Through Machine or Genius? Essaying the Essence of Repair
Rev. Douglas Olds
August 6, 2024
Geniuses are those whose senses or whose consciousness arise to meet the moment by being less attendant to life’s struggle to attain in and gather for themselves, and such attachments that funnel acquisitive and egotistic social and cultural norms into the soul. Either detached, as Henri Bergson has written, by “Nature which has forgotten to attach their faculty of perceiving” to their ego’s faculty of acting or, as I rejoin, more by nurture where character--privilege, rejection, stubborn resistance, and dogged and polymathic discipline combining--come to overwrite insecurities so to overrule egotistic strategies. Instead genius rescopes and adds sturdiness and scale to new ranges of expressive, gifting and other-directed craft, a craft and brilliance that outlives its promulgator. When genius “look[s] at a thing, they see it for itself” and not for how it applies to oneself as central but to the thing’s deeper logos, its radial structures and taxis of value alignment to sort out current problems of an historical language group and artistic canon (kinesthetic measures of the human soul). “They do not perceive simply with a view to action [striving: Homo faber];[2] they perceive in order to perceive” deeper and broader. For the poet, nothing is ephemeral and the old categories are suspect: for genius drives and is driven by the ever-youthful pleasure of perceiving into absolutes and how they hang together and rearrange the scope and scale of situatedness when perturbed. In regard to a certain aspect of a thing’s nature, its static utility, “whether it be their consciousness or one of their senses, they are born [or become] detached.” For the poet it is not the material utility investigated and perceived, rather the kinesthetic (the initium of Goethe’s ueberschauung) blended or revealing the metaphysical element of rightness of the thing (what Goethe misses, but Herder does not, by absenting ethics from aesthetics which reveals teleology)—its essence in the performance of grace and motilities of justice. The poet, with a prophetic ear, voices prescriptions against the hegemonic forces that block the flow of grace's absolute will. Whether this detachment is specific to a particular sense or a general awareness, visual artists, musicians, and poets of genius embody Roberto Duran’s ‘no mas,’ dropping the wrists and gloves to embrace an eternalizing way of living.
Carlyle wrote of sincerity of those immerse themselves directly into reality, not upon the consensus, the status quo, the norms of expedience that exclude and box in. Rather than a hermeneutics of market fundamentalism (Marxist or neoliberal) that interprets all historical change as the result of economic and communal processes, it is the necessity of genius that breaks the logjam of reactionary resistance to change, to teleological improvement rather than the call to retrieve traditions, to return to a simplified home, to take refuge in blood kinship and autochthonous energies cast as biological merit.
Genius unboxes, polymathically driven to loosing the cosmic dance from routines. Synestheticians of the Trinitarian perichoresis, by their inner hum of sensation collected by the snap of insight, genius cracks through to shatter the sediments of reactionary kinesthetics, that annealing pugilism of stale, transcendent claims which institutionalize the state machining its idea of “human nature” into blocks and tackles, dog whistles, and hammers and sickles.
Artificial Intelligence with its machine learning language models will never[3] accede to or recognize genius: Instead, its algorithms try to define, by predetermined criteria, nature, law and spirit in technical (consequentialist symbolic) terms and by substituting a metrics or norm of efficient process or hedonic outcomes (reflecting past patterns) for the juridical, forensic, or deontological norms of moral rightness or duty of the Golden Rule. Their codes degrade, by neglecting, the specifically metaphysical quality of law, the analogue character of mercy, and the infinite possibles of nature by transforming both the evolution of legal process and precedent of established law according to a technical normative frame of ethical consequentialism set in binaries (cf Friedrich Georg Jünger). Machine technics code for a set of preferred outcomes of recurrent forms established by history--their efficiencies for some end (for some, freedom, for others order) rather than their rightness [1]--that routinely conflict with the Prophetic Torah's intent and energies (spiritual law's messianic and reparative virtues)! It is the in the episodic emergence of genius and the spread of her virtues that will ever superannuate machine learning models and their systematizers of pattern fragments that come to Frankenstein: his deterministic and doctored recombinants of the past.
ChatGPT admits as such:
1) "The deterministic and probabilistic nature of machine learning models is inherently at odds with metaphysical concepts that fall outside of these parameters. A machine trained to identify patterns based on historical data will struggle with ideas that defy or break these patterns"
2) "Th[is current] text innovates ...by arguing that AI cannot grasp the metaphysical and ethical dimensions that human genius can. This critique...highlight[s] the enduring relevance of metaphysical and ethical considerations in the age of technology. The [text's] distinction between technical norms (efficiency and outcomes) and juridical/deontological norms (moral rightness and duty)... is essential in understanding the limitations of AI in comprehending and applying human ethical principles...The critique of AI is well-founded, emphasizing the gaps between technical processes and the deeper dimensions of human experience" (ChatGPT4o, August 6-7, 2024)
The escape from this dilemma may only be through embodied virtues--the Shema's (Deut. 6:4-9) human essence called forth from the languaged-archived tradition that proclaims the heart's priority so to drive understanding (repentance-consequent understanding [metanoia] stimulating and driving productive, problem-solving insight [dianoia]: Matt 22.37). The human essence involves limited knowledge of universally summed cause and effect and the complete operations of grace and justice. Limited knowledge may only, authentically, commit the essence of humanity to Christ's virtuous humility and ethics of service, especially, in the case of political theory, to disinterestedness as to material outcomes, leaving such to the trustworthiness of cause and effect where plays out the politically and pedagogically determinative virtue of accountability to justice amidst generational change. In this soil of language expressed in terms of trusting and embodied by soothing virtue and the Golden Rule are the kinesthetics of genius participatory of the saving logos of repair--and recognized as such with their sturdy and sturdying examples archived.
Notes:
[1] Machined efficiency programs a goal or end, for some in freedom from law's hindrance and for others that makes law more rigorous for the end of a preferred social order it calls beauty or "natural." The logic of a coded strategy is manic and partisan--its impulse on the one hand toward absolute freedom from law which is secured, at the same time, in the absolute necessity of law imposed on others that can never touch the partisan's life or property. Or at the least, such assaults of coercion and mechanized hegemonic technics efficiencies are to be walled off from the partisan's conscience and an arrogated claim of his professed enlightened view of his character and nature. In this, his liturgical life gives the partisan a hypocrite's confidence that he is participating in the unfolding kingdom of God.
Yet Rightness involves more than just beauty of form: it is its flowering, its energies, its transmission and tutelary genius building from the virtues, esp. of disinterestedness amidst generational change and turnover, and of recollection of spiritual process leading to progress and not a static feature of history typed and recurrent. Be warned: form transcendentalized as institutional beauty frames teleology in nostalgia.
[2] Genius is attendant to the call of human essence to (its) nature in contrast to the second-rate artist expressing the ruts and routine as tried and 'true nature.' Genius, on the other hand, climbs out or breaks the mold and unboxes the energies that liberate teleological purpose: "If you want to know a nation, frequent its second-order writers: they alone reflect its true nature. The others denounce or transfigure the nullity of their compatriots, and neither can nor will put themselves on the same level. They are suspect witnesses" (--master ironist EM Cioran).
[3] Lest one be put off by such an outrageous claim as "overly deterministic," let us check in with those infinite number of monkeys typing through eternity to repeat the collected works of Shakespeare, to ask a question: will a finite number of silicon boxes and bots processing historical patterns ever get Satan out of hell?
[4] Is it human "nature" to be “measure of all things” so to canonize pattern--yardsticks of human phenomena that cycle or recur through history-- or rather it is the human essence refined and open to progress that measures generationally from a baseline but is unbounded? Whereby the substances of nature are ever divided and remixed, but not the essential wholeness of earth as renewing, God as providing, and humanity growing as the bridge of these to come its own mature essence and responsibility of repairing what it has harmed? Creative and innovative minds dismantle and re-place outdated or oppressive social and historical patterns. By doing so, genius helps to bring about a more dynamic, evolving human essence--its messianic logos--that embraces diversity of nature and progress of shalom. Genius combats any imaginary--categorically recombinant and partial though identified by a "pattern," an aesthetic canon--that has become absolutized, its form(s) institutionalized as normative, even transcendent and thus hegemonic, an image of God, an image for humanity, for “Christianity” that is “singular, unchanging, partisan, and exclusionary” so to escape accountability in liturgies and the loyalty-building lies of what CS Lewis called an institution's "inner ring" [5]. These imaginaries are ever at risk of becoming deterministically normative by machine learning and implementation, so that the machine age ever more requires the recovery by genius of tearing away frozen images so to extend humanity's capabilities, to valorize the widening diversity of functionings, beliefs, practices, traditions, aesthetics etc. of those who might identify themselves as human, and particularly as "Christian."
[5] Olds, Douglas B. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Wipf and Stock, 2023, esp. 137 ff; 171; 184.
[6] ChatGPT 4o, 8/18/24: "[A] poem’s depth of reflection, symbolic richness, [nuanced imagery,] and lyrical style [indicate] the work of human author[s]. [A] thoughtful interplay of cosmic and personal imagery, along with the nuanced exploration of divine and human themes, reflects a creative process that is deeply intentional and resonant, hallmarks of human poetic expression... [E]xplorations of sensory experiences and philosophical questions reflect[ed] by thoughtful and intentional creative process [are] characteristics typical of human poetic expression [in contrast with AI output]. [Such] captures the interplay between the natural world and the human senses, particularly how nature's subtle signals—whether visual, auditory, or tactile—interact with... inner perceptions and understanding, [with] careful crafting of sensory detail and emotional resonance."
