We have together produced a type of university in which teaching and enquiry in the humanities (and often enough also in the social sciences) are marked by four characteristics. There is first a remarkably high level of skill in handling narrow questions of limited detail: setting out the range of possible interpretations of this or that short passage, evaluating the validity of or identifying the presuppositions of this or that particular argument, summarizing the historical evidence relevant to dating some event or establishing the provenance of some work of art. Secondly, in a way which sometimes provides a direction for and a background to these exercises of professionalized skill, there is the promulgation of a number of large and mutually incompatible doctrines often conveyed by indirection and implication, the doctrines which define the major contending standpoints in each discipline. Thirdly, insofar as the warfare between these doctrines becomes part of public debate and discussion, the shared standards of argument are such that all debate is inconclusive. And yet, fourthly and finally, we still behave for the most part as if the university did still constitute a single, tolerably unified intellectual community.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 7–8
The testimony of history suggests that the phenomena of “nation” and “empire” are both equally ineradicable from human political life. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to the relation, albeit with (over the course of millennia) both chickens and eggs getting larger and larger, and with the caveat that historically the egg of the nation really did come first. To (over)simplify: imperial projects emerge out of national projects that reach beyond their “national” boundaries, either in response to a regional power vacuum of some sort or as a desire to take over an existing imperial project, while national projects emerge (or re-emerge) from the desire to self-define over against a broader imperial project and/or the other national projects uneasily coexisting within that imperial frame. Once you have the first empire, all nations' self-definition is somehow reacting to the context of empire. The modern exemplar of this dynamic is the rise of 19th century European nationalisms within and without the Habsburg empire: the nations and nationalisms in question positioned themselves and their national projects relative to (i.e., over against) the Vienna system, whether or not they had really been ruled by Vienna for some time. There are ancient exemplars, too: the empire incorporated by the Assyrians (who had a robust national project if ever there was one!) was taken over and expanded by the Babylonians, then by the Medes and the Persians, then by Alexander the Great.
The specialist in the history of either period might now protest that there are many salient and irreducible differences between Alexander’s empire and the Habsburgs'. Certainly, I am oversimplifying: a nation is not a nation is not a nation, and an empire is not an empire is not an empire. Such forms inhere only imperfectly in this crude matter. But if there is not such a thing as a “nation” or an “empire” (and the permanent squabbling over how to define these terms suggests this is in fact the case), there are such things as “nationalism” and “imperialism.” Not things, exactly. Rather, they are basic political impulses or desires: not, in themselves, goods or virtues, but tendencies of political aspiration that exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic.
And these desires have, as have all human aspirations and efforts here under the sun, virtuous and vicious aspects to them. The virtuous aspects of nationalism stem from the love of and gratitude for what is immediately given to me: it is good to be grateful for one’s own place and family and history and traditions, and to be in a sense protective of the goodness and justice of their continued existence (insofar, of course, as these traditions are good and just!), and to feel a sense of solidarity with all those who share those goods. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “Oh Lord, I thank thee that thou hast made me a $NATIONALITY — not one of those $OUTGROUP-NATIONALITIES over there, whom I hate and assuredly You hate too.” The good of nationalism is the love of the particular, and the evil of nationalism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to my particular. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of the universal.
For the virtuous aspects of (what one might call) imperialism stem from the love of and gratitude for those who are not immediately given to me: it is good to love and feel solidarity with those who do not share my place and family and history and traditions, because what we do share is humanity, is personhood. It is good to grieve when other persons, even those distant from me, do not enjoy the goods and fruits of justice and cultural flourishing. It is also good to want to share one’s own goods with those who lack those goods, and to want to share in the goods that others have. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “And because we here must have the goods that they have there—” or “they must be given the goods that we have here” — “we are justified in dominating them, for the good of all parties.” The good of imperialism is the love of the universal, and the evil of imperialism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to the universal. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of other particulars.
I said above that these basic political desires and aspirations exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic; that nationalism and imperialism beget one another in a perpetual cycle. This is, I think, because we humans are easily dissatisfied — it is easiest to see the failings of whatever desire dominates one’s own political situation, nationalist or imperialist, and to thus overlook the failings of the alternative — and also because we are vicious. It is hard — maybe impossible? — to hold a pure nationalism or a pure imperialism without being consumed by the vicious aspects of either. The worst state for any person is probably to be a vicious nationalist and a vicious imperialist at the same time, as many (most?) empire-builders in history have probably been. But the best state would be to desire the virtuous form of both: a universal kingdom, with no geographical or temporal borders to compromise its perfection, ruled with perfect justice by a righteous king, so that every particular — every person — under the reign of this universal may flourish as itself, becoming the most glorious version of itself.
Nationalists and imperialists both, in their own ways, long for this kingdom. Their desires are incomplete, malformed versions of this longing: they are unable to hold together loving both the particular and the universal. Their last state will be worse than their first. But there is One who can.
Technology is the human’s achievement, not his failing even though the use he chooses to make of it may be fallen indeed. If the products of human technē become philosophically and experientially problematic, it is, I would submit, because we come to think of them as autonomous of the purpose which led to their production and gives them meaning. We become, in effect, victims of a self-forgetting, losing sight of the moral sense which is the justification of technology. Quite concretely, the purpose of electric light is to help humans see. When it comes to blind them to the world around them, it becomes counterproductive. The task thus is not to abolish technology but to see through it to the human meaning which justifies it and directs its use… not to abolish the works of technology but to bracket them, to escape their fascination in order to rediscover their forgotten meaning.
— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 24–25
Why you should not use ChatGPT, large language models, or other “artificial intelligence” (falsely so-called) tools in your research or work, for any of the synthetic tasks (summaries of data or information, etc.) for which it is proposed as a helpful time-saver:
The process of pattern recognition and synthetic integration is the basis of how human beings come to know and understand the world.
This process is an inextricably bodily process in humans. (This is true of human cognition in general: the whole of the human body, not just the brain, is involved in every act of thought — and in fact other bodies are involved, too, because thought is an intersubjective process. But I digress.)
ChatGPT and similar tools are, however, definitionally disembodied. Even if they are in fact “just pattern-recognition machines” (dubious), by virtue of being disembodied their pattern “recognition” is not the same as the real thing in humans.
In fact, insofar as ChatGPT exists in the physical world, it is under a very different sort of embodiment — a non-organic sort — which is antithetical to the human sort.
Therefore, ChatGPT and so forth cannot be trusted to faithfully simulate human knowing — and if the mechanism cannot be trusted neither can the results.
Additionally, by using such a tool, a human being forgoes the opportunity to practice and experience such knowing, kneecapping his or her capacity to learn from the experience.
In a nutshell: the promise of LLMs is “impersonal knowledge” — but no such thing exists. Relying on it is thus, in a meaningful sense, worse than nothing.
Addendum: true personal certainty is much rarer than one thinks. Strictly speaking I am, I think, only confident that 2 + 2 = 4; very confident, since I know from trustworthy authorities that arithmetic may be proven logically consistent and from experience that categories of twos added together produce fours. Confident enough, even, to bet my life (if such a bet were necessary) that adding two to two in any life-threatening scenariorio would make four. Confidence is a real part of knowledge. But am I certain that 2 + 2 = 4? I do not understand the rules and axiomata of mathematical logic by which such statements are proven logically certain in the strong sense. I could, I suppose, be living in a remarkable delusion which has filtered out all experiences of 2 + 2 failing to equal 4 — which seems highly unlikely, but is that not just what such a deluded person might say? My certainty is “only” functional, which is actually — a species of confidence. Is there anything regarding which I am truly certain?
Important to explore, in all fields of life and thought: the practical difference between confidence and certainty. I.e., what action is the right one to take in any given situation may depend significantly on whether you are confident in vs. certain of a given outcome.
In a technological age, philosophy, too, tends to conceive of itself as a technē. To some writers, it has come to appear as one of the special sciences, whose subject matter is language, whose task is the analysis of arguments, and whose virtue is technical proficiency. Others take philosophy to be a metatheory whose subject matter is the theories of other philosophers and scientists, whose task is speculative construction, and whose virtue is sophistication in the peculiar sense of maximal remoteness from lived experience, so that the author who writes fifth-generation commentaries thinks himself more advanced than the preceding four generations of commentators—and far more so than the naïve observer upon whose original insight they all comment. Both linguistic analysis and theoretical construction are, surely, legitimate tasks. Yet the thinkers whose insight withstood the test of time, from Socrates to Husserl, were of a different breed. They were the perennial beginners, taking the sense of lived experience in its primordial immediacy for their subject matter. Their stance was one of wonder, not of sophistication; the task they undertook was one of articulation—and their virtue was naïveté, a willingness to see before theorizing, to encounter the wonder of being rather than enclose themselves in cunningly devised theories.
— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, xi
We come, then, to a first paradox of modernity… that its own drive has often been toward forms of political repression far worse than most things perpetrated in despised Christendom. … [The] assertion of the rights of the many has paradoxically, dialectically perhaps, achieved the opposite, the subversion of the many by new and in some cases demonic versions of the one.
— Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 33.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a great and important philosophical work, of course; but nobody had ever told me that it was funny. Savagely funny, even. The discourse of Johannes de Silentio skewers at every point those self-consciously modern persons who are “unwilling to stop with doubting everything but [go] further” (5). I am helpfully informed by the endnotes that this refers to certain Danish Hegelians — and given the role of Hegel’s philosophy in the more technical part of the book, that is a perfectly defensible historical reading; but the irony with which the text is saturated cuts at those in every generation who hold that they have acquired full “proficiency in doubting” (6) from their very beginning. The work, for all that Kierkegaard is genuinely interested in exploring the philosophical problemata of Genesis 22, uses humor as its sharpest surgical tool to cut away the audience’s layers of self-conscious Rationality and Skepticism and expose the comical, self-deluding pretense that Reason is ever able to surpass Faith and “go further.”
You would hardly know any of this from the scholarly introduction, the myriad references and summaries in other philosophical/theological works, or the Wikipedia article. These generally fundamentally — and I presume not inaccurately — historicize it, one way or another: as Kierkegaard wrestling with and justifying his decision to break his engagement to Regine Olsen, as a riposte against the Hegelian treatment of ethics, or the like. But the historical element cannot be permitted to take the sting out of the irony that is so essential to its effect as a work of philosophy, classically construed as an enterprise in convincing the reader that (as in Rilke’s poem) “you must change your life.” The humor is that unparaphraseable, unextractable aspect that makes it great.
It seems utterly clear to me that, for instance, the last lines of the Exordium before the “four paraphrases” are pure irony: “That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham” (9). For what follows are, judged by the rest of the work, four failed exegetical paraphrases of the story: proof that the story is not “easily understood” by any means, proof that no rationalization adequately captures the movement of faith.” Lest anyone be tempted to think that the simple man in the Exordium was merely lacking in learning, was not actually entering more closely than the Hebrew scholars into the experience of faith and of Abraham, Kierkegaard demonstrates — with brilliant mockery — that the basically paraphrastic resources of the “exegetical scholar” are insufficient to the task. The proverbs about the mother and the weaned child that conclude each paraphrase offer a kind of demonstrated rebuttal to the possibility of paraphrasing, of explaining and principlizing, such a story; exactly what Johannes de Silentio goes on to demonstrate in the rest of the work. What matters is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Genesis 22 — by the incomprehensibility, the miraculousness, of Abraham’s faith in God; what matters also, mutatis mutandis, is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Fear and Trembling — to feel one’s own pretenses to complete rationality caught, exposed, even flayed.
UPDATE: I forgot about this passage, which — rich irony! — captures this dynamic marvelously:
There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little more about them than is found in German and German-Danish compendiums. Therefore I know that these two passions are essentially different from the passion of faith. Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation. [51]
A less critical remark about the Reformation section of The Master and His Emissary. One intriguing feature of this section is a passing comparison of those two great Martins, Luther and Heidegger, as both being “somewhat tragic figure[s]” whose work was “hijacked” and ultimately unleashed “an anarchic destruction of everything [they] valued and struggled to defend” (314). This is an interesting parallel, and I think reveals more than McGilchrist recognizes in the moment.
Luther’s great flaw — a flaw that he inherited from 1300 years of Christian tradition, radicalized by his apocalyptic self-understanding, knit uncomfortably close through his theology, and bequeathed to later generations with horrendous and anti-Christian consequences — was his personal and theological anti-Judaism. On the Jews and their Lies is of course the most (in)famous and horrifying expression of this flaw, and is admittedly a document that requires some historical contextualization — Luther, like practically everyone else in the sixteenth century, thought the Second Coming was close at hand, which meant a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity was imminent; when it became clear that this was failing to happen, his bitter reaction was expressed with the most splenetic language he could muster. But really (as we can see more clearly now in the wake of the Shoah) even the most robust Protestant must admit that Luther’s formulation of justification — not to mention some of his more polemic statements in defense of it — depends on such a sharp antithesis, even opposition, between Law and Gospel that it has historically proved difficult for Lutherans (other than Luther himself, an Old Testament scholar extraordinaire) not to see progressively greater and greater justification for casting aside Torah, Moses, and Israel entirely. Lutheranism’s theological failure mode is Marcionism (as seen in Adolf von Harnack), and Marcionism bears more than a passing family resemblance to Christian anti-Judaism; which, with the modern invention of racial essentialism, was radicalized into Christian anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, The Master and His Emissary was published in 2009, and is absolutely dependent on Heidegger’s philosophy; somewhere McGilchrist calls him the most comprehensive expositor of the right hemisphere worldview in intellectual history. (In my view, the book’s real muse — the Beatrice to McGilchrist’s Dante — is Hegel, but Heidegger plays the part of Virgil throughout.) As scholars have been discovering since Heidegger’s Black Notebooks began to be published in 2014, Heidegger embraced and creatively rearticulated the Nazi ideology during its period of ascendancy and regnancy, and remained — at least in private, once it was no longer permissible to be public about it — a defender of Nazism until his death, long after the exposure of Nazi Germany’s numerous crimes against humanity and above all the Jews. (Apparently Richard Wolin’s recent Heidegger in Ruins (Yale, 2023), is the important book on this topic, though I haven’t read it… yet.) McGilchrist’s book evinces none of this — and it is hard to blame him for it, given the genuine importance of Heidegger to all subsequent twentieth-century thought and the timing of the Black Notebooks' publication; but I am, to say the least, intrigued to see how, if differently, Heidegger may be treated in The Matter with Things (2021).
So, if Heidegger is the prophet of the right hemisphere — does that make Nazism the right hemisphere’s most seductive, and most horrifying, failure mode?