Robert Pogue Harrison: “We’re trafficking in concepts and not in spirit.”

You could easily miss this long article with the long title, “Writer, podcaster “Robert Harrison challenges A.I. brain delusion, the Humanities' deathbed and Fear & Loathing with the Love Bots .” I wouldn't pass it up I were you. Scott Thomas Anderson has a conversation with Robert Pogue Harrison , Stanford's leading humanist and Dante scholar, and Aqsa Ijaz , who writes for The Marginalia Review (we've written about her on the Book Haven here ) and it shouldn't be missed. An excerpt: “We were talking about the horrifying and exciting possibilities of Chat GPT, and I asked, ‘What if it starts to write books like you?” Ijaz reminded Harrison. “And you said, ‘I'm not worried that A.I. will be able to think metaphorically, or write books like mine. I'm worry that it will hasten the day when human beings themselves will no longer be able to think metaphorically and lose access to those depths.' What do you think is happening in the Humanities? Have students already lost access to their metaphoric depths?” Robert Pogue Harrison “I think so, yeah,” Harrison admitted. “At Stanford, when I arrived in the 80s, there was the whole war over the Western canon. It had gone from Western Civilization to ‘Civilization, Ideas and Values.' So, when they changed the reading list from Western Civ. to ‘C.I.V.,' essentially, they threw out all the poets. They retained Thomas Aquinas but threw out Dante . They retained Machiavelli and threw out Shakespeare . They retained the theorists, the people who think in terms of concepts, but not in terms of images. So, this isn't even due to technology, it's just the fact that our culture is getting more and more prosaic, and professors are more and more in the profession of trafficking in concepts and not in spirit. So, it's that de-spiritualization. And we're becoming completely illiterate in terms of the language of imagery, symbol, metaphor. This increasing literalization of reality is a terrible blight on the poetic imagination.” For Harrison and many of his listeners, that has consequences: This weakening of the full breadth of […]