YESTERDAY’S TIDBITS BEGAN ANALYSES of Christopher Beha’s “A.I. Isn’t Genius. We Are.” Today in Part 2 we pick up Western philosophy in our early first millennium.
The Christian Era’s Unity with God. “In the Christian era,” Beha says, “the person touched by genius gave way to the mystic-saint who had achieved ecstatic moments of unity with God.”
Saint Augustin, Augustine of Hippo, 354–430, theologian and philosopher whose writings deeply influenced Western philosophy. Image by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645, via Wikipedia. You’ll notice the artist’s placement of truth.
Beha continues, “Reality had deep truths that could not be arrived at by way of the intellect, and these truths could make themselves manifest in surprising ways.”
Then Came the Enlightenment. Beha continues, “With the rise of the Enlightenment, tutelary spirits and divine visitations went out of favor, but secular culture could not quite do away with the allure of genius.”
Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Portrait of Kant, 1768, by Johann Gottlieb Becker.
I’ve long admired Kant’s Categorical Imperative: We should act in a way that could be a universal rule of conduct. It’s sorta a philosophical version of “Do Unto Others….”
“People,” Beha continues, “now spoke of certain human beings as being geniuses, not as having geniuses, but the term still indicated something other than simple intelligence.”
A Temptation to Give Up on Genius. Beha asserts, “There are many reasons our culture has largely given up on geniuses, some of them very good. We’re living in a thoroughly fraudulent era whose signature figures, from Donald Trump to Sam Bankman-Fried, have made the claim of genius central to their frauds.… On all fronts, we have become rightly impatient with those who make up their own rules.”
Genius Just Means Rich?? “Our culture,” claims Beha, “seems now to reserve the designation of genius almost exclusively for men who have put quantitative skill to work in accumulating enormous wealth. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all been awarded the status at one time or another.”
However, Beha notes, “When the clearest sign of genius is a net worth in 10 figures, we have come a long way from the ascetic outsider who suffers for the truth.”
Why Not Return to the Socratic View? Beha describes, “Believing again in genius means believing in the possibility that something truly new might come along to change things for the better…. It means recognizing that great works of art exist to be encountered and experienced, not just recycled.”
Beha posits, “… perhaps we could instead return to the old Socratic-mystic idea that genius might visit any of us at any time. There is a voice waiting to whisper in our ears.”
He concludes, “Everything about our culture at the moment seems designed to eliminate the space for careful listening, but the first step in restoring that space might be acknowledging that the voice is out there and allowing that it might have something important to say.”
I’m encouraged that the concept of truth seems to have a place in all this. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025