metaphoric and only learns to be literal after we take residence in an order of meaning? Cassirer’s view is the latter. He contrasts his view with that of Max Müller. To sum up a complex dispute, Müller gives primacy in the development of consciousness to practical symbols with fixed and finite references, which he says become over time rhetorical devices for evoking infinity through an indefinite pluralization of meanings, i.e., the productively polysemous symbols of myth are second in order to the pragmatic indexicals of life. Thought for Müller begins practical and becomes mythical before it at last learns to think scientifically, i.e., discursively and logically, with unambiguous signification. For Cassirer, the reverse is the case: consciousness begins mythic and learns to think discursively through a process of disciplining the significative power of symbols by restricting reference to one clear and distinct meaning. Barfield goes further than both and sees in primordial metaphors a trace of an earlier, pre-Lapsarian consciousness which he call participatory. Metaphors are only partially successful efforts to recover something of the unitive experience of man, world, and word. Müller’s theory of language: pragmatic→metaphoric→scientific. Cassirer’s alternative: metaphoric→pragmatic→scientific. Barfield’s view: participatory→pragmatic/ scientific→poetic. 14. If original thought has a pragmatic function, it is to bring us together so that we can act as a team. See American psychologist Michael Tomasello’s studies of primates which offer empirical evidence in support of the thesis that we belong to a species of apes with a unique capacity to cooperate. The argument that our success as a species is due to our sociality has been popularized by Harari in Sapiens. But the way original thought brings us together is not by signally the things around us (Harari gets this dead wrong). Rather, thought unities us by substituting a world of meaning for the natural environment of useful, indifferent, and dangerous things, in which the non-human animal lives. Within the properly human world, linguistic signals can be deployed with immensely greater success than any non-human animal signals. 15. What grounds our need to express ourselves is not our sociality or capacity to cooperate. Rather, contemplation makes our remarkable capacity for cooperation possible. Only because we thrive in thought, in narrative, in aesthetic, imaginative, and ritual acts, and later, in philosophic and scientific endeavour, are we homo cooperans. It is not our cooperation that engenders our capacity for symbolization; it is our capacity for symbolization that gives rise to our cooperation for it makes us talkative and interested in one another. 16. To use the language of this essay and summarize the point common to Schelling, Cassirer, and Barfield, language begins intensively, in the expressions of mythic consciousness characterized by participation, and only learns extension through a long history of evolution of consciousness. Myths are not bad science or allegorized history; they are symbolic narratives expressing the collective identity of a people (See Schelling’s Historical Critical 23 Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology). For the mythic mind, there is no separation between thinking and what is thought, or what we call subject and object. In a positivist age, thought becomes a representation of something that is assumed to exist independently of thinking. Barfield’s Saving the Appearances is the most radical and impressive statement of this argument. Positivist thought does not participate in the unrepresented. It stands in for it. At the same time, positivism assumes that behind the representations stands an unrepresented, which in no way corresponds to it: colourless, soundless, and formless wave/ particles in empty space. And yet the positivist fails to draw the consequence: that the world is a collective figuration, which could be and has been figured otherwise. The representations are taken for direct effects of reality and their collective and constructed origins are forgotten. Meaning then becomes something imposed on the inherently meaningless. Thought becomes subjective. The participatory nature of thought is lost. A fiction comes to prevail in the theory of the origins of language that speech begins as a simple, indexical signalling of the presence and absence of physical objects and only through a transposition of subjective associations onto the physical develops into metaphor and poetry. With other representatives of the Herder school (notably Schelling and Cassirer), Barfield argues that the development of language is exactly the opposite. Language begins with intensive signification, with the expression of mystical participation of thinking with what is thought and only later, with the loss of participation, after intensive signification has given way to extensive signification, does language become metaphorical. Metaphors are not original. They are a post-Lapsarian effort to try to recover lost participation by constructing poetic association. But since extension is still assumed by the metaphoric speaker to be primary, the effort by poetry to recover the speech of the Garden of Eden is doomed and only entrenches the breach it aims to heal. “In the infancy of society every author is a poet because language is itself poetry” (Shelley cited in Barfield 1928, 58). 17. The distinction between the original mythic intuition and the scientific thought is not a distinction between an individual experience of meaning and a communal experience of meaning but rather between a concrete and mystically participatory experience of communal meaning and an abstract and scientific communication of sense. For Cassirer (Language and Myth), the first move toward the primal dissociation of word and thing, thought and experience, is a move from the mythic experience of “a momentary god,” a sudden theophany in nature, a revelation of a spirit or a divine power inhabiting an ordinary thing or place, to a communal doctrine of a pantheon or system of gods. The fact that primordial mythic ideation has a singularity to it should not mislead us into thinking that this experience is the achievement of an individual alone. The community has as essential a role in constituting the world of meaning in which the theophany occurs as it does in establishing the terms of a scientific discourse. In primordial “mythic ideation,” thought stands enraptured before the unveiling of “the momentary gods” that are suddenly revealed to inhabit nature, rendering strange the familiar objects and activities of everyday life. A source of water is found in the desert and the spot is hallowed by the presence of a divinity to the one who found it; a bush burns without disintegrating; a founding father of the tribe has a vision of the tutelary god while fasting in the wilderness. These momentary gods precede the pantheons or systems of gods characteristic of developed, literary mythologies. The 24 taming of the theophanic by incorporation of the momentary and unnamed divinities into systems of gods with clearly defined identities and relations to one another—Venus is the god of love, Mars, the god of war; Yahweh is the God of all gods—is the first step toward scientific ideation. Only through a process of disciplining the significative power of symbols does the mythic world of excessively intelligible singularities become a rationally knowable one of logically mappable generalizations. Cassirer cites Schelling’s Historical Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology with approval: “Language itself is only faded mythology: what mythology still preserves in living and concrete differences is preserved in language only in abstract and formal differences.” Schelling, Historical Critical Introduction, 40. 18. Pars pro toto: in mythic thought (participation mystique), in metaphoric thought (see Kohak and Wheelwright), and in Platonism. The thing is horizoned by the form of which it is an instance and shows itself as a part of the whole and at the same time as the whole itself (see Plato’s Parmenides; the early Schelling on symbol). The form of the feminine shows itself in the beautiful woman in front of me; she stands as a symbol of the whole, which radiates through her but also exceeds her. She is a proxy for Venus, the light of whom overwhelms the actual woman’s contingent features. The excess of sense is a key element in the experience of form. It as though she is overdetermined by beauty in the instance in which she makes the form manifest. More is shown through her than can be identified with her. Living metaphors still work this way. 19. What is crucial to note then is that meaning, from the beginning, is a communal rather than individual. Even the mythic symbol in which the subject loses itself is a communal one. However singular the experience of theophany may be, there are no momentary gods for one without language. To put the point in more familiar philosophical terms, there is no private language. Mythic ideation is communal rather than subjective, expressive rather than pragmatic, and productive of sense rather than restricted to a position in a pre-established system of sense. Note the inadequacy of the Cartesian objective/subjective binary to catch these distinctions. Myth gives rise to thought, to art, religion, and philosophy on the one hand, and to science and technology on the other. Science depends upon the substitution of discursive and generic symbols for mythic symbols. 20. I want to argue, against Cassirer, that the mythic and the logical are not serially related nor mutually exclusive, with the logical only appearing on the scene when the mythic has run its course. There is no question that mythological consciousness precedes a certain kind of technical use of language that allows for the development of science and law. But the forms of ideation at work in both do not exclude each other like potency and act. The mythic ideation diminishes in intensity as the logical expands but it does not disappear. This is because the mythic is not ‘primitive’ and the logical is not ‘advanced.’ This colonial hierarchization is not only insulting to non-European modes of cognition; it also fails to recognize the persistence of primordial symbols in so-called developed societies. Think for example of the power of really successful advertisement, or the power of representational paintings in Western art prior to impressionism, or the language of dreams, that we all speak fluently every night. Even Jung was guilty of subordinating mythic symbols to logical and scientific thought. He has been taken to task for it by his own followers, with the result of a 25 more satisfying account of archetypes as socially constituted master symbols. See Colman, Act and Image. 21. Moderns do not experience the apparition of gods in nature. But they have their own, no less revelatory unveiling of the intelligible relations of things. Barfield’s idealism is problematic and too anti-modern in this regard. All intensive language, whether primitive or modern, begins vague and suggestive before it can be mapped and explored, a flash that illuminates not only the thing thought but a greater, still undiscovered whole of which the thing is a part. The realist’s ‘universal’ is at first only an intimation of non-imposed order or serial pattern where there was previously a meaningless contiguity of beings. The symbol, Ricoeur says, in an unforgettable phrase, “gives rise to thought” (Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 347). 22. Where art, religion, and ancient philosophy, blend, often seamlessly, mythic and logical forms of thought, allowing primordial symbols to jostle alongside conventional symbols (think of the Roman Catholic liturgy), science and technology develop by substituting a conventional symbol for every primordial symbol, thus replacing the expressions of personal experiences of sense with the communication of de-personalized and de-mystified information. There is good reason for this. In the high Middle Ages, Scholasticism required that all scientific terms be defined in terms of genus and species so that clear distinctions and sound deductions would be possible. As Duns Scotus objected to Aquinas, a syllogism falls apart if its middle term is ambiguous or equivocal. But stipulation becomes sclerosis when we forget that the restriction of sense is a convention, something we decided upon, for good, pragmatic reasons. Stipulation of sense becomes sclerosis of sense when we come to believe that the conventions are original and that all deviations from convention are figurative, playful subjective acts, of no metaphysical significance. Stipulation, for scientific reasons, becomes habit (thought hardens into idle talk) (See Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 37). In Charles Taylor’s history of modern philosophies of language, the HobbesLocke-Condillac (HLC) school, which won the day over the Hamann-Herder-Humboldt line (HHH), as the nominalists and atomistic empiricists won out over the realists in early modernity, insisted, for good scientific and jurisprudential reasons, that terms must be clearly defined and non-metaphoric. The problem is that HLC brought with it not only a discipline for scientific and legal precision but a false account of the origins of language. See Taylor, The Language Animal. The disciplinary imperative for precision and univocity in scientific and legal language becomes confused with a false story of the genesis of language in which ostensive definitions and pragmatic signalling precede figurative and expressive speech (Max Müller’s account, criticized by both Barfield and Cassirer). This confused story of the origins of speech is at the root of the marginalization of aesthetic in our time and the mistaking of intellection with information processing. 23. That said, it cannot be denied that symbol formation requires dissociation from sensible immediacy. We symbolize when we substitute a sign for the given. Even speaking of what is directly before us requires dissociation from the given. Thus dissociation, which is the ground of consciousness, is the reason why humans and humans alone suffer mental illnesses, which are for the most part forms of pathological dissociation. But the dissociation at the root of consciousness has a positive or productive telos, the transposition of the mind 26 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. from animal immediacy into a world mediated by meaning (Lonergan). We may have done it as early as 225000 years ago, which is the earliest evidence of symbolic activity by Homo Erectus. And we shall be doing it for as long as humans remain human. Myth makes for clumsy science because its polysemy does not allow for logical inference, which requires univocal sense. But science makes for unsatisfying religion and cannot guide us axiologically. Water, inhabited with countless gods and goddesses in the mythologies of the world (see the list: Wikipedia / List of Water Deities), becomes nothing other than two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen. Let us not Romanticize the origins: not only is this semantic discipline needed for the progress of science; it is also crucial for the emergence of the rule of law. Without the practical fixity of signification in legal and scientific symbols (‘murder,’ C02), inferential thinking is not possible. Intensive signification is like a match that lights up a small corner of a darkened room dimly revealing a high ceiling extending up into the shadows and vaguely delineating architectural features that could not have been guessed. I can report on what I have seen. But I cannot directly share it with you because it is not mine. It should be clear enough from the above that intensive signification, original thinking, is something that only humans do, which is not to diminish the capacities of other animals. They all have their unique powers which exceed ours. I will never smell my way through a natural environment like a canine does. Language does not require any immense dispensation of practical, animal intelligence. It is born of a distinctively human tendency to transcend the immediate and consider things irrespective of immediate practical needs. Most people want their culture to confirm their taste, not elevate or educate it. We speak here of the phenomenon of kitsch and if we sound an aristocratic note, it is somewhat inevitable. There will always be something elitist about aesthetics if for no other reason than that cultivated taste is not equally distributed, with the true innovators usually, not always, but usually, appealing to a much smaller percentage of the populace than the successful followers of tried and true formulae. This is the law governing the mass production of bestselling novels, pop music, and movies. The producers, who are business people, interested primarily in a return on their investment, are unwilling to risk it on a creative innovation but demand, rather, that the book or the song or the film do something which has been done before because they know that it works. So kitsch is safe, indeed, it is protected and will thrive under the governance of AI, which is the kitsch production machine. Our love of language, broadly understood as all that mediates thought, thus all symbolic activity, whether high or low culture, makes us human. It is a love as manifest in a life dedicated to the study of literature as it is in a teen addicted to her phone. That the former is rare and requires cultivation and the latter, common, changes nothing concerning the primary fact: both the scholar and the media-addicted teenager are given over to an imaginative-intellectual enjoyment, however varied, to be had only through symbolic mediation, that is through language. For the philosopher, the desire is satisfied in reading, writing, and teaching. For the common person, the desire is satisfied in the consumption of social media, music, and television. High or low, the function is the same: selftranscendence through thought in all of its registers: fantasy, aesthetic pleasure, self- 27 forgetful absorption in a narrative, in the lives of others, or in the pursuit of a line of philosophical or scientific argument. Works Cited Aristotle. The Complete Works. Princeton University Press, 1984. Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1928. ——. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. London: Faber & Faber, 1957. ——. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. ——. “Afterword”. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Third Edition. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Callaway, Ewen. “Homo erectus made world’s oldest doodle 500,000 years ago”. Nature (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.16477. Caputo, John. 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What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Fjelland, Ragnar. “Why General Artificial Intelligence Will Not Be Realized”. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7, 10 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0494-4. Franke, William. “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance”. In Philosophy and Rhetoric, 33, 2 (2000): 137-153. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 1960. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. 1985. Trans. Oscar Burge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Griffin, Andrew. “Facebook's artificial intelligence robots shut down after they start talking to each other in their own language”. Independent (2017). https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2014. ——. Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York, NY: McClelland & Stewart, 2015. Hart, Ray. Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation. 2nd edition. 1968. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Haugeland, John. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. ——. Basic Writings. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1993. Hedley, Douglas. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit Herder, J.G. “Treatise on the Origin of Language”. 1772. In Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings. Trans. and ed. Michael Forster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 65-166. 29 Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Volume One. 1900. Trans. John N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. 1949. Trans. Michale Bullock. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953. Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Kohak, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. 1942. 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. ——. Feeling and Form. New York, NY. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. McGrath. Sean J. “In Defence of the Human Difference.” Environmental Philosophy 15, 1 (2018): 101-115 ——. Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology. Corrected Edition. Glasgow: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. ——. “AI and the Human Difference”. Analecta Hermeneutica 15, 1 (2023): 43-61. https:// www.iih-hermeneutics.org. Previously published in Natürliche und künstliche Intelligenz im Anthropozän, ed. Uwe Voigt and Joachim Rathman (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2021, 53-77. Menon, Ashish. “AI can bring your loved ones back from the dead to aid grief, says scientists”. Esquire Middle East, 2024: https://www.esquireme.com/brief/ai-can-bring-your-loved-onesback-from-the-dead-to-aid-grief-says-scientists. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review 83, 4 (1974): 435-450. Pan, David. “J.G. Herder, the Origin of Language, and the Possibility of Transcultural Narratives”. Language and Intercultural Communication 4, 1-2 (2004): 10-20. Polanyi, Michael and Harry Prosch. Meaning. University of Chicago, 1975. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. 1967. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. 30 ——. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Yale University Press, 1977. ——. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. 1975. Trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Rosengrün, Sebastien. “Everything but the Truth: On the Relevance of Algorithms”. Analecta Hermeneutica 15, 1 (2023): 16-26. https://www.iih-hermeneutics.org. Schelling, F.W.J. The Ages of the World. 1815. Trans. Jason Wirth. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. ——. Historical Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. 1842. Trans. M. Richie and M. Zisselsberger. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. ——. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. K.F.A. Schelling. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1856-61. Smith, Brian Cantwell. On the Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. MIT, 2019. Sokolowski, Robert. Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Taylor, Charles. The Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ——. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Vintage, 2018. Tomascello, Michael. Why We Cooperate. MIT Press, 2009. Wheelwright, Philip. Metaphor and Reality. Indian University Press, 1962. Wynn, Thomas and Frederick L. Coolidge. How to Think Like a Neanderthal, Oxford, 2011. 31 32 Works Cited Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1928. ——. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. London: Faber & Faber, 1957. ——. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. ——. “Afterword”. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Third Edition. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Callaway, Ewen. “Homo erectus made world’s oldest doodle 500,000 years ago”. Nature (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.16477. Caputo, John. The Weakness of God. Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. 1925. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1946. —— An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. 1944. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2021. ——. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Three Volumes. 1923-1929. Trans. Stephen Lofts. London: Routledge, 2020. Castaldo, Joa. “Prominent tech leaders call for temporary pause on AI development over ‘profound risks’” The Globe and Mail, 29 March 2023. Cukier, Kenneth, and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. “The Rise of Big Data”. Foreign Affairs (May/ June 2013): 35. Retrieved 24 January 2014. Dreyfus, Hubert. What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Fjelland, Ragnar. “Why General Artificial Intelligence Will Not Be Realized”. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7, 10 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0494-4. Franke, William. “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance”. In Philosophy and Rhetoric, 33, 2 (2000): 137-153. 33 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 1960. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. 1985. Trans. Oscar Burge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Griffin, Andrew. “Facebook's artificial intelligence robots shut down after they start talking to each other in their own language”. Independent (2017). https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2014. ——. Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York, NY: McClelland & Stewart, 2015. Hart, Ray. Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation. 2nd edition. 1968. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Haugeland, John. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. ——. Basic Writings. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1993. Hedley, Douglas. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit Herder, J.G. “Treatise on the Origin of Language”. 1772. In Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings. Trans. and ed. Michael Forster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 65-166. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Volume One. 1900. Trans. John N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. 1949. Trans. Michale Bullock. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953. Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 34 Kohak, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. 1942. 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. ——. Feeling and Form. New York, NY. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. McGrath. Sean J. Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology. Corrected Edition. Glasgow: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. ——. “AI and the Human Difference”. Analecta Hermeneutica 15, 1 (2023): 43-61. https:// www.iih-hermeneutics.org. Previously published in Natürliche und künstliche Intelligenz im Anthropozän, ed. Uwe Voigt and Joachim Rathman (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2021, 53-77. Menon, Ashish. “AI can bring your loved ones back from the dead to aid grief, says scientists”. Esquire Middle East, 2024: https://www.esquireme.com/brief/ai-can-bring-your-loved-onesback-from-the-dead-to-aid-grief-says-scientists. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review 83, 4 (1974): 435-450. Pan, David. “J.G. Herder, the Origin of Language, and the Possibility of Transcultural Narratives”. Language and Intercultural Communication 4, 1-2 (2004): 10-20. Polanyi, Michael and Harry Prosch. Meaning. University of Chicago, 1975. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. 1967. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. ——. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. 1975. Trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Rosengrün, Sebastien. “Everything but the Truth: On the Relevance of Algorithms”. Analecta Hermeneutica 15, 1 (2023): 16-26. https://www.iih-hermeneutics.org. Schelling, F.W.J. The Ages of the World. 1815. Trans. Jason Wirth. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. ——. Historical Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. 1842. Trans. M. Richie and M. Zisselsberger. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. ——. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. K.F.A. Schelling. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1856-61. 35 Smith, Brian Cantwell. On the Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. MIT, 2019. Sokolowski, Robert. Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Taylor, Charles. The Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ——. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Vintage, 2018. Tomascello, Michael. Why We Cooperate. MIT Press, 2009. Wheelwright, Philip. Metaphor and Reality. Indian University Press, 1962. Wynn, Thomas and Frederick L. Coolidge. How to Think Like a Neanderthal, Oxford, 2011.