In studying The Prince, we encounter the question of the extent to which Machiavelli’s teaching is still relevant today. Great scholars have noted Machiavelli’s dual reputation, as both a “teacher of evil” and the first modern political scientist. Have we, with our twenty-first century civility and science, not progressed beyond the need to learn from such a man?

Before addressing the question at hand, we must acknowledge that the impulse to place ourselves beyond Machiavelli is provoked, at least in part, by the shocking character of his teaching, and in particular his realism. On the one hand, we might sympathize with the practical criticisms of classical idealism that we find throughout The Prince. On the other hand, we might be distressed by his narrow picture of human motives and his ejection of morality from strategic considerations. There is no doubt that Machiavelli’s teaching is distinctly and sympathetically modern. But, at the same time, he makes us want to believe that we have moved beyond the framework that he introduced. We want to think that our situation has progressed. If we are honest about this reaction, the only way to test its value is to assess whether we still see ourselves in Machiavelli’s teaching, and whether, or to what extent, arguments for progression beyond his realism stand up to scrutiny.

Returning, then, to the question of Machiavelli’s enduring relevance, we must confront the sense that the world he helped to introduce has undergone various kinds of progress. First and foremost, advances in technology have reshaped many of the industries and institutions that underpin political life, including (but not limited to) agriculture, manufacturing, military arms, and communications. Coinciding with this expansion of technological power, the world has undergone revolutionary changes in the spheres of politics, religion, and economics. Modern nation-states, which are generally secular and claim exclusive territorial sovereignty within recognized borders, have largely replaced the prior order, which was characterized by religious influence, dynastic rule, and fluid borders. Furthermore, over the last several decades the United States and its allies have sought to formalize international relations among nation-states into a “rules-based order” that integrates sovereign powers into a global system of trade and governance oriented towards peaceful cooperation, over and against aggressive use of power. It bears mentioning that within the sphere of international relations, a certain brand of Machiavellian realism characterized by “picking the less bad as good” is still recognized as more or less strategically sound (XXI). Yet, given the aforementioned political, military, economic, and religious transformations of the last 500 years—along with the fact that core features of Machiavelli’s teaching pertain to commanding political power, wielding military arms, acquiring worldly goods, and conducting spiritual warfare against the Catholic church—it would seem reasonable to assume that the relevance of his teaching has, in general, declined commensurately.

Even if we grant that the modern world has come to look very different from the world of Machiavelli’s time, close reading and careful consideration of The Prince reveals that the sense he has become outdated is mistaken. Machiavelli’s insights are as relevant today as ever. Furthermore, proper study of The Prince provides a corrective view of politics and humanity, leading us to a vantage point from which we are able to see beyond the contemporary prejudices that diminish the persisting relevance of his teaching. In particular, we may gain a higher perspective for evaluating our own situation, as well as the human situation, as such, by turning to the distinction he draws between maintaining existing states and founding altogether new ones.

In the second sentence of The Prince, Chapter I, Machiavelli writes that “principalities are either hereditary, in which the bloodline of their lord has been their prince for a long time, or they are new” (I). This classification, between old and new regimes, is the very first statement he makes regarding kinds of principalities. With old principalities, or “hereditary states accustomed to the bloodline of their prince,” the modes and orders of governance are inherited from prior generations, such that the people grow attached to their form of rule, and even the familial lineage of their rulers (II). We might say that people become naturalized to a longstanding regime. For the prince seeking to maintain his power, inheriting ancestral orders is an advantage. Over generations his people will have grown to prefer the stability and way of life associated with his family’s rule. As long as he does not exhibit “extraordinary vices,” e.g. by committing egregious crimes against his people, he should enjoy secure rule (II). This means that it requires tremendous force to overthrow a hereditary prince. Furthermore, such a prince, if he is overthrown, will stand a decent chance of reacquiring his principality. His people will retain a fondness for the ancestral rule of which he is the living manifestation. The thrust of Machiavelli’s teaching, here, is that regimes which exist for a long time grow to have a stable, almost inertial quality because they shape the attachments and judgments of the people under their rule.

With altogether new regimes, on the other hand, there is no inherited memory of modes and orders upon which the prince can rely, and in which the people can believe. The founder must introduce “new orders and modes,” requiring extraordinary virtue, and must bring his people to believe in them, whether by persuasion or else by coercion (VI). That is, because the people belonging to a new state are not habituated to the order of the founder’s new regime, and people in such a position are “variable”—both easily persuaded and easily lost—Machiavelli teaches that “things must be ordered in such a mode that when they no longer believe, one can make them believe by force” (VI). Machiavelli’s emphasis on the use of force discloses that what he means by virtue (or rather virtú) departs from the classical meaning of the word. Whereas the classical meaning refers to human excellence, broadly understood, Machiavelli narrows the meaning to refer to manly spiritedness that makes one capable of raising armies, conquering lands, and willfully gathering power, by force when necessary. Virtue, in this sense, is epitomized by “the greatest examples” of founders: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. According to Machiavelli, these men began with essentially nothing, except for the opportunity to exhibit their virtue, and forged not just new states, but new and distinct peoples—often by violent means. (Consider, for example, Moses’s command to the Levites in Exodus 32.) Rather than trying to be simply virtuous, in the classical sense, Machiavelli suggests the founder must, by necessity, use both virtue and vice according to what is most prudent. In summary, for Machiavelli, the great founder must be able to see and act beyond the horizon set by preexisting modes, and beyond the constraints and rules of ordinary morality.

By dividing regimes into old and new, and teaching that the old is characterized by a loyal adherence to inherited modes, while the new is characterized by the prudent and virtuous establishment of new modes, Machiavelli provides a crucial insight into the contrasting psychology of the people and the founder. Generally, people inhabit a view from within an inherited regime which takes for granted the existence of the regime, its modes and orders, and the way of life it supports. As people grow attached to the ways of their regime, they become accustomed to seeing things as they appear from within the regime’s horizon of opinion (XVIII). In contrast, the perspective of the greatest founders can take nothing for granted. It must strive to see the world as it really is, not as it appears based on conventional opinions. Only then can such a founder successfully exercise prudence, exhibit virtue, and lay a firm foundation for his enterprise, by whichever means necessary. Furthermore, if it is true that all regimes were once new enterprises, then Machiavelli gives his careful readers cause to reevaluate their own opinions and perspectives. That is, he encourages us to ask:  how are our own attachments, perceptions and judgments shaped by the modes and orders that we have inherited?

Now we can return to reevaluate the question of Machiavelli’s enduring relevance, in light of his insight into the questionable quality of the perspectives of people deeply influenced by their own political environment. Earlier we said that the view that Machiavelli is a relic of the past is grounded on a particular perspective—namely, that of the inhabitant of the modern nation-state, in the late modern rules-based order. From that perspective, the apparent advances in technology, science and civility of the reigning modes and orders (i.e. the nation-state and rule-based order) seem to rebuke certain unsavory elements of Machiavelli’s teaching. But does not Machiavelli, himself, give us good reason to step back and examine that perspective? Could our sense of our own situation—including the “progress” we seem to have achieved—arise not from an accurate account of the world, but rather from influences of our political environment? In other words, if the judgment that Machiavelli is antiquated arises from the perspective of an inhabitant of the modern nation-state and the rules-based order; and if founding these very political structures required acts of prudential realism, extraordinary virtue, and overwhelming force; then Machiavelli’s teaching on the foundations of political life explains, and thus is vindicated by, the very perspective of his would-be critics. Those who would seek to diminish Machiavelli have not so much escaped his unsettling teaching by progressing beyond it, as they have insulated themselves from feeling its sting—and for reasons Machiavelli, himself, understood all too well. We find, then, that by making our way back through a careful reading of Machiavelli, we can return to the present with a deepened understanding of our own situation, which establishes the argument in favor of Machiavelli’s enduring relevance.

There remains, however, one more question to address. Why does any of this analysis matter to us? What is it that motivates us to recover an adequate understanding of Machiavelli’s teaching? For one thing, we live in a world that he and his most influential readers helped to shape, i.e., the modern world. Machiavelli’s break with ancient and medieval thought in many ways precipitated the development of our contemporary mode of politics. And, given the fact that we are creatures which rely on politics for our very survival, we should welcome any understanding that helps us to navigate the problems of political life—especially in this age of awesome and terrifying technologies. Furthermore, we should try to understand Machiavelli because we are creatures that tend towards idealism and self-delusion, which can lead to disastrous outcomes if left uncorrected. As he writes in XV, “many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.” Precisely when we want to imagine that our time is better—that we can successfully employ new and better ideologies toward the perfection of man—we can turn to Machiavelli for a corrective view that, although it sounds harsh, may prove to be less cruel than the ruin that attends the uncorrected path.

The best way to gain a perspective that corrects for modern prejudices is to read the greatest works with care, and preferably with the guidance of capable teachers. We can only understand where we are, and where we are heading, in the winding river of history by first making the difficult journey upstream. The mission of Parnassus House is to make just such a journey, and in doing so, to educate ourselves so that we may become better teachers, better students, and better leaders. We invite you to join us.

Parnassus House recently completed its inaugural seminar series on Plato’s Republic. Many thanks to all who participated and dedicated their time to reading and discussing it with us. To mark the occasion, I’d like to offer a brief reflection on what we learned about Plato’s view of the human situation and the importance of education.

We first encounter Socrates walking with Glaucon back to town from a religious festival at the Piraeus. The pair are stopped by Polemarchus and Adeimantus, and although Socrates protests, he and Glaucon are roped into joining the interlopers for an evening of speeches and dinner. Thus we first observe the political community encroaching on the plans and desires of individuals, subordinating them to collective interests. From the very outset of the drama, we are brought to see that the numerical majority has the capacity to create a “regime” which makes claims on individuals that may or may not align with their aims, and which are not easily rebuffed.

In the conversation that follows Socrates raises the theme of justice, which proves sufficiently interesting to replace the evening’s plans. Proceeding from questions first posed to Cephalus, the interlocutors engage the questions:  what is justice, and why is it of any concern to a man with money and power? If a man can commit crime with impunity, and in so doing can take many desirable things for himself at the expense of others, would such a life be preferable to a life of moderation and restraint? What, ultimately, is the best way of life—the life that affords the surest path to happiness?

Socrates, in a puzzling maneuver, promises to address the question of justice by “watch[ing] a city coming into being in speech” (369a). He begins by acknowledging that the city comes together, in the first place, because “each of us isn’t self-sufficient but is in need of much” (369b). The impetus for the city is, thus, human vulnerability and need, in the sense of our basic requirements for food, shelter, and clothing. Given the immediacy of such requirements, it follows that humans seek to organize around their optimal fulfillment, with the principle of organization, “one man, one art,” informing mankind’s first conception of the common good (370b). In accord with this principle, we watch the naturally moderate, yet undeniably primitive, city in speech coming into existence. The city needs each individual to dutifully perform a task for the sake of the common good, and in return the individual counts on the city to supply what he needs to live and, perhaps, to thrive.

But Glaucon objects that such a city would be a “city of sows,” unfit to meet the many desires of men such as himself (372d). And so the action of the conversation quickly shifts toward a different concept of political economy, the “feverish city” that is capable of supporting luxurious living, replete with meats, cakes, courtesans, and gold (372e–373a). We come to see that such a city requires growth. And for growth it requires a new art, the art of war, and thus a new class of citizen, the warrior, to form a standing army for the sake of both conquest and defense. This development, though necessary, comes at a cost. The ability to use force to dominate foreign populations is inseparable from the ability to use force to dominate the local population. Once there is a class of heavily armed soldiers capable of such force, despotic political rule by a military faction becomes a threat. Recognizing this problem helps us to see that, although the individual needs the city, and the city needs the individuals to perform their trades and practical arts, it is emphatically not the case that all functional political arrangements afford spontaneous harmony among all inhabitants. As a direct consequence of the development of the city out of what might reasonably be called a “state of nature” and into “civilization” the quest for harmonious living becomes deeply problematic. If the systems we can’t help but build in order to fulfill our needs do not harmonize with all aspects of our lives, then what are the prospects for our achieving happiness? And if our prospects for achieving happiness through fulfilling our needs turn out to be questionable, then what are we to make of broader questions pertaining to the human situation, e.g., that of divine providence?

If Socrates is going to locate perfect justice in the perfect city, then he must address these problems. He does so throughout Books III, IV, and V, demonstrating what would be required of a regime that sought to fully and perfectly harmonize the demands of political life with the lives of each of the human beings that constitute the regime. Education would have to be overhauled by driving out the fractious and tragic character of the gods of Homeric mythology, in favor of a more rational and moderate education. The division of labor, which elevates some individuals to positions of power and authority while subjecting others to necessary but menial tasks, would have to be justified through the widespread belief in a myth—a noble lie—that establishes and legitimates a stable caste system. The possession of private property, which tempts the powerful to gratify their desires through acquisitiveness at the expense of others, would have to be outlawed. The traditional family structure, which causes people to care for their own relatives more than they care for others, would have to be abolished. To that end, the citizens would have to be indoctrinated into believing that they are all one family, and traditional procreative practices would have to be replaced with an elaborate centralized program of eugenic human breeding. Finally, and most laughably according to Socrates, an all-knowing philosopher-king would have to rule over this perfect regime. 

The brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, become deeply invested in Socrates’ founding of the city in speech over the course of the conversation. They are enamored with its noble perfection, owing to their idealistic hopes, ambitious inclinations, and erotic longings. But the careful reader, aided by common sense as well as some awareness of the complex motives behind Socrates’ questionable moves, understands that the utopia Socrates has constructed is not only untenable—for such an elaborate scheme could never practically work—but it is also undesirable.

The human condition is characterized by inherent tensions that resist resolution. Our souls are filled with erotic longings and thumotic attachments. We want to have more than the natural order seems to provide of its own accord, and somehow feel justified in demanding that the world meet our desires. We seek to become more than the natural order seems to support. To complicate matters, we have capacities for speech and techne. We organize into complex political communities and shape natural materials into surplus goods, which permits us to expand civilization in order to gratify these outsized desires. Such gratification leads not to some ultimate harmony, but rather to expanded desires, disordered appetites, and factionalized conflicts. To attempt to resolve these fundamental problems is to create not a utopia (“no place”) but a dystopia. In the final analysis, man seems destined always to exist in some degree of fundamental tension with his regime.

Still seeking definitive proof that the just life is choiceworthy for its own sake, over and against the tyrannical life, Socrates goes on to classify the parts and types of the human soul. Comparing the types of soul to types of regime, he shows the tendency for decadence to arise as a function of the shift from noble and prescriptive ways of life into base and permissive habits. Humans are creatures of habit. We are not purely rational beings, capable of understanding the causes and effects of our choices and actions at every moment. We depend heavily on routines to shape our behavior. Once we have habituated ourselves to gratifying our desires—for only necessary goods, at first, but then for unnecessary ones, and finally even harmful pleasures—the soul manifests a kind of corruption that makes it difficult or impossible to live well. Desire is, at once, essential to our being, and a spectral plague that threatens the possibility of our flourishing. Or, as Cephalus puts it in Book I, eros is a “mad master” (329c). Thus, Socrates emphasizes the importance of the virtue of moderation. Through moderation, we can tame our desires like a master taming a wild beast, and in so doing we can live as harmoniously as our nature and our politics permits.

But we have come to understand that mankind is not naturally endowed with the virtue of moderation, and so the pressing question becomes: how does one cultivate it? Returning to the beginning, we see that Socrates has been suggesting and demonstrating the answer to that question all along. From the refutations in Book I, through the poetic reforms of Book III, through the allegorical imagery of Books VI and VII, to name only a few examples, Socrates emphasizes the crucial importance of education. Only though good education can man properly structure his soul. Only through good education can he adequately habituate himself to a way of life that affords flourishing, insofar as flourishing is permitted by his circumstances. The best life is only possible with the right kind of education. Insofar as the teaching of the Republic aims to guide careful readers in pursuit of the best way of life, it makes its greatest theme that of the pursuit of a proper education.

A proper education is one that liberates us to lead good lives. We all live in political regimes, due to necessity. Political regimes support the possibility of living nobler and better lives than could be lived without them. But they also burden us with tasks that exhaust us, laws that coerce us, pleasures that tempt us, pains that sting us, and various other dynamics that chafe against our natural longings. The uneducated soul—or, worse, the badly educated soul— will not naturally find its way towards higher and better possibilities because it will be snared and crippled by the tyranny of vice. But through good education we stand a chance of seeking the best of what is possible for us, and avoiding the worst.

We founded Parnassus House to provide such an education—the kind that makes us better learners, better teachers, better leaders, and better friends. There could scarcely be a more important task than to prepare ourselves and our friends for the pursuit of the good life. Studying Plato’s Republic is only the beginning, but it is the best possible beginning we could imagine. We invite you to join us as we continue to learn and to teach in the spirit of care and friendship.

It's necessary to step back from the drama to ask: what, precisely, is all the optimism and pessimism about? Many people have used the current generation of cutting-edge tools, and few deny their exciting and fearsome character. Such is the excitement that it becomes tempting to look further and further ahead to the most extreme possible outcomes without ever pausing to look to the past. That is, it is all too tempting to believe that there is no room for old teachings to moderate and inform the discussion around the promise and perils of A.I., or even its essential character.

Yet, for the student of classical political philosophy, the headlines, whitepapers, and dramas unfolding across the A.I. landscape can yield to what might be characterized as a rediscovery of essential insights that Socrates, himself, brought to light in ancient Athens—insights which give rise to a cautious and inquisitive moderation. In order to investigate those insights, one must start with a spare and provisional definition of artificial intelligence as it exists today, in the form of machine learning.

What is machine learning?

It would be an error to speculate about what artificial general intelligence might entail, because such a thing does not exist. The final section of this essay will consider such possibilities. The A.I. tools that people do encounter today, e.g., large language models (LLMs), fall into a category of technologies known as deep learning. Deep learning is a subset of the broader field of machine learning. Machine learning most often refers to a category of statistical techniques that use various kinds of neural networks to manipulate information from vast data sets in such a way that general patterns can be detected and used to respond accurately to novel prompts.

When speaking of machine learning it is all too tempting to anthropomorphize, in part because the design is loosely inspired by the neural connections in human brains, but also because the surface-level interactions people have with machine learning technologies are designed to feel like interactions one would have with a person behind a screen. For example, one can query in plain English, “What were the circumstances which led to the Thirty Years’ War?” and receive a plausible answer that might receive passing marks in a high school exam on the topic.

Behind the facade of human-like interaction, though, the fact remains that machine learning tools are fundamentally computers running software programs to manipulate information into a useful form. In the case of machine learning, the software involves transforming large amounts of data in service of two broad goals, the first serving the second. The first goal is to “train” the neural network to generalize relevant patterns from the data it is given. For a relatively crude model that identifies letters and numbers in images, this might involve a human providing millions of images of written text, each of which is paired with the letter or number it depicts. At first the neural network will do nothing more than guess letters and numbers at random. But the software is designed to use human-provided descriptions to correct its predictions, thereby “training” it to accurately detect the correct letters and numbers. The second goal is to use the now-trained model to respond to novel prompts. Following the previous example, a well-trained letter detecting model can be given images it has not seen before, and accurately detect the correct letter.

The core mechanism underpinning all machine learning is prediction through mathematical means. Every neural network that has been trained to respond to prompts with satisfactory answers has been trained to predict a sequence of bytes, i.e., 1s and 0s, that will satisfy the needs of the human who submitted the prompt. As this is somewhat abstract, it's worth considering a very basic example of a much simpler technique that does not qualify as "artificial intelligence," but which performs a similar operation. Linear regression is a statistical technique that takes as input a set of data with measurable parameters (in this simple case, represented by X and Y coordinates) and calculates a linear equation that "fits" that data. A linear equation may be said to "fit" a set of data if it seems to "take the shape" of the data from which it is derived, such that points along the line pass very close to the actual data, i.e., with sufficiently low error. An adequately well-fit equation can then be used to predict where other, similar data might fall. A common exemplary application uses linear regression to predict house prices, given a set of data and relevant variables, e.g., square footage, number of rooms, etc.

Neural networks are almost incomparably more complex than linear regression models, but the two share a very important core characteristic. Namely, both use statistics and historical data to build a mathematical model, which can be used to make future predictions. In the case of LLMs, the predictive step is called "next-token prediction," which means that, given a prompt, an LLM will predict some number of words, working one word at a time until a suitably complete answer has been generated. Although next-token prediction sounds quite a lot more like the way linear regression functions than the way human intelligence functions, Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, believes that it alone is enough to endow a machine with a capacity for so-called "general" intelligence:

What does it mean to predict the next token well enough? It's a deeper question than it seems. Predicting the next token well means you understand the underlying reality that led to the creation of that token.

Readers may sense in this description a certain skepticism about the relationship between the function of neural networks and the faculty of human minds which we call “intelligence.” That is intentional, not least because we simply do not know the causes behind the intelligence of the human mind. Honest neuroscientists will readily admit that the field is pre-paradigmatic, meaning that it is still waiting on a fundamental breakthrough. Certainly, a great many neuroscientists and A.I. researchers would seek to draw stronger connections between cognitive science and contemporary work on artificial intelligence. Holding such a view is only natural for scientists and entrepreneurs whose desires for success hinge on their ability to resolve the complexity of the human mind, but their overzealousness commits them to the principle error of bad philosophy—namely, to lack adequate awareness of what one does not know, and thus to stand with confidence atop an intellectually uncertain foundation.

If intelligence pertains to knowledge, as most seem to agree, then an understanding of knowledge and its limits will be essential for proceeding to investigate the possibility of mechanical minds. The most prominent man to declare that he knew what he did not know was Socrates. We now turn to his view of knowledge in order to shed light on modern A.I. efforts.

Socrates on knowledge

Socrates based his philosophical investigations on “a new approach to the understanding of all things,” distinguishing himself from the “madness” of philosophers who came before him by his characteristic combination of wisdom and moderation (Strauss 122-123). Many of his predecessors attempted to explain the workings of the cosmos by theorizing about the materialistic roots of things, i.e., the matter and processes that lead to the creation of the various beings that exist. Socrates, on the other hand, preferred to situate knowledge within the horizon of experiences that are natural for man in common life.

Thus, a Socratic treatment of knowledge necessarily begins with an important question. Why did Socrates pursue a different path than his predecessors did? What did Socrates think was wrong with the scientific investigation of beings in terms of matter and motion?

To help answer these questions, we can trace Socrates’s own philosophical development, drawing on the detailed account provided by Dustin Sebell in The Socratic Turn.

Problems of causality

Before he turned away from natural science, in favor of his own new approach, the young Socrates studied natural science in hopes of explaining the world. He looked upon the world of human awareness, full of things like tables and dogs and people, and sought to explain everything by reducing each thing to a set of underlying causes. In particular, natural science was concerned with material and efficient causes. Studying material causes involves investigating the essence of matter, itself. Studying efficient causes involves investigating that which is said to move matter into position. For example, one might seek to explain a wooden table by investigating the material of the table (i.e. wood) and the movement or positioning of that material (i.e. the manipulation of wood involved in carpentry). Young Socrates seems to have believed that such a style of inquiry, if successful, could explain all of the beings that man encounters.

For natural science to succeed, it had to satisfy two main conditions. First, it had to confirm its presupposition that nothing comes from nothing, i.e., that “nothing can come to be without a cause.” This amounts to a belief that all things, which both come into being and perish, are underpinned by an eternal, stable material that does neither. Such a material was called “an Atlas” by pre-Socratics, but modern readers will recognize echoes of this idea in the discovery of the atom and the principle of mass conservation. Second, science had to provide an adequate explanation of the “way of being” of each thing in terms of its matter, or physical parts and elements, and its motion, or the physical processes leading to its generation and corruption. Again, readers may recognize a modern version of this idea in claims that every single thing known to pre-scientific awareness is merely some composition of physical and chemical interactions. Everything is “just atoms,” nothing more, and the full essence of each thing can be reconstituted from a view of atoms, alone. Failing to satisfy either of these two conditions would amount to an admission that natural science, although useful in many respects, cannot explain the being of things with genuine knowledge.

In the course of his investigations as a young natural scientist, Socrates ran into a series of problems. The first pertains to the inadequacy of material and efficient causes for explaining the existence of things. As Sebell argues, “the need natural science has to reduce the way of being of each thing to its materials or elements coexists, uneasily it seems, with the need it also has to reconstitute that same way of being out of them again” (Sebell 44). That is, if there is nothing that truly exists but a homogeneous “soup” of identical, stable and eternal matter; and if there are a wide variety of heterogeneous beings which come to exist and to perish, necessarily out of that soup; then the problem of form arises. Recall, the second condition for the success of science demanded that it explain the ways of beings, not atoms. Atoms, by definition, must take many forms if they are to constitute tables and dogs and people. But what explains the existence of those forms, as wholes, in the first place? Anything worthy of being called a cause must account for why each form exists and is the way that it is. That why, or account, of each discernible form cannot exist at the atomic level, but according to materialistic natural science atoms are the only substrate in which anything can exist (without coming into being out of nothing). Here, Socrates seems to have reached an impasse.

Having recognized that matter and motion are not causes of particular forms of existence, but merely conditions for existence, Socrates turned his hopes toward that which seemed to provide the order and form which is otherwise absent: mind. Consider the example of dogs. What makes a dog a dog? For any given instance of a dog, what is responsible for the class of “dog” and the identification of a particular dog with that class? Nothing internal to the dog bears that responsibility. Rather, the mind that perceives the dog also classifies it. Likewise, where there is both a big dog and a small dog, beside one another, what can be said to explain the bigness of the one and the smallness of the other? It cannot be reduced to their position in space, nor to anything internal to each, as an even bigger dog would make the big dog seem small, and vice-a-versa. Again, it is rather the perceiving mind’s relational capacity that provides for the phenomenon in question. As Sebell, again, writes, “The primacy of form, together with the fact that what accounts for form is some mind’s eye, means that the coming into being and perishing to which the forms are subject can be fully understood if—and only if—a mind is, and is known to be, their orderer or cause” (Sebell 71). The view of mind-as-ordering-cause is known as “teleology.” Whereas material and efficient conditions could be described as a “bottom-up” view, starting with the smallest possible parts and working towards the whole, teleology takes a “top-down” view, starting with a whole, or an end (telos), that determines what would be good for that whole, and working towards ordering the parts. When a human makes a machine, he can be said to do so teleologically—with an end in mind, he orders the parts.

As promising as a teleological science may sound, Socrates’s hopes for such a science were soon dashed by further insoluble problems. Teleology focuses on knowledge of ends, or purposes. That is, it "supposes that knowledge of what is 'best for [each thing]' is somehow the same as knowledge of the cause of each thing" (Sebell 81). Each thing is somehow explained by pointing back to the purpose by which it was ordered. But in considering purposes there is a distinction to make between that of the whole and that of the parts that make up the whole. Does purpose pertain to each thing, separately? Or does it pertain to all things, as a whole? Socrates found that this investigation led to two very different conclusions, each incompatible with a firmly grounded natural science. When teleology focuses on parts, it falls into the trap of needing to presuppose a prior standard, i.e., a nature inherent to each thing to which it can point back. Instead of explaining the relevant causal question, e.g., why a dog is the way that it is, such a teleology ends up merely describing how that dogs fulfills what is needful according to the nature of dogs, leaving the presupposed nature of dogs unexplained. Furthermore, a teleology of parts quickly becomes reductionist, or concerned with parts, and parts of parts, all the way down to the level of the atom. Socrates had already rejected reductionist natural science as untenable, and this path would lead to the same dead end. But the opposite path, a teleology focused on the whole presents its own problems. Namely, such a view terminates in the wholly unscientific mystery of divine will. Can it be said that there is an “end” in “mind” for all of being? Is there, at the highest cosmic level, one universal purpose of being? If so, Socrates recognized that such knowledge could never be acquired by man. In the end, “teleology comes perilously close to—it may even be the same as—theology” (Sebell 77). Faced with the dogmatic incoherence of reductionism, on the one hand, and the dogmatic mists of theology on the other hand, Socrates was forced to abandon teleology as a ground for non-dogmatic, reason-based science.

With both approaches, the bottom-up and the top-down, lying in ruin, is there anywhere left to turn? It is from this point that Socrates set off on his “second sailing” in search of knowledge.

Knowledge though dialectic

The genius of the Socratic way is that it proceeds from a starting point that is very difficult to dispute. Namely, it begins from that which is already known to pre-scientific awareness, i.e., the noetically heterogeneous beings. His new approach dictated that an inquiry into the being of these things—of tables and dogs and humans, as well as the many human phenomena like courage and justice and love—can, and in fact must, be investigated on their own terms. Both the “too low” view of reductionism and the “too high” view of teleology were found to obscure these heterogeneous beings, as they are experienced, and each terminated in dogma as a result.

Furthermore, Socrates's approach avoids reductionism by refusing to focus exclusively on the sense perceptions of material reality. That is, his method does not blind itself to opinions about tables and dogs and humans, in favor of physically indisputable “facts.” Quite the opposite. He recognizes that the world present to our awareness, and which we hope to explain, presents itself in two distinct aspects, both of which must be acknowledged in any inquiry that does not suffer from “a kind of narrowness or incompleteness of perspective” (Sebell 108). A complete inquiry has to take into account both the presence of things through the body, in terms of sense perceptions, and the presence of things through the soul, in terms of speeches and beliefs.

In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss gives another account of the Socratic method, which takes soul and speech into account. He writes:

Socrates started not from what is first in itself or first by nature but from what is first for us, from what comes to sight first, from the phenomena. But the being of things, their What, comes first to sight, not in what we see of them, but in what is said about them or in opinions about them. (Strauss 124)

Starting from one’s own common sense, and the common sense opinions of others, is crucial for Socrates because the alternatives tempt the inquirer to become obsessed with abstractions. Abstractions prove to be very useful because they are graspable and easily manipulated towards a use. But they purchase their usefulness at the cost of drawing man into a kind of delusion about the world—namely, that it is essentially homogeneous, rather than a complex and often contradictory composition of heterogeneous parts. Such abstractions may be useful, but that doesn't make them real or true. Furthermore, the utility and power of abstractions can come to distract the thinking man from his most important faculty, which is perception in the mind’s eye of what is real for man qua man. As Strauss puts it, referring to man’s common sense opinions:

Socrates implied that disregarding the opinions about the natures of things would amount to abandoning the most important access to reality which we have, or the most important vestiges of the truth which are within our reach… opinions are thus seen to be fragments of the truth, soiled fragments of the pure truth. (Strauss 124)

But, of course, Socrates was not satisfied with mere opinion, as opinions are almost always wrong, or at the very least incomplete. An opinion does not imply knowledge. In order to arrive at understanding, opinions have to become knowledge somehow. To that end, Socrates was famous for asking his interlocutors challenging questions, because he saw in his method of conversation the opportunity to refine opinions about a topic into genuine knowledge pertaining to some fundamental question. This conversational method is known as “Socratic dialectic.” Strauss describes Socratic dialectic as “the art of conversation or of friendly dispute” through which contradictory opinions are distilled into knowledge. No one opinion about a thing will ever be purely true, but each genuinely-held opinion contains “soiled fragments of the pure truth.” “Philosophy consists, therefore, in the ascent from opinions to knowledge or to the truth, in an ascent that may be said to be guided by opinions.” (Strauss 124)

In summary, then, Socrates seems to have believed that genuine knowledge—knowledge pertaining to the fundamental questions that man faces in his direct experience of living—is only attainable by having friendly conversations with people whose common sense opinions result in contradictions, which can then be resolved through questioning. If the right questions are asked, then the interlocutors’ false opinions can be challenged and ultimately relinquished, while preserving and refining the fragmentary and perhaps ineffable truths embedded in them.

Adherents to modern versions of physical and social science will, no doubt, bristle at certain aspects of this description of knowledge. People have become habituated to think of knowledge as something that institutional science somehow creates. By "institutional science," people tend to mean organizations, like government and university research labs, carrying out a systematic process that includes formulating plausible hypotheses, collecting vast amounts of data, and using statistical methods to try to falsify the hypotheses through hard-nosed analysis.

Anyone who enjoys the fruits of modern medicine and technology must admit that modern scientific techniques have amazing power and utility. But likewise it must be acknowledged that the entire edifice of such material science is built atop the same foundation of philosophy just now articulated. That is, science can not reject but can only build on the fundamental premise that there is a natural whole, which is composed of parts, and which the mind’s eye can directly perceive, and about which a reasoning being can make informed judgments. As Socrates discovered in his investigations as a young scientist, without this firm basis, science dissolves into incoherence and dogma. Strauss, again, explains beautifully:

All knowledge, however limited or “scientific,” presupposes a horizon, a comprehensive view within which knowledge is possible. All understanding presupposes a fundamental awareness of the whole: prior to any perception of particular things, the human soul must have had a vision of the ideas, of the articulated whole. (Strauss 125)

Thus we are returned to the core faculty underpinning human knowledge and understanding, which is a certain “fundamental awareness of the whole.” It would seem that without the soul’s capacity to intuit the whole of being, and the many noetically heterogeneous beings, there would be no way to form opinions, or even to perceive the parts that make up the whole. Those who speak of “the hard problem of consciousness,” are possibly speaking about something along these lines. And, to repeat, this mystery is a core reason that honest neuroscientists consider their field to be pre-paradigmatic.

Having traced the course of Socrates’s quest for knowledge, we can now return to modern questions about artificial intelligence. Given a fresh understanding of the character and limitations of knowledge and intelligent minds, what light can be cast on the prospects for building mechanical forms of intelligence?

Artificial intelligence in light of Socrates

In order to inquire into the possibility and limits of artificial intelligence, a standard of intelligence is required. As we have said, intelligence seems to pertain to the acquisition and application of knowledge. At a glance, various LLM technologies seem to already achieve something like this standard, in that they can provide relevant information in response to a given query. Is that not "application of knowledge," in some sense? Yet, haven't computers always done this, to an extent, since the advent of databases and the Internet? And doesn't the growing sense of fear and excitement indicate that many people want to measure artificial intelligence against a much more ambitious standard, which might equal or exceed human intellectual capacities? For clarity, then, we can formulate the question at hand as follows. Is it possible for people build computers that exhibit the kind of full intelligence characteristic of human (or possibly even super-human) beings?

Our foray into Socratic science and dialectic will provide a standard for human intelligence. A truly intelligent computer would have to meet or exceed the human ability to derive knowledge from an experience of being, and it would have to be able to adequately apply that knowledge to some end. We will leave open the provocative question of whether or not computers will be able to choose ends of their own, provisionally assuming that humans will remain "in the loop" of such an artificial general intelligence.

The first obstacle to building fully intelligent computers is that computers have a fundamental lack of awareness. Instead of awareness, computers have all manner of ingresses for information in the form of devices like cameras, microphones, thermometers, gyroscopes, etc. Smart phones are so amply outfitted with these devices as to have become eerie, quasi-aware things that more than a few people have suspected of discreetly spying. But measuring various kinds of stimuli, no matter how accurately or surreptitiously, does not meet any reasonable standard for “awareness,” and comes nowhere near the “fundamental awareness of the whole” that people clearly exhibit. Awareness is a deeply mysterious faculty of the soul, manifesting for us effortlessly and opening us to an unmediated flow of experience of the world in which we exist. Unless a computer can exhibit such a capacity, it would seem that the full scope of human intelligence is unavailable to machines. After all, without this fundamental awareness of the whole, the entire process that follows cannot begin. Parts cannot be identified, opinions cannot be formed, and dialectic in a quest for knowledge cannot commence.

Even if a lack of awareness will prohibit machines from reaching "full" intelligence, we should not stop the analysis just yet. Perhaps something equivalently, or exceedingly intelligent could emerge from a computer that has been adequately primed for experience. After all, as we have noted, machine learning algorithms involve a “training” step for a reason. Namely, computers don’t just miraculously wake up and start exploring the world on their own, so they must be “educated,” in a way. And the fact that computer scientists can and do train models would seem to suggest that machines are capable of learning, in some sense. Following the prerequisites of Socratic dialectic, then, one might say that people initially supply something like opinions to computers in the form of very large databases, containing data collected from a great many people over a long period of time. These data still need to be transformed into knowledge, though. Nobody believes that it is enough to mount a hard drive containing a very large database to a computer, and to call that “intelligence.”

For neural networks, it would seem that the training step supplies the apparent transformation of data into "knowledge." Interestingly, such training generally takes a quasi-dialectical form. The program does not proceed from axioms, but rather takes each piece of information as it is presented, and works with human-defined "correctives" to hone mistakes into accurate responses. One can imagine that an image classification A.I. model says, “This is a cat,” and the training program responds, “No, that is not a cat,” or “Yes, that is a cat.” Such a dialectical conversation is not exactly friendly, in a human sense, nor is it of the same philosophic or literary caliber as The Republic, one must admit, but is nevertheless broadly dialectical.

Yet, compared to human intelligence A.I. models exhibit a further deficiency stemming from the faultiness of equating “data” with “opinions.” It may seem like splitting hairs, but the distinction is a crucial one. Data are inert pieces of information, 1s and 0s, arranged in some state on some storage medium. A datum, itself, is not able to provide further explanation, nor is it able to frame itself within a context. In that sense, it is like the atom that cannot explain the form of the beings. A single datum, or for that matter, a group of data of arbitrary size, is still lacking an ordering cause – that which transforms the bits into knowledge. With human opinions, on the other hand, further explanation and framing within a context are available, by virtue of the fact that they are held by an already-intelligent human mind. The human holding the opinion can be asked questions. Perhaps a person shares the opinion, “I don’t like anchovies because they are stinky.” An interlocutor replies, “You say you don’t like anchovies, but at dinner last week you ate a Caesar salad!” The person responds, “Oh, well, in that case they're alright because romaine lettuce is so plain, otherwise, and at any rate…” The datum “anchovies are stinky” is at most a written artifact of an opinion, but its lifeless inability to say any more, especially in the face of a fruitful contradiction, betrays that it is not, internal to itself, a real opinion. If an opinion is to be rich enough to contain a "soiled fragment of the truth," it surely must exist in mind that already has the intelligence to reconsider.

As a brief aside, it should be noted that A.I. researchers claim to have discovered a "mysterious emergent behavior" known as in-context learning whereby already-trained LLMs seem to be capable of inferring patterns in training data without explicit, per-datum human correctives and tuning. While that is very interesting, indeed, it invalidates neither the claim that computers do not hold opinions, nor the claim that they are not aware. Rather, it speaks powerfully to what computers are capable of, namely extremely complex forms of prediction, which was described above. And, as we have also seen, mere prediction, no matter how sophisticated, does not qualify as intelligence.

Returning to the question of intelligence, it seems that without both awareness and opinions, machines are bound to remain fundamentally unintelligent. Compared to living, aware, opinionated beings, computers are seen as exactly what they are: lifeless, unaware, repositories for written artifacts of already-gained human knowledge. In spite of the amazing feats of computer science that allow for plain-language queries and rich lingual and visual responses, nothing worthy of being called full intelligence seems to be remotely possible within a computer. The living mind that orders the computer's repository of information and logical structure through instruction, it seems, can never quite make its way into the machine, remaining forever ever on the periphery.

In the end, such an inquiry leaves one rather disenchanted with (or relieved about) the prospects for building fully intelligent machine minds, and rather amazed by the mysteries of the human mind. It would seem we are safe from the most radical kind of possible upheavals, at the hands of super-intelligent computer overlords. Then again, no philosophic reasoning can ever close, once-and-for-all, the door to new revelations out of the purely unknown. It is always hypothetically possible that a miraculous breakthrough will "solve" the mystery of the conscious, intelligent mind and usher in an age of super-intelligence. However, such hopes are grounded not on a rational assessment of computers and intelligence, but a dogmatic belief in the possibility for nous to spontaneously emerge out of a bundle of connected transistors.

That said, even limited forms of artificial intelligence still pose very real, very serious threats to the stability of any regime and the flourishing of its people. Political philosophers are far back as Plato have warned that the innovations of technology inevitably cause massive upheavals. Much simpler technologies, like writing and the printing press, have proven this out. In a future essay, I hope to be able to draw on political philosophy to investigate the character of the sorts of upheavals that A.I. tools, however limited, may precipitate.