Heidegger Again

He knew exactly what is wrong with AI.

Mind blown. So I’ve had books by George Steiner on the shelf for at least a year. I got really bored of the Thirty Years War and started on Steiner’s book on Heidegger and almost immediately I get this:

Witnesses, such as Löwith, as Gadamer, as Hannah Arendt, are of one voice in saying that those who did not hear Martin Heidegger lecture or conduct his seminars can have only an imperfect, even distorted notion of his purpose. It is the lectures, the seminars already prior to Sein und Zeit, which, in Marburg in the very early 1920s, came as a shock of revelation to colleagues and students. The “secret king of thought,” as Arendt memorably called her master, acted through the spoken word. Gadamer characterizes the experience of hearing Heidegger as one of “Einbruch und Umbruch,” of “break-in and of [destructive-foundational] transformation.” The rare recordings we have of the ageing Heidegger’s voice and mode of speech retain their spell. Critics have referred to a kind of histrionic sorcery, masked as questioning simplicity. This charge has, we know, an ancient ring. And the Socratic motif is of utmost relevance. Socrates is, rules Heidegger, the “purest” of all Western thinkers; that purity is immediate to the fact “that he does not write.” Plato’s Phaedrus and the Platonic VIIth Letter express the primal contradiction between the serious pursuit of the Logos, of philosophic insight on the one hand, and writing on the other. The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Texts subvert the absolutely vital role of memory (Heidegger’s key-term, Erinnerung). It is the sophist, the rhetorician, the venial orator who commit their craft to writing. The true poet is an oral rhapsode. The true thinker, the authentic pedagogue above all, relies on face-to-face speech, on the uniquely focused dynamics of direct address, as these knit question to answer, and living voice to living reception. This theme of the abstention from writing of all responsible philosophic teaching is perennial in the Western tradition (as it is also in the Orient). We find it in a sharp guise in the practices of Wittgenstein, himself, like Heidegger, an anti-academic academic and scorner of the “profession of philosophy” in its conventional and publicist sense. (It is, I believe, the conjunctions in depth between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the two foremost philosophic-linguistic thinkers of the age, so seemingly antithetical, which offer the most fertile ground for coming investigation and comprehension.)

This is what is wrong with AI, and it is something that will always be wrong with AI.