Attaining this understanding requires that we reexamine certain presuppositions, especially concerning the reasons why we hold nature and the artificial to be opposed. It will also require us, again, to think more deeply about the nature of technology itself.

I. False Opposition of Nature and Artifice

We often talk about nature and artificial things as though they stand in simple opposition to one another. The natural is conceived as something given, and the artificial as something imposed or even created. Where nature tends to take care of itself, affecting a kind of long-term harmony and balance even amidst its short-term disasters and calamities, human artifice—especially in its form of modern technology—seems to progressively worsen, with its short-term improvements nevertheless contributing, ultimately, to long-term imbalance. Thus, increasingly we see some people present nature as an unqualified good, and technology as, at best, a conditionally necessary evil. A return to nature will promote a flourishing life, while the interventions of artifice alienate us from our own rhythm of living. One finds compelling or forceful arguments for this opposition in the works of, for instance, Jacques Ellul, Wendell Berry, and Paul Kingsnorth. For this position, we find an insightful and well-balanced critic in Lewis Mumford, whose Technics and Human Development, The Pentagon of Power, and The City in History form a powerful trio of works.

But there can be a temptation in this simple opposition to turn it into an oversimple one. The artifice the critics seemingly want to oppose is not technology as such—or should not be, let us say—but a particular kind of machine technology; and I would suggest, most especially a particular mechanistic technological thinking. It is a thinking discussed in our white paper on the “Conception of Technology” as one that views all things as mere resources to be used. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings might think of the character Saruman: “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” It is this industrial mind, this mind that sees in all things a “standing reserve of resources” for human artificial ends, against which there is good and legitimate opposition. This technologically-dominant way of thinking persists in the post-industrial age as well, and one finds even the attempts to correct our industrial excesses fail in line with the same pattern of thought. It is the mentality that Mumford ably describes in his City in History as a “megalopolis”: an invisible city defined not by geographical limits but by a totalizing reach of such thinking.

However, we cannot forget that it belongs to human nature to produce technologies: that any home, any vehicle, any tool—indeed, even our concrete languages and systems of communication—are technologies of a kind. These are not mere contrivances for convenience, but an integral part of our flourishing as human beings.

II. Naturally Artificial Technologies

The section title here suggests another way for thinking about the artificial: namely, that it may be naturally or unnaturally ordered. It is further helpful here to think about environment: its meaning and purpose. When we identify something as an environment, we are not simply positing a set of external physical surroundings, a background or setting within which things happen. Rather, it is a place within which one lives, which place plays a role in that living. The environment shapes the life of that which lives within it, without strictly determining that life. This shaping occurs principally at a pre-intellectual level: giving us opportunities and means for perception and training us to react in accordance with the things perceived. We form pre-intellectual judgments about the good or ill of those objects, and through experience following those judgments, form habits of attraction and aversion.

Crucially, as human beings, we transcend this pre-intellectual level and subsequently, through our abstractive capacities, are able to form complex systems of instrumentation and technological intervention by which we alter the perceptual environment itself. These systems, when they make the environment more comfortable, tend to outlast the individuals who originated them, receiving further developments in subsequent generations. In other words, we pass on what we have learned.

As such, no one reading this essay has lived his or her whole life without some technological structuring of the environment. Without such technological structuring, you would not be able to read. We do not commonly or explicitly recognize the technologies that enable our activities of reading, however, because they become “sedimented” into the environment. There are many technologies that settle in this manner. Quite a few do it in a way which befits nature: that we as human persons should build roads, bridges, farms, homes, fireplaces, clothes; systems of grammar, implements of writing, publication, distribution, mail—these are all technologies which seem to enable our flourishing and which, if thoughtfully implemented, do not necessarily damage the physically given elements of our environments. They may disappear from our explicit awareness, but they continue to shape how we live day-to-day, whether conscious of them or not.

Moreover, these environments, if kept stable, reinforce our habits of living. Building technologies into our environments that help to reinforce good habits—not merely their repetition, but their conscious development and improvement—belongs to us by nature. Put otherwise, our technologies ought to serve nature: both that of the physical surroundings and of our own selves.

III. Unnaturally Artificial Technologies

Unfortunately, today we live in a world permeated by many unnatural, or let us say, anti-natural technologies. These are technologies which extend our abilities to disproportionate reach, oftentimes upsetting the balance of the physical surroundings as well. By such disproportioning, we constitute doubly-unnatural environments: contrary to our own natures and contrary to the natures of things around us. To give an examples: widespread transit via personal automobile ownership, not only kills many persons per year, not only pollutes the air, and not only indirectly kills much vegetation through salting northern roads in winter, but also results in fragmentation of our communal lives, separating work and home and friendship.

Or to use a more controversial issue being confronted today: data centers for “AI” systems allow increased compute for countless tasks which may streamline endless work operations—but at profound costs not only to the human psyche (which unlearns the demands of work) but also to the physical environment: polluting water, consuming enormous amounts of energy, and saturating the surroundings with endless distressing noise.

As the built environment became ubiquitous—hardly, if ever, can we escape it today—the “natural” becomes increasingly perceived from within that artificial framing. In other words, it, too, becomes technologized. “Green spaces” in cities become amenities, the land becomes “real estate”, a river becomes a “view”, and so on. Forests become “national parks”. Even Mount Everest becomes a “challenge” to be conquered. Yes, our technologies may “ruin” our natural environments. But more fundamentally, a technologized mind attempts to resolve nature to the artificial—and thereby does damage to nature before ever touching it.

IV. Reforming the Unnatural

Given the complex interweaving of such anti-natural artifice—long dominant in the thinking of the Western world—the temptation to simplistic opposition, even revolution, is understandable. But the visions of an idyllic, pastoral life often offered to those sickened by technological excess are nostalgic images of a fantastic and never-realized past. We must not believe that the turn to machine technologies arose out of mere laziness or material rapacity, but at least in part from the real recognition that certain tasks can be done better. There are times and occasions in which efficiency is, indeed, a virtue. This recognition turns perverse only when we lose our vision of the whole to which those tasks belong—a power of sight, admittedly, that we have all-but-abandoned in our technologized myopia of today.

But we should not cut out our eyes to cure our short-sightedness. Electricity’s permeation of all things at all times may have been recklessly implemented, for instance, and installed in such a way as to damage our natural bodily rhythms—but the ability to provide electric power to many things in many circumstances is not a small good. Take refrigeration, for instance: a great deal of food scarcity and preservation is easily alleviated by this technology. The power of electric light at night, in the occasion of an emergency—a rescue, a repair—seems almost without question an enormous benefit. (Even communities that eschew electricity and coolant refrigeration, such as the Old Order Amish, may indirectly rely upon and benefit from this tech, inasmuch as they sell to others who do use it, who would not buy their products without it.)

The principle which ought to govern the extensions and integrations of technology, in other words, is not simply to leave nature untouched by the artificial except wherever absolutely necessary for survival, but rather to ask continually the question of whether the technology’s influence or effects on nature are conducive to natural flourishing. Any efforts to reform the presence of technology in our environments today must begin with that question; which requires a strengthening of the vision by which the whole may be grasped.

V. Conclusion: Restoring Artifice to Nature

Allow a momentary digression: a popular book titled The Trivium—oft touted among those attempting to affect a return to “classical education”—claims in its opening page that the liberal arts are divided by the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). This division, the book claims, flows from diverse concerns: the trivium concerning the mind and the quadrivium concerning matter. This division is incorrect, but will not explore why here (it would take us too far afield). But it does (in a twist of irony) correctly describe that tendency towards oversimple oppositions. The arts of language and a linguistic approach to life allows the world to appear romantic, enchanted, fanciful. Well-wrought words may paint for us rich landscapes of imagination. The arts of quantity, if disconnected from those of language, appear cold and calculating: presenting a ratio divorced from the λογός. One attains order at the price of absolute sterility. Many think of the “natural” world as symbolic, richly linguistic; and the “artificial” world as numerical, spiritually void.

Not infrequently, that is—even in efforts to retain and promote the “classical”—we lapse into thinking that any two things which are at all opposed cannot truly exist in a complementary fashion. One must dominate the other. This lapse demonstrates the misunderstood nature of the human being.

That is: language and number should not be held as irreconcilably opposed, nor should nature and artifice; and we must recognize that the products of language are no less “artificial” than those of quantitative reasoning. In order properly to understand either, both must be understood as complementary to the other; arts through which we are able to articulate the whole in all its intelligible dimensions, artifice which aims to support and encourage rather than dominate and enslave nature. Our own nature, as human beings, is ordered in part through such artificial production—however often we fail at rendering our products actually coherent with that nature.

Put otherwise, the effects of artifice need not be destructive to the order of nature. Properly understood, human nature itself orders us to the production of things artificial. The flourishing of our nature entails the use of art for the protection, stewardship, and efforts at promoting flourishing for all nature.

This flourishing requires efforts to re-order our sense of the technological to its principles in the natural. The common, facile opposition against all technology—or all modern technology—romantic and charming though it is, seems to omit consideration of technology’s inherent, essential naturalness. Too often, the negative effects of technology upon the natural environment stem from our unthinking adoption of new devices, instruments, or sy

Continue the Inquiry

This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “Natural and Artificial Environment” which investigates more deeply the question of environment and the effects had upon it by technological interventions.

Brendan McCord of the Cosmos Institute recently published a piece titled, “Raising Claude, Forgetting Us”. Therein, he correctly identifies AI as a technology profoundly formative on the users of it—and asks what capacities its users must retain when making their decisions.

McCord’s question emerges from another recent argument by Seth Lazar, namely that advanced AI systems require normative competence: the ability to recognize, understand, and appropriately respond to reasons. Lazar notes that such systems may eventually need to judge when they should “scaffold” human autonomy rather than replace it. McCord identifies the unresolved difficulty lying concealed within that proposal: even if a model can, in principle, distinguish assistance from displacement, according to what account of human formation—according to whose conception of the human person—should that distinction be made?

Asking whether an artificial system can attain a moral character, or a convincing and effective simulacrum of one, is an interesting question. But it is miniscule in importance as to whether and how its representation of morality and thinking affect not only the users of it, but the entire environment of human signification.

1. Asymmetrical AI Ethics

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, are very concerned with their creation. They have made the perhaps unusual-seeming move of consulting philosophers and theologians about their product—looking to give it the very best not only in speed and accuracy, but a kind of “education”. They want it to be moral; they want it to be good. But as McCord rightly prompts us to question: do they want us to be moral? Are we shaping Claude or, as famously said of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, will Claude end up shaping us?

“What will be left for us to do?”

Elon Musk has claimed, recently and more than once, that within twenty years, “Work will be optional.” AI and robots, he says, will eliminate the need for human labor. We will become overseers, at most; free to check in once in a while and spend the rest of our time doing whatever we please.

But at what cost? If AI can do everything we can do, what does that mean for us?

2. Capacities and Habits

What are the capacities of a human being? We could enumerate particulars beyond counting—but generically, we have capacities for sensing, perceiving, evaluating, desiring, avoiding, ignoring, conceiving, judging, inferring, loving, hating—and between and amidst all these acts, many more. The identification of judgment and autonomy are frequently placed as most distinctively-important for human life. Can AI really supplant these capacities in our own lives?

In truth, many have already dispensed with much exercise of judgment and the subsequent reality of choosing—well before AI came on the scene. Already, many have accepted into their thinking certain authorities, without question, including questions of that authority’s legitimacy. Judgment comes only after conception, and we have been nothing over recent decades if not lazy about how our conceptions are formed. That is, we may already be too late, if we take umbrage only at the usurpation of judgment.

We started ceding our most important, most human capacities to technology when we put a television in every home. How quickly that technology became a ubiquitous, daily habit for many! Consider the internet, the smartphone. Each has not only changed our behaviors, but our habits of thinking, our habits of perception.

3. Language as the Locus of Formation

These early technology’s pernicious effects, however, do not mean there is nothing new with generative AI. Every technology extends some human capacity, reducing the effort required to accomplish those goals by our natural means alone. Generative AI differs from earlier technological extensions because the capacity it extends is language itself: the medium through which specifically human thought achieves completion and becomes communicable. It therefore enters and potentially interferes not only with the execution of our intentions, but also their formation; all the distinctions, questions, and judgments by which we arrive at conclusions.

Our thinking, we may recognize with a little reflection, often remains indeterminate until we find the “right words”. We know what we want to say, but until we figure out how to say it, it remains incomplete—not only because we have not been able to communicate it to another, but because we have not fully grasped it ourselves. The efforts by which we articulate our thinking, in other words, are not incidental to that thinking. They are integral. Outsourcing them to the machine is to amputate a part of our minds.

The very fluency and plausibility suggested by the well-refined language of an LLM conceals what it takes away from us. It may extend our ability to write, and to communicate, and to do so very quickly; but simultaneously, it weakens our capacity to do this ourselves. We quickly become reliant upon its suggestions, its additions, its clarifications. Normal human conversation is often confused and muddy. We must struggle our way to clarity. This struggle refines not only the spoken expressions exchanged between interlocutors, however; it strengthens their minds. It makes them better at being human, if only in some small measure.

Protecting not only our use of language, but deepening our understanding of it, seems the very heart and soul of remaining resilient in our humanity in the age of AI.

4. Stimulation vs. Substitution

That does not mean there are no good or legitimate uses for AI. On the contrary, it is a technological marvel. But all technological marvels are dangerous, not only by misuse but by tendencies incorporated into their designs. In the case of present-day LLMs, this dangerous design consists in an ambivalence: namely, between stimulation and substitution. A system may stimulate our activity, prompting new thoughts, the revisitation of questions thought settled, or by removing unnecessary drudgery otherwise required of us. Or it may substitute for those activities: performing actions that make us human, including not only the explicitly linguistic and creative, but so too many of those things we might easily regard as “tedious”.

Present systems are not wholly determined towards substitution, but the prevailing design does lead its users in that direction. Too easily, we can allow them to “step in” for us—the systems are frequently frictionless. We are required to do very little to receive a lot. In some domains, this may be no great threat to our well-being. In others, it may undermine our very humanity: depriving us of the habits of inquiry, discovery, argumentation, articulation, and revision—conforming our minds to the logic of a machine, instead of seeking their correspondence to the λογός of the world.

5. Semiotic Competence

McCord’s question—what must AI leave its users able to do?—requires more of us than preserving the moment of choice. That the individual retains his decision to click does not mean he has not already surrendered every act leading up to that moment. Our freedom as human beings is not a libertarian indeterminacy, but always a choice of goods; if we cede the evaluation and determination of the good to inhuman minds, we are, in effect, ceding the options between which we are allowed to choose. That the final movements of our wills remain indomitable does not mean we remain competent at choosing.

What must remain ours are habits through which meaning, questions, possibilities, reasons, and responsibilities remain rooted in our being, and not be outsourced to even the most excellent of digital assistants. That excellence is poorly bought, that is, when the price is our own competence.

This is why autonomy alone is an insufficient standard for evaluating AI’s effects upon our capacities and habits. Any truly meaningful choice presupposes a certain “semiotic competence”: an ability, learned and refined over time and through teaching, to interpret signs, to evaluate their relation to what is real, and to use them responsibly in our efforts at both making judgments and communicating their results to others.

The proper question for discerning the legitimacy of AI assistance must therefore concern its effects on human formation. What human capacity is being extended? Which acts involved in exercising that capacity are displaced, and to what extent? Does repeated use leave the person more capable of acting without the system, or increasingly dependent upon it? And who remains responsible for the question’s framing, the answer’s interpretation, and the resulting judgment made?

These questions do not yield a universal prohibition against substitution. Some tasks required of us today are genuinely inhuman. But the closer an activity lies to any act of moral or intellectual formation, to something proper to human responsibility, to the affectation of social relationality, the more carefully substitution must be resisted. In such activities, the system’s efficiency cannot be the governing measure. Inefficiency, often, is necessary for the formation of the person.

6. From a Question to a Standard

Lazar is right to emphasize the need for normative competence in advanced AI systems, and McCord is right to ask what such systems must leave their users able to do. But neither can be answered adequately without an account of how human capacities are formed.

The distinction between stimulation and substitution offers the beginning of such an account. Stimulative uses should strengthen our abilities. Substitutive uses diminish us. The ethical quandary arises in properly distinguishing between the two.

This is the concern behind SEPPUAI, the Lyceum Institute’s developing Semioethical Principles and Protocols for Using Artificial Intelligence. The framework takes as its principle that AI must be evaluated not only as a technical system, but as a formative element within the human environment of signs—a kind of universal mediating interface. The aim of SEPPUAI is to identify forms of design and use that preserve proportion between technological extension and human development, so that our instruments may stimulate our capacities rather than substitute for their development.

I would suggest a furthering of the question that McCord has posed: not what Claude—or any other AI system—must leave human beings able to do, but whether patterns of their use improve or denigrate our cognitive, moral, and socially-relational capacities. Their efficacy in extending these capacities may deceive us into believing ourselves grown stronger, because of what they produce; and therein lies their danger.

Cosmos Institute

Raising Claude, Forgetting Us

This is part I in a series about Anthropic’s moral convenings, how to think about efforts to form Claude, and where that leaves us…

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a month ago · 84 likes · 15 comments · Brendan McCord

Cosmos Institute

Are Frontier Models Good at Ethics?

Seth Lazar is a Professor in the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, a Professor of Philosophy at ANU, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI…

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2 months ago · 32 likes · 9 comments · Cosmos Institute and Seth Lazar

I. Beneath the Surface

In 2024, I added a feature to my phone: a visual on the lock screen which shows how many times during the day I have unlocked it, and for how long. The first two days, I used my phone without changing any habits. To my horror, despite thinking myself a relatively restrained person when it comes to using the device, I unlocked it 76 times the one day and 68 the other.

Since, I have attempted (mostly successful, apart from traveling days) to unlock it no more than 20 times per day. Most especially, I avoid the thoughtless or time-wasting unlock. If I do not have something otherwise immediately occupying my attention, that is, I do not want to occupy it instead with the informational chaos that the phone so readily delivers. Let me think or observe, instead.

We have all likely suffered this device-mediated-distractedness, whether in our own lives or in the lives of those close to us, or both: not only that distractedness, but in fact the whole environment of restlessness, anxiety, and diffusely-scattered thought to which it belongs. It renders users attention-bound to their devices, compulsively ensuring that no notification goes missed; makes them impatient with any delayed gratification; and emotionally volatile, as the physical world and the digital simulacrum present conflicting accounts of what is and ought to be.

But these effects, damaging though they are to the integrity of our lives, signify much deeper causes than the mere presence of devices or patterns of their use. That is, our anxieties and distractedness caused by the smartphone or social media are only the superficial marks of technology’s effects on our psyches. To understand this more fully, it will be helpful both to disabuse ourselves of certain common presuppositions and to subsequently take a deeper look into the nature of the human mind.

II. Undoing Mechanistic Presuppositions

In his Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas states that we have an “almost irresistible tendency… to interpret human functions in terms of the artifacts that take their place, and artifacts in terms of the replaced human functions” (110). For centuries, the human mind was compared to a book. In the past century, the brain has been thought of as “hardware” and thoughts as “software”. Therapy has sometimes been treated as “reprogramming”; education as “information transfer”; capacity for attention becomes “bandwidth”, and so on. Just recently, a young man claimed he was able to find a solution by “imagining what an LLM would do”. Conversely, our LLM agents will show “Thinking…” or the like while processing our requests.

Underlying these diverse expressions, one comes to believe, there are found reductive commonalities. In other words, what we are doing is no different than what our machines or technologies are doing. There might be different means through which the goals are pursued, but each is ordered from beginning to end through a “mechanism”, which mechanism is ultimately the explanation for the goal’s accomplishment. While the use of our technologies to explain our own functioning (or even the machines’) often begins as a metaphor, such usage tends to blur and lose its distinction over time. We stop questioning the difference and unthinkingly accept the apparent similitude. But words are never mere words; they shape how we think about the realities themselves. We may not intend to think of our minds literally like computers; but using the language of “hardware” and “software” reinforces an associative conception regardless of our intentions.

This tendency is common to humankind as a whole: we tend to condense complex issues into simple statements whenever that makes day-to-day life easier. But it is also something reinforced today by the problem-oriented-mindset of modern technological society. The pipeline from simplistic reduction to immediate operationalization runs smoothly. But we have put ourselves into this pipeline; we are what becomes operationalized, we become “resources” to be used.

III. Nature and Formation of Habits

A brief but relatively comprehensive primer on the nature of the psyche, its faculties, actions, and objects is available here. Anyone interested in a deeper dive should begin there.

Here, we want to focus on one key element discussed therein (and in the corresponding white paper): habit. “We are creatures of habit”, it is often said, and this is true. But we need to understand the nature of habit correctly. Often, they are reduced to what is merely “automatic” or even unthinking. Some do form this way. But others form by choice, by deliberate action. In other words, a habit can be a perfection of self-control. Every truly well-formed habit, though it may be reinforced by certain mechanisms of the brain, body, and neurochemical system, consists also in a cognitive and moral intentionality—a recognition of the good and the will to pursue it.

Conversely, those habits which are formed without our intentional involvement may be to our benefit or harm; but very often, they are the latter. The smoker seldom intends the habitual inclination to cigarettes, or the alcoholic to liquor. Someone may be raised to keep his room clean, but, given freedom from strict parenting, rebel to the contrary in young adulthood. It is not mere repetition of action that matters in the formation of habits, in other words, but also action’s integration with purpose. This includes not only the things we do physically, but also our thinking itself. Thinking, too, forms habits—ordinary ways of judging—that can be either beneficial or harmful. For not all thinking is entirely self-controlled; the things we watch, the fantasies in which we indulge—these too go to forming habits of thought.

IV. Effects of the Medium

It is in habitual harms, both those formed through action and thinking, that we can see the intervention of technological devices and systems most clearly, as, for instance, in the compulsive behavior many exhibit regarding their phones. In part, this harm is due to the content, which is often novel—albeit only a little—and presented in a way that provides a very easy stimulation (scrolling is much like taking tiny drags off a cigarette or a vape) along with a gradual reshaping of norms. For instance, one scrolling through video shorts can become accustomed to seeing less and less female modesty, or more and worse violence. One can try to solve this by the use of content filters or restrictive settings, by blocking or muting certain accounts.

But it is not just the content of our technology that harms us. Indeed, the very problem-oriented way of thinking that characterizes modern technological society is itself a habit, or set of habits. For the most fundamental essence of a habit is this: it is a way of holding ourselves towards the world. When our world is pervasively structured by technologies, as extensions of our thought and abilities, we often fail to see the world as anything else than how technology reveals it.

For one example, consider the difference in coming across a profound and insightful passage in a book and coming across that same passage on social media. When our eyes light upon the line upon a page, with nothing else in our hands and nothing else asking for our attention, we will probably stop and reflect on the passage; perhaps mark it, or write it down. On the phone, we tap like and scroll onwards.

Or—perhaps—if we are frequent users of the phone and/or of social media, we come across the passage and immediately think how it may be packaged to receive likes, to draw attention, to promote ourselves or our institutions and programs. I know that I have myself been guilty of this. Rather than living in accordance with the technology of the book, which promotes silent and individual reflection (which too may become a fault, carried to an extreme), we live in accordance with the digital social medium, which promotes quick and easy engagement. Rather than appreciated as a passage for contemplation, as something to be truly digested, or as part of a greater whole, it becomes interpreted as a potential signal to extract and use for attention.

This reveals the deeper set of habits which modern technological society and its various media have formed in us: a resource-and-use-oriented holding-towards all things, a calculative way of thinking that allows the fundamental realities and importances of things to be obscured.

V. Extension and Amputation

There can be no serious doubt that modern technologies have rendered us countless material benefits. But although they may fruitfully extend our abilities to cultivate and store food, improve the speed and efficiency of our communication, and enable us to live more comfortably, our unquestioning adoption of these instrumental improvements comes at a great cost, not only of unforeseen physical side-effects but often of great and uncontrolled psychological re-orientation as well. We ask what content we would like to see—and not whether we should be “consuming content” at all. We get information faster—and do not question if its real worth is found in a slower and more difficult way of acquiring it. And we allow our machines to accomplish our tasks without having to practice or think about those tasks themselves; and thus become more productive at the expense of being less capable.

Carried to their extremes, these “extensions” may become “amputations”. For instance, were we to live our whole lives outsourcing the remembrance of things important to machines, we would effectively cut out our own memories. Many a young man or woman, grown up in the digital environment of the smartphone, finds face-to-face interaction (especially with the opposite sex) profoundly difficult, almost impossible.

Why are human beings capable of choosing such self-destructive paths? This question is not one about particular choices, but about the manner in which we make our choices at all; what enables us to do the things we do, as human beings, and why? It is an important question, not to be answered quickly. Slow and consistent reflection alone will help us find a true understanding.

VI. Conclusion: Human Formation

“Diagnosis and description”, writes Marshall McLuhan in the preface to his Gutenberg Galaxy, “must precede valuation and therapy.” Put otherwise, we need to know what we are treating before we can decide how to treat it. Before we can fix human formation, we must know what it is and why it has gone awry. A place to start, I suggest, is in recognizing an unhealthy behavior: namely, the attempt to turn over formation to systems of education. That is: we have for too long attempted not only to measure our development by a progression through grade levels, courses, test scores, and certifications or degrees, but to regard this as the development itself. Such befits a mechanistic view of the person.

Continue the Inquiry

This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “Technology and the Psyche” and the theoretical paper, “The Soul and the Machine”, which identify more fully the nature of the psychological faculties, their habits, and technology’s effects upon them.

But that question already distorts the situation. Not everything troubling in human life is a problem to be solved. Some things are difficulties to be lived with well.

I. The False Comfort of “Solving” Technology

Framing our technological difficulty as a series of problems has an appeal. A problem may not yet have a solution; but the possibility of a solution is implied. Once the solution is in place, we no longer need to worry about it. Thus, a problem might be solved with more regulation, or a better design, the implementation of an ethics policy, a better-adapted tool, a better source material, a clarification of a system’s procedures, and so on.

All of those things might help us, indeed, with solving certain technological problems we encounter. But if we misunderstand technology in its essential nature, this nevertheless leaves us simply waiting for the next problem, which wants yet some further solution—all the while, contributing to the difficulty’s obscurity. In other words, treating technology as a problem encourages technical solutions to technical harms. This tends to deepen our dependence upon the same mode of thinking that produced the problems in the first place.

II. Two Inadequate Views

To help us understand this false comfort, we outline here the two most common views of technology which are taken today: first, what we will call “instrumental optimism”, and second, “technological pessimism”. These are general categorizations not meant to enumerate exhaustively the range of positions commonly taken, but to give a broad orientation.

1. Instrumental optimism

From within this perspective, technology is seen as neutral: a tool whose goodness or badness depends only on the uses to which it is put. This argument has often been used, for instance, in debating gun control, nuclear technology, or automotive regulation. One may cause great harm with all three, but that is not an intrinsic and inescapable necessity. The automobile has made possible a much greater material abundance, flexibility, and connectivity. Firearms may kill, but they also prevent would-be criminals from committing atrocities. The nuclear bomb is not only a weapon of mass destruction, but a deterrent—and the underlying technology can be used to provide enormous quantities of electric power. Similarly, the smartphone might distract us, but it also enables us to reach others quickly in an emergency; the calendar might flatten out our sense of time, but it helps us stay organized in busy lives.

If we can only use the technology rightly, from this view, we will be able to build a better society.

But there is a problem with this view: namely, that our tools not only shape the world to which they are put, they also shape us, the users. Technologies, in other words, do not merely help us act with greater power, efficiency, range, or regularity. Rather, they often fundamentally change our relationships with the world and with one another—and even reorient the habits by which we think and feel about all of what is.

2. Technological pessimism

Contrariwise, the technological pessimist views technology as an autonomous system that takes over human life. The car remains instructive, here: once it becomes widespread, we see sprawl which undermines community, changes the price of homes, allows one to suffer a long daily commute, and so on. All our labor-saving innovations of the past centuries have seemingly only ushered us towards working more and more, producing less, finding less satisfaction in what we do. We become victims or our own advancements.

Here too there is a problem: namely, that such a view surrenders agency and responsibility by buying into a reductionistic theory of causality. We become caught in a web of apparent inevitability because we cannot understand how we ourselves are the most fundamental causes of technology.

In this, perhaps ironically, the pessimist and the optimist share alike: that is, both fail to understand technology’s essence as intrinsically and necessarily related to human faculties.

III. Technology as a Human Difficulty

Let us restate an earlier point: problems can be solved. Difficulties, on the other hand—while they might involve or produce problems—follow from something that cannot be solved. To navigate a difficulty, one needs prudence; one or another solution will not work at all times and in all places that such a difficulty is encountered. For instance, lifelong relationships always have unique difficulties; what solved the problems in one will not solve the problems in another.

Technology, too, is a difficulty. It does not arise from this or that particular piece of technological instrumentation, but rather from the very nature of human cognition. We are able, through our abstractive reasoning capacities, disentangle intelligible ideas from the things in which they are found (e.g., shapes like circles or forces like momentum), revise those ideas, and then—in some cases—re-instantiate them differently in the world. Principally, we form such productive concepts which extend our own natural beings. We make tools to enlarge our sphere of influence on the world outside ourselves. But the world will resist some of these efforts. That does not mean we strive either, on the one hand, to flatten the world before our might; nor, on the other, that we ought to give up and become Luddites.

Language produces misunderstanding, but ceasing to speak is not the answer. Politics produces conflict, but abandoning common life is not the answer. Education can become indoctrination or vanity, but refusing to teach is not the answer. Likewise, all technologies may produce real distortions—especially if they are pursued carelessly—but technological elimination is not a serious human answer.

IV. Fixing Technology with Technology

Using naught but technology to try fixing technology’s flaws is a fool’s errand. Of course, this has not stopped many from responding to technological harms by developing more technology. For instance, we become distracted by screens, so we install screen-time apps; overwhelmed by information, so we curate algorithmic filtering; we become isolated by social media platforms, so we join more platforms; we become anxious from technological acceleration, so we automate more tasks.

These may provide a certain short-term relief. But, like scratching a bug bite, they seldom eliminate the cause of the problem. Often, they make it worse.

That is: misuse—directing something towards the wrong ends for the wrong purposes or in the wrong manner—is not the primary reason we end up with so many technological problems. Rather, it is a lack of rightly-conceived proportion in the development, design, and deployment of our technologies before they are ever commonly used. Each technological innovation allows us to amplify certain powers; but always at the cost of weakening others. Technology extends means, but it does not provide the measure by which those means should be judged.

V. Human Measure and Resilience

When we confront the expanding mass of technological problems in the twenty-first century, it can be easy to panic and seek the insurance of human safety. And of course, safety is an important consideration. We can hardly flourish as human beings if our technology kills us all. But so, too, we cannot flourish if our instinctual reaction to every new technological innovation is one of rebellion. We must understand what the technology is, and what it can do. But in order that this knowledge be completed, that understanding must be folded into a larger conception of human faculties and flourishing.

Only from within a rightly-ordered conception of what it means to flourish as a human being, in other words, can we say whether a technology is good or bad, and in what uses that goodness or badness consists.

This requires the human being to form certain habits of cognitive and emotional resilience which are resistant to technological reduction. We think here of the arts that enable contemplation, patience, well-ordered memories, embodied cognition and skills, that foster social relationality, and that allow us to judge the truth of what we behold.

Such habits cannot, by nature, be formed efficiently. But the human being is not measured by efficiency—to accept such a measure is already to subjugate oneself to the reign of technology.

VI. Conclusion: Not Rejection, Not Surrender

If technology were only a tool, better design would save us. If technology were an autonomous force, we ought to destroy every last innovation… or resign ourselves to an inhuman fate. But if technology is an intrinsic human difficulty, then the task is neither naïve embrace nor nostalgic rejection. Rather, our need is one of developing prudence: recovering the human measure of our own making.

Continue the Inquiry

This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “The Conception of Technology”, which frames technology not as a problem to be solved, but as a difficulty intrinsic to human life and therefore requiring philosophical, cultural, and practical response.

A few brief reflections derived from our recent Philosophical Happy Hour on Fate:

1. Many people use the term to avoid responsibility for not only their own actions, but even for having to think about the complex nature of reality. In other words, chalking this or that happenstance up to fate simplifies our lives. But this simplification deprives one of an important freedom. To say that something was fated (or destined), in this manner of avoidance or escape, is to deprive ourselves of both agency and understanding. one cannot act freely under such deprivation.

2. Contemporary lapses into notions of fate run downstream of bad philosophy concerning causality. Put otherwise, if we conceive of “causes” to be, in the sense offered by David Hume, as nothing other than a sequence of chronological events in which Event A efficiently causes Event B, then we arrive at the belief of determinism. When this belief becomes a background presupposition, one does not need to think it explicitly in order to operate underneath its auspices. Modern scientific determinism, in other words, is “fate” stripped of its more mystical dimensions. So long as this notion of causality remains widely presupposed, it makes it even easier for non-scientifically-minded people to slip into more mystical beliefs about fate.

3. The Christian idea of providence, though it shares elements in common with the conceptions of both fate and determinism, does not fall into the same denial of freedom. This follows from two principles: first, the notion of God as omnipotent sets Him apart from fate; the latter might be “all-determining” but must work through what exists. Second, a robust notion of causality inherited from Greek philosophical traditions, most especially from Aristotle. While this notion of causality is not intrinsic to Christianity, nor has it always been within its traditions, it nevertheless helps explain the providential ordering revealed through Scripture.

4. The freest human being in Scripture, therefore, can be understood as Job. One ought to contemplate this.

A few key insights derived from our Happy Hour:

First, outside rare situations, Aristotelian dialectic has become almost impossible in the US (and many other countries as well). This near-impossibility has rendered many persons not only unfamiliar with the practice, but also uncomfortable with its encounter—even when there is no hostility intended. What has caused this state of affairs? Simply answered, as to the immediate cause: we lack meaningful common opinions, or, what has the same result in practice, are disinclined to communicate those beliefs which might allow us to discover such meaningful commonalities.

Second, the remote causes of this condition are many and complex. They include mass media, geographical and social mobility, a pre-existent acceptance of radical individualism, and—more recently—a fear of being “cancelled” because of our opinions’ irreconcilability to the supposedly common opinion. These causes have produced a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, we have a greater cultural homogenization of common and popular knowledge than at any point in history. On the other hand, that knowledge is of less weight than any commonly held before. Everyone knows Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, that there are military conflicts involving Ukraine and Russia, Iran and Israel, perhaps that the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship: but for most Americans, the direct ramifications of these events and individuals are, on a personal level, nil.

Third, this extensive common knowledge-about-nothing shows how deeply our society has fallen under the sway of a “rhetorical” mode of communication. Put otherwise, the “common” consists only in what has been communicated through mass media. Only those positions espoused to the many can be discussed in a public forum. An important aside not discussed in the Happy Hour but relevant: this “rhetorical” domination remains true even under the conditions of algorithmically “loosened” social media. Content filtration algorithms which favor some narratives and disfavor others, for instance (as experienced in various election cycles or concerning medical information, e.g., with COVID-19), exhibited a top-down control of what was shown to be “common”. Such an apparatus was long in place with centralized media control of television. But even in the “loosened” algorithms of present-day X.com, as the prime example, “powerful” accounts are still able to control the narratives by the recommendation-algorithms’ favorable weighting of certain metrics at which they inevitably excel.

Fourth, this “rhetorical” mode seems to be “rhetoric” only in a defective sense of that term. This “seeming” touches on a distinction between Aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric and that found in the Roman tradition, exemplified by Cicero and Quintilian. For the latter thinkers, “rhetoric” names an intellectual practice inseparable from moral virtue. The rhetorician, to perfect and thus truly possess his art, must be virtuous. Aristotle is more ambiguous: the skills of rhetoric may be put to virtuous or vicious ends. I believe both are correct, but in want of a distinction. The skills, put to a vicious end, turn those efforts into what today we call “propaganda”—an effort to persuade without relating the operations of reason to truth. Ours is a propagandized society: opinions tends toward the reflection of what popular figures say. There may be more diversity among those popular figures—but as exercising a propagandistic modality of communication, there is not a dialectical effort to discover what is true. A clear sign of this: the unwillingness to discuss or debate the first principles upon which the rest of their arguments depend.

Fifth, this effort to discover what is true, or what seems most reasonably to be closest to the truth, is what characterizes true dialectic. Oftentimes, dialectic takes on a “pugilistic” form: it may become a kind of combat, carried out in words, as opposed opinions are pitted against one another, with arguments being proposed and rejected, distinguished, attacked, and so on. But just like sparring is undertaken to improve the abilities of each combatant, so too dialectical disputation leads each towards the refinement and strengthening of opinion.

Sixth, consistency and trust are essential to advancing in the long and difficult trajectory required by many dialectical endeavors. The absence of interpersonal consistency—fostered not only by our geographical and social uprootedness but especially by the digital medium of the internet, where joining and leaving most communities is frictionless—makes it impossible for one person to dialectically move another out of a deeply held opinion or into one strongly resisted. Moreover, we cannot have trust in any medium where we do not live with and share in life with the other person.

Relatedly (let us call this “6a”, as it were), in many environments where there are contrary opinions of merit, a third essential element appears: namely, authority. Political and ethical quandaries, were consensus the only means to action, would more often than not end in compromise. This does not mean authority ought to override the dialectic; it needs truly to hear what is said, even if it consistently chooses one opinion over another, or none of those that were offered at all. This authority, too, to earn trust, must be consistent in its dealings with dialectical partners.

Seventh, and finally, the retrieval of dialectic requires a re-training in our habits. That is, more than any absence of common opinions, or the confidence to express them, we suffer an absence of common habits, a common willingness to hear the opinions of others, to have our own challenged, to refine our beliefs in light of what others might say. As with so much else wrong in our world, today, we have lost the matter of dialectic—and thus the art by which it is refined—because we lack humility. Until we recognize that truth is not a possession but a light, we will continue to stumble in the darkness.

The Lyceum Institute’s Human Formation in the Digital Age will change that.

This is not an opportunity to advance your career or add a line to your CV. It is a chance to think more deeply about what it means to be human, and to transform those deeper thoughts into meaningful habits and actions.

But you might make some new friends. St. Louis, 16–17 September 2026. Learn more and register here: https://lyceum.institute/hfda

Our Philosophical Happy Hour conversation concerning “consciousness” (held 10 June 2026) and spanning more than two hours covered a great many particular topics: the distinction between “being conscious” and “having consciousness”, whether being conscious and having consciousness are binary or rather on a spectrum, the diverse modalities and degrees of attentiveness in our experience, the relationship to intelligence, the question of consciousness’ unity or multiplicity, the relationship to the “self”, the question of whether it is supervenient upon our actions or prior to them, the notions of desire, embodiment, language, temporality, narrative, and death. Were it the outline of a book, we would have many great chapters to write. But the principal purpose of this retrospective is simply to draw out the key points which allow our thinking on the topic to continue unfolding.

Being Conscious and Having Consciousness

Commonly, imprecision between these two terms seems to result in confusion. The term “conscious” (and its opposite, “unconscious”) is typically used attributively, and most often in modification of the term “acting”. At times, it may be used as a subject complement: “He is conscious”, specifically to mean “not asleep”. Generally, this word is used to signify an “awareness”. When we use it attributively, we identify awareness of that which it modifies. When we use it in contraindication of sleeping, we identify the possibility of that attributive awareness. Someone who is “not unconscious”, that is, is capable of being conscious of what he does or of what is happening to him. He experiences not only the presence or absence of objects cognitively, but also appetitively (i.e., desires).

Notably, this awareness does not seem to be a binary phenomenon. In other words, it occurs in degrees or on a spectrum. We can see this in the states between waking and dreaming, in lucid dreaming, and in the “cocktail party effect”—the ability to selectively attend to a singular voice amidst a noisy environment where the many voices form a singular indiscriminate “drone” (or to have one’s attention suddenly elicited by a particular stimulus—such as one’s own name—amidst such an environment). We diversely attend to the perceptual world, that is, not only by its physical presence to us but, indeed much more, by our own dispositions relative to it. A sleepy person is “less conscious” of his surroundings than one in “high alert”. A gourmand is “more aware” of food than someone who eats only to fuel his day.

But this is not the same as “having consciousness”. Indeed, this “being conscious” seems to occur in varying degrees in (nearly) all animals. There may be borderline cases: but certainly it is signified in the behavior of chimpanzees, dolphins, cats, dogs, and clever birds like ravens. Most animals, in fact, seem “more conscious” of their physical surroundings than do we human beings—attentive as we are to other objects which are not strictly present to us physically.

Rather, the expression “having consciousness” seemingly entails a reflective “being conscious of being conscious”. We are, in other words, aware of our own being conscious—and this appears distinctively human. That is not to say other animals may not be “self-aware” in some sense, in that they can become objects of their own consideration. Human beings appear uniquely capable of distinguishing themselves from themselves. Putting this otherwise, we are able to distinguish the object signified from the signifier of it. Thus, we are not only “aware of…” but able to differentiate ourselves as being the ones who are aware.

It is from these activities of self-reflective awareness that there comes to be the phenomenon we identify as “consciousness”. Or, to offer a definition: consciousness is the experiential unity by which an intelligent being becomes present to itself, as a self, in and through its intentional acts.

Elaborating the Definition

There are five core elements to this definition which deserve elaboration: 1) experiential unity; 2) intelligence; 3) presence; 4) self; and 5) intentional acts.

To begin with intentional acts, as these should be clarified immediately: “intentionality” in this sense does not mean “deliberate”. Rather, it relates to the sense found partially in phenomenology and more fully in Scholasticism: that is, of acts which are fundamentally constituted by “being-towards”. We experience such acts most commonly and obviously in cognition and desire. When I think of the last filet mignon I ate, for instance, my thinking is towards that particular cut, its odor, taste, texture, accoutrements—as well as the setting in which it was consumed, and so on. Simultaneously, thinking of a delicious piece of steak may elicit a desire for another one, or to have a similar experience of enjoying such a meal. Such being-towards characterizes our being-conscious—even when we are reflecting on ourselves, our pasts, and so on.

An interesting but difficult nuance here, however, is that even acts of which we are not conscious have a way of being implicitly intentional. That is, not only the acts of knowing or desiring, but so too the acts of being-known or desired have a certain intentionality to them. For that matter, other aspects in our own unconscious being have a characteristic towardsness, by which towardsness can they become known. Many habits, for instance, we form and experience unconsciously. This topic was not raised in the conversation, however, and so we will leave it for future considerations.

What was raised in the conversation was the notion of the “self”. This term, even more so than consciousness, suffers imprecise use. We will not dive into here: but suffice it to say that what we mean in saying it reflexively is something of our irreducible subjective being. It is the locus of experience. Invariably, that which has experience does so as a self. The presence of the self to itself seems to occur to all animals but, again, in varying degrees. The constitution of that presence appears to be determined by the cognitive awareness of the environment. The more sophisticated the evaluative capacity of the animal, the more developed its self-presence.

Yet even the most highly-developed self-awareness of non-human animals does not seem to have “intelligence” in the proper sense. This term is where the greatest elaboration is demanded: “intelligence” is a term which has suffered various equivocations over the past several centuries. Today, commonly, it is used to mean the gathering and evaluating of information so as to solve problems. Many presuppositions—ironically, many of them unconscious—stand behind this conception. Contrariwise, here we employ the notion of “intelligence” to mean principally the kind of intellectual cognition by which a human being grasps objects of an irreducible universality. In other words, we become cognitively aware of objects which cannot be reduced to any collection of particulars, but the meaning of which is potentially infinite. Put otherwise, we are conscious of objects not simply in what they particularly are relative to ourselves, but in what they intelligibly are in themselves.

To become present to oneself, as a self in possession of this kind of intelligence, is of no little consequence for the constitution of our experience. The word “experience” suggests in its etymology, “from what has been gone through, tried, or tested”; the “per” includes a sense of “through to the end”. In what sense is our experience “united”? We go through many things, we attempt many things. What makes them one? Often, we find our experiences put us into internal conflicts—most especially of desire. For instance, I may desire to be thinner, but also to enjoy my food, and the food I most enjoy may not help me become thinner (to the contrary). On a merely animal level, such experience occurs only in bodily feeling. For a human being, it becomes a part of not only our intellectual awareness, but something that may inform our consciousness—our awareness of being aware, that is.

Towards Resolution

This leads me to three other anchor points: language, temporality, and narrative. These are enormous topics, of course—language being one of the principal educational concerns of the Lyceum Institute. Temporality will form the basis of two seminars, one to be taught this Fall and the second in the fall of 2027. Narrative has been an on-going topic of discussion, commonly at the Lyceum but even broader in the various concerns which today one finds about the reading of classics and their interpretation or translation.

But let us begin with language. Oftentimes, “language” is misunderstood to be nothing other than the external system of communication which we share alike with animals and, it seems increasingly, with “artificial intelligences”. Against this, we oppose what the semiotician Thomas Sebeok termed “language in the root sense”, a faculty of cognitive awareness which antecedes any specific linguistic expressions. The natural consequence of this “root sense” of language, of course, is the production of some concrete system of language—a kind of natural complement to the root faculty. But it is this root sense that allows us to grasp the general or universal objects of intelligence, and to bring them before our awareness. This can be helpfully expressed by a distinction between speech and language. Speech may be a vocal or expressive behavior or even a signifier of interior states; language, in the fuller semiotic sense, is the capacity to enter into general, triadic sign-relations.

For our consciousness, this means that we are not only conscious, but able to signify our being conscious. We can say, “I was angry”, “I misunderstood”, “I was not myself”, “I now see that differently”, and so on and on. Our experiences become articulated. We can stand in relation to our own experiences as meaningful. This articulation informs our understanding of both narrative and temporality, which two aspects of our experience become intertwined through language.

Narrative, that is, constitutes a higher development of our linguistic articulation of experience. Through narrative we turn a report of what happened (whether really or in imagination) into a kind of intelligible continuity. The conversation brought this out through discussion of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Joyce. In each case, we can see that narrative enables a human person to inhabit an experience, even if he has not personally undergone it precisely, while nevertheless recognizing it as both generally intelligible and as somehow illuminating of his own strictly personal experience. Or to put this in another way, through narratives we are able to expand our experience by resolving the general intelligibilities presented therein to our own personal lives.

The example of Achilles is particularly useful to see this. No one needs to be Achilles to understand rage, wounded honor, greatness, pride, and ruin. Narrative expands consciousness because it allows one person’s experience to become available to another, not by direct transfer of feeling, but by a unity affected through symbolic sign-relations.

Narratives have a great philosophical importance, that is, because they allow the concrete particular to disclose the universal. Achilles is not merely one man filled with rage; he becomes a symbol through whom not only rage but also the feelings of indomitability, glory, and regret are signified beyond the individual. In narratives we discover a mediation between individual experience and universal meaning—they help us to resolve the diversity of experiences in a singular unified consciousness. This resolution is not limited to fictional narratives, however, but even how we interpret our own experienced pasts. Our memories, interpreted in the light of narrativized intelligibility, do not remain as fixed images. They can be (and in fact often are) reinterpreted. An action once desired can later be re-evaluated as foolish, perhaps shameful. In some cases we might realize what seemed at the time to be a grave error turned out to be providential.

But narrative is impossible without the linguistic articulation of temporality which is distinctively human. Non-human animals remember, anticipate, and learn, but only from within what we grammatically identify as the continuous present. Their “past” is reactivated only by present stimuli and their future is pursued through learned reaction to what is currently before them. Human beings, contrariwise, through naming the past as past and the future as future separate these times out from the present. Correspondingly, they can place themselves in time and compare the “past self” to the present self, and think about how the “future self” will differ from one’s current self.

To say “when I was twelve”, “after my father died”, “next year”, “when I am old”, or “when I die” is not simply performing an act of recollection or of anticipation. Rather, it is situating oneself—as presently being—within a temporally structured and intelligible life. Our temporally-articulated possession of consciousness does not consist in amalgamating one after another present, but rather in narrativizing the self as changing from past, present, and future into an intelligible unity.

A remark made in the conversation, concerning the importance of prudence, signifies this clearly: action in the present proceeds from the past for the sake of the future self. Prudence presupposes that the self not only can but must be addressed across time: the present self can attempt to form the future self, through reflection on the past self. This corresponds with the provocative idea advanced by C.S. Peirce’s, also raised in the discussion, that direct control over the present self is, in fact, impossible. What can be controlled is the future self: by forming habits that change one’s future disposition.

To conclude, we highlight consciousness of mortality. To know that one must die means being conscious that there is an end to life; a truth from which we not infrequently attempt to escape. Yet, the inevitability (and unpredictability) of death demands inclusion in the unity of our consciousness. That is, what we are as selves cannot be formed only from the past and acting toward the future, but also aware that its earthly future is individually finite. Our consciousness, that is, should not be restricted to the existence of the individual entity.

Immediately, it seems a claim either absurd or pure hyperbole: there are still over 3,000 accredited institutions of higher education in the United States alone, after all (to say nothing of the rest of the world), and universities remain lightning-rods of attention and controversy. Rare are the days where Harvard, Columbia, Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, or some other prestigious and historic school does not at least one national headline. We fight about their curricula, evaluate their faculty; argue about how they should be structured, what they could be “if only…”; we hear of countless dollars spent in efforts to control their future; we protest or laud their events, their speakers, their initiatives, and so on. Were the institution truly dead, it would be not only strange but morbid for so many people to be up in arms over how the corpse ought to live.

At the very least, thus, it seems that to claim the university is “dead” constitutes mere hyperbole.

Well—there is no doubt that it is hyperbole. But let us strike away the “mere”; for exaggeration sometimes becomes necessary to make clear a less-obvious reality. It has oft been stated, over the past seventy years, that education is “in crisis”.[1] The word English “crisis” comes from the Greek κρίσις—specifically, the meaning given it in medicine: the turning point in a disease at which the patient will either improve or turn terminally ill.[2] Diagnoses may differ as to causes of the ailment, but it has long been acknowledged that our educational systems are not healthy. How long, we must ask, can an entity be “in crisis”? At some time, we pass the point of crisis—for better or worse. Do we believe that the university, today, is better off than it was even just a few decades ago? If it were truly in crisis, and it has not gotten better, then it must be headed towards death.

But it is true: the university is not literally dead. Not yet, at least—it may hang on for some time. But I do not believe it will last much longer in any but a truly decrepit and unnatural form, surviving only in a form unfitting to its actual proper human purpose.

Nevertheless, it occurs to me—hyperbole being today overused and therefore not as effective an exaggeration as once it was—that I should explain more clearly and more precisely the reality of the object in question. In my previous efforts to explain the death of the university, I have used the metaphor of a living individual substance: saying that, much like any living body, the university possesses a natural lifespan. But upon further reflection—brought on by an astute line of questioning from a conversation had at a Lyceum Institute Philosophical Happy Hour—it occurs to me that this metaphor stumbles; for, although individual universities may come and go, departments may grow or shrink, and the signs point to a general decay, the idea of the university not only persists, but continues animating those who seek its perpetuation. As such, the image does not convey the point as well as I would like. This or that particular institution, continuing to exercise the vital operations of higher education (some of them even evidently thriving), seems like a counterfactual instance to my claim.

Thus, the better metaphor—understanding that the point of any metaphor is not to explain the object it signifies, but to help us see its presence more clearly—could be found not in the death of the individual but rather in the evolutionary decline of a species. That is: when the external conditions of the environment shift, extant species’ previously suitable adaptations—by which adaptations they attained dominance within that environment—may become not only insufficient for their continued thriving but prove even to be inhibitions to their survival. A maladapted species may persist for a time, with diminishing dominance; or perhaps even continue indefinitely, as an evolutionary relict.[3] This decline towards the status of a relict, I believe, well-describes the university—for the environment has irrevocably changed, and while the needs of the human mind remain fundamentally the same, the means employed by the university are no longer adequate. In other words, it is not only the case today that the majority of universities are failing to bring their “matter” (faculty, curricula, etc.) to the standards of their purpose (the education of students and the advancement of science and understanding), but that their “form” (the structure of the university itself, the elán vital that motivates its existence) is incapable of sustaining that purpose.

Of course, unlike a living biological species, here we are discussing a socially-constituted reality. The university does not have an internal form making it to be what it is. Rather, its form is what we make it to be through our language. In other words, we create and re-create the university insofar as we keep talking about it.[4] This ability to create and re-create, however, is not a matter of mere arbitrary stipulation. The objects of social constitution, that they evolve into custom and thereby gain a kind of “legislative force” for our practice, require a fittingness to the mind-independent realities of the world.[5] The more we insist upon observing and committing ourselves to social institutions that are maladapted to these mind-independent realities, the worse becomes the situation for both the institutions and individuals alike.

So let us being a nascent inquiry—“nascent” for it is a question far deeper and broader than can be covered comprehensively in this essay—and ask what is the environment we today inhabit, and why is the university maladapted for it?

1. The Hostile Environment

By the term “environment”, here, I do not mean merely the physical surroundings that we inhabit. A human being never inhabits a merely physical environment, that is. We add to (or even obscure) the worlds in which we live by the ways in which we think about things and the manners in which we present objects to one another through our words and actions.[6] Nothing in the physical structure of my house makes it mine, that is, any more than something in my neighbor’s house makes it his; but I do not go sleep in his bed, and we would have quite a disagreement if he tried to take a shower in my bathroom uninvited. In other societies, in other places and in other times, such disagreements may not have been as pronounced or present; social cohesion amongst neighbors may have allowed a different “environment” or “world” to be discovered or instituted among similar physical surroundings. But it is almost universal that some recognition of the rights of property structures both our understanding and operation in the environment, and such come to be widely accepted and practiced in our social interactions because they have a certain natural fittingness, even if those “rights” are not embedded in natural beings themselves. The degree to which someone may lay claim to objects as property, however, is not fixed and may change depending on the availability and abundance of the goods by which human beings survive and thrive.

Education, somewhat similar to property, has a natural fittingness to the human person. Just as we adopt certain laws and regulations (both stipulated by authority and customary in practice) concerning the rights of ownership—to prevent both the extremes of poverty and excess—so too we develop institutions to provide education. But just as we might see environmental conditions demand changes to our practices of property ownership, so too we can see changes in the environment will require adaptations of our educational institutions. A man living in a sparsely populated, expansive country might rightfully possess 100,000 fruitful acres he leaves untouched; but in a time of land-scarcity and popular need, it seems unjust for him to hoard and waste this property. His intent may be a certain conservational magnanimity; but he continues that pursuit in defiance of the higher common good of actual human beings. The physical environment remains the same in this case, but the socially-constituted world requires a re-thinking of property.

So too it is today with respect to education. Despite not being a material good that can be reduced to a quantified measure in the same way as land, it remains a good to which one needs access, and access to it is far from guaranteed. Moreover, access to information alone does nothing to ensure one receives an education. Rather, we still need institutions to provide it—institutions which are capable of passing down learning from one generation to the next; institutions within which traditions of understanding can be preserved and built. But the socially-constituted world no longer allows such a concentration of learning traditions in the university; and, indeed, the university no longer possesses the structural capacities to provide the education we need. The details of this deficiency in the university are discussed below, in section 2. But first we must ask…

What has changed in our environment? Why is the university becoming obsolete? In a word: the internet. That is, our minds—immersed in and thus challenged and altered in many ways by the digital environment—are insufficiently served by the present institutions of higher education. How is it that the environment has undergone this change and how has it affected a corresponding change in what the human mind needs for the sake of becoming educated? To put these questions otherwise, we need to know the conditions first before we can understand why the university cannot meet them. And make no mistake: though it may appear “unreal” in itself to many, the effects of the internet are as real and efficacious on our minds as are the rights to property. Indeed, their obscurity or hiddenness from us makes their effects all the more difficult to escape.

We can trace the evolution of this technology heretofore—and its radical alteration of the environment—in five stages: 1) the groundwork stage from 1988 until 1993; 2) the commercial boom from 1994 until 2000; 3) the development of web 2.0, from 2001 until 2006; 4) the social internet, from 2006 until 2016; 5) and finally, the age of total digital integration, from 2017 until the present. The first three of these might be classified as an “early” stage of evolution; the latter two as a “later” stage.

1.1. Early Stages of Networked Digital Evolution

In the groundwork stage, the early hardware infrastructure was developed and implemented by the U.S. National Science Foundation, followed closely by the development of HTML and HTTP, and the opening to commercial use in 1991. Over the next two years, use of Telnet, FTP, and Usenet allowed a new form of communication, but in a manner where the infrastructure seemed merely like an accelerated postal service or fax machines, as yet limited by the hardware of computers and networks. Yet the increasing capacities of digitization heralded already what might quickly become. While the quantity of data transferred today perhaps seemed inconceivable in 1988, the technological principles behind the architecture remain much the same.

During the commercial boom, web browsers (NetScape Navigator, Microsoft Explorer, etc.) entered the scene, commercial ISPs (such as AOL and EarthLink) expanded rapidly. This public connectivity was followed closely by the advent of websites such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and Google. Direct public investment in the internet became an increasingly sought-after skill, as the web became not merely a place to exchange things for money, but information became itself a readily-exchanged commodity. Unrecognized at the time, this connectivity to the home or personal computer radically altered the boundaries of place and privacy. Not only did the store come into the home, but so too the workplace and—darker elements as well. Previously, one would have to risk a physical, public exposure in the purchase or consumption of pornography, for instance. But it did not take very long at all for the commercial internet to become saturated with such content. Limited regulations on all manner of digital enterprise saw everything imaginable proliferate, for some years, on the “world wide (or perhaps, wild wild) web”.

Subsequently, many of these ventures—over-specialized, too niche, too rapidly-established—collapsed in the dot-com bust. But the infrastructure they had expanded remained, and many websites dedicated to interpersonal networking began to be developed: Wikipedia, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and more, as broadband networks began rapidly expanding across the country. Blogging, forums, and online communities became an opportunity for those in even rather remote places to find interpersonal connections about even the most obscure of interests and hobbies. Simultaneously—and too little-discussed—this increased social dynamic exposed many individuals to sensorial objects and concepts they would unlikely have encountered otherwise, most especially of a pornographic or otherwise salacious nature. In the 1990s, that is, one had to go looking for such content. During the 2000s, it would be brought to you even when you were looking for something else.[7]

But beyond these shifts in the landscape of moral imagination, the advent of social media caused a certain democratization of theory to appear: that is, one could find beliefs being articulated, with varying degrees of polish and persuasion, which were not part of the “mainstream” opinion. In effect, social media gave every user his own broadcast channel. Just as one no longer had to go looking for pornography, so too one no longer had to go looking for conspiracy theories or alternative histories. While freedom of speech or expression was no novel concept, never before had the means to broadcast one’s thought been so readily available and easily mastered. This element of the environmental change in particular has had many deep effects on education—including, as one consequence that ought to be very clear with a moment’s reflection, that it undermined the authority of the university (and all other educational institutions) and, simultaneously, confidence in the very notion of truth as “objective”.[8]

1.2. Later Networked Digital Evolution

In 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone: and the internet rapidly transformed from something to which one connected himself to something itself connecting everyone. The magnitude of this element of environmental change and its consequences are difficult to overstate. By virtually attaching us all to one another at our fingertips, the social networking aspect of the internet became the predominant use of it—indeed, the social element has pervaded nearly everything digital. In the years following the advent of the iPhone, connectivity infrastructure increased exponentially: with not only the integration of Wi-Fi and mobile networks, but the move to cloud computing, real-time data mining, and the processing of input and output through increasingly complex algorithms. In 2013, when Edward Snowden exposed the extent of government surveillance, there was considerable outcry—but it seemed already then that the whole world had been infected with a digital parasite it could not extract. The continued consolidation of various platforms and services under the growing umbrellas of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others, led to the continued increase of algorithmic mediation of content and communication. On the one hand, this insertion of a mediating filter was necessitated for the companies by the sheer volume of content produced, much of which simply becomes “noise” that users do not care to see; continued saturation of their platforms with noise would assuredly drive meaningful users away. However, this algorithmic filtration which attempted to prevent the “noise” from obscuring the “signal” reached an obvious point of tension in 2015. This causality requires a little explanation.

An algorithm must adjudicate which content to show or which to hide on measurements that are either simply quantitative (as, for instance, engagement metrics—likes, shares, comments, views, etc.) or somehow qualitative. Simply quantitative algorithms will either promote the most shocking, bombastic, and attention-grabbing narratives, or they will be manipulated by bad actors. Qualitative algorithms, however, can only operate according to developer-input, and principally by a means of quantitatively weighting different semantic patterns. For instance, under a simply qualitative algorithm, an extremely outlandish headline might be very successful: “Patrick Mahomes smokes crack with a baby”, or “Vladimir Putin caught kissing Benjamin Netanyahu”. Contrariwise, a semantically-weighted qualitative algorithm might demote articles that juxtaposed the phrases “Patrick Mahomes” and “smokes crack” or promote one that asserts “U.S. economy in trouble again”.

Prior to 2015, most algorithms operated at least primarily on quantitative metrics—filtering posts that contained certain words, perhaps, or linked to a few sites, but not systematically filtering everything. As the major news cycle proved less efficacious on the political opinions of many in the United States than did the content and commentary of social media and non-traditional outlets—amply demonstrated by the 2016 election—and thus opinions considered more “extreme” became more commonly accepted, social media sites shifted to more rigorously-qualitative algorithmic systems.

From 2017 until today, we have seen no regression of this algorithmic control; rather, we have entered an age of total digital immersion, with even greater quantities of data being produced every day. The deliberate spread of misinformation from not only fringe sources but also the mainstream, increased tribalization and competitive narration, and the willingness to deceive or misinterpret factual demonstrations for the sake of these opposed narratives led to many adopting a so-called “post-truth” attitude. This suspicion of truth, or at least of our ability ever to know it, intensified with the COVID lockdowns, during which the increased dependence upon the digital environment pushed us farther away from events themselves while pulling our attention ever-deeper into the diverse myths of their presentations. The rise of generative LLM technology (so-called “artificial intelligence”—better named “intelligence simulation”) rapidly increases the creative architecture through which divergent and even opposed narratives can be presented. Simultaneously, the advent of 5G wireless communications technology has accelerated the “Internet of Things”, by which more and more devices are connected to the digital grid. The on-going development of 6G aims at a world of total connectivity even for devices that do not have a chip. In other words, the broadcast and interpretation of 6G signals aims at functioning like a highly-sophisticated universal radar.[9] LLM technology, integrated into such a framework, would allow for the connective web established by the smartphone to extend even further—and to immerse even more deeply even those who aim at simpler, less connected modalities of living.[10]

1.3. Hostility to the Real

Thus, the conflict of powers and ideologies today concerns less and less the “content” of the narratives communicated. Instead, the great world powers—countries and corporations alike—struggle for control over the environment of communication itself. While this struggle has been undertaken ever since the development of the printing press, the reach of today’s communication technologies is far broader and accomplished much faster. Thus, through manipulation of algorithms, one foreign power might influence another’s election, rouse a coup, shift attitude on a policy, spread slanderous accusations hard to repudiate, obscure some important happening from the public eye, or simply build a sense of general outrage. The populace, wearied by these fragments, becomes—consciously or not—more and more adherent to ideology not as a mere interpretation of what ought to be, but as the filter through which reality itself is strained. Counter-movements such as minimalism, analog revivals, and radical decentralization (cryptocurrency, web3, urbit) remain inefficacious and ultimately dependent upon the same technological frameworks (even if partially independent by, e.g., unique protocols) and exist within the same environment.

Of course, the digital environment consists not only in the technologies constituting this largely-virtual world, but so too the ways of thinking and behaving of the persons within it. In the first two or even three stages of the internet’s evolution, the patterns of thought were likely not yet changed in any fundamental ways. But just as the university changed when the vision of liberally-educated minds was displaced by knowledge-workers and effective contributors to a technocratic society, so too the internet underwent a change when users became “content creators”. The university student even of today can still find, although vanishing fast, programs in which his mind attains the liberal arts and is set on the path to philosophic wisdom. But even if he takes this rare path, he knows the other avenues are there—and that they are more lucrative. Someone may open social media and simply consume what others have produced; but he knows that he, too, can create videos and write blog posts; that virality and fame (who knows how much or for how long?) are just a few clever words away.

This consciousness signifies a deeper psychological change with respect to the environment we inhabit. Put as simply as possible: we inhabit an environment signifying seemingly infinite possibility in which the distinctions between real and unreal are perceptually obscured to persistent intellectual confusion. To take the example of the “social media influencer” or “content creator”: most of us know that a lot of what we see distorts or outright deceives as to the reality behind the screen. But the perceptual illusion remains persuasive nonetheless. And it is not merely a matter of this or that individual’s curated illusory presentation of some particular life or object. Rather—and this is essential for us to realize—digital technology’s capacities of storage and representation make no discrimination between real and unreal. Consider a few simple demonstrations: filters on photos, music editing software, and the editing of websites. Any photo taken with a modern smartphone can be easily edited, changing contrast, brightness, sharpness, tint; removing blemishes, re-shaping lines, and so on—oftentimes within the native camera apps themselves, to say nothing of more sophisticated programs. The translation of light into pixels occurs by fragmenting the real continuum of difference into homogeneously stored and manipulable data. Similarly, any digitally-encoded music can be “cleaned up” with various editing tools, improving pitch, loudness, even adjusting the timing; a band that might sound terrible live sounds incredible, streamed over the internet. And any website—Wikipedia for a prime example—can be edited ad infinitum. The text that appears on such a page can be altered within seconds, whether changing a single word or rewriting a whole novel.

Again, it must be stressed that inhabiting such an environment not only imperils the particular factual history of human activity but alters our habits of thinking—even when we are not on our devices, and even if we as specific individuals spend relatively little time immersed in digitality, for the habits become societally disseminated. Thus, invariably, the perceptual environment increasingly appears as constituted by ephemeral objects and we collectively lose our sense of intelligible object permanence. And so it is that, although we may retain an abstract belief in “truth” and “good”, the ever-shifting boundaries and subsequent blurring between real and unreal exhibited in the digital environment strip away the images in which these ideas are embodied. “Truth” and “good” become habitually regarded as mere abstractions. These alterations of environment and mind alike render the university—and, indeed, our current understanding of education as a whole—no longer adequate for forming minds in truly human thinking.

2. Maladaptation of the University

The term “maladaptation” describes either the persistence or the development of a trait which does not help a species to survive or thrive in its present environment, but rather causes it harm—if not immediately, then in the long run. When transferred to socially-constituted realities, such as educational institutions, “maladaptation” describes an established custom out of keeping either with the rest of cultural reality or, more fundamentally and destructively, out of keeping with human nature. It should be clear, from the foregoing section of this essay, that there exists some conflict between the current custom of university education and the digital culture. But is it merely a matter of rightly accommodating the first (university) or the second (the digital) to the other?

Put otherwise, though there may have circumstantially been a time at which the university was sufficient for educating in a way concordant with the good of human nature, could it be the case that—given a radical change in the environment within which that nature must today operate—the university no longer fails at its own particular task, but that its particular task is no longer sufficient for providing what the human being needs?

2.1. The Slide into Technocracy

The crisis—or is it perhaps a multitude of crises?—in education identified in the mid-twentieth century concerned principally the accommodation of curricula and standards to the conduct of life in an industrial society. Put otherwise, between the early-twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first, education quickly and progressively shifted from the refining of man to the training of men. Advocacy for such a change did not begin in the twentieth century but had been pushed for hundreds of years. John Locke’s treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (published in 1693) claimed that a great deal of knowledge taught to the youth—such as the Latin language—would never be needed in their daily lives (and thus was mere “trash”).[11] And St. John Henry Newman, in his 1852 lectures published as The Idea of a University, has this to say about the educational utilitarians of his time:[12]

They argue as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction “useful,” and “Utility” becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called “a Liberal Education,” on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind.

But while the nineteenth century had Newman to lay out the ideals genuine to a university education, the twentieth fell under the sway of John Dewey, whose philosophy of education—to risk an oversimplification—subordinated all learning to the solution of social problems.[13] Thus, the question of “how to educate” becomes the problem of how to align individual with communal interests. The most efficacious solution to such a problem is to provide the training which most immediately satisfies the material wants of the individual without disrupting the social machinery.

This “training” itself underwent changes, inevitably given such principles, as Western society’s labor became increasingly postindustrial—specifically moving from the manufacture of products to the management of information. Thus, not only primary and secondary education but so too the institutions of “higher education”—colleges and universities—became increasingly ordered to training for this managerial society. The environment “independent” of education changed and as such the teaching provided by educational institutions, committed to this question of alignment, re-focused accordingly; lower and more highly-specified targets for students’ competence, increasingly, became the aim.[14] In the meantime, a continued tacit recognition for prudence allowed non-technocratic learning to continue—under which learning alone are the conditions for prudence cultivated—albeit in ever-narrowing margins of the university and primarily for those otherwise “socially elite” who could advance their prospects, careers, and fortunes without need for specific training. Today, these margins are becoming razor-thin and avoided even by those possessed of generational wealth.

But these changes, well-documented and rightfully but largely ineffectually challenged by traditionally-minded educators again and again, are not the maladaptation of the university I have here in mind. Though they are indeed adaptations, they are also, no doubt, signs of the university’s failure to adapt appropriately to the environment, even for hitting those lowered aims. Most training for managerial employment—or for functioning professionally within a managerial system—is not effectively accomplished through a university education. Simultaneously, the inefficient education in specialized fields crowds out the general intellectual development most germane to the university environment. Both the individual student and the wider societal structures of our world would be better served by on-the-job training. However, through influences too complex to trace here, the intertwined structures of bureaucracy and credentialism have allowed the university to survive by awarding degrees.[15] These degrees today seldom signify the assessment of professors that their students have attained meaningful knowledge; rather, they signify a willingness and ability to play an arbitrary game disconnected from natural realities, a ticket that one has purchased.

2.2. Social Misalignment

Yet again, this perverse compliance with an artificial, arbitrary game is not the maladaptation I have in mind—though it, too, is a sign or symptom of that maladaptation. Not too long ago, the professor was a respected member of society, not merely for his own credentials but for the knowledge and ability he possessed, as teacher and/or researcher, as part of a knowledge-class responsible for the intellectual well-being of society. Regardless of his specialty, he was expected to have something of a liberal mind: inexpert in Plato and Shakespeare, perhaps, if his field was chemistry—but familiar with their works and the outlines of their thought. Perhaps not a master of Greek and Latin, if a teacher of physics, but competent at expressing himself at least in English. Conversely, the professor of philosophy or literature may not have understood precisely the calculations used by the physicist, or the experiments run by the chemist, but they were appreciated as the works of his colleagues and upheld as a matter of interest nonetheless. Together, they worked to form their students’ minds in arts of reasoning and sciences of understanding. Through not only their individual expertise but also their collective assessment, the education provided students a path to a genuine liberality of thought. But again, in a history too complex to trace, the college became fragmented; the university ceased to be unified. Though there always were tensions among faculty—both within departments and between departments—these tensions were a healthy part of the intellectual atmosphere. At some point, however, professors ceased to maintain those tensions; they slackened, atrophied, decayed. The professor withdrew: first into his own department, then into himself; increasingly siloed in working a job at the college, rather than being a colleague. Thus he became a facilitator of the technocratic, bureaucratic system. Resolute, perhaps, on continuing to uphold the dignity of his task—but the unjustly condemned prisoner lives behind bars no matter how straight he keeps his spine.

Still, this fragmented technocratic gulag is not the maladaptation I have in mind, clear sign though it is of a gravely-ill entity. Many might, in seeing these symptoms of the university’s ailing condition—its marginalization of liberal learning, its subservience to technocracy, its replacement of knowledge and love of wisdom with information and efficiency of training—respond by insisting that the treatment is, simply, to reverse course. “Let us restore a core curriculum! Let us eliminate the professional training programs! Let us cease to train managers and return to educating the best minds in the highest things!” It is a romantic, idealistic, and utterly impractical dream. But not only does this dreamy-eyed longing for a bygone intellectual institute wear blinders to the reality of today’s university; it is itself a symptom of the ailment that produced the current conditions in the first place. Treating the symptoms of a disease undiagnosed has perhaps, at times, alleviated our suffering. But, doing nothing to cut out the root cause of rot, it has allowed the disease to spread and worsen.

We know the purpose of education. It is not to train individuals for work in the world; it is not to align the interests of individual and community. It is to enable students to flourish, to grow in virtues of the intellect—especially knowledge—and thereby to bring good into the world wherever they go.[16] Truly well-educated students are not instruments of society; they and their minds especially are the fundaments upon which a healthy society is built and through which the nature of that society is determined.

But the relations constituting society, unlike those between the parts of a building, are fluid. They change not only year after year, month by month, but by weeks, days, sometimes even hours. Though they take many particular forms, these societal relations are all in principle communicative (and we may even say linguistic or postlinguistic—but that is another difficult issue that would take us in a different direction). Thus, as the means for communication change, so too do our societal relations. We need not repeat the histories of how societal changes followed in the wake of the printing press, the newspaper, the telegraph, the telephone, the television—or the internet, a change so swift and profound we have only the slightest clue of what it has done to the fundaments of society. And yet, somehow, amidst the rapidly unfolding changes in communication technology, we have insisted upon maintaining the same patterns, structures, and institutions of education, as though they had been simply perfect—as though simply perfect education could ever exist.

2.3. Failures Internal and External

Yet the paideia of antiquity, Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, the Roman schools of oratory; the cathedral school, the Scholastic university; the private schools of the Renaissance; the Enlightenment university, the great research institutes of the twentieth-century—none of these have ever been perfect, neither in their methods or curricula nor in their adaptation to the conditions of intellectual life. Aiming at such perfection, arguably, makes one’s institute an enemy of the good. What each had in common (at least in part with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but undoubtedly in the earlier institutions) was a sense of continuity between the life of learning and the world outside one’s school. Education was not a phase of one’s life but a habit of being. This sense of continuity and the habit of education has most certainly been lost from all but the rarest of institutions—and even there, we find often a fractured sense of that continuity. In other words, though they desire continuity they encounter discontinuity, and thereby develop a sense of the school contra mundum.

One can see the erosion of continuity throughout the twentieth century. The increase of geographical and social mobility—the ability to travel great distances with relative ease, for relatively universalized costs and standards of living, the transferability of trained skills, the de-emphasizing of family—allowed life to be normatively divided into a building-block conception of time and place, and subsequently of the self. Education, as one such modular building block, might therefore prepare one for the next phase of life; but it does not continue in virtue or practice. That is, one might continue to be trained; but the exposure to liberal learning of a genuine kind, even of the marginalized sort still extant today, has lost its vitality. It has been relegated to a “piece” of the educational puzzle, rather than the guiding principle of the mind’s development.

To state the point succinctly: the adaptations made by higher education to accommodate the changes reshaping the world over at least the past century, consequent to technology, betrayed the fundamental purpose of higher education. To survive in this environment, higher education abandoned pursuit of the end to which it is ordered by nature. But this survival tactic proves itself short-sighted. The expansion of the university in its reform to a universal training program for a managerial society results in an institution not only disproportioned within itself,[17] but serving a population rapidly becoming insufficient to sustain the bloat.[18] Sadly, rather than recognize the root causes of their structural problems, most institutions are doubling-down on the technocratic training track and “trimming” their budgets by lopping off studies in the humanities—especially the traditional disciplines of philosophy and classics.

One can, again, cry out against this temporally-provincial small-mindedness that we must simply “go back!” that we must “return!”—but this will be to no effect. For it is not simply a matter of dismantling the technocracy, the world-wide-bureaucracy, the (post)industrial-capitalistic complex, of re-shaping communities, and markets, and the workplace. No, even all that would not be enough to “go back”. It is not enough to ban smartphones and laptops in the classroom. One can and should ban them, indeed—but it is not enough. One would instead have to destroy the smartphone, the laptop, the desktop, the television, the tablet, to erase the internet as a whole, not just from the classroom but across the whole world. Even less likely to succeed, one could attempt to regulate every usage of such technology that has led us to the conditions in which we find ourselves today. For it is not simply the intrusion of this technology upon the classroom, upon the university, which has made it so difficult to provide a real education. It is that this technology, and those technologies upon which it has been built, in fact structure the rest of the world, including our own minds, our own way of living. We are caught up in the technological web, and the only way out of it completely and quickly requires chopping off our own limbs. Some very few might choose that path; but you will not convince anywhere near the majority to give up their comfortable environments.

Most unfortunately, and most damningly for the reform of higher education, the environment produced by this technological environment as it exists today is persistently and actively corrosive to the virtues of an educated mind.

Or to put this otherwise: it is no longer enough to raise up a child in the right way. Teach him grammar, logic, rhetoric; form his moral imagination with good literature, stories rich with virtue; send him off to the rare college still extant where he may study and truly learn the deeper things. He will live better, no doubt, than someone deprived of such an education. But he too will find himself immersed in a blurring confusion of real and unreal, not only through the digitally-connected devices inevitably he will have to use to navigate society but also among his peers, colleagues, friends, and loved ones, who themselves are less likely to all be the beneficiaries of such an education, for the conditions of the world make it increasingly impossible to provide. The extraordinary individual might endure such circumstances and maintain the virtues of his mind… but his, we must acknowledge, will often be a lonely existence.

Thus it is that the university today—built entirely around the premise of a time-constrained track to credentialed approval—stands ill-adapted to the digital environment which demands a revolution in how we hold ourselves towards the habits of thinking. Already and now for quite some time it has struggled to provide the opportunity for developing genuine intellectual virtue. Not only will this decline continue at an accelerated pace, but even a stasis or improvement of the university in its current structure would prove insufficient for accommodating the needs of the human being in its present environment. Consequently, if we are to preserve the opportunities for genuine intellectual virtue, a rather radical and rapid evolution would seem necessary.

3. Evolution of Higher Education

The theory of evolutionary biology holds speciation to happen in either of two ways. First, there may be anagenesis, in which the accumulation of genetic alterations, over time, results in a development of an organism sufficiently distinct from the original form to qualify as a new species. In anagenetic evolution, there may be earlier and later stages, but fundamentally the species’ lineage remains the same. Second, there may be cladogenesis, in which differing responses to the environment (or differing environments) result in a split of the singular species into two or more, with better and worse adaptations to the environment. The better-suited branch tends to overtake and crowd out their weaker, less well-adapted kin over time.

Whether the university—being a socially-constituted reality and therefore not beholden to a genetically-determined origin of its existence but essentially a product of language—will prove capable of anagenetic adaptation suitable for survival remains to be seen. I could be wrong. It may be that the university adapts not only for survival, but even to once again thrive. It could be that leaders with vision and ability take over, finding ways to restore a proper sense of education’s purpose, to implement a curriculum which instills habits of intellectual virtue, to reduce administrative bloat, to extricate themselves from the technocracy, to save themselves from the demographic cliff, to promote and retain faculty capable of teaching the things that matter, to rebuild collegiality. As detailed in the previous section in this essay, however, the current structure fundamentally resists adaptation to the current environment. Because it is a socially-constituted reality, one might think the educational institution relatively easily reformed. One needs only to make the right choices. But the number of choices that need to be made by the number of people is far greater than might be realized. It is constituted by stipulations, by choices and linguistic proclamations—but these become customs, and those customs are woven into the far greater fabric of society as a whole. Affecting the adaptation required today does not require merely the restoration of some previous paradigm. Thus, though I could be wrong, I believe quite firmly that only by a radical restructuring can the university, as an institution which provides a path to properly human intellectual virtue, survive the coming years.

But even if the university does manage to restructure, this will not crowd out the development of new branches for higher education, which branches may yet be the better adapted to our environment. Indeed: the unchallenged hegemony of the modern university structure has always been something of an artificial anomaly—a gated community where wealth and reputation provide the appearance of intellectual superiority. But is the activity of learning itself so limited that its only legitimate forms of life can (or ought to) be confined within so narrowly-circumscribed garden path? The growth of thought, perhaps, should not be left entirely untamed and free to sprout wildly wherever and however it might; but neither should it be restricted to rigidly manicured hedgerows.

Thinking, instead—now as always, but now especially—needs a genuine freedom. Most institutions in our late-modern decline proclaiming themselves defenders of the “freedom of thought” do not seem, in fact, to know what such a freedom is; for they hardly conceive of thought, but regard it only from the dim vantage point of having exercised themselves at some measure of thinking, and thus cannot really conceive what it means for thought to be free. That is: thought, like any living thing, does not grow freely if it has no source of nourishment, no ground in which to root. Thought can be free only if it has principles that allow it to grow freely. Thinking does not come into being ex nihilo and the mere absence of restraint is no better than its excess. Any genuine freedom of thinking must be freedom for thinking to be what thinking is. Thus, we must understand what it means for a human being to think and implement the practices by which thinking is done well.

Because our educational institutions do not have natures in the same way as do plants or animals, they cannot “evolve” themselves; rather, they must be shaped and re-shaped by human beings. The mistaken structures of our current institutions, it seems to me, result from these institutions being shaped contrary to the good of being human. Put otherwise, they have neither implemented the practices by which thinking is done well nor understood truly what it means to think. This failure does not mean that the universities (and other similar institutions) have failed in all ways, at all things; it is very difficult to be completely wrong, after all. But it does mean that we need to branch off in a different direction if we wish to “evolve” our institutions in a way suitable to genuine education, especially in the environment of the twenty-first century.

3.1. Unseen Barriers

In the first half of the twentieth century, two rather different philosophically-minded thinkers—Étienne Gilson and Martin Heidegger—shared a certain insight in common: namely, that the Western world had largely lapsed into philosophical idealism as the default position. This position, that we know ideas directly and the “real world” only as pictured in these ideas, still occupies a privileged place in the minds of many today, even if only unconsciously.[19] Both men saw in this default presupposition of the idealistic position a problem: namely, that, because it was the default, idealism established the terms of the debate—and thus, any argument carried out within this structure naturally favors idealism as the only answer to the question of “how” and “what” we know. Put otherwise, if we take for granted that the idea “in our minds” is what we know, we can never get outside of idealism—regardless of how we argue for that idea being formed in the first place.[20]

The situation today concerning education and our presupposition of its necessary or inevitable structure exhibits an analogous presupposition to that of idealism. Education’s terms have for long been established by a belief in credentialism; such that the sign of “being educated” is one’s collection of credentials. A “highly-educated woman” is one who has many degrees, certificates, and accomplishments achieved within the academy and its approved institutions. “He didn’t finish his education”, we say of the one who withdraws from a degree. Of course, neither idealism nor credentialism have agency; rather, they are themselves ideas that determine actions stemming from the purchase they hold in the minds that have accepted them. Idealism does naught without idealists, and credentialism requires institutions of credentialing. And so long as we continue to pursue credentials as an end of education, we are confined by the often-hidden barriers of the credentialing complex—and the roots of thought, as a consequence, are constrained to narrow channels limiting their ability to adapt and expand.

These unseen barriers exist not merely within the university, but come to hold in our own minds as well. Indeed, since the university itself exists only by virtue of our minds, anything we come to believe about it is something that exists in our minds necessarily. But as the university declines, and studies in the humanities—especially graduate studies—find themselves being squeezed out, the professors and other defenders of credential education find themselves in a panic. Who will safeguard knowledge, wisdom, the teaching of truth? (Is this what our universities have been doing?) For at least some decades, it seems to me, the university as an institution has not been the protector of any true education—which has been preserved solely by the efforts of a dwindling minority of professors, only. We must instead distinguish between the words that people speak and the practice they uphold. I think here of words over a century old, penned by Charles Sanders Peirce—himself an outcast from the academy for his own unorthodox behaviors and views, despite his generational brilliance:[21]

Many people do not so much as know what the love of truth is, but confound it with a love of dogma, where this word is used for whatever statements there may be assent to which on their parts has been inculcated either before they could really apprehend their meaning,—even if they have any meaning, or at any rate in a way that could afford no reasonable assurance of their truth. Such people wear an armor almost impenetrable by any correct notion of the love of truth, or even of truth itself, while the inculcated formulae themselves, whether catholic, or calvinistic, or spiritualistic, or “christian-scientistic”, or pseudo-pragmatistics, or “positivistic”, or homeopathic, or what not, are almost always of a nature to undermine and wreck the reason that is natural to man but which their victims have been taught to regard as not merely fallible but thoroughly evil.

The ideological formulae which prohibit the function of reason—which formulae become ideological not strictly through the words of their own constitution but rather the unquestioning and unreasoning manner in which they are adopted—change over time. They may signify an adherence to a particular religious creed or to maxims of atheism, to fideistic dogmas or to scientistic worship.

Today we see in our universities often the atheistic and scientistic, perhaps even the Marxist or the “anti-fascist”, the unquestioning unthinking hatred of religion and tradition, an ideological slant denied only by the most obtuse or dishonest. We should be troubled by this slant, no doubt. But note as well the unthinking dogmatic acceptance that those dogmatically-captured institutions are themselves the only means for providing what we call an “education”.

3.2. Recovering the Roots of Thinking

Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu—nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.[22] Reasoning, as an activity of the intellect, cannot but arise from sensation, or what we might call sense-perception. Every thought we have has some origin in and relation back to the phenomena of sense. This sensory basis of our cognition does not entail, however, that every thought must be of objects strictly contained in the sensible as such. Rather, what we discover in sense-perception are realities signified by those sensory objects but not reducible to them. I will return to this point of how the sensible signifies the non-sensible in a moment.

But first, let me note that—as discussed in the first section of this essay—today’s perceptual environment finds itself blurred between objects real and unreal; for the contemporary perceptual environment increasingly finds itself mediated and determined by the use of digital technology. Confusion about the nature of perception and its role in human cognition proves therefore particularly dangerous. Such an environment leads easily into confusion not only of a perceptual but an intellectual nature as well—we are inhibited both from correctly discovering and from judging the intelligible realities of our world. In a vicious circle, an especially pernicious contributor to the contemporary confusion stems from one such error of judgment about the intelligible reality of ourselves: namely, the belief that the human person is his or her brain—that the psychological identity of the individual is reducible to the structure and patterns of the neurological. I have named this belief “neuroreductivism” for short.

Such neuroreductivism extends the aforementioned idealism noted by Gilson and Heidegger in a strangely materialist turn. Under this belief, ideas are not regarded as immaterial or spiritual occurrences in a mind separate in principle from the body, but rather as diverse configurations of our neurologically-ordered gray matter. Yet these materially-constituted “ideas” are still constrained to being “inside” one’s “mind”, even as “mind” is reduced to that neurological configuration. Accepting this belief as a principle for understanding the self has led many individuals to jettison responsibility for their own actions and behaviors. “That’s just the way my brain is”, or “He is mentally ill”,[23] we hear offered as an exculpation for one or another fault or failure, intellectual and moral alike, from extreme acts of violence to mundane acts of irresponsibility. Thus this neuroreductivism becomes an excuse not to think; we simply accept ourselves as neurological machines, and therefore excuse ourselves from having to work out the meaning of any objects we experience. Because we are thinking things, we do continue to think about the objects we perceive nonetheless. But possessed by these presuppositions, we think about those objects primarily (if not exclusively) only insofar as they are useful or pleasurable. We do not think about what the objects are, in themselves—merely what they are to us, and, therefore, close off consideration of what they really ought to be, or how they should be used, or what pleasure is right to take in them.

Despite the prevalence of these presuppositions today, neither perception nor thinking do in fact occur within our brains, even though our brains are necessary for perception and thinking to occur. Rather, those occurrences that do happen within the brain are signs of the things perceived or thought. Even though the brain may signal that something unpleasant afflicts the foot, we do not say that pain is in the brain, and we do not start rubbing our heads to get rid of a stomachache. We might have confusions in the signaling—such that we think something external causes a pain, or a pain is referred from one part of the body to another—but this is a certain malfunction within the body.

We need, in other words, a correct habituation of our perceptual faculties to think clearly. This habituation of our faculties is not mechanically accomplished. It exists inseparably from conceptual thought and conscious intention. In other words, even though we may do a lot of thinking that occurs at the perceptual level—interpreting and navigating the phenomena that appear to our senses, that is—these operations do not occur in isolation from our higher conceptual thinking. The two are entangled. The things we perceive affect and are affected by the things we think. When our perceptual environment confuses and conflates and blurs the real and the unreal, fact and fiction, we cannot think rightly; and those misconstrued thoughts can bend back confusedly to the perceptual environment, making it more difficult to see what is there before us for what it really is. Our educational environments need to recognize and adapt to this entanglement—and to the grave possibility of its perversion today, at the risk of thought’s widespread ruin. We, if wishing to educate for the true good, should not attempt to separate the two and treat them separately, in other words, but discover the fitting and natural harmony of intellect and sense-perception.

This harmony is not, however, symmetrical or of equal parts. Though the perceptual dominates our lives quantitatively, the intellect is stronger qualitatively. Perceptual cognition proves quite limited in its scope when contrasted with the conceptual. The clearest sign of this contrast can be found in the most distinctive aspect of human—as opposed to non-human animal—communication: namely, that ours is structured through language, whereas no non-human animal has anything more than speech. We cannot here fully demonstrate the significance of this difference: suffice it only to say, here, that human communication recognizes the difference between signs and signifieds in a way that no other animal accomplishes. This difference brings our distinctive intellectual cognition to bear upon all that we do.[24]

But if we do not recognize the nature of this difference, nor understand with greater clarity what it is our language does through our use of it—or how its use structures our environments, especially the digital environment—invariably we misuse that language. Subsequent to that linguistic misuse, we also misconstrue our environments, both in developing them and in interpreting them. Thus, we find the digital environment in particular to favor today a continued confusion of our perceptual thinking. We have gained a certain expertise in designing digital applications and ecosystems of attention, in which different patterns of attraction exercise a continual pull on their users. This expertise in design plays upon a particular fragility of human thinking: an attraction to that which seems novel, as that in which an easy satisfaction can be obtained at little cost. We therefore find ourselves all-too-frequently in an environment of rapid change: continual bombardment with new news, new media, new iterations and variations as we scroll through social media timelines and content recommendations algorithmically-produced alike. We can hardly keep up, intellectually. The speed at which this environment changes its appearances results in a shallowing of language; that is, language becomes swept up into functioning as an image (e.g., “based”, “cringe”, “liberal”, “conservative”—even countries and persons, as “Israel”, “Ukraine”, “Gaza”, “Trump”, “Putin”, etc.), losing any semantic depth, any richness to the objects conveyed.[25] This rapidity through present uses of the digital erode our semantic depth prove inimical not only to language, but also to the good formation of memorative habits, as the speed with which the new overtakes the old disrupts both the possibility for repetition and the kind of focus by which language can attach to durable meaning.

But—even the most confused perceptual environment remains permeated by intelligibilities resonant with the essential nature of linguistic signification, if only their proper nature can be discerned. Thus, even where and when we cannot say what will prove to be fabricated or factual, even if we cannot distinguish the exaggerations or obfuscations of the screen from the reality behind it, we may nevertheless continue to think about what is being said, and how it is said. Even the images properly speaking that dominate our environment today are possessed of a structure that can be linguistically regarded, understood, and questioned.

Thus, an education which brings this awareness of language, and of how to think through language about the environments in which we live, alone will prove capable of allowing humanity to endure its present digital blur.

3.3. Breathing in the Air of Inquiry

Put otherwise, the digital may not distinguish between factual and fictitious representation; but language cannot keep from distinguishing between true and false, even in only the most implicit and vaguely-conscious judgments. Unfortunately, this inevitability of judgment can itself be poorly habituated—and long has it, in the United States of America. In consequence of such neglect, an unthinking attitude towards the true and the false results in their attachment to perceptual phenomena—often resulting in an ideological bent towards thinking; even, at extremes increasingly common, fanaticism. Put otherwise, though we as linguistic animals cannot but insist upon certain things being true or false, if we are poorly trained in making such distinctions and applying them to the world of perception, we tend to become unthinkingly insistent upon the errors we inevitably make.

This unthinking attitude germinates in the narrow corridors of today’s educational institutions. Countless words have been written on how K-12 education has done much to stifle natural human inquisitiveness. But so too, many universities today—themselves ordered in the narrow paths of credentialing for careerism—allow questioning only under the imposition of artificial constraints. Too little and too few are the opportunities to breathe deeply in an environment of inquiry. Such air alone brings vitality to the life of the mind, nourishing those roots set down through perception. Today, the vast majority of the United States—if not the whole of the Western world—has never known its thought nourished by such clear, clean air.

But even those few who do experience such rarefied atmospheres experience them for too short a time, in a way of living quite disconnected from “normality”—that is, they have such an experience only in the narrow halls of the last vestiges of true academia. If a student wishes to continue breathing that air, he must become a member of such a rare academy himself, perpetuating the disconnect from the world outside. But if, like most students, he departs the academy after four years, he will find himself then thrust back into the clouded worlds of perceptual confusion and thinking suffocates under the corrosive miasma—a miasma which must note which pervades the halls of most universities today, as it is. Only by heroic effort can a pipeline to clear thinking be kept.

The point, of course, is not merely to grouse about the conditions, but to see in them the opportunities. Human beings, if we can but free ourselves from the conceptual shackles by which we confine ourselves to “accepted” paths, have a remarkable ability for innovation.

And today, despite the gross abuses rendered through it, digital technology does indeed provide an incredible opportunity to live in an intellectually-rich environment, wherein inquiry can be not a mere pastime of the wealthy or idle but a habit for daily living. We have in our hands the speed at last to slow down—and think. We need not do this alone, as mere consumers of content, but may discover and engage communities of like-minded inquirers, of those who want to order their lives not by ideological reaction or under the intoxication of ever-changing perceptual distractions, but by a coherent collation of the truth. And we can accomplish this by bringing language back to the center of our education; not as a mere necessity of societal functioning, but as the very essence of what makes us human.

Put otherwise, the perceptual environment needs to be brought into the light of intelligence; we need to shape our habits of perception in accordance with the reality with which language resonates.

4. Epilogue: Building New Institutions

I wrote these words, of course, as the founder of an institution attempting to do just this. I am—thankfully—not the only one in the world making such an effort. I am beyond fortunate to have found nearly a dozen a faculty willing to aid the Lyceum’s specific purpose and to help build it as an alternative institution. So too, I am fortunate to know good people fighting to realize similar aims with the Albertus Magnus Institute and the Catherine Project. We may differ on many points of philosophy and pedagogy—but we agree in what perhaps is the main point of dispute in the world today: the importance of truth.

So too, I know many an independent academic—rejected by the academy, or having spurned what it has become—who strive nonetheless to put their talents and gifts to fruitful venture. Together, in these pursuits, we can break learning out of its artificial modern constraints. We can build something better.

But building something better—building anything at all that is good, stable, truly worth building—is not an easy task, especially when that something is most-needed. And make no mistake: the world today needs the Lyceum Institute. I wish it did not. I wish that I could have received my doctoral degree and taken up a position teaching, research, and writing. The university fails to adapt properly. New branches of educational institute are needed. These branches must see the reality of the world in which we live and dispose themselves rightly to continue on the mission of true education. If I must give up my dreams of reading and writing as I would prefer to make that happen—or to at least make the effort—then I must.

At the center of the effort for any new institution must be a proper understanding of the human person. Such understanding has long been lost. It is for this reason we put the personal relationship of community so central in the Lyceum’s praxis. The thinking exhibited in words must be restored to a sense of the person—not to abstract ideas, but to the living human being. It is thus that we can best re-unite intellectual understanding and perception. Through such a unified cognitive vision, we see the proper scale, structure, and size of our institutions—and thus we can build a society that again allows the human mind to thrive.

Thank you for reading. If you support the work of the Lyceum Institute, donate to our Endowment Fund and help us build the future of education.

[1] Walter Moberly published a text in 1949 titled The Crisis in the University; Hannah Arendt penned an essay in 1954 titled “Crisis in Education”. Both bemoaned the movement away from the mores of traditional conveyance—of the fostering habits of liberal mind apart. Moberly undertook an explicitly Christian perspective, however, while Arendt suggested a kind of “value neutral” approach to early childhood education.

[2] More generally, the term identifies “a separating, power of distinguishing; choice, selection; decision or judgment”—from the verb κρίνω.

[3] Such as the Snowdon lily, the Tasmanian tiger, various species of shrew, Ginkgo biloba, and many others—including, it has been hypothesized, the Neanderthal.

[4] Thus it is considered what John Deely (1982: Introducing Semiotic) termed “post-linguistic reality”: entities which may not be constituted solely out of language but which would not exist or function as they do absence the web of linguistic communication. Cf. Deely 1994: The Human Use of Signs and 2015: Logic as a Liberal Art for more detailed discussions.

[5] Pivotal here are notions in semiotics, particularly those found in John Poinsot’s 1632: Tractatus De Signis, book two, q.5-6 [R.I: 715a22–722a37] and the various works of Charles Sanders Peirce, particularly that found in his notion of symbols and their growth. Cf. Kemple 2019: The Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology, 260-74 for a more detailed discussion on this latter point.

[6] So too do non-human animals, but we will not get into that here!

[7] I can distinctly recall, for instance, encountering highly sexualized images attached to links for pornographic websites on gaming forums.

[8] In itself, the phrase “objective truth” is a gross abuse of language—cf. Deely 2009: Purely Objective Reality, 8-15.

[9] See the white-paper from Ericsson linked here or the more accessible news story from telecom.com.

[10] In his 2012 history of digital development, Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson writes: “The [computational] arms race being fought in the basement of Fuld (and now Bloomberg) Hall [the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University] will never be decided in favor of the completely deterministic over the probabilistic and incomplete. The wilderness, even if only a digital wilderness, will always win. There are codes, and machines, that can do almost anything that can be given an exact description, but it will never be possible to determine, simply by looking at a code, what that code will do. No firewall that admits even simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. The digital universe will always leave room for more mysteries than even Robert Frost could dream of. The twilight zone remains.” I believe this statement’s truth has been borne out in the ensuring thirteen years—but also, this has not stopped efforts to create avenues of determinate digital control. If anything, the growing wilderness has inspired ever more-maniacal efforts to subdue dissent.

[11] 1893: Some Thoughts Concerning Education in The Works of John Locke (1824), vol.8: 6–205.

[12] 1852: The Idea of a University, Discourse VII, §2, p.110.

[13] Most thoroughly detailed in his 1916: Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education.

[14] There is a certain irony in that Dewey himself identifies (ibid, 266) “narrow specialization” as being “fatal to the very idea of education.”

[15] In the background, as well, is the extremely high degree of social and geographical mobility in an intensely individualistic society, wherein witness testimony to another’s character or ability have for decades been unfeasible as a means of verifying an applicant’s capabilities. There may be a possible way out of this through digital technology—but this requires the re-establishment of “local” (i.e., properly scaled) communities.

[16] Put otherwise: Dewey’s position is causally backwards.

[17] See this 2023 report from Paul Weinstein Jr. of the Progressive Policy Institute, including statistics of the ratio between faculty, non-faculty employees, and students; or his article simultaneously published in Forbes.

[18] See this 2021 article by Bryan C. Harvey or this 2024 report from Liam Knox at InsideHigherEd.com.

[19] Heidegger 1927: Sein und Zeit, 207 (in the English translation by Macquarrie and Robinson, 251): “As compared with realism, idealism, no matter how contrary and untenable it may be in its results, has an advantage in principle, provided that it does not misunderstand itself as ‘psychological’ idealism. If idealism emphasizes that Being and Reality are only ‘in the consciousness’, this expresses an understanding of the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities.” Gilson 1935: Le réalisme méthodique, in the English translation by Trower, 93: “Most people who say and think they are idealists would like, if they could, not to be, but believe that is impossible. They are told they will never get outside their thought and that a something beyond thought is unthinkable. If they listen to this objection and look for an answer to it, they are lost from the start, because all idealist objections to the realist position are formulated in idealist terms. So it is hardly surprising that the idealist always wins. His questions invariably imply an idealist solution to problems.”

We can see this privileged presupposed position of idealism in the expressions “according to my mind”, “in my understanding”, “that’s your perception”, “we can’t really know anything but our own ideas”, “we all live in our own little worlds”, “it’s all a matter of perspective”, and countless others.

[20] It is precisely this idealist presupposition that semiotics (broadly understood) in the traditions of Scholasticism, Charles Peirce, and John Deely overcomes by identifying the concept as a formal sign—that is, something which does not first need to be grasped as a terminal object at which our thinking stops (or which is itself somehow cognized as an object) but rather a that-through-which our minds are directed towards the objects that they make known. Cf. Kemple 2025: “The Doctrine of Signs in John Poinsot”, Studia Poinsotiana, 78-83 for a more detailed yet succinct discussion.

[21] Peirce 1910: “The Art of Reasoning Elucidated” R678, in Logic of the Future, vol.1, 152.

[22] This particular formulation is found in Peirce 1903: “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction”, EP.2: 226, but it has its origins in Aristotle (cf. c.348-47bc: Posterior Analytics, II.19, 100a-b; i.348-30bc: Metaphysics, I.1) and is a common maxim of the scholastics (e.g., Thomas Aquinas 1256-69: De veritate, q.26, a.6, ad. s.c. 2; 1259/65: SCG, lib.2, c.73-78; 1266-68: ST Ia, q.79, 84, 85, 86 but esp. q.84, a.6; so too Duns Scotus c.1300-02: Ordinatio, lib.1, d.3, q.3, and many other thinkers too).

[23] The point here is not to downplay mental illness, but rather, as quite frequently is the case, to note that psychotic breaks with reality do not necessarily excuse the ill from the behaviors that led to his illness, nor to every action committed while suffering from it.

[24] There are a great many texts which have attempted to demonstrate this. For some examples, see Deacon 1997: The Symbolic Species; Taylor 2016: The Language Animal, the works of Thomas Sebeok, and of John Deely (especially 2002: What Distinguishes Human Understanding?).

[25] Words properly understood in the context of fully-linguistic signification, that is, function as symbols—rendered fully meaningful by a context of predication and argument—within which there are comprised potential infinitudes of meaning. In the reduction to merely “iconic” (i.e., simply images) signifiers, stimulating one to an emotive rather than an intellectual reaction, this symbolic wealth is all-but-entirely impoverished.

Yesterday, we engaged in a nearly 2-hour conversation concerning beauty. A few highlights, conclusions, and elaborations:

1. Beauty is necessarily encountered first through the senses. It is also, in our experience as human, always connected somehow to a sensory experience, even if the object greatly exceeds what sense alone can provide. Mathematics, for instance, provides an object primarily removed from sensation but which finds or demands completion in some one or another symbolic representation.

2. The experiencing of beauty proceeds through a drawing-out-towards completeness. There is a twofold kind of “drawing” which occurs in the beautiful. First, this is of the person experiencing it into the object of beauty. Literally, this is a seduction, a se (itself) ducere (leading into). Second, this is of the relation accomplished between observer and object. We see this drawing out of the person in the attraction to the object, the captivation or fascination by it. We see the relation accomplished inasmuch as the person comes to know the object, and to see in it more than the object itself possesses. This is why the beautiful work of art or nature has an inexhaustibility to it: it affects the opportunity for truths to be realized which in some sense remain only virtual; opportunities beyond the intention even of the artist in creating it.

3. Intellectual understanding is often necessary to appreciate beauty. As an example, moves or plays in games or sports—precisely as actions within those games or sports—require an understanding of the rules to be fully appreciated. That is, we might admire the physical competence without knowledge of the sport, but to appreciate a performance, we must know something of the rules by which it was constrained and within which bounds it was accomplished. So too, paintings may be beautiful simply by their color and composition, but an ability to “read” the painting will, generally speaking, greatly enhance one’s ability to perceive the beauty therein.

3. The object experienced as beautiful is always beheld, never possessed. This can be seen in the way we use the predicative adjective, “beautiful” of sensed objects: they are seen, heard, perhaps at times smelled, but never touched or tasted. To be seduced, the object must be at some distance from us. Objects of taste and touch may be enjoyed, and they may elicit imagined desires for future sensory experiences that could be called beautiful as imagined; but “beauty” seems always to be at a distance from the one experiencing it.

4. Beauty moves powerfully—and thus can be dangerous. To be beautiful necessitates a certain goodness, but the seductive draw of the beautiful can be away from the good. What has a proportion and a fittingness in itself may elicit a desire that is disproportioned and unfitting in another. For instance, my neighbor’s wife may be beautiful—well proportioned in bodily frame and face—but for admiration of beauty, in this case, to turn into desire for intimacy is most certainly not good. Desiring to possess the beautiful is to conflate it with the good; but the good, properly and rightly discerned, is always perfective of us. Beauty is not.

5. Ugly things may be beautiful, if seen rightly—but this is not “subjective”. If we look at some paintings—say, by Picasso, Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch—we may see things unpleasing to the eye; distorted music may grate against the ear. And yet, rightly-arrayed ugliness tends to draw our attention in much the same way as the beautiful. The disproportioning may signify to us something beyond the surface of the work. It thus belongs to a greater whole within which it may yet serve a proportionate role. We can see this in fiction and cinema perhaps particularly well.

There is much more to be said about beauty. Two hours proves a surprisingly short time. Perhaps we will revisit the topic again in the future, with a more focused point of discussion.

1. AI must remain subordinate to human judgment, not replace it

In practice, this means AI should be used as an aid to deliberation or analysis, never as the final arbiter in domains requiring prudence—education, hiring, medical decisions, governance, or moral reasoning. Responsibility must remain clearly attributable to persons. Any act of outsourcing properly human judgment to AI constitutes a rejection of humanity and an act hostile to the well-being of the individual, the community to which he or she belongs, and of humankind as a whole.

2. Institutions should preserve non-automated domains of decision-making

The discussions of our seminar consistently stressed that some practices must remain intentionally inefficient: slow reading, deliberative assessment, face-to-face judgment, and discretionary authority. These are not failures of optimization but safeguards for truth, formation, and accountability. It belongs to institutions in possession of authority—and the persons charged with exercising that authority—to maintain environments or domains in which human prudence is cultivated through these practices, and decision-making thereby retain its fundamentally human character.

3. AI use should be limited in formative contexts

Particular caution is required where habits of mind are being formed—especially in education and early professional training. Reliance on AI for thinking, writing, or synthesis risks deforming intellectual habits by substituting output generation for understanding. While someone may use such technologies in a beneficially-stimulative way, such stimulation can be fruitful only to habits already well-formed; otherwise (and even then, if used carelessly), it risks displacing those habits and enervating the human person in the process.

4. Surveillance-driven AI should be treated as a political, not merely technical, issue

Because AI depends on large-scale data extraction, its deployment implicates citizenship, privacy, and power. The practical implication is that societies must draw principled limits around behavioral monitoring and predictive governance, rather than treating such systems as neutral efficiency gains. On the one hand, this requires instrumental intervention to prevent the intrusion of universal “datafication”. On the other hand, it requires also the continual cultivation of virtue, as antidote to the deeper root from which technological rationality springs—namely, the will to turn one’s gaze from truth to power.

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“There are not one hundred people in the United States”, once said Fulton Sheen, “who hate the Catholic Church; but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” We may take this claim, I believe, and expand it: not only the Catholic Church, but religious faith in general receives a hatred for being something it is not. For many have come to believe, as wrote Thomas Paine in 1794, that “All national institutions of churches—whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish—appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit”[1] and that “Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals… as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.”[2]

Though Paine’s sentiments may not have been accepted by the commoner of his own time, it is hard to dispute that these resonate with many, today—to the extent, even, that they are tacitly accepted or incorporated into some ostensibly religious teaching. That is, we see in not a few churches (perhaps in some synagogues, perhaps even in some mosques), a kind of religious egalitarianism: the claim that there are many paths to God, different but all potentially salvific—some perhaps less directly, but all with the possibility of arriving at the same end.

This flattening of religious difference into a mere matter of personal convenience (that is, a religion’s fittingness to one’s accidental constitutions of life—time and place of being born, of living, to which parents, in which society, culture, and all the circumstances having shaped one’s own habits of mind) not only presents religious faith as a series of essentially equal options: it makes faith itself appear as one among a number of options. “Belief” is reduced to something internal. “Faith” is its doctrinal form. But the doctrinal form of something purely internal carries no weight in the “objective” world of facts and truths. Thus today—so at least it seems to me—many reject the idea of faith as anything other than a personal preference: it may inform how you choose to live, but it does not, of itself, inform the world. There may not be sufficient reasons to reject faith, but there are also no sufficient reasons to accept this or that faith, or, therefore, to be obedient to the doctrines of any faith.

Or to put this otherwise: one might acknowledge that our world lacks something which religion seems to supply, but that which religion seems to supply does not preclude other possible answers. From this perspective, religious faiths, despite their claims, seem not to be sources of knowledge, but only of a certain moral code. This code may be either wholly arbitrary or partly determined by some observation of nature and nature’s laws, but it is not reducible to nature (else it would not be a religious but only a natural belief) and therefore stands outside reason and the things that reason may judge or evaluate. Does this divide of faith from the reach of reason, then, make religion itself something wholly arbitrary?

From within each religious faith (generally speaking—that is, within at least among the three great monotheistic religions of the world), the doctrines are not viewed as arbitrary, for they are grounded on some revelation: that is, some way in which God has communicated Himself to the world beyond the signs of nature. These revelations are collected by the Jews into the Torah, the Muslims into the Qur’an (and perhaps in some indirect manner, the Hadith, or reported sayings of Mohammed), and the Christians commonly into the Bible, and, specifically in Catholicism, the teaching of the Magisterium. That a religious faith’s doctrine be taken as authoritative resides on the legitimacy of these revelations.

But—so protest those taking a stand against religion—why must anyone take revelation itself as authoritative? Perhaps the person to whom the revelation was made initially; but as Thomas Paine objects, “It is a revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other; and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it”:[3]

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication—after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation to me and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

Notably, Paine, though objecting to the many different particular creeds, was not himself an atheist, but a deist. The idea of a creator God was not one that he opposed—the universe appearing to sense to have an order and therefore it seeming reasonable that there be an orderer. But, it seems to me, the grounds of his objection to revelation, namely that it relies upon the testimony of others and consists in no sensible phenomenon which may be evaluated and put to the test by the individual mind hearing it second-hand, seems also the grounds upon which many a modern atheist rejects even the idea of a creator God.

The purpose of this seminar is not to explore the rationale proposed for atheism or its many objections to God—however God might be conceived—nor to argue against those positions. Nevertheless it is instructive for our purpose (navigating the tensions of faith and reason) to consider why the atheist rejects revelation. Put simply, it is this: there is no reason why these words should not be purely the fabrication of human beings. The author may believe his words divinely inspired or not; he may believe he is recording a message received directly from God, or he may believe he is simply recording historical fact, or telling a story. Thus, that there are conflicts (not to say contradictions) within the texts of the sacred scriptures seems even more so an indication of their inauthenticity as divine—for how could a divine being contradict itself? Why would God make His texts so difficult to understand, if providing guidance for adherents of a specific creed?

Behind these objections, no less than that of Thomas Paine, lies a certain presupposition quite common to the modern mind, though one which might be put in very diverse formulations: that human reason itself is sufficient; that our innate capacities for reason are the measure by which all things are evaluated; that the intelligible coherence of claims to oneself constitutes their rationality and the incoherence of claims to oneself puts them outside of reason; that the human mind is the judge of order, if not the agent responsible for it. Or to put this perhaps another way—anticipating a discussion raised by Strauss in his 1954 “Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy”—that what we know of the whole universe is sufficient to judge the reasonability of any claims about the universe; perhaps not infallibly, but where the faults in our judgment concern particulars within the whole and not the whole itself.

That such a presupposition undermines the very supposed rationality of the anti-religious rationalists should not need much exposition, for it seemingly would put the human mind outside the whole of the cosmos, from which position alone it would seem possible to make judgments concerning that whole. But undoubtedly it is true that pure human reason in its highest form—not the facile reductionistic or scientistic position common today, but rather the truly philosophical spirit of inquiry—does in some sense deal with the whole, with all things and man’s effort to understand them somehow. So, too, does revelation—or faith—or theology—claim in some way, and in fact in a more definitive way, something about the whole. Because of this, tension between the two is inevitable.

Tension, from the Latin tendere, signifies a certain stretch—and implies thereby a struggle or opposition of the two points between which that stretch occurs. We are doubtless all familiar with tension, both in its physical experience and in the metaphorical extension to matters of the psyche. Tension creates stress in all its parts: a tense muscle suffers prolonged contraction from one attachment point to the other; a tense moment between husband and wife may strain not only each spouse but so too the marriage; a tense conversation between political leaders may stretch economic and political relations between their constituents. We often aim, therefore, to avoid tensions; or, suffering them, to find means of bringing them quickly to an end.

Perhaps most commonly, people avoid the pain of tension by simply cutting the tie. This cutting might mean either the rejection of one or another cause of the tension, one “point” or the other; or it might be a kind of segregation or compartmentalization. If the stress is caused by tension between your spouse and a casual acquaintance, “cutting” the two apart may be an easy and good solution; between a spouse and a parent, it seems much more difficult and much less good either to cut one or the other out of your life or to try keeping them entirely separate—for even if this satisfies the two, it strains the self: the claims made on our lives by parents and spouses undoubtedly overlap, and to satisfy both separately seems to require a certain “doubling” of the self.

So too the claims on our lives of philosophy and faith, inasmuch as each concerns the whole—and especially as each makes claims about the good that is sought within that whole. Philosophy subjects all experience to the “tribunal of reason” in its efforts to discriminate good from bad; but faith accepts as true certain claims which, as accepted, stand above or outside of what we can know by reason—and thus, holds to claims which cannot be judged by that tribunal. Christ says to turn the other cheek, to love your enemy; Caesar says to cut off his hands, so as to see even in mercy, an expression of power. Can the non-Christian be convinced by reason that a life of suffering injustice is better than behaving cruelly? Can the Christian rule over the barbarian, constrain his raw violence, without committing violence himself?

Does the “suprarational” character of its source entail that faith and all its many practices which reason could never divulge to us are “unreasonable”? Does this elevation of faith render any reasoning conducted under the auspices of revelation to be a kind of impure reason—an exercise of reason only “in a certain respect”? Is there such a thing as a “Christian reasoning” or a “Christian philosophy”?

Many have denied that faith can inform reason—just as many have denied that reason can discover faith. Contrariwise, others have claimed that while faith provides data to reason from a supernatural source, these data are no less open to rational operation than any other we receive, including that which comes directly from the senses—only that the conclusions we can draw from inquiry into these data differ in some fashion. Yet despite the efforts at times that have been made to sever the tie, to segregate the two, or to subsume one into the other, still the tension remains; and it thus remains for us to ask: why? Come ask this question with us.

[1] Paine 1794: The Age of Reason, 6.

[2] Ibid, 7.

[3] Paine 1794: Age of Reason, 7-8.

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Attacks upon religion, particularly from the Enlightenment onward, remain today common: that it is mere superstition, a smokescreen for autocracy, a system of moral and political control, a cause of civil neglect, an unreasoned prohibition against progress and technological advance, and that it keeps its adherents uneducated, stupid, and backwards.

Although these arguments find their greatest success by ignoring, strawmanning, or otherwise misrepresenting the greater proponents of a coherent relationship between faith and reason—figures like Augustine (c.350–430AD) or Thomas Aquinas (1225–74)—they nevertheless resonate with many. Why?

In short: faith and reason (or, we might say, revelation and philosophy) do, at times it seems, make competing claims about the nature of the human being, the sources of knowledge and morality, and the right way to live. Christ says to be merciful as the Heavenly Father, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies; Caesar says to cut off their hands so they may never again take up arms against you—to use even your mercy as a threat.

Must these two sources—the books of nature and of the divine word—render opposed narratives? Or may they be reconciled, somehow? How do we account for the apparent contradictions or interpretive difficulties in sacred scripture, if it is to be coherent with reason?

To guide a pursuit of these questions, one should read the aforementioned Catholic saints, Augustine and Aquinas; but should consider also the works of the Islamic philosopher, Averroës (or Ibn-Rushd; 1126–98) and the Jewish Rabbi, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), each of whom took up the challenging nature of the relationship between reason and revelation.

Through a careful inquiry of their works, we may discern with greater clarity the precise nature of the question itself. This clarity is needed: for the question itself has today been greatly obscured by presuppositions not only about the nature of faith but also reason.

For those interested in challenging their own understanding of the relation, and in seeking that clarify of questioning, we are offering a seminar on the topic this Spring. Details at this link.

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John Poinsot and Charles Sanders Peirce may be, as Walker Percy once opined (in a letter to Deely), respectively the grandfather and father of semiotics—and indeed, in their works one finds all the most important doctrinal points. Yet it is in Deely that we find this powerful lineage protected from the onslaughts of modernity, and from his works that the tradition of genuine semiotic thinking will come to flourish.

(It is our pleasure to offer again our seminar on the thought and contributions of John Deely to the enterprise of semiotics. Learn more at the link.)

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Read this on the Lyceum’s website [PDF available]

We have for the past few decades, largely unawares and too-little concerned until late, been living under conditions of a rapidly fragmenting sensibility. We relate what we see to what we hear (but smell, taste, and touch very little), and neither what is heard nor what is seen relates to something that is. In truth, the cracks of our sensory world first began with the earliest advent of electric technologies[1] (one might even say with the separation of modern physics from philosophical wisdom); but what began in the nineteenth century with a few spidery veins under the buzzing of electric light spread wide through radio and televisual communication, and what was deepened unseen with the computer, now is being realized in the opening, widening fissures of the networked digital age.

As Marshall McLuhan spent much of his career demonstrating, all communication technologies alter the ratios between not only themselves but also our cognitive faculties.[2] Put otherwise, we tend towards privileging different faculties of cognition depending upon the means by which objects are conveyed to us. In an oral culture—one where we transmit meaning primarily through the spoken word—we are more prevalently aural in our thinking, individually and communally. Conversely, where we privilege the written, we tend towards a more visual orientation of self and society alike. But it is not only our senses which have ratios. Rather, all our cognition—including things like memory or judgment—exist in such a proportion to one another. In the electric age, we find ourselves dealing with many more media of communication—increasing aimed at immersion—(for, arguably, all technologies are at least part of a communicative framework), which communicative innovations of the past two centuries have resulted in these ratios having been altered—nay, distorted—beyond all proportionality.

The technologies today being widely peddled (that is, marketed) as “artificial intelligence”—which, in truth, consist in nothing more than probability mechanisms presenting a simulacrum of human sentience—would be more aptly named “intelligence-simulators.” Despite their oft-overblown capacities, these technologies nevertheless threaten to completely shatter the proportionality of our cognitive faculties. The world always comes into the ambit of our cognitive awareness, from the lowest to the highest of our thinking processes, through external sensation: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch (which lattermost comprises a diverse array of sensorial modalities). Beyond or behind these external senses, there is that faculty which Thomas Aquinas—following the Aristotelian tradition—names the sensus communis. Rendering this Latin term by its English cognate of “common sense” requires extensive qualification that it not be misunderstood. Therefore, I propose to use the English name “integrating sense” for this power, because this integration seems, indeed, to be the objective of the faculty: to take the diverse sensory stimuli and render them into coherent objects upon which the elaborative cognitive faculties of both our interior senses—memory, estimation, imagination--and the intellect may operate. The result of this integration is to terminate the diverse sensorial array at a common point.[3] From this common point, our cognitive faculties—interior senses and intellect alike and together—elaborate the meaning of those phenomena that we have received. And it is precisely here, precisely at this point, that intelligence-simulators may cause a breakdown of our cognitive proportionality.

1. Integrating Sense

Thomas Aquinas discusses the sensus communis briefly in a number of texts: with interesting passages in the two Summae, the Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, Quodlibetal questions, the Sententia Metaphysicae and Sententia Ethicorum, and—of course and at quite some length and depth—in both the Sentenciae de Anima and de Sensu. It is in these latter two texts that one finds not only fascinating insights but interpretative difficulties, particularly as Aristotle’s own explanation of the power relies heavily upon an abstruse metaphor: namely, the relation of a geometric point to lines. Although my purpose in this essay does not include a defense of textual interpretation—though such a defense of course can be made—I do believe it necessary to exposit one point in particular.

We find Aquinas explains this relation of “point” to “line” as a metaphor for the integrating sense in both commentaries on the De anima and the De sensu. In the first, he claims that the relationship between the sensus communis and the particular senses can be understood in two ways: either as it is the one principle of all sensible immutation, or insofar as it is the principle and terminus of each individual sense.[4] The point, as Aristotle says, can be understood as indivisible in itself and yet relationally divisible, inasmuch as the same point is used as the terminus by two different relations: thus, the one and selfsame indivisible sensus communis is the terminus of both sight and hearing. Yet the faculty evidently remains something one because it not only senses the visible as visible and the audible as audible, and it not only judges the difference between the two, but it cognizes them simultaneously. Inasmuch as the two sensory receptions are terminated at the same point, they are united, or, we might say, integrated—not formally, but materially. Put in other words, different intelligible notions (the formal) coincide in the same subject (the material), as the notions of “loud” and “red” differ from one another, but both belong to the fire-engine with its sirens screaming. The sensus communis discriminates between the sensory phenomena (distinguishing between the “loud” which is heard and the “red” which is seen) simultaneously as it judges[5] that they belong together in the same subject, namely, the sensible (in this case, the fire-engine)—either as altogether present to a common sensory environment, or as this sensible, which twofold possibility Aquinas makes clear in his commentary on the De sensu et sensato.[6] For instance, I might sense something white and something sweet, not in strictly one and the same individual subjective entity, but placed together on the common subject of a single plate; or I might sense something that is both sweet and white, as the frosting of a cake. So long as they can be reduced to a common sensible rationale—that is to say, a rationale accordant with the sensorial objectivity—the diverse sensory objects can be held in a certain unity by the sensus communis.[7]

But, as a quick digression, this common-belonging to a sensible subject does not yet render that sensible into an object of properly cognitive awareness. The “judgment” of the sensus communis produces a stimulative object; not a terminative one. Put in other words, it constitutes a unified sensory but not a formally perceptual object. Because we experience objects as perceptual—that is, inasmuch as we have an awareness of them—we tend to conflate objects of sensation and perception. But sensation occurs through a physical or material immutation, while perception occurs only with an intentional immutation. Such an intentional immutation consists not solely in the reception of some stimulus but also the constitution of the object as a terminus of that awareness; in the language of later Scholasticism, the terminal object requires not only an impressed but also an expressed specification.

Our principal concern with the sensus communis, however, concerns its function of integrating the stimuli of diverse sensory modalities.[8] Without here getting too bogged down into the particulars, recent decades of neuroscientific inquiry have discovered that several regions of the brain seem to be involved in the integration of diverse sensory data. For instance, the superior colliculus seems to incorporate three layers that constitute differing maps of “visual”, “auditory”, and “somatosensory space”, and many of the neurons within these layers come to develop responses to multiple stimuli. For instance, one neuron within the superior colliculus will respond to both auditory and visual stimuli. When both kinds of stimuli are presented to a brain already familiar with their co-presence, the brain is more active in attending to the stimuli than if just either one of the two is present. We all likely have some experience of this phenomenon ourselves: if we hear someone in a crowded room without seeing him speaking—i.e., if we do not see his lips moving—we are far less likely to grasp what he says than if we both hear and see.

We can see the importance of multisensory integration through the negative example of autism. It has been hypothesized and given some substantial evidence from research that autism spectrum disorder (or ASD), may be caused or exacerbated at least in part by a neurological inability to integrate multisensory information. Among the many difficulties faced particularly by those with ASD are judgments concerning the simultaneity of different kinds of sensory stimuli,[9] cross-modal attention switching (i.e., changes in attention from auditory to visual),[10] and a focus upon details or aspects of an object presented to sensation without an ability to integrate those details into a coherent sensory whole.[11] While there are many complexities and individuated nuances across different cases in ASD, these difficulties, generally speaking, seem to revolve around an inability to affect an integration of diverse sensory modalities into unified stimulative objects. This inability impedes the operations of our higher cognitive faculties to correlate phantasmal or intellectual conceptions with diverse material objects. Thus we can observe that those with ASD sometimes exhibit profound and savant-like abilities to focus with great insight and talent upon specific formal aspects of objects, the material wholes of which elude their comprehension because the stimulative object they have formed presents an incomplete picture of the mind-independent subject.

While the conditions of autism demonstrate to us the most profound consequences of a fragmented sensibility for individuals—and as we will see momentarily, this is tied directly to the digital world we now inhabit—these conditions also help us to reflect upon our use of these technologies.

2. Broken Signs

Indeed, although engaging in Thomistic scholarship and explaining how contemporary neuroscientific research coheres with the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the integrating sense, are of course important tasks, our primary purpose in this essay consists in neither scholarly exposition nor defense of its relevance. Rather, we wish to see the danger posed to the integrating sense by the increasing ubiquity of intelligence-simulating digitally-mediated technologies—that is, those technologies masquerading under the deceptive moniker of “Artificial Intelligence”.

The digital age has rapidly accelerated the fragmentation of our sensory proportionality. Before we can explore this accelerated fragmentation, it must be noted that what we signify by the term “digital” is, in fact, a technology of technologies: it does not so much belong on the screens beneath our fingertips but rather runs through the veins our devices—or perhaps, even, what sparks the firing of our synapses. The 5G network of your smartphone, the Bluetooth connection to earbuds, the computer upon which I typed this essay, and the televisions located in homes, bars, gyms, hotels, and all throughout our screen-facing world—all are permeated by the digital, for each conveys its data through the digital information paradigm. Thus, each can—and increasingly we see this to be the case—be made to do the same things, to handle the same data, to output the same content despite the diversity of presentative media. The digital paradigm homogenizes the information which it receives. This homogenization allows for complex reconfigurations to be made with startling efficiency. Whereas the translation of the now supplanted VHF broadcast signal into anything other than that which is received by a VHF antenna requires many other steps and devices, we now can, with digital technology, translate a song into an image, or show a movie on your refrigerator—so long as it has a screen.[12]

What’s the point of drawing attention to this digital ubiquity? Simply put: we already inhabit a technological environment—and have for some time—in which we are faced continuously with sensory stimuli that resolve to no distinct underlying subjects possessed of their own natures. Consider the shifts in movie-making over the past century. While the creation of stages and sets has always been a part of the cinematic art—relatively few films having been shot entirely in real locations—today a great deal of what appears on the screen is not physically there at all. On a more basic level, even in television shows produced with a corporeally-present set, the visual perspective is given through rapid-switching of diverse camera angles; the yawn of real time is shortened through the montage or the quick-cut; and everywhere we find heightened dramatizations presented as though the norm. Similarly, since not long after films departed silence, most of the sounds in movies have been faked, such that what you are hearing is not what you are seeing—from the sounds of horse hooves to the rustling of leaves or the scratching of a face, most of what we have heard in movies has been the product of what is known as Foley art. Today, vast libraries of already-recorded and synthesized sounds and ability to manipulate them digitally makes the sound even less “real”. Decreasingly have the products of our art come from an immediate effect of technical know-how in the artist and increasingly from the capacities of a system. There remains, of course, an art in manipulating that system—but it seems the work produced becomes farther and farther removed from the artist, even as the ability to present accurate and convincing simulacra of the represented phenomena increases.

The occasional suspension of reality in favor of fictionalized presentations, and with a strong awareness that we are observing something unreal (or better yet, that something deeply real abides in the unreal presentation), may do relatively little harm to our psychological formation (and even some genuine benefit). But what happens when real and unreal become indistinguishably blurred in our perceptual environments? What happens when our neurological avenues for integrating diverse sensory phenomena are bombarded endlessly by objects without any underlying common subject? We live already in a world where the lines of reality have been blurred and our brains have (been) adapted to the lack of distinction between the real and the unreal. Our eyes and ears are filled with objects of no mind-independent sustenance. In the words of Anton Barba-Kay, “Online browsing tempts us to a twilit, oneiric realm in which our fantasies take on manifest forms outside our minds.”[13] With the bend of digital technology ever-more-towards the realization of these manifest forms, we create fantastic, unreal, deceptive images of what we wish to see right alongside things that are, that can be in fact, with no readily-discernible distinction between the two. The consequences of this have been, frankly, devastating.

Though far from definitive, quite a lot of research—as well as the primary observations we have all likely made with our own eyes and ears—has linked the increasing apparent prevalence of ASD, not only in its most explicit but even its highest-functioning forms, with the digital permeation of our environments and especially the frequent use of screens early in life.^[14] The precise mechanism by which these devices impact the neurological development of young brains is far from fully distinguished. The hypothesis that it occurs by presentation of only fragmented sensory objects, however unproven, makes a great deal of sense, given the symptoms exhibited. Certainly, in young children and adolescents, it has been shown that high-exposure, low interaction, interruption-heavy (i.e., frequent attention-grabbing), and background contexts of screen usage and presence result in poorer language, executive, and general cognitive performance.[15]

But we ought to ask also, I believe, what effects these kinds of digitally-permeated environments have on more typically-developed brains—effects more difficult to see, perhaps, because we have all been suffering them. Indeed: our fragmented sensation affects not only neurological development but our persistent interaction with the environment. The highest acts of intellectual understanding yet require connection to the perceptual that they be complete. Though our perceptual cognition itself is elaborated through the internal senses of the imagination, memory, and cogitative faculty, these perceptual cognitions do not exist in a catalog of unmoved persistence, but continue to be shaped and re-shaped dynamically through our continued sensorial experience. If the stimulative objects of our sensation are not themselves experienced as integrated realities, as things independent of the mind with their own proper subjectivities, then “meaning” will appear to come primarily if not solely from our own minds, and not from things themselves, or with any necessary resolution to them. We lose things themselves as the objects of our inquiry; we receive only disjointed representational fragments.

Our cognitive operations, in consequence, manifestly suffer: not only in the increasing prevalence of ASD and other such diagnosable disorders, but in the general prevalence of unreasoned and unreasonable beliefs dominating the public sphere.

But we are now on the precipice of a much steeper cognitive decline.

The primary function of LLM intelligence-simulators consists in analyzing and reconfiguring patterns of digital data. They are able to do this far more efficiently than any human being—and thus to synthesize in reconfiguration according to algorithmically discerned patterns emergent from a quantity of points incalculable by a human mind. If I ask you to reflect upon all the images of horses that you have seen, and all the direct experiences of horses that you have had, and to draw me a realistic image of them, it will likely take you some time. If I give the same prompt to ChatGPT, it will give me a very sophisticated image in about 30 seconds. Similarly, if I ask you to summarize the Warsaw Pact, you might pause to remember what it was, when it happened; you might need to look up details. I asked ChatGPT and received all the major details before I could finish typing this sentence. I can also ask it—and receive just as quickly—to represent the Warsaw Pact in a triptych according to the style of Hieronymus Bosch. In the former two cases, that of the horse and of the description of the Warsaw Pact, we see extraction from human presentations (drawings, photographs, and verbal accounts), homogenized and synthesized into a presentation which is novel in its particularity but commonly resoluble to something of real experience. However, there is no functional difference whatsoever in ChatGPT’s creation of an image of a horse and that of the triptych. In 2023, Netflix began streaming a Reality TV show titled Deep Fake Love, in which contestants watched a video of their significant others cheating on them in convincing faked videos—to the psychological torture of those watching.[16] Already, OpenAI has introduced a video-production model, named “Sora”, which (in only its first semi-public iteration) can produce high-quality realistic minute-long videos from nothing more than a textual prompt.[17] What were unthinkable productions a few decades ago now may take remarkably little effort. Improvements to this technology will, of course, revolutionize the industries of cinema, television, gaming, virtual and augmented “realities”. If ever they become integrated with direct neural interface devices—such as those being developed by Neuralink, Neurode, or Synchon—such that not only can brains directly interface with instruments, but that sensations may be simulated, we may find our sensorial integration with the mind-independent world not only to be fragmented but divided by an ever-growing chasm.

But even without such direct neurological interference, unleash the ability for convincing and rapid audio-visual fabrication through every device now permeated with digital technology and we will quickly inhabit a world of perceptual phenomena irresoluble to a sensible mind-independent real; layers upon layers of patterns derived from human input reconfigured in a manner entirely inhuman, building a world utterly devoid of objects in which we can trust. Moreover, it seems likely we will find our memories entirely undermined by this lack of resolution—incapable not only of holding to the consistency of a stable mind-independent reality but even of holding ourselves in any coalescent sense of coherent selfhood.[18] We have been trending in this direction of sensory disintegration for decades—but intelligence-simulating digital technology will accelerate us along this trajectory a thousandfold. As devices increasingly mediate our interactions, we will find ourselves correspondingly inundated with increased indistinction between entia rationis (beings of reason) and entia naturae (beings of nature). The networked digital paradigm and its permeation by LLM intelligence simulating technology may not distort your own cognitive faculties, in your own lifetime—but the next several generations will suffer for it greatly, absent a radical shift in thinking not only about technology, but, more fundamentally, about our humanity.

3. The Recovery of Proportion

The danger posed by contemporary digital and intelligence-simulating technologies does not consist principally in the production of false propositions, nor even in the displacement of human labor by automated systems. More fundamentally, it consists in the gradual erosion of the conditions under which truth can appear to us at all. Truth is not the product of intellectual systemization but a discovery and conformity affected through rigorous inquiry about what is. That conformity presupposes not only intellectual activity but a properly ordered sensory foundation upon which higher cognition relies. Where that foundation becomes unstable, truth itself becomes imperiled. Thus, our technologies do—in fact—pose a real danger to our humanity; but principally because we have immersed ourselves in an environment hostile to the activities that allow our humanity to flourish.

The integrating sense occupies a decisive place in the environment of flourishing. It is the faculty by which diverse sensory stimuli are united into coherent sensibles, providing the material unity required for perception, imagination, memory, and ultimately for both intellectual discovery and subsequent understanding. Where sensation fails to integrate—where what is seen, heard, and otherwise experienced does not resolve to a common object—cognition is deprived of its proper object. What remains are fragments: images without things, sounds without sources, representations without realities. In such a condition, meaning no longer appears as something received from beings but as something imposed upon disordered data. Digitally mediated environments increasingly confront us with precisely this condition. The homogenization of all information into a manipulable digital substrate allows for the indefinite recombination of sensory presentations without reference to any mind-independent unity. Images, sounds, and narratives are generated, altered, and disseminated without originating in—or resolving back to—sensible subjects. Intelligence-simulating systems accelerate this process by producing outputs that make these generated objects appear seamlessly with those that are real. The result, however, is not merely confusion between the real and the unreal, but the gradual habituation of the mind to objects that cannot be integrated—because there is no object within which integration could occur; just a flurry of ephemeral disjointed sensory phenomena.

The consequences of this disjointed sensory environment extend beyond perception and into intellectual thought itself. Intellectual acts remain dependent upon phantasms, and phantasms upon sensation. Where sensation is persistently fragmented, the intellect increasingly operates upon either internally generated patterns (cognitive fictions) or upon simulated coherences (on screens or through other devices) rather than upon beings. Truth thus comes to appear as coherence within one’s accepted systems rather than as an adequation to the mind-independent intelligible real. This shift manifests as a tacit orientation of thought away from discovery and toward construction.

The recovery of proportion, therefore, cannot consist merely in better content, improved regulation, or more responsible technological design—though each may have its place. It requires, more fundamentally, the restoration of those conditions under which sensible unity is possible and under which language, judgment, and understanding again resolve toward what is. This restoration is not primarily technological but educational, in the sense of truly educating the human soul. It consist in renewing and revitalizing the communally-fostered habits by which human beings remain attuned to a shared, mind-independent world: habits of attention, discrimination, and most of all of linguistically-robust understanding grounded in common experience.

Linguistic signification, though it reaches its first initial perfection within the one speaking, is not fulfilled in isolated interiority nor in relaying commands to impersonal systems, but in the abundant overflow of communicative acts ordered toward the truth of something perceived and shared in common. Where the sensible world fragments, language loses its anchorage; where language loses its anchorage, truth becomes elusive. To preserve the possibility of knowing, therefore, is to preserve the integrity of sensation as ordered toward being—but also to preserve language’s connection to the things that themselves are, and as intelligible objects relayed through linguistic disclosure.

That is, language occupies a privileged place in any attempt at cultural restoration precisely because it alone possesses the capacity to gather, order, and render intelligible not only the full range of human experience but the constituent realities whereby that existence is possible in the first place. While sensation provides the material conditions for cognition, language gives form to what is known by making it sharable, stable, and revisable across time and persons. Linguistic signs do not merely label pre-existing thoughts; rather, they complete the act of understanding by articulating it. As such, language functions as a secondary but indispensable mode of integration: where the integrating sense unifies sensible data into perceptual objects, language unifies those objects within a common intelligible world—rendering the world more than merely sensed; rendering it understood. A culture that loses confidence in language’s power to signify reality will inevitably lose confidence in reality’s intelligibility itself.

This integrative power of language depends upon its grounding in a shared, mind-independent world. Linguistic signification is neither a private projection nor a self-contained system of symbols; it is ordered toward making known what is. Grammar, syntax, and semantic distinctions are therefore not arbitrary conventions but reflections—however imperfect—of the structure of being and the relations that obtain within it. When language is treated merely as a manipulable instrument for effect, persuasion, or efficiency, it becomes detached from this grounding and collapses into pragmatics alone. Such detachment mirrors, at the level of thought, the fragmentation already introduced at the level of sensation by digitally mediated environments. Restoring linguistic discipline—through careful attention to meaning, relation, and form—is thus not pedantry but an act of cultural repair, for it will allow us to see through the sensory obfuscations and fragmentations, to perceive what must be the case, even when appearances deceive.

Finally, language restores culture not primarily by transmitting information, but by sustaining the conditions for inquiry. Genuine linguistic exchange presupposes that speaker and listener are jointly oriented toward something held in common, something that can be questioned, clarified, and known more deeply. In this sense, language is intrinsically dialogical and irreducibly interpersonal: it unfolds most fully not in isolated consumption of content, but in acts of speaking to and with others about the world we share. Where such acts persist, even within technologically saturated environments, they preserve a space in which truth may again be encountered rather than constructed. The recovery of proportion in our cognitive life therefore passes necessarily through the recovery of language as a disciplined, reality-oriented, and communal art.

We must again learn to speak to one another if we are to affect a more properly integrative world, a world fit for human beings.

[1] 1964: Understanding media, 29: “Submerging natives with floods of concepts for which nothing has prepared them is the normal action of all our technology. But with electric media Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native. We are not more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.”

[2] Cf. for example 1964: Understanding Media, 78: “What I am saying is that media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves.”

[3] This denomination is hardly novel; cf. Schmidt 1983: “The Unifying Sense: Which?” in The New Scholasticism 57.1: 1–21. Schmidt argues against the main commentators of the 20th century that the vis cogitativa is principally responsible for the unification of sense. I agree with Schmidt on a specific and important point: namely, that the formal objects of our awareness are constituted through operations of the vis cogitativa, by which alone does the sensible-something attain the level of perceptual-evaluation (and thus become an object of our awareness rather than merely of our senses). However, I disagree inasmuch as I hold that the material object of our awareness must necessarily be assembled into a kind of sensorial unity before it can receive this formal constitution, to which function the sensus communis is appointed.

[4] 1268: Sentencia De anima, lib.2/lib.3, lec.27/lec.3, n.609-631/n.11-15. Note that significant differences occur between the Leonine and Marietti editions of these texts, not only as to orthography, punctuation, and specific words, but also as to numbering of libri et lectiones.

[5] 1266-68: ST Ia, q.78, a.4, ad.2: “Unde oportet ad sensum communem pertinere discretionis iudicium, ad quem referantur, sicut ad communem terminum, omnes apprehensiones sensuum; a quo etiam percipiantur intentiones sensuum, sicut cum aliquis videt se videre. Hoc enim non potest fieri per sensum proprium, qui non cognoscit nisi formam sensibilis a quo immutatur; in qua immutatione perficitur visio, et ex qua immutatione sequitur alia immutatio in sensu communi, qui visionem percipit.” I believe this judgment (discretionis iudicium) should not be understood in a strict sense—Aquinas does, after all, use the term in a myriad of ways (cf. Poinsot: 1631: Ars Logica Prima Pars, q.d.5; R.I.144a25–150b18)—but rather in a metaphorically-said manner, inasmuch as judgment is the intellectual operation by which we both compose and divide formal unities or disunities.

[6] 1268: Sentencia De sensu et sensato, tr.1, c.18/1.7, n.286-289, especially the lattermost. Cf. 1265/66: SCG lib.2, c.100, n.3: “unde videmus quod diversa genera sensibilium, quae quinque sensus exteriores percipiunt, una vis sensus communis apprehendit.” 1266-68: ST Ia, q.1, a.3, ad.2: “obiectum sensus communis est sensibile, quod comprehendit sub se visibile et audibile, unde sensus communis, cum sit una potentia, extendit se ad omnia obiecta quinque sensuum.” i.1256-59: Quodlibet VII, q.1, a.2, ad.1: “dicendum est de potentia sensitiva, quod non potest simul plura primo sentire, sed ex consequenti, in quantum plura accipiuntur ut unum, sicut sensibilia differentia uniuntur in una differentia, et plura sensibilia quae sunt partes uniuntur in uno toto, unde quando sentitur totum, sentiuntur simul plures partes ex consequenti, et tunc intentio sensus non fertur ad aliquam partium principaliter, sed ad totum, quia, si ad aliquam partium ferretur ut ad sensibile principale, non simul sentiretur alia. Et iterum sensus communis, quamvis sit una potentia secundum essentiam, tamen aliquo modo multiplicatur secundum esse in quantum coniungitur diversis sensibus propriis, sicut unum centrum coniungitur pluribus lineis; unde immutationes omnium sensuum simul terminantur ad sensum communem, sicut motus qui esset per omnes lineas posset simul terminari ad centrum.”

[7] i.1256-59: DV, q.15, a.1, ad.3: “quod sensus communis, cum omnia sensibilia percipiat, secundum philosophum, oportet quod in ea feratur secundum unam communem rationem, alias non haberet unum per se obiectum; sed in hanc communem obiecti rationem nullus sensuum propriorum pertingere potest. Sed in simplicem acceptionem ratio pertingit sicut ad suum terminum, ut quando discursus rationis in scientia concluditur. Unde non oportet quod in nobis intellectus sit alia potentia a ratione, sicut sensus communis a propriis.” Ibid, a.2, c.: “Sed cum in natura corporea inveniatur aliquid in quo omnia corpora conveniunt, aliquid vero in quo diversa corpora diversificantur; possibile erit aptari unam potentiam corpori alligatam omnibus corporibus secundum id quod commune habent; sicut imaginatio prout omnia corpora communicant in ratione quantitatis et figurae et consequentium (unde non solum ad naturalia, sed ad mathematica se extendit); sensus vero communis prout in omnibus corporibus naturalibus, ad quae solummodo se extendit, invenitur vis activa sive immutativa.”

[8] Ibid, q.57, a.2, c.: “Hoc enim rerum ordo habet, quod quanti aliquid est superius, tanto habeat virtutem magis unitam et ad plura se extendentem, sicut in ipso homine patet quod sensus communis, qui est superior quam sensus proprius, licet sit unica potentia, omnia cognoscit quae quinque sensibus exterioribus cognoscuntur, et quaedam alia qua nullus sensus exterior cognoscit, scilicet differentiam albi et dulcis.”

[9] Stevenson et al. 2014: “Multisensory Temporal Integration in Autism Spectrum Disorders” Journal of Neuroscience, 34.3: 691–697 [DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3615-13.2014]. Foss-Feig et al. 2010: “An extended multisensory temporal binding window in autism spectrum disorders”, Experimental Brain Research, 203.2: 381–389 [DOI: 10.1007/s00221-010-2240-4].

[10] Brandwein et al. 2015: “Neurophysiological Indices of Atypical Auditory Processing and Multisensory Integration are Associated with Symptom Severity in Autism”, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45.1: 230–244 [DOI:10.1007/s10803-014-2212-9].

[11] Happé and Frith 2006: “The Weak Coherence Account: Detail-focused Cognitive Style in Autism Spectrum Disorders”, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 36.1: 5–25 [DOI:10.1007/s10803-005-0039-0]. Booth and Happé 2016: “Evidence of Reduced Global Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder”, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders [online – DOI:10.1007/s10803-016-2724-6]. It is worth noting that the superior colliculus not only receives but also shapes attention direction; malformation of neurons in the superior colliculus may not only result, that is, in an inattentiveness, but exacerbate it. Cf. Krauzlis 2014: “Attentional Functions of the Superior Colliculus” in Nobre and Kastner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Attention, online edition [DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199675111.013.014].

[12] Through the homogenization of the data stored in a digital paradigm, we can easily transduce the patterns of one medium into another. Because of the ability, further, to compress this data, we can store enormous quantities of it with minimal loss. More poignantly, so long as we have an apparatus which can translate a sensory medium into a digital data, we can produce representations of any sensory phenomenon. While odor and tactile digitization technologies—both those which translate the sensory phenomena into digital data and those that, from such data, reproduce simulacra of such experience—such technologies remain nascent, but their development is well under way.

[13] 2023: A Web of Our Own Making, 124.

[14] Heffler et al. 2020: “Association of Early-Life Social and Digital Media Experiences With Development of Autism Spectrum Disorder-Like Symptoms” in JAMA Pediatrics, 174.7: 690–696 [DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.0230]. Zhao et al. 2022: “Association Between Screen Time Trajectory and Early Childhood Development in Children in China” in JAMA Pediatrics, 176.8: 768-775 [DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.1630]. Kushima et al. 2022: “Association Between Screen Time Exposure in Children at 1 Year of Age and Autism Spectrum Disorder at 3 Years of Age: The Japan Environment and Children’s Study” in JAMA Pediatrics, 176.4: 384-391 [DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.5778]. Sarfraz et al. 2023: “Early Screen-Time Exposure and Its Association With Risk of Developing Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review” in Cureus [DOI: 10.7759/cureus.42292].

[15] Christodoulou and Roussos 2025: “‘Phone in the Room, Mind on the Roam’: Investigating the Impact of Mobile Phone Presence on Distraction” in European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology, and Education, 8.15.5.74 [DOI: 10.3390/ejihpe15050074]; Mallawaarachchi et al. 2024: “Early Childhood Screen Use Contexts and Cognitive and Psychosocial Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis” in JAMA Pediatrics 178.10: 1017-26 [DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.2620]; Bal et al. 2024: “Examining the relationship between language development, executive function, and screen time: A systematic review” in PLoS One 26.19(12) [DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0314540]; Miller et al. 2023: “Impact of digital screen media activity on functional brain organization in late childhood: Evidence from the ABCD study” in Cortex 169: 290-308 [DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.09.009]; Siebers et al. 2023: “The effects of fragmented and sticky smartphone use on distraction and task delay” in Mobile Media & Communication, 12.1 [DOI: 10.1177/20501579231193] Hutton et al. 2022: “Associations between digital media use and brain surface structural measures in preschool-aged children” in Scientific Reports 12.19095 [DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-20922-0].

[16] https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/07/25/the-cruellest-show-on-tv-deep-fake-love-goes-too-far-with-ai.

[17] https://openai.com/sora.

[18] Multisensory integration creates better memory performance—see Okray et al 2023: “Multisensory learning binds neurons into a cross-modal memory engram” in Nature 617 [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06013-8], 777-84.

Unlike the previous bit of satire, this one could spiral quickly into lots of abstruse philosophizing—for the issues here are much more serious than the fundamental unseriousness of grifters. That is, I believe even rather serious people misuse these words, and do so often. But the habits of language (mis)use tend to sink deep into our minds and correction seldom comes easily.

1. Values

This is perhaps the most pernicious term of the modern English vernacular, given its common use. What is a value? How does a value originate? For centuries, the term has been used to signify something of use or esteem for some purpose to some person, and principally in the mercantile world of price. It is a term which signifies something of a referential context of meaning. Put otherwise, the “value” of anything always stems from the psychologically-subjective judgment of the individual. This may or may not correspond to a mind-independent virtue of the object being judged; but the value itself is always something placed upon it subsequent to the mind’s operation. To speak thus of “values” is to speak of something consequent, not something prior, and something derivative, rather than something primary. When people speak of “pursuing” or “upholding” values, therefore, they are implicitly suggesting a subjectivistic framework for the world.

2. Objective / Subjective

A particular pet-peeve of my own: the word “objective” was, in its original Latin formulation of obiectum, introduced to signify precisely the opposite of what it is used to signify today. The root comes from the verb iacere, “to throw”; and the preposition ob-, meaning “against”. The obiectum is that which is thrown against the subiectum, the subject. Thus, the Scholastic philosophers who developed this word used it to signify something precisely inasmuch as it was made an object by a subjective power or faculty. The screen at which you are looking is the object of your eyes; the person you love is the object of your affections. Remove the affection or close your eyes, and they cease to be such objects. In other words, without a mind, there can be no objects! And yet today, “objective” is used to mean “things as they are in themselves independently of what anyone thinks”—which is just what the Scholastic philosophers meant by a “subject”! There is not merely an inversion of terminology, here, however, but the obscuring of the relation between the two which is fundamental to our very understanding of reality.

3. Culture

I will not say much on this, simply because it is too slippery a can of worms. Briefly, however, while I do believe the term “culture” signifies something real and important, the casual manner in which it is commonly used obscures the nature of what culture is. Instead of a complex weave of interpersonal relations and the symbols by which they are governed, people mean by it something little more than “vibes” or “aesthetics” (another term about which I could here rail, but I have limited myself to 5…) or “nebulous cloud of feelings and images”. Ask yourself, when you see the word used, whether it clarifies or obscures what the author or speaking is saying.

4. Epistemology

Another pet-peeve: though again something on which I will not say much. The term “epistemology”, the “study of knowledge” was first coined in 1854 and used as a kind of corollary to “ontology”, “the study of being”. Already, this framing imports a dualism: as though being were one thing and knowledge another. But even removing ourselves from this misframing, what is “knowledge” as an object of study? It seems that, as an object, it could only be artificially cut off from its own reality—something “in” the mind, “of” the world. This “cutting off” would be destructive to the very thing sought!

5. Worldview

Much as with the word “value”, a “worldview” is something which comes consequent to operations of the mind—and though it may be descriptively accurate it has no place in a prescription for how to think about the world! Of course I view the world differently than someone raised in a Buddhist environment, or in rural South America, or on the border of Ukraine and Russia. Our “views” of the “world” cannot but be different. For that matter, how I view the world and how my immediate elder brother, 4 years my senior, views the world are also different. To talk about “a” worldview as something shared is more or less useless for clarifying either the world or the view. It implies the same kind of modern psychological subjectivism as does “value” when we talk about “competing worldviews”.

There is an episode of the sitcom Parks and Recreation featuring a cult that named themselves “the Reasonabilists”.[1] The cult worships “Zorp, the giant lizard god who will destroy the earth with his cleansing fire of judgment.” When asked why the cultists call themselves “the Reasonabilists”, Amy Poehler’s character answers, “Well, they figure if people criticize them, it’ll seem like they’re attacking something very reasonable.” As Adam Scott’s character remarks, “that’s weirdly brilliant”; if one may package their beliefs in the right way, it almost does not matter how absurd, ridiculous, or antithetical to reason they are—especially if they can be made to seem reasonable, or even as though those beliefs are the grounds of reason itself.

While a giant lizard god with cleansing fire of judgment will not seem very reasonable to most people (at least, not here and now) most unreasonable beliefs are not so immediately or directly presented, else Scientology, which seized upon the spreading 20th century view of Christianity as irrational and anti-scientific—not to mention Christian institutions’ unpreparedness to handle the apparent increase in psychosis and mental illness subsequent to the Second World War, the advent of television, and the introduction of psychedelic drugs—would never have grown the way it did. The same appearance of relative reasonableness goes for most cults, and even for many conspiracy theories. You may more easily lure someone into an uncritical and ultimately unreasonable belief, that is, by threatening them with that which is more obviously contrary to reason. Raise up a terrible and dark evil, and your own foolishness may seem as though a shining beacon of reason by contrast.

In the last three decades, a new variety of obviously and unashamedly unreasonable thought has become a prominent fixture in the theater of public attention: once called “social justice”, more recently “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or the “woke”, but also frequently (if inaccurately and uncritically) labelled as “postmodernism”.[2] It is, without a doubt, an incoherent ideology, lacking any semblance of principles and operating off a profoundly anti-realist and emotivist base: that you can be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, think whatever you want to think, and that any challenge to the slightest pursuit of your whims constitutes an act of oppressive violence against which violent rebellion is itself fully justified. At times, one can find its adherents quite literally denouncing reason—as a glorified invention of white cisgender patriarchal phallogocentric imperialist hegemony, or some such—and claiming that one’s singularly-personal umbrage at differing opinions trumps another’s rational arrival at that opinion. The result is the “intolerance of intolerance”[3] taken to a very intolerant and sometimes even physically violent, murderous extreme.

Some years ago, against this foil, a new set of “Reasonabilists” emerged—not ones that believe in a giant fire-breathing lizard god (not that I know of, anyway), but who are deceptively adamant about their own reasonableness nonetheless: a loosely collected set that could be and have been described as centrists, or classical liberals, or neo-Enlightenment moderates, or any number of associated terms, but for whom the central uniting concern is the defense of “free speech and free expression of ideas” and the broad conception of civil liberties (roughly grounded in the political being constituted through social contracts) against the rabid emotivism of the “woke left” mob—though always, it turns out, with certain arbitrarily stipulations about which ideas actually deserve a platform for expression, and thus, now, they repudiate the “woke right”.

One first found and still often today finds them at sites such as Quillette, the Babylon Bee, formerly Arc Digital and Areo Magazine, and now New Discourses—in figures such Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, the Weinsteins and the Winegards, Dave Rubin, and all the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web”,[4] among many others. Some will undoubtedly balk at being grouped together. Some do not care for each other—Areo Magazine, for instance, once readily criticized the quality of work on Quillette[5] (including implicitly—given Areo’s self-professedly liberal perspective—by labelling it a “conservative” site[6]), and Quillette once published an essay blasting the lack of political diversity in the “Intellectual Dark Web”,[7] resulting in snarky tweets being volleyed around between various persons involved—and many have inarguably entered this broadly centrist sphere as little more than enterprising capitalists who have discovered a moment of profit—the game played by grifters. More recently, James Lindsay has turned on Benjamin Boyce for hosting, on his podcast, guests who profess anti-liberal ideas.

But despite their divisions, these varied groups have remained largely united (though occasionally only by ostracism of those who go too far in opposing the party line) both by their common opposition to the contemporary mobs bent on smashing reason beneath the boots of DEI (the “woke left”) and by their common commitment to the principles of the Enlightenment. By comparison, then, they have appeared as reasonable, given that many within the Western world take “reason” and “freedom of speech” as self-evident goods—and so anyone they can paint as being opposed to these supposed goods appears as someone against the good. Indeed, these varied groups seem even more reasonable insofar as they seem in love with the idea of reason, specifically as the engine through which any and every thought may be processed, tested, and accepted or rejected when it comes out the other side. Thus, Quillette says that they[8]

respect ideas. Even dangerous ones. Our writers are a collection of individuals from across the political spectrum, with different life stories and backgrounds. We aim to bring our expertise together into one platform – to create an organic group committed to free thought… [and] to provide a platform for original thought and quality cultural criticism… to give writers freedom to take risks and express controversial ideas.

Arc Digital—now reduced to the newsletter of a singular individual but formerly a regular home to many authors—likewise summarized their raison d’etre by saying, “Our core value is responsible intellectual pluralism… The pluralism part means we are committed to publishing a variety of perspectives. Ours is a platform for omnidirectional opinion. That’s a non-negotiable for us. But the responsible part means we set certain editorial parameters so that our pages don’t turn into a bad-faith free-for-all.”[9] New Discourses lists among the defining values at the core of their perspective to be “profound respect for the power of reason and the utility and strength of science” and that “when failures of reasoning occur, it is better reasoning that reveals them”[10] and claims that their site aims “to be a place where dialogue is possible and encouraged, regardless of differences in politics, aiming to be responsible with our speech and thought while not feeling fettered by restrictions of political correctness in any of its myriad manifestations. It also hopes to inspire dialogue—both new ways to discuss old topics and new conversations in their own right.”[11]

Yet despite their apparent adoration of reason, these “Reasonabilists” are in truth no more than “reasonablish”, I say somewhat tongue-in-cheek; for they are clearly not so unreasonable as the raving leftist woke ideologues they justly lambast nor are they lost in the clouds of Gnosticism and mystical superstition belonging to the laughably inaccurate caricature of pre-modern thought which many of them believe historically accurate and to which they so readily refer.[12] But adamantly clinging to this caricature reveals undeniably the limits of their reason: for a critical examination of the true contours of pre-modern society would show it to be no less and in the vast majority of instances a great deal more reasonable than what arose as “scientific” during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and perhaps therefore induce reflection upon the modernist principles which they have uncritically taken for granted.[13]

This is to say that the “reasonablish” centrists (or non-radical, anti-social-justice-woke-DEI-mobbery leftish liberals; or pseudo-realist empirical scientistic progressives—whatever one might choose to call them) affix their beliefs in the method that Charles Sanders Peirce described as the “a priori”: which is to say, a system of beliefs constructed with relative internal consistency and coherence, but which edifice rests itself upon foundations not subjected to a critical evaluation or careful thinking, and therefore leaving the entire system of beliefs on fundamentally unstable grounds.[14] Far from the least of these uncritically-adopted and insecure foundations is their common presupposition concerning the meaning of “reason” itself.

Liberalism’s Bad Faith

The common rallying cry of today’s self-professed “classical liberals” or “modernists”—both of which I will use as justifiably-accurate catchall terms—are the irreproachable values of free speech and reason; and that by upholding scientific standards of reason, we may entertain any well-presented argument and rationally expose what flaws it may have while retaining its true merits, thereby improving our stock of knowledge and wisdom.[15] This exaltation of “the rational” (or “reasonablishness”) is a continuation of the Enlightenment spirit, which combined the empirical approach to knowledge initiated by Locke with the faith in reason proposed by Descartes:[16]

It is true that there is a sharp contrast between the geometrical reason of Descartes and the empirical common sense of Locke, which reflects the difference in spirit of the two cultures. Nevertheless, these two schools of thought met and mingled with one another in the culture of the Enlightenment. The philosophy of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists was that of Locke rather than of Descartes. Yet the driving force behind it is still the Cartesian rationalism with its sublime confidence in the infallibility of reason, its dissolvent criticism of received beliefs and traditions, and its determination “never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such.”

And yet if one looks closely at the philosophies informing the Enlightenment (and the adjacent growth of liberalism in nineteenth century England), whether Cartesian or Lockean, Hobbesian or Berkeleyian, Leibnizian or Humean, Wolffian or Kantian, one finds the nature of reason and knowledge always presumed—the disputes between rationalists and empiricists not being over the nature of reason itself but rather over the how of reason, specifically in competing theories of ideation and in how that ideation results in knowledge of the extramental world. To explain, we must touch upon some abstruse points of philosophy. For underlying and undermining both sides—“rationalist” and “empiricist” alike—is a common error: namely, the presumption that ideas are the direct and immediate objects of our acts of knowledge.[17] While every era of human inquiry has its presuppositions and flaws, the uncritical appropriation made by every well-known “modern philosopher” of the Cartesian postulate—that we know ideas directly and the “extramental world” only indirectly, through a direct “internal” knowledge of those ideas (and the often-shared presumption that “knowledge” consists in propositions indisputably demonstrable, while all else is opinion)—would be laughable had it not been for centuries, and still to this day, so devastating to the formation of human minds.

The result of these presuppositions—somewhat ironically, given the atheistic inclination of many of Enlightenment heirs—is a kind of dualism: for the only valid method of arriving at knowledge, given these presuppositions, is the scientific;[18] and yet our experience extends so far beyond what science may divulge, since science can reveal facts but not meaning, that systems of unscientific opinion inevitably come to dominate, for they become the frameworks through which meaning is rendered. By abandoning the methods proper to philosophical inquiry and idolizing the methods of science—resulting in a monistic theory of knowledge—one severs the factual from the meaningful.[19]

That is, by failing to understand how facts and meaning can be united—that is, how facts can be interpreted as to their meaning, a process which per se stands outside the scope of scientific methodology—the “standards” by which the reasonableness of arguments and ideas are measured invariably become increasingly narrowed and therefore committed to one or another ideologically exclusionary perspective. However often the call to renewal is sounded or however frequently “diversity of opinion” may be lauded for its own sake (if never long exercised in practice—some ideas or beliefs being Verboten in accordance with the unquestioned a priori principles of belief), even a small error in the beginning becomes great in the end.

But this is no small error. For not knowing how things are known leads inevitably to mistakes in knowledge. Right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice, truth and falsity: none can be known by modern empirical science (whatever Sam Harris might claim) but require philosophical insight,[20] through which they are not only discovered but defined, refined, defended, and explained. Eschewing genuine philosophical thought inevitably leads to self-professed centrist or classically liberal venues becoming not only exclusionary to those who express genuinely different perspectives, but so too to developing an ever-increasing animosity for one another.[21]

This is not to say some of these venues have not given a voice to those who deserve to be heard; many worthy authors have been published in one or another outlet, and rightly so. But these authors have been published, near as I can tell, not only because they are good writers who articulate their points thoughtfully, but because the points articulated sufficiently overlap with the views guiding the editorial directions of the sites in question. It is a common sleight of hand: including authors who describe themselves as from various political, ideological, religious, or philosophical backgrounds, so that one can claim diversity, without allowing the expression of truly diverse viewpoints.[22] Everyone has an ethics, conscious or not—insamuch as everyone has have a conception of the good. But the hubris of the human heart obscures whether those things we hold as good are true—instead, we often hold as true only those things that befit our unquestioned belief in what is good.

I do not think that this duplicity is fully intentional, or even close to conscious. But having adopted an intellectually effete “worldview”, the self-professed champions of free speech and reason have succeeded in establishing a far narrower and less stable foundation for themselves than they recognize. That is, deriving their principles from the Enlightenment—not adherence to all that came out of that specific period of time nor of any definitive roster of thinkers, but belief in the merits of individualism, an opposition to authoritative interpretations of dogma, a commitment to “progress”, and an exaltation of the scientific method (in consequence of which, an implicit tendency towards reductionism likewise emerges), which ideas have developed and not necessarily consciously or thoughtfully in the intervening centuries—they have constrained themselves to a position which believes the human mind needs no rigorous education in the foundational arts of thinking itself, but only training in specific scientific endeavors. The resultant cultural modernity is not the same as modern philosophy, but dependent upon it—and thus, inheritor of that philosophy’s greatly erroneous principles.[23]

It is just this dependence which undermines the integrity of the modern project as a whole, leaving some parts which may be redeemed, but which cannot stand in the crumbling edifice built by thinkers of the Enlightenment. This undermined integrity is unrecognized by those who have built their homes of belief on this shaky ground—possibly out of mere ignorance, for the Enlightenment was nothing if not the product of a successful historical and intellectual obfuscation,[24] but likely out of obstinate clinging to that ignorance as well. Convincing them they ought to leave their unstable home is no small task. But perhaps others can be dissuaded from joining their doomed enterprise by exposing the rot at its foundations.

Lacking from the support structure of cultural modernity is any appreciation of the kind of philosophical insight necessary to have a lasting ethos.[25] The result is, just as it was in the Enlightenment, the proliferation of a “self-confident, superficial rationalism of the new lay intelligentsia.”[26] That is not to say the men and women writing for these publications or engaging in debates on social media are not intelligent—but even a great intelligence fixated by poor principles will err more often than not.[27]

Among these advocates for modernity, it is New Discourses (property of James Lindsay and heir apparent to Areo Magazine) that most ardently propagandizes for a modernist perspective, and which most clearly opposes itself against both “postmodernism” and “premodernism” (and thus admits the least intellectual diversity to its publication). The bullet points which summarize their “Manifesto against the Enemies of Modernity”, written by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, are worth presenting in full:

• Modernity, in terms of the views and values that have brought us out of the feudalism of the Medieval period and led us to the relative richness and comfort we enjoy today (and which are rapidly spreading around the world), is under threat from the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum.

• Modernity is worth fighting for if you enjoy and wish others to enjoy the benefits of a first-world existence in relative safety and with high degrees of individual liberty that can express itself in functional societies.

• Most people support Modernity and wish its anti-modern enemies would shut up.

• The enemies of Modernity now form two disagreeing factions — the postmoderns on the left and the premoderns on the right — and largely represent two ideological visions for rejecting Modernity and the good fruits of the Enlightenment, such as science, reason, republican democracy, rule of law, and the nearest thing we can claim to objective moral progress.

• Left-right partisanship is the tool by which they condemn Modernity and continually radicalize sympathizers to choose between the two warring factions of anti-modernism: postmodernism and premodernism.

• A “New Center” centrist position is well-intended, represents most people’s politics, and cannot hold. It is naturally unstable and reinforces the very thinking that perpetuates our current state of what we term existential polarization.

• Those who support Modernity should do so unabashedly and without reference to relatively minor partisan differences across the “liberal/conservative” split. The fight before us now is bigger than that, and the extremes at both ends are dominating the usual political spectrum to everybody’s loss.

• Modernity can be fought for, and it’s probably what you already want unless you’re on the lunatic fringe of the left or right.

This bullet list—and the full manifesto no less—presents a mythos of the supreme reasonableness of modernity that could rival the most dogmatic of authoritarian religious proclamations. It claims science and reason are the fruits of the Enlightenment (as though these two things never existed at all before Bacon and Descartes lit the sparks of the so-called “Scientific Revolution”[28]), implies that material comfort and its associated individualistic freedom are the fundamental yearning of the human spirit, and that if you disagree with their position, you belong to the “lunatic fringe”—you must be Woke, and now, if not of the Left variety, then of the Right.

Of course. Who else but a woke lunatic would attack the Very Scientific and Reasonable fire-breathing giant lizard god of modernity?

One could criticize any of the points structuring Lindsay and Pluckrose’s manifesto at great length. But what is held in common with other perhaps less obvious and maybe even less self-aware modernist propagandists is the adoration of amorphous concepts of science and reason.

Holding Untruths as Self-Evident

The attitude commonly taken by Enlightenment-minded classical liberals towards the thousand years intervening the Christian baptism of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance recovery of antiquity is one of derision: what good came out of that millennium being regarded as only despite and not in the least because of Christian belief. “For the men of the Enlightenment,” writes Christopher Dawson, “viewed Religion—and above all Christianity—as the dark power which is ever clogging and dragging back the human spirit on its path towards progress and happiness. They saw in the development of the historic religions an unrelieved tale of deception and cruelty.”[29] It is, of course, futile to ask those who do not believe in a God to see what is of value in the study of divine revelation—since such is already prejudged as a product of human deception or madness—and thus to recognize that there is a merit in what is thus received.

But it is not only explicit atheism that prevents the modernist from the requisite intellectual humility needed to appreciate theological wisdom; rather, there is a deeper obstruction which also prevents them from grasping genuine philosophical insight, which stands always an antecedent necessity to the science of theology. For in following the way of ideas characteristic of modern philosophy, rational order becomes seen as the product of human reason, rather than the other way around. That is: one of the greatest scientific inaccuracies long and widely believed, the varieties of geocentrism established in ancient Greece and unchallenged until Copernicus—and remaining widely believed for centuries afterward—was interpreted as exhibiting an anthropocentric universe: for we, on earth, were thought to quite literally be at the center of everything.

But with Galileo, the evidence became too strong that geocentrism (strictly conceived, at least) was an untenable position. Though Galileo’s own proposed heliocentrism likewise turned out to be false—and though one new inaccurate cosmology followed another as the decades and centuries passed—gradually the mysteries of the corporeal cosmos and its constitution became better known, as better and better models for understanding were developed. Along the way, many of the commonly-employed arguments—rooted all the way back in the theories proposed by Aristotle in the fourth century bc—for an intrinsically ordered universe disappeared; or so it would seem to those who understood the arguments at only the most superficial of levels.

The Aristotelian picture of the cosmos saw the regularity of heavenly motion as determining a repetitious regularity on earth: the recurrence of the seasons and thus the perpetuation of species both animal (by inducing them to mate at regular times of the year) and plant (by allowing the cycle of decay which enabled them to grow and bear fruit). Deviation from the natural course was observed as being normal but also circumscribed within limits by these celestial determinations.

With the advent of a new cosmology, which revealed that the heavens were neither so regular nor so directly impactful on earth (though certainly correlated to the regularity we do observe), and especially with the discoveries that led to the theory of evolution, the Aristotelian image of the cosmos was shattered. In correcting these errors and proposing more viable alternative interpretations, the idea of intellectual progress emerged as though an inevitable consequence of the consistent and rigorous application of the scientific method. The belief thus rose that truth would be progressively unveiled by discovering more and new phenomena that help explain the functioning of the universe. Thus “order” came to signify the result not of anything natural or cosmic, but of the regulation of facts discovered through the industrious application of the human intellect. However, this apparent revolution was only a deception—one that ran deep and that has led to a state of absolute intellectual chaos. In truth, the ancient belief—that order is discovered in rather than imposed upon the universe—was only the picture of Aristotelian cosmology, and not its principles.[30]

The ancient belief (constant throughout the intellectual world until Galileo) in an intrinsically ordered universe, put otherwise, followed most fundamentally not from observations of the heavens but from a belief about what we are ourselves: namely, the belief about how we acquire knowledge. This theory of knowledge,[31] which began with Plato and Aristotle but in the medieval synthesis received developments from Augustine of Hippo, Ibn-Sina (Avicenna), Ibn-Rushd (Averroes), Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Cajetan, Domingo de Soto, the Conimbricenes, and perhaps reached its peak in John Poinsot (also known as John of St. Thomas for his fidelity to the thought of Aquinas), has its scholastic development so thoroughly ignored in all the authors of modernity that it can only be concluded they had no substantial knowledge or comprehension of it. In direct consequence, the theory of human freedom in scholasticism likewise fell into neglect and thus human freedom became conceived as something purely negative, i.e., the absence of restraint—“the last conquest of the Gospel.”[32]

Indeed, ignorance of history is not only a hallmark of the Enlightenment and its contemporary advocates, but a deliberately cultivated characteristic. Rather than engage with the whole system of scholasticism, men such as Descartes, Cudworth, and Leibniz extracted points for criticism that, once deprived of context, appear absurd; while Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau emphasized an interpretation of history and society—likewise satirizing a caricature of the past—which positively centered around practical economics, technology (broadly conceived), and politics; and thereby skipping over many details of life which unfolded during Middle Ages, where all these things were intertwined with questions of faith, details which show how instrumental Christendom was to European culture—including to the incorporation of classical learning.[33] That is: having the Enlightenment and its heirs as the only source of learning for understanding the Middle Ages would be like having Aristophanes as the only source for understanding Socrates.

In the place of the tradition-preserving and synthesizing scholasticism, thinkers of the Enlightenment strove for novel solutions—much more inclined to use the works of ancient Greece and Rome as aids to rhetoric than as sources of understanding—to the intractable problems contrived by not only the contentious political discord into which Europe fell after the Protestant fragmentation of Christendom, but also the disagreements rendered through modernity’s hare-brained nominalist presuppositions.

It is little surprise, in fact, that the Enlightenment “philosophers” painted themselves gradually into obsolescence, for their contributions to the intellectual life of Europe were decreasingly philosophical and increasingly enamored of “science”: that is, the process of hypothesis, experimentation, observation, and repetition. Philosophy became an auxiliary, relegated to questions for which methods of scientific observation and experimentation had not yet been developed, a merely transitory “thinking for the gaps”, self-effacing as it helped science to improve.[34]

But this is a failure to understand what it is that philosophy does or seeks. Without dwelling on what I have discussed at length elsewhere,[35] it can be succinctly stated that philosophy is that science[36] through which we discern intelligible meaning, a phenomenon which is neither new nor factual, but which permeates our entire lives. Without a science capable of discerning intelligible meaning, we invariably reduce “meaning” to and confine within the worst tendencies of our nature: our selfishness, self-centeredness, and most of all our conceit in the sufficiency, accuracy, and completeness of our own knowledge.

The Center Cannot Hold

Thus it is that without any training in the science of discerning meaning—or with only pretended education at the hands of sophistical nominalists—that the heirs of the Enlightenment are doomed to a culture of continual fragmentation. Credit must be given to some within the movement for recognizing the untenability of a “new center”; but this credit is minor, for their objection to the “center” is that it attempts mediation between the “existential polarization” between “left” and “right”; and so instead, they exhort doubling-down on the ungrounded principles of modernity without recognizing that those very principles give rise to the so-called “postmodernity” to which they so vociferously object.[37]

That is: presuming meaning, reason, and order, to all be the inventions of the human mind, rather than what it discovers (at least in origin) within the things themselves as existing regardless of our interpretation of them—and thus with an order that is not merely factual but also normative—modernity cannot but give rise to the so-called “postmodernity” running rampant today. That outlets like New Discourses and Quillette, figures like James Lindsay and Clair Lehman, protest the “postmodern” only shows that they have not yet allowed or not yet recognized (and likely never will) that the principles of modern philosophy oust the natural orientations of human cognitive existence, and thus, these outlets—though ignorant of its structure—still maintain a semblance, consciously or not, of belief in the discernibility of extramentally-constituted meaningfulness.

It is inevitable, in other words, that lacking belief in the ability to discover principles free of human caprice which explain or provide a normative order of life, the universe, and everything—not as something we can grasp immediately or with a perfect comprehension, but which we might unfold gradually and over time—no system can endure without subordinating the freedom of the many to the decisions of one (or at least, the united few). Upholding any sort of individualistic, nominalistic theory of ideation for all things non-empirical entails the absence of principles through which disagreement about meaning can be resolved.

Attempting to combat all the individual errors of unreason in today’s world is a fool’s errand: the digital diaspora[38] has led to a fragmentation of ideological perspective unlike anything seen in the past. Every academic engaged in the digital sphere, every writer, every pundit, every numbskull with a computer or a smartphone and social media accounts can become an “influencer”, capable of distributing ideas and interpretations into the ether, for better or worse (and usually the latter).

If one is looking for reason today, as something solid against which the upheaval of ideologies run amok can do no harm, modernity is not the answer, but only a return to the roots of the current problem. Perhaps instead, one ought to look at those in eras long past who studied—and those who now again are returning to a study of—the arts and human faculties of reasoning themselves.

[1] Season 4, episode 6: “The End of the World”.

[2] On the terms “postmodernism” and “postmodernity”, see Kemple, 5 November 2023: Peripatetic Peridiocal, “On Modernity, Ultramodernity, and Postmodernity”.

[3] Marcuse 1965: “Repressive Tolerance” in Wolff, Moore, and Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 91-117.

[4] A group of individuals that are certainly contrarian, seen from the perspective of the so-called “postmodern”, but which is relatively homogenous in their views—with the one significant exception, I would say, being Ben Shapiro, who alone possesses pre-Enlightenment principles in his worldview (Jordan Peterson having violently appropriated anything drawn from before the Enlightenment into a Frankensteinian monster of his own creation).

[5] Pluckrose, 14 April 2019: Areo Magazine, “No, Secular Humanism is Not a Religion”.

[6] Watts, 26 March 2019: Areo Magazine, “On Quillette and the Engaged Left”.

[7] Harris, 17 April 2019: Quillette, “Is the Intellectual Dark Web Politically Diverse?” Outside the ambit of these venues one will find, on occasion, similar sentiments to those in the broadly-centrist movement published at Aeon—but the discussion of Aeon and other such sites falls into the ambit of another discussion for another time.

[8] 16 October 2015: Quillette, “A Platform for Free Thought”.

[9] 09 April 2021: Arc Digital, “The Next Phase of Arc Digital is Here”.

[10] 21 January 2020: New Discourses, “A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity”. Originally published 22 August 2017: Areo Magazine.

[11] New Discourses, “About”.

[12] One can frequently find “medieval” used as a pejorative (see, e.g., Francis 29 March 2019: “The Democratic Revolution of the Enlightenment”—originally published in abbreviated form on 19 March 2019: Areo Magazine, “The Enlightenment and the Democratic Revolution”—where slavery is identified as a “Medieval institution”, revealing both the author’s bias and his historical ignorance), while Christianity and the cultural benefits it rendered as the dominant form of belief from late antiquity until the Enlightenment is often relegated to the condition of being incidental (see, e.g., Bassett, 23 August 2018: Quillette, “Progress and Polytheism”; Wakeling, 30 June 2024: Quillette, “The New Political Christianity”); the idea of creation is identified as an “ancient myth” (Krauss, 14 November 2023: Quillette, “The Return of the Creationists”); books promoting the return to religious sensibility are blithely dismissed (Daseler, 28 May 2025: “Religious Reasoning”; Coyne, 13 March 2025: “Religion: A Bad Prescription for America”).

[13] To extrapolate from many personal anecdotes, worshippers of the Enlightenment regularly engage in both polemic and apologetic gymnastics of remarkable gracelessness in vilifying religion and excusing secularism: the Spanish Inquisition and Crusades being exemplars of the evil inherent in religiosity while the Terror was merely a mistaken speedbump in pursuit of freedom, and the countless millions murdered by twentieth century totalitarian regimes not a consequence of rejecting religion, but of rejecting liberalism. This is not to say certain reprehensible excesses have not been pursued in religious societies—but so they are in every society, for human erring occurs in every human era. “Utopia” is a “no-place”.

[14] See Kemple, 16 April 2019: Epoche Magazine, “C.S. Peirce on Science and Belief” for an accessible presentation of Peirce’s 1878 article: “The Fixation of Belief” in The Essential Peirce, vol.1.

[15] A call also recently championed by institutions oriented towards or within higher education, such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the University of Chicago. Their drums signify no impending march on an improvement to thinking: only sound and fury. But this is a digression.

[16] Dawson 1959: The Movement of World Revolution, 40-41.

[17] Thus, all modern philosophy falls into the pit of nominalism, which may be defined as “the denial that relations as such possess an ontological status independently of the mind, or, being effectively the same thing, if they do exist they cannot be known.” Cf. Deely 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 511-89.

[18] Voegelin i.1945-1953: From Enlightenment to Revolution, 3: “The eighteenth century has been variously characterized as the century of Enlightenment and Revolution or alternatively as the Age of Reason. Whatever the merit of these designations, they embody a denial of cognitive value to spiritual experiences, attest to the atrophy of Christian transcendental experiences, and seek to enthrone the Newtonian method of science as the only valid method of arriving at truth.”

[19] Cf. Simon 1970: The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space, 163-178; Maritain 1959: Degrees of Knowledge.

[20] One of the most valuable—if extracted—insights of any philosopher belonging to modernity was the distinction that Jeremy Bentham proposed between idioscopic and cenoscopic sciences (appropriated by Charles Sanders Peirce). Idioscopy is the branch of science that operates through specialized observational means in pursuit of discovering new phenomena; cenoscopy is the branch which operates through the common reasoning faculties possessed by all human beings. Among the asinine consequences of scientistic tendencies is the belief that human beings need little training to excel cenoscopically, despite all historical and present evidence to the contrary. See Kemple, 16 April 2019: Epoche Magazine, “C.S. Peirce on Science and Belief”.

[21] Thus not only does Quillette publish a piece criticizing Dave Rubin, but Rubin fires back and derides Quillette’s declining standards, to which Claire Lehman, founder of Quillette, responds by implying Rubin is a hypocrite. James Lindsay drives a wedge between Christians by conflating Christian charity and liberal neutrality.

[22] That is, “diversity” often signifies nothing more than a “superficial quantitative plurality of identity characteristics”, used as a smokescreen to mask the lack of genuine diversity—and even an ignorance of what “diversity” as a cultural phenomenon truly means. Thus one will find the occasional, truly diverse piece on any of these sites, written by a truly diverse author—one who does not share the viewpoints of the editors—but these are scarce, and included strictly because they fit the ideological commitment to a superficial, quantitatively-measurable concept of diversity.

[23] The term “modernity” being one which has suffered some confusion, given its historical usage as signifying something like the recent past and present, as well as its application to various philosophical and cultural events, thinkers, and movements.

[24] Reference to the historical

[25] See Kemple 24 April 2019: The Synechist, “The Sophistication of Sophistry”.

[26] Dawson 1959: The Movement of World Revolution, 41.

[27] I think, for instance, of Immanuel Kant, who was nothing if not a brilliant philosopher, but also one who began from and never left an erroneous principle concerning the nature of human knowledge, and thus undermined the entirety of the philosophical system he quite brilliantly constructed. I am quite confident that many of the frequent contributors to these sites are gifted with a greater natural intelligence than my own, just as was Kant—but also quite confident that I have been fortuitous in my education with exposure to great minds and, moreover, to the truth of wisdom as something beyond any human mind.

[28] Which was not really a revolution at all, but rather the continuation of an intellectual trajectory begun centuries before, with the recovery of Aristotle’s texts through receipt of the Islamic tradition, which allowed science to become distinctly recognizable as, conversely, philosophy deviated into the unphilosophical path of modernity. See Deely 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 487-510.

[29] Dawson 1929: Progress & Religion, 21.

[30] St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens and Earth (1272/73: In de caelo et mundo, lib.2, lec.17, n.451) noted that all the given explanations of cosmological observation merely attempt to “save the appearances”; that is, that they are not necessarily explanations of what is being observed, but ones which accord based upon the present evidence.

[31] Which may be seen in part by an enormous number of writings, beginning with Aristotle’s c.330bc: Περὶ Ψυχῆς (On the Soul), but found intelligently developed into a coherent and consistent whole with parts from St. Augustine’s i.397-426: De doctrina Christiana and c.389: De Magistro, Avicenna’s i.1014-20: Kitab al’Shifa, Averroes’ commentaries (c.1180) on Aristotle’s On the Soul, St. Thomas Aquinas’ i.1256-59: Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate, 1259/65: Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, 1266-68: Summa Theologiae prima pars, q.75-88, his 1268 commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, Cajetan’s commentaries on Aquinas’ De ente et essentia (c.1493) and the Summa Theologiae prima pars (1507), John Poinsot’s i.1631-34: Cursus Philosophicus (especially the parts edited and contained in the edition prepared by John Deely, Tractatus de Signis and the Quarta Pars Philosophiae Naturalis), and as explicated in the past hundred years through Etienne Gilson’s 1935: Methodical Realism, 1939: Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, Yves Simon’s 1934: Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain’s 1959: The Degrees of Knowledge, John Deely’s 1982: Introducing Semiotic, 1994: Human Use of Signs, 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 2007: Intentionality and Semiotics, 2010: Semiotic Animal, and my own 2017: Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition and 2019: Introduction to Philosophical Principles, among many other worthy works.

[32] Manent 1987: Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme: Dix leçons in the English translation by Balinski, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1995).

[33] Cf. McLuhan 1943: The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, which explains the reception, development, and struggle over classical learning (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) from the end of antiquity through the Latin age and into the Renaissance.

[34] Evidenced in the 20^th century by the quite silly claim of Wittgenstein—who was proud of his ignorance of the history of philosophy—that it belongs to philosophy to discover the problems that science solves.

[35] 2022: Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person.

[36] See n.20 above.

[37] And thus the so-called “postmodernism” is really better termed “ultarmodernism”.

[38] Kemple, 5 February 2019: LapsusLima, “Leaving the Global Village” – republished 29 August 2021 on Covidian Aesthetics.

1. The titles of content always look like this one.

Not that they will all look exactly like this one; but they are always, in essence, promising to arm you with a certain τεχνή for improving your skills, abilities, habits, or life. They will make you cognitively sharper, intellectually richer, more resilient psychologically, more confident in your masculinity, more capable with women—as though you simply need this one piece or set of advice to unlock a treasure you have been missing.

2. The content is always going to be “life-changing”—but to get the key, you have to subscribe.

This need to subscribe, of course, is the grift. They scratch the itch you feel, of course, with free content—then promise that by subscribing, they will get rid of the itch altogether. And then you subscribe and discover that they just keep on scratching.

3. They always have answers but never linger upon questions.

This might be the most telltale sign that someone does not really know—for he does not admit what he does not know, and does not make what he does not know an integral part of his work. They claim to possess the wonderful but not themselves to be possessed by the restless wonder of unknowing.

#s 4-5, which will absolutely transform your understanding of human psychology, are for paid subscribers only! (I’m joking, they’re right below.)

4. They tend to be promoted by a lot of the same people.

Behind the scenes, there are grifter networks—quid pro quo associations that boost one another, often tapping into algorithmic promotional schemes by which engagement metrics allow them to appear prominently regardless of their content’s quality. Each lavishes praise upon the other—never do you see them confronting, challenging, or disputing amongst themselves. Theirs is a rhetoric of commercial benefit and not a dialectic of genuine friendship.

5. They engage with your engagement, but never with you.

It feels good to have engagement with an account or digital presence possessing a much greater reach than your own. After all, this is one of the major ways to increase your own reach. But how do they engage? A like, a quick comment without substance? A hollow compliment? You are to these accounts not a human being but a mere instrument in metric ascendancy. Only if you become yourself successful at producing such a crop will you be welcomed in, approached by, or promoted amongst the kings of grift.

Perhaps some who read this are offended by it. If so, know that my intent is not to offend but to reproach—from which, feeling offense may be the byproduct of a guilty conscience. I want you to be better as persons, not more successful at the game: two ends which are, as near as I can tell, in mutual opposition to one another.

.

00:00 – The Journey into Intellectual Life
15:38 – Signs and Semiotics: A Philosophical Exploration
29:49 – Crossing the Chasm: Science and Philosophy
36:53 – Understanding Signs and Their Significance
43:25 – The Art of Reading
52:41 – Semiotics and Relativism
56:07 – The Unfolding Journey of Meaning

Dr. Kanzelberger is a Faculty Fellow of the Lyceum Institute. Learn more about his background here.

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