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The West’s Dangerous Obsession With Analytical Intelligence

The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.
The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Everyone wants to be intelligent. But no one is quite intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.

There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence. By the Collins English Dictionary, intelligence is ‘the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct’. By the Macmillan Dictionary, it is ‘the ability to understand and think about things, and to gain and use knowledge’.

In seeking to define intelligence, a good place to start might be with dementia. In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, multiple higher cortical functions are disturbed, including memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judgement. In my time, I have worked with over a thousand people with dementia, and I think it significant that they, along with people with severe learning disabilities, cope very poorly with changes to their environment, such as moving into a care home or even into an adjacent room.

Taken together, this suggests that, at its broadest, intelligence refers to the functioning of a number of related faculties and abilities that enable us to adapt and respond to environmental pressures. Because this is not beyond animals and even plants, they too may be said to be possessed of ‘intelligence’.

We Westerners tend to think of intelligence in terms of analytical skills. But in a close-knit hunter-gatherer society, intelligence might be defined more in terms of foraging skills, hunting skills, or social skills and responsibilities. Even within a single society, the skills that are most valued change over time.

In the West, the emphasis has gradually shifted from language skills to more purely analytical skills, and it is only in 1960, well within living memory, that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped Latin as an entry requirement.

In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the seminal paper on emotional intelligence, and EI quickly became all the rage. In that same year, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser. Today, we cannot go very far without having some considerable IT skills (certainly by the standards of 1990, or even 2010), and computer scientists are among the most highly paid professionals.

All this to say that what constitutes intelligence can vary quite considerably according to our values and priorities.

The West Before the West

The Western privileging of analytical skills is rooted in Ancient Greece—but the story is more complicated than it first appears.

Before Socrates, there was the Oracle at Delphi. For centuries, prominent Greeks travelled to Delphi to consult the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, whose cryptic pronouncements were thought to issue from the god of light. One of these pronouncements concerned Socrates himself.

According to Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Pythia replied in the negative. When Socrates found out about this, he did not know what to make of it. So he went about questioning one man after another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of Apollo, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test.

Thus, one of the founding stories of Western rationalism begins not with some argument, but with a rather irrational oracle.

Socrates held that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He typically taught by the dialectic or Socratic method, that is, by questioning one or more people about a particular concept such as courage or justice to expose a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoke a reappraisal of the concept.

But even Socrates, the great champion of rational enquiry, made room for another kind of knowing. At various times, he claimed to have a daimonion or ‘divine sign’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as going into politics or fleeing Athens after having been sentenced to death. When, in Plato’s Crito, his friends urge him to flee Athens, he refuses on the authority of his daimonion: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; this voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.’

So here we have it: the father of Western rationalism, in hock to some mysterious voice.

The Rule of Reason

Plato and Aristotle built upon the legacy of Socrates, while underplaying his more mystical side.

For Plato, reason could carry us far beyond the confines of common sense and everyday experience into a ‘hyper-heaven’ (Greek, hyperouranos) of ideal forms. He famously fantasised about putting a geniocracy of philosopher kings in charge of his utopic Republic.

Aristotle—who for centuries came to be known simply as ‘our Master’—argued that our distinctive function as human beings is our unique capacity to reason, and therefore that our supreme good and happiness consists in leading a life of rational contemplation. To paraphrase Aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Man more than anything is reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, the best, and the most divine of all.’

And with that, where else could the West go?

Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, also conceived of God as ‘thought thinking upon itself’ (noesis noeseos). In later centuries, reason became a divine property, found in man because made in God’s image. If you struggled with your SATs, you now know who to blame.

When Intelligence Becomes Human Worth

As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, the West’s obsession with analytical intelligence has had, and continues to have, dire political, social, and, above all, moral consequences.

Immanuel Kant—probably the most influential philosopher since Aristotle—most memorably made the connection between reasoning and moral standing, arguing (in simple terms) that, by virtue of their ability to reason, human beings ought to be treated, not as means to an end, but only ever as ends-in-themselves. From here, it becomes all too easy to conclude that, the better you are at reasoning, the worthier you are of personhood and its rights and privileges.

For centuries, women were deemed to be ‘emotional’, that is, irrational, or less rational, which justified treating them as chattel or, at best, second-class citizens. The same could also be said of non-white people, over whom it was not just the right but the duty of the white man to rule.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) begins with the lines: Take up the White Man’s burden–/ Send forth the best ye breed–/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need;/ To wait in heavy harness/ On fluttered folk and wild–/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half-devil and half-child.

Although this sounds appalling today, at the time most of Kipling’s countrymen would have approved of the sentiment. In his lifetime, Kipling was offered (and turned down) a knighthood, the position of Poet Laureate, and the Order of Merit. He was not writing from the fringes.

People deemed to be less rational—women, non-white people, the lower classes, the infirm, the ‘deviant’—were not just disenfranchised but dominated, colonised, enslaved, murdered, and sterilised, in all impunity. As late as 2015, Virginia agreed to compensate surviving victims of its state-sponsored sterilisation programme for, among others, the ‘feeble-minded’.

Today, of all people, it is the white man (that is, the white male) who most fears artificial intelligence, imagining that it will usurp his status and privilege.

But even on its own terms, analytical intelligence is not quite what we make of it.

According to science, IQ is the best predictor of job performance. But that is not altogether surprising given that ‘performance’ and IQ have been defined in similar and overlapping terms, and that both depend, at least to some extent, on third factors such as compliance, motivation, and educational attainment.

Genius, in contrast, is more a matter of drive, vision, creativity, and luck or opportunity, and it is notable that the threshold IQ for genius—probably around 125—is not all that high.

William Shockley and Luis Walter Alvarez, who both went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics, were excluded from the Terman Study of the Gifted on account of… their unremarkable IQ scores.

In later life, Shockley developed controversial views on race and eugenics, using his ‘formidable intellect’ to make claims about the intelligence and worth of others. 

And so it was that a Nobel Prize winner who had failed to qualify as ‘gifted’ came to advocate eugenic measures on the basis of supposed differences in intelligence.

Of course, analytical intelligence is of value. But it is not intuition, it is not imagination, and it is not wisdom.

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How We Can Mean Much More Than We Say

Illustration of the legendary telegram exchange between Victor Hugo and his publisher

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

According to lore, when Victor Hugo wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, he sent his publisher a telegram consisting of a single character: ‘?’ 

The publisher replied: ‘!’

Two punctuation marks had been able to carry an entire conversation—because they could lean on shared knowledge and expectations.

Much of our communication works like that.

Suppose I am hosting a dinner party at 7pm. At 4pm, one of my guests texts me, ‘I’m free from 6pm.’ From that, I will understand, ‘I’m free from 6pm, and I’d like to arrive early if that’s OK?’

As the evening progresses, another of the guests says something horribly rude. I respond with, ‘So, what did you all think about the fish?’ From this, my guest ought to understand that he has overstepped the mark.

As a writer, I am acutely aware that I am conveying much more than the words on the page. As a psychiatrist, I am acutely aware that my patients are disclosing much more than the face value of their words.

So, how exactly do our words and sentences achieve so much?

The Theory of Implicature

The Oxford classicist and philosopher Paul Grice (d. 1988) attempted to answer this question with his theory of implicature.

Grice distinguished conventional implicatures, inherent in certain words such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, and ‘indeed’, from conversational implicatures, which arise from a sort of game-playing, and rule-observing, between speakers.

Let me give you an example of each.

If I say, ‘She was poor but honest’, I am, by the simple use of the word ‘but’, also conveying or betraying a certain prejudice that poor people are generally dishonest.

A few hours before my dinner party, I bump into a friend while stepping out of a bakery with three loaves under my arm. My friend asks, ‘How are you?’ To which I respond, ‘Dinner party tonight!’ By which she understands, ‘I’m excited and rather busy preparing for the dinner party I’m hosting tonight—and so may not have time to chat.’ That’s at least three separate things.

With conversational implicatures, our utterances can take on added meanings, or different meanings, according to the situation or context in which they are uttered.

When we speak to our partner in a crowded place, they are able to derive much more meaning from what we are saying than the strangers who are also in earshot, in part because they are leaning upon background information known only to the both of us. Our partner is capturing not only our words, but also how they work with or wrap around the world that we have in common. Like a compression algorithm, conversation can dispense with whatever information the receiver is already able to reconstruct. The more we know about each other, the less we need to say.

More interesting, I think, is that non-literal meaning can also be created by pushing against certain general and deeply ingrained principles of communication and co-operation, shared even with strangers.

In particular, meaningful conversation can only take place on the assumption that the speakers are, at least on an epistemic level, cooperating with one another.

Grice divided this so-called cooperative principle into four maxims of conversation:

  1. Maxim of quality: That utterances ought to be sincere, justified, and truthful.
  2. Maxim of quantity: That the right amount of information ought to be provided.
  3. Maxim of relevance: That the information provided is in some way pertinent.
  4. Maxim of manner: That the information provided is as clear and unambiguous as possible.

Whenever one or more of these maxims appears to have been flouted, we reflexively assume that the speaker must somehow have observed the maxims and start searching for a likely non-literal meaning.

After my dinner party, I ask one of my guests, ‘How did you like the dinner?’ and she replies, ‘The conversation was stimulating.’ My friend has apparently failed to answer my question. But because I assume that she is cooperating with me, this failure becomes informative: she has politely and indirectly answered my cooking, while also telling me what she thought of the company.

In other words, implicature arises when the Gricean maxims are flouted, or would have been flouted had it not been for the implicature.

We are, in effect, pushing against expectations to save on words. The speaker need not transmit the entire meaning because the listener already possesses most of the apparatus required to reconstruct it. As a writer, I try not to underestimate your reconstructive machinery—because if I do, I risk becoming literal and boring.

Playing with Meaning

Common examples of floutings that, by implicature, are not true floutings include irony (maxim of quality), metaphor (maxim of relevance), and euphemism (maxim of manner). And some jokes as well. When my neighbour arrives late—from next door—to my dinner party, she exclaims: ‘Sorry, the traffic was really bad!’ Once we notice the gap between what is said and what is meant, we begin to see it everywhere.

Flirting is especially dependent upon this ambiguity. ‘Are you staying for another drink?’ can be nothing more than a question about another drink—or not. The advantage is precisely that neither party need decide, at least not yet, which meaning is intended. If the invitation is declined, both can retreat into the literal meaning without embarrassment.

This possibility of retreat gives rise to one of the great uses—and abuses—of implicature: plausible deniability. The diplomat, politician, seducer, passive-aggressive friend or relative, or social media troll can all communicate something without assuming full responsibility for having communicated it. ‘I never said that’ may be literally true, but entirely disingenuous.

At its darkest, implicature can become the political dog-whistle: an expression innocuous enough to one audience but freighted with additional meaning for another. The speaker communicates on two levels at once, while the ambiguity itself provides cover.

The maxims can also be flouted in a genuinely non-cooperative way. Thus, politicians often answer a different question to the one asked, or provide a much longer answer when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, or been preferable. In such cases, most of the interviewer’s interjections are, in effect, attempts to return the politician to the maxims. In ordinary life, we might do much the same when we don’t know the answer to a question, but are too embarrassed to admit it.

Conversational implicatures serve a number of important functions such as: increasing the efficiency of communication; making communication more lively, varied, and humorous; and introducing ambiguity or restraint to avoid being ostracised or otherwise penalised for speaking hard truths.

But this slipperiness, this malleability, also gives rise to a number of ethical and legal problems—which is why legal contracts, witness statements, and the like are expected or even required to be as concrete and literal as possible.

More fundamentally, while we can be held responsible for what we say, to what extent can we be held responsible for what we implicate?

The same leaning on context that enables a bad actor to insinuate without admitting also enables friends to joke, lovers to flirt, diplomats to negotiate, and all of us to communicate far more economically and effectively than if we had to spell everything out. Meaning is not contained in words alone, but arises between words, expectations, and circumstances. Language is not merely the transmission of meaning from one mind to another. It is the art of sparking another mind to reconstruct meaning for itself.

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What the Logicians Have Missed

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato was a master of metaphor. He compared the soul to a chariot and the state to a ship at sea. He compared his teacher Socrates both to a gadfly and to a midwife.

But the most famous of all his analogies is the Allegory of the Cave, in which he compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their entire lives in a cave, are unable to imagine a world beyond.

How exactly do allegories work? An allegory (Greek, ‘a speaking about something else’) is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a myth, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one.

Allegories are often described as ‘extended metaphors’, so one way of understanding the allegory is by understanding the smaller metaphor. Whereas an allegory is a complete narrative that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another, a metaphor is a sentence or short segment that equates two seemingly unrelated things. For example, Solomon 2:1-2:

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

The first sentence consists of two metaphors (‘I am the rose of Sharon’ and ‘I am the lily of the valleys’), and the second sentence consists of a simile.

Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy

What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much. Whereas a metaphor says that something is something else, a simile says that it is like or as something else.

Simile might be considered a type of metaphor, as might also analogy, which involves drawing a comparison for the purpose of explaining or clarifying an idea, for example, if I say, ‘Scientists are as blind to their own paradigms as fish to water.’

In fact, the second sentence from the Solomon (‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’) is more properly an analogy than a simple simile. But my broader point is this: they are close relatives and their boundaries are porous.

Metaphor and simile are figures of speech, which are a type of rhetorical device (also called, depending on context, literary or poetic device). They are both forms of analogy, which can be purely cognitive as well as rhetorical—in the mind and in the mouth, or in the mind only.

Metaphor and the Structure of Thought

Unlike other rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and resonance, metaphor is not merely ornamental, but a cognitively respectable way of knowing.

Metaphor and analogy enable an abstract or unfamiliar idea to be grasped in terms of a more concrete or familiar one. What’s more, the superimposition or juxtaposition of two superficially dissimilar ideas brings out any hidden or secondary correspondences between the two. This is not unlike formal deductive logic, which marries two ideas to give birth to a third—and is, in fact, a lot more common.

Logicians and their students prefer to focus on deduction and induction, but it may be that analogy is the principal form of human reasoning.

Faced with something new, the mind reaches for something familiar: What is this like? It then carries the structure of the familiar over to the unfamiliar, enabling us to make inferences that it may not otherwise have made.

We reason by analogy whenever we apply the lessons of one situation to another. A historian reaches for the past to illuminate the present, a doctor compares a new presentation to previous ones, a lawyer argues from precedent. Darwin reasoned from artificial selection to natural selection. In each case, analogy helps us connect the familiar to the novel.

In the words of Aristotle, whom Dante described as ‘the master of those who know’:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

What Makes for a Good Metaphor

The force of a metaphor depends above all upon its freshness and originality, in some sense, upon its disruptive qualities.

If a metaphor is overused, it becomes a cliché, and some metaphors are so tired that they are no longer visualised or even thought of as metaphors. For instance, in English (as opposed to, say, Spanish), we tend to talk of time in terms of space and distance, even if we are no longer aware of doing so: ‘I won’t be long’, ‘Let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’, ‘His drinking finally caught up with him.’ Metaphors such as these that are no longer visualised are called dead metaphors, and language is full of them.

Indeed, an argument could be made that all language is either onomatopoeic (or imitative, like ‘cough’, ‘splash’, and ‘thud’) or metaphorical. After all, what else could it be? The word ‘metaphor’ derives from the Greek for ‘a carrying over’, so it is itself a metaphor.

In its broadest, Aristotelian sense, metaphor is the carrying over of meaning from one thing to another on the basis of some perceived relation between them. Metaphor is a large family, including simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. Here’s a metaphor, or arguably a simile, by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer…it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Unlike tired or dead metaphors, fresh, vivid metaphors like this one are experienced as beautiful and pleasurable. Beautiful because they are so concise and condensed. Pleasurable because, like humour, which they often contain, they exercise our cognitive range and flexibility. And like humour, they can be a little playful, a little naughty, and a little dangerous.

In the words, again, of Aristotle:

To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest.

The Most Brilliant Metaphors

Now back to the allegory. Like the metaphor, the allegory serves to convey abstract and at times subversive ideas in more concrete and condensed forms that then become symbolic of the ideas, making them easier to reveal or conceal or otherwise play with.

When an abstract notion is given the form of a person or animate being, this is known as personification. Narcissus, for example, is a personification of vanity and self-absorption, and Icarus of hubris. The Mahabharata, the Iliad of India (although a lot longer), presents three approaches to moral problems, personified by Bhima (brute force, ego, desire), Yudhishthira (rigid moral law, deontology), and Arjuna (virtue ethics, moral indeterminacy), who, wavering between the paths of his two elder brothers, is forced to make difficult, existential choices.

An important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy it as it suits them, and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or indeed, whatever they wish to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds.

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How Humanity Learned It Was Not the Center of Everything.

For centuries, the West rested on a stable psychological foundation, with human beings firmly at the center of a purposeful cosmos.

The geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, in which the Sun, stars, and planets revolved around a fixed and unmoving Earth, did more than describe the heavens. It organised meaning. Humanity occupied a privileged position in creation, and the structure of the universe seemed to confirm it.

The Copernican Revolution shattered that certainty. Yet its significance was never merely astronomical. It was psychological. It obliged human beings to confront the unsettling possibility that we are not as central as we imagine.

That confrontation did not end with astronomy. Over the following centuries, humanity would endure a succession of intellectual revolutions, each removing another claim to exceptional status. The same drama may now be unfolding once again with artificial intelligence (AI).

Aristarchus of Samos

The parallels begin with resistance. Nearly eighteen centuries before Copernicus, Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth moved around the Sun. Anaxagoras similarly suggested that the Sun was not a divine object but another celestial body. Yet neither transformed humanity’s understanding of itself.

The obstacle was not a lack of evidence alone. Human beings are not neutral observers of reality. We are psychologically invested in narratives that place us at the center of events, and we resist discoveries that threaten that position.

The same tendency shapes our response to AI. The possibility that machines might perform tasks once regarded as uniquely human has been dawning for decades. Yet many people continue to regard intelligence as an exclusively human possession. As with heliocentrism, the deepest resistance is not empirical but existential. What is at stake is not merely a theory of intelligence, but humanity’s place within it.

Copernicus and Tycho Brahe

When, in 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, he displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.

The first response was not acceptance but compromise. Tycho Brahe proposed a hybrid system in which the planets orbited the Sun while the Sun itself continued to orbit the Earth. The new evidence was accommodated without fully abandoning the old hierarchy.

We often respond to AI in a similar fashion. We describe it primarily as a tool, an assistant, or an extension of human agency. These descriptions are true in practical terms. Yet they may also serve a psychological function, allowing us to absorb the implications of machine intelligence without fundamentally reconsidering humanity’s place within the cognitive landscape.

Like Tycho’s system, such interpretations preserve the familiar hierarchy while making room for disruptive facts.

Johannes Kepler

Genuine revolutions require deeper adjustments.

Kepler provided one by replacing perfect circles with elliptical orbits governed by mathematical laws. This was more than a technical refinement. It represented the abandonment of a profound assumption: that reality must conform to human intuitions of beauty, symmetry, and perfection.

The universe no longer reflected what human beings wished to see. It followed impersonal principles.

We often anthropomorphise AI in the opposite direction, imagining it as a digital version of ourselves. Yet its operation is fundamentally unlike human thought. Contemporary AI systems identify patterns across immense quantities of data using methods that frequently defy human intuition. Their successes emerge not because they think as we do, but because they often do not.

Like Kepler’s ellipses, their effectiveness can be unsettling precisely because it does not conform to our expectations.

Galileo

Galileo’s telescope deepened the rupture.

Mountains on the Moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, and countless previously unseen stars revealed that the heavens were neither perfect nor organised exclusively around the Earth. The cosmos appeared populated by multiple centres, multiple systems, and multiple worlds.

Today, AI may be producing a comparable shift in our understanding of cognition. For centuries, language, reasoning, and creativity were treated as evidence of humanity’s unique status. Increasingly, these capacities appear capable of emerging in different substrates and systems.

This does not necessarily mean that machine intelligence and human intelligence are identical. Yet even the appearance of machine cognition exerts a decentring effect. It forces us to confront the possibility that intelligence may not be an exclusively human phenomenon.

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno carried the implications of heliocentrism beyond anything Copernicus himself proposed.

He imagined an infinite universe populated by innumerable worlds. In such a cosmos, humanity lost not merely its central location but the very idea that any location could be central.

The significance of Bruno’s vision was philosophical as much as astronomical. If there are countless worlds, then no single perspective can claim cosmic privilege.

Today, something similar may be occurring in our conception of intelligence. The traditional hierarchy that places human cognition at the apex of all thinking systems is giving way to a more distributed landscape of minds, algorithms, networks, and machine systems.

The challenge is not simply that machines perform cognitive tasks. It is that intelligence itself may be a broader and more varied phenomenon than previously imagined.

Newton

By the time of Newton, cosmological decentring was largely complete. 

Heaven and Earth were unified within a single system of mathematical relationships. The same laws that governed orbiting planets governed falling apples. Reality no longer revolved around human purposes but operated according to indifferent principles.

Just as Newton dissolved the distinction between the terrestrial and celestial realms, AI may be eroding the distinction between human and machine cognition. Capacities once regarded as uniquely human increasingly appear to be manifestations of more general informational processes.

Yet human psychology has not evolved nearly as quickly as human knowledge. We remain creatures who seek significance, narrative, and reassurance. Newton himself devoted enormous energy to alchemy and theology.

The desire for meaning survived the collapse of geocentrism. It survived Darwin and Freud as well. It will survive the rise of AI.

Nietzsche

After the Copernican Revolution, meaning could no longer be derived from occupying a privileged position in the cosmos. Meaning had to be created rather than discovered.

Now, we may have to learn this lesson anew. If intelligence is not uniquely human, then our value cannot rest on exclusivity. It must rest on how we choose to live, create, relate, and act within a reality that no longer upholds our physical and mental centrality.

The Copernican Revolution was the beginning of a long psychological transition: from a world organised around humanity to a world that simply is. The AI Revolution is simply the next stage in that journey.

Nietzsche would have recognised this moment. Copernicus removed humanity from the center of the cosmos; AI is removing it from the center of intelligence. Nietzsche argued that maturity begins when we stop demanding a privileged place in reality and instead create meaning for ourselves.

The question raised by AI is therefore not whether we remain special, but whether we can flourish without being the center of everything.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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800 Pages in One Simple Essay

Immanuel Kant, the Becker portrait
Immanuel Kant, shortly before isolating himself for ten years to excogitate the Critique of Pure Reason.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most important—and difficult—books ever written. Its central idea is surprisingly simple: the mind does not merely observe the world, but helps to shape the world as we experience it.

In 1781, after a decade of introspection, Immanuel Kant published a book so difficult that even leading philosophers struggled to finish it. Kant’s friend and rival Moses Mendelssohn described the Critique of Pure Reason as a ‘nerve-juice consuming book’. Yet, buried within its more than 800 pages is one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought—an idea that Kant himself compared to the revolution begun by Copernicus in astronomy.

Previously, everyone believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Copernicus (1473-1543) turned the tables by asking how it would be if, instead, the Earth revolved around the Sun. Kant believed that human thought itself required a similar reinvention. It had always been assumed that human knowledge must conform to the world, that the human mind was just a passive observer. But what if it was the other way round? What if it was the world that needed to conform to the structures of the human mind?

Why Kant’s Revolution Was Needed

Since Descartes (1596-1650), a debate had been dominating philosophy. On one side stood the rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who believed that the senses were deceptive and that reason was the only secure source of knowledge. On the other side stood the empiricists, especially Locke and Hume, who argued that the mind starts as a blank slate and that all knowledge is founded in sense experience.

Hume (1711-1776) pushed the empiricist position to its logical conclusion, which is that there are only two kinds of human knowledge: ‘matters of fact’, which are founded in observation, and ‘relations of ideas’, such as logic and mathematics, which are true by definition. Anything that is neither—including God, the soul, and free will—belongs to the realm of illusion and speculation.

This scepticism deeply troubled Kant. Hume’s position undermined many of the concepts on which science and social life depend, not least causation. We assume that causes produce effects, but never—according to Hume—observe causality itself: all we do is observe one event regularly following another. Kant fully acknowledged his debt to Hume: ‘I freely confess: it was the objection [to the principle of cause and effect] of David Hume that first … interrupted my dogmatic slumber…’

The Synthetic à Priori

Kant’s response was to seek a new foundation for knowledge, based on a distinction between different kinds of judgement.

Some statements, such as, ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’, are analytic, in that their truth is contained within the meanings of the words themselves. Other statements, such as, ‘The cat is on the mat’, are synthetic, in that they carry new information. Most of the claims that we make are synthetic, because, unless you’re a pedant like me, new information about the world is a lot more useful and interesting than tautologising.

Kant also distinguished between knowledge that is à priori (acquired independently of sense experience) and knowledge that is à posteriori (acquired from sense experience).

Whereas analytic truths are à priori, synthetic truths are à posteriori. But could some synthetic truths be à priori? If so, we could learn something genuinely new about the world independently of sense experience.

Kant believed that mathematics, geometry, and, indeed, causation are prime examples of synthetic à priori knowledge.

But how could reason alone provide us with new knowledge, independently of sense experience?

Kant’s Categories and the Active Mind

Kant’s answer was revolutionary. The human mind is not a passive recipient of information, but actively shapes experience.

The mind possesses built-in structures that organise raw sense data. Among these ‘categories of understanding’ are concepts such as causality, substance, unity, plurality, and necessity.

Whenever we experience the world, these categories are already at work. They are not learned from experience; rather, they make experience possible in the first place. They package raw sense data into forms that are graspable to the human mind. If, as per Hume, we never observe causality, this is because causality is a feature of the human mind.

The same is true also of space and time, which are not features of the world, but ‘forms of intuition’ by which the human mind organises sense experience. Space is the framework by which we perceive external objects. Time is the framework by which we order events and mental states.

That space, time, and causation are in the mind does not make them subjective fantasies. Because all humans share these cognitive structures, they provide a common framework for objective experience. Simply put, there is, for a human being, no other way of seeing the world.

And here lies the price of Kant’s solution: the same structures that make knowledge possible also place limits upon what we can know—for we can only know what it is possible for a human to know.

The Limits of Metaphysics According to Kant

So here we have it. The mind does not conform to an independently structured world; rather, the world as we experience it conforms to the structures of the mind. Thus, we can know some things about the world by knowing about our mind. This is what underlies and enables the synthetic à priori. This is, in other words, what makes it possible for reason, working outside of sense experience, to arrive at new knowledge.

Causation and mathematics arise from the very conditions that make human experience possible. But the flipside is that we cannot know what lies outside of human experience. We cannot know how the world is in itself. Unlike the phenomenal world of human experience, this noumenal world is closed to reason, science, and knowledge.

Thus, metaphysical questions about God, the soul, and freedom are outside the scope of human knowledge. Kant may have rescued causation from Hume and the empiricists, but he did not rescue God (although, later, he defended belief in God on moral grounds). He acquired the nickname ‘the All-Crusher’ because he seemed to have demolished centuries of metaphysical speculation about God, the soul, and free will, which, he thought, were outside the scope of human knowledge.

The Antinomies of Pure Reason

Whenever reason attempts to venture into the realm of metaphysics, it becomes entangled in contradictions. Kant demonstrated this through four specific ‘antinomies of pure reason’, that is, contradictions that reason falls into when trying to understand ultimate reality.

Here is my own example of an antinomy of pure reason. After more than two thousand years of debate, there is still no consensus on who made the stronger case: Heraclitus, in arguing that the universe is in constant, perpetual flux (thesis), or Parmenides in arguing that it is in fact a single, static, unchanging, and eternal whole (antithesis).

Reason, Kant noticed, can construct persuasive arguments on both sides. The resulting conflicts reveal not the failure of reason but the danger of taking it beyond its proper domain. Plato demonstrated something similar in the Parmenides, though less explicitly than Kant.

The Legacy of the Critique of Pure Reason

Unlike the German idealists whom he inspired (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel…), Kant did not go so far as to claim that the mind creates reality, only that the world as it appears to us is structured through the forms and categories of human cognition.

Since Kant’s time, developments in modern physics, particularly non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein’s theory of relativity, have challenged some of Kant’s specific claims about space. But his central insight continues to shape philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

We do not simply discover the world. We actively shape the way it appears to us. This was Kant’s Copernican revolution: the insight that knowledge is not merely a mirror of reality but the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the mind and the world. By redefining the relationship between human beings and experience, Kant transformed philosophy as profoundly as Copernicus transformed astronomy.

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To explore Kant’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

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