Michael Boland writing in New Polity recently pinned down this difference to a modern “forgetting” of Aristotle’s Final and Formal causes in favor of a flattened, horizontal worldview that only sees material and proximate (efficient) causes. The way Leavis went ad hominem didn’t help him make his point, but he had an important message: to philosophically reduce everything to concepts addressable by a scientific worldview is to produce a kind of death. It is to produce what C.S. Lewis called “Men without chests”—-men lacking zoe, life.

Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that it doesn’t quite make sense that things have intrinsic “being” and “ends” to which they are objectively and irrevocably oriented. It’s ultimately all raw material to be fashioned to purpose. This was demonstrated in a small way in a recent thread on Magnifica Humanitas.

The dichotomy is particularly important at this moment given that many of Leavis’ disposition see AI as the final technological embodiment of Snow’s worldview. If you see only efficient and material causes (and I’d argue even material causes are on their way out given cultural developments towards trans humanism), then AI is a smarter, more capable person (person being defined by what they can do, or effect in the world). If we leave out form and ends, then we will have birthed the first creation that surpasses the creator, on his own terms, in all ways. Someone of Leavis’ persuasion might say, “AI is a facsimile intelligence. Worse, a fraudulent intelligence. One that is missing the very essence of what it means to be intelligent, because “to be intelligent” entails relationship, and care, and ultimately love of the other who shares in your intelligence. The very meaning of intelligent “output” relies on this relationship being present, which is impossible for a cold, formless machine that renders tokens instead of words.”