Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

You may call my love Sophia
But I call my love Philosophy Van Morrison Philosophy always buries its undertakers. Etienne Gilson The only thing worse than spurious metaphysics is spurious warnings about metaphysics. It should be obvious that the farther one moves away from the physical, the greater the likelihood of fancy; but that is merely the occupational hazard of metaphysics, in the way that superstition is the occupational hazard of religion and dogmatism is the occupational hazard of reason. (And of unreason even more.) I say fancy but not falsehood, because falsehood is a possible fate for all opinions, and falsehood is different from nonsense and occurs also in the domain of serious thought. Yet the possibility of metaphysical error is hardly an excuse for sufficing with the physical. This is especially true in a society that has been smothered by physicalism. Contemporary physicalism — the church of matter — takes many forms: biological, economic, algorithmic, historical. The tyranny of historicity over popular understandings of human life is the most pervasive and stealthy materialism of all. The most triumphalist formulation of it that I have come across is the striking remark by Luc Brisson, the French historian of classical philosophy, that “even transcendence has a history,” which is factually incontrovertible but philosophically another anti-metaphysical ambush. The reputation of metaphysics in our time has been damaged also by its conflation with religion, or more precisely with the intellectual degradation of faith by folk religion and by politics. Except for vulgar atheists, however, metaphysics is as much a secular inquiry as a religious one.  Metaphysics is the deepest dissent of our time, and that is only the first of its attractions. I have always been helpless before it, and famished for it; and I have an absurd tolerance for its excesses, which seem to me to err in the right direction. Nobody ever promised that the truth will not be outlandish. I confess without shame that two of Swedenborg’s books sit on my shelves: Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, From Things Seen and Heard, and the magically titled The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugal Love, After Which Follow The Pleasures of Insanity Pertaining to Scortatory Love. (Scortatory means sexual.) These interminable volumes are crazy — the pleasures of insanity, indeed — but that is not all they are: they are also the productions of a huge intellectual ambition and they are riddled with penetrating intuitions about, well, everything. Czeslaw Milosz enlisted Swedenborg in his campaign to expand the range of intellectual respectability to include what he called “modes of eccentric vision.”  Kant himself, and there never lived a less crazy man, took an interest in Swedenborg’s flamboyant visions, purchasing many of his books and publishing, in 1766, a colorful (for Kant) denunciation of Swedenborg called Dreams of a Spirit-Seer — but admitting to Moses Mendelssohn in a letter that same year that his view of Swedenborg was in fact less hostile: “As regards the spirit reports, I cannot help but be charmed by stories of this kind, but as regards the rational basis of such reports I cannot rid myself of one or two suspicions of their correctness.” Only one or two? He went on to fulsomely defend metaphysics to the Jewish metaphysician as nothing less than a requirement for “the true and lasting welfare of the human race.” As I say, erring in the right direction. In his attack on Swedenborg, Kant made a distinction between “dreams of sensation,” which is what the spiritualist knows, and “dreams of reason,” which is what the metaphysician knows. This was years before his epic circumscription of metaphysics in the first Critique. But the notion of an oneiric rationalism certainly throws the door open to florid speculations. It would be only a few decades until Goya illustrated a less forgiving attitude to the “dreams of reason,” though Kant anticipated Goya’s alarm, his swarming monsters, when he remarked in the second Critique that “a fanatic is a person who dreams according to principle,” and warned unforgettably of “rational ravings.”  Not even I believe that metaphysics is a condition for the welfare of the human race. The long political career of metaphysics, the many centuries