A Modern Prometheus, Part 4

Seeing how only humans can transcend this world

06/11/2024

It's been a bruising few rounds between the AI teacher and the human teacher. But ready or not, it is time for Round Four: Ding, ding! In addition to the edge a human teacher enjoys in religious schools, we discover another advantage in liberal arts schools. Even though I attended the University of Dallas, a proudly professed liberal arts school, I did not understand the purpose and power of a liberal arts education until I read Josef Pieper’s book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. Do not be fooled by Pieper’s anodyne title; the book will rock your world. Pieper identifies two chief characteristics of liberal arts that make it an unique and even formidable education. First, it is inherently free from external demands and even from work. Think of liberal in the sense of liberty or freedom, not as liberal versus conservative. And second, it produces an existential shock that wakes us up to realize we are in the rat race. When we learn how these two facets of a liberal arts education function, we discover a third definitive advantage of a human teacher over an AI teacher.

One year after I was ordained, Bishop McDonald sent me to study canon law at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. One of our more entertaining professors was Fr. Robert Kennedy, who regaled us with hilarious stories. But he never tired of reminding us: “This is not a trade school!” Naturally all of us students agreeably nodded assent, but in our minds we were thinking: “Yeah, right. Look, the bishop only sent us here so we could learn how to do annulments. That is the only trade we want to learn. You can dispense with the rest.” Don’t most students only care about making an A in class, and landing a lucrative job? Otherwise, what is a school for? Put it this way: what do you call the person who graduated last in his class from medical school? You call him “doctor.” That is, he has learned enough to practice the trade of medicine, even if you don’t want him as your doctor. In other words, Fr. Kennedy hoped to instill in us a love for canon law beyond any practical benefit. To appreciate its inner logic and power as an expression of our faith, and therefore free (liberated) from any external uses we might make of canon law in annulment cases. But we did not care.

Josef Pieper distinguishes between liberal arts and the useful arts, remarking: “The knowledge of the functionary [those in a trade school] is not the only knowledge; there is also ‘the knowledge of a gentleman’ (to use Newman’s very happy formula in the Idea of a University, for the term artes liberales).”  That is, while other subjects, like science, math, engineering, technology, medicine (and we would have lumped in canon law!), all aim at a useful purpose (healing, building, buying/selling, balancing the books, annulling marriages), a liberal arts education is “free” from these outside aims. Therefore, one freely studies them for their own sake. In a moment we will consider how a human teacher is far better suited to teach such liberal arts, that is, the “knowledge of a gentleman,” than an AI teacher.

Pieper also insists that liberal arts produce a sort of “shock” that can shake a student and open their eyes to see the world and themselves as they truly are. Pieper provides this stark illustration: “But all the same, just try to imagine that all of a sudden, among the myriad voices in the factories and on the market square (Where can we get this, that or the other?) – that all of a sudden among those familiar voices and questions another voice were to be raised, asking: “Why, after all, should there be such a thing as being? Why not just nothing?” – the age-old, philosophical cry of wonder that Heidegger calls the basic metaphysical question!" Such a cry might elicit laughter from many people engulfed in the workaday world. But it might also come across as cold water splashed on the face, waking us up as if the whole world were somnambulists.

Besides this philosophical cry, Pieper lists other topics and experiences like poetry, prayer, love, and death that tend to produce this soul-shaking shock. Pieper explains: "The act of philosophizing, genuine poetry, any aesthetic encounter, in fact, as well as prayer, springs from some shock. And when such a shock is experienced, man senses the non-finality of this world of daily care; he transcends it, takes a step beyond it. The philosophical act, the religious act, the aesthetic act, as well as the existential shocks of love and death, or any other way in which man’s relation to the world is convulsed and shaken – all these fundamental ways of acting belong naturally together, by reason of the power which they have in common of enabling a man to break through and transcend the workaday world.” Liberal arts, therefore, are programmed precisely to deliver this dramatic “Aha!” moment. Like the moment the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes cried, “Eureka!” discovering the law of displacement in the bathtub, and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse. It is an urgent invitation to step back (or step beyond - transcend) the sensible world around us.

Let’s apply Pieper’s analysis to education specifically: to a liberal arts school (where philosophy, poetry, literature, history are taught) and a technical school (where law, medicine, engineering, math, etc. is taught). In the technical or trade school, I freely grant that the AI teacher is better prepared to help students achieve their aims: be a canon lawyer to work on annulments, be a doctor and heal the sick, etc. In a liberal arts school, however, matters are decidedly different. How so? While an AI teacher could indeed present the textbook material on philosophy and poetry and "teach" it with all the best available pedagogical skills, such teaching would stop at solely imparting information, but it would be utterly incapable of the critical next step, the step beyond, namely, transcendence.

The AI teacher would never cry out like Fr. Kennedy did so often in class: “This is not a trade school!” For an AI teacher it is always and only a trade school. The AI teacher could never demonstrate the method of philosophizing by its own example (recall the same impossibility regarding prayer). It could not say to the students, "Watch how I philosophize," or "Imitate me", or "This is how you do it." Why is that? Because the act of philosophizing requires an existential shock that can only be experienced by a being with spiritual powers wielded by a soul. That spiritual principle enables it to catapult and transcend the immediate, tangible world before his eyes and, as it were, to see all things, indeed see itself, from thirty thousand feet. An AI teacher is ultimately incapable of self-transcendence, but a human teacher is. Remember in the movie “The Truman Show" how falling in love – an emotional shock! – caused Truman to see how his whole world was a television show, a sham? An AI teacher would never experience the shock of love and thereby possibly transcend “The Truman Show.” It is trapped in this world, and it is trapped within itself.

It is noteworthy that Richard Dawkins, the atheistic, Oxford professor, also deals with this possible shock, but only to inoculate readers from any of its deleterious effects (in his view). He wrote about the aesthetic shock of beautiful music: "Obviously Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare. A great conductor is credited with saying: “If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?” In other words Dawkins would say that Pieper’s so-called shock is another “delusion” which the truly wise would do well to ignore. In order to maintain that position, however, Dawkins must deny the immaterial, spiritual soul, our origin and continuous connection to God, and our eternal destiny. Put differently, if Dawkins had starred in The Truman Show, he would forever have happily repeated the catch-phrase: “Good morning! And if I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!” Because he refuses to take the step of transcendence, he remains forever trapped. Ding, ding! End of Round 4.

Praised be Jesus Christ!