November 14, 2025
Thanks to James Robertson, an HMU doctoral student, for today’s post.
Heraclitus tells us that we cannot return to the same river twice. With respect to Heraclitus, while this statement expresses the truth that facts are temporary and experiences fleeting, it may conceal a crucial point, one upon which it relies. We may not return to the same river, but we can return to Heraclitus. His words can enter and re-enter our experience, and while we may bring changed selves to him, and we may, one hopes, leave and be changed by him, yet in this encounter, we find communion, that is, a resurrection of his thoughts in the theatre of our experience.
Hobbes makes this point. By language, we share our thoughts, and enrich our experience by means of the thoughts of our fellows. Speech, then, enables the communication of thought, and books the reiteration of thought. In Phaedrus, Plato expressed the fear that writing would weaken memory, and threaten the development of understanding, for a book cannot explain itself. Nevertheless, he wrote. Whether Plato was right to hold books in suspicion, to the extent that his thoughts enter our experience today, they do so by means of books, as is true of Hobbes and Heraclitus.
Liebniz once wished to build a machine that would represent thought by means of symbols, and, by mechanical process, to solve all riddles, and answer all questions. Swift satirised such notions in Gulliver, and yet some would now say that Liebniz was merely a little ahead of his technology, and that we have achieved this device. I do not think it so.
Plato evidently held that, although a book might not communicate every nuance of thought, it was still worth writing. This implies a willingness to rely on the written word, a faith, minimal perhaps, that writing could convey meaning. In other words, Plato’s dialogues may not bring us into his direct presence, but they can, in a sense, bring us into his mediate presence. That is, we can enter a meaningful relationship with a real, yet vastly distant, prior state of human experience.
For some time we have had the search engine, and now we have the AI summary. Today we do not need to go to Plato. AI will bring him to us. I do not say in chains, but this is the implicit promise of these new technologies. They will extract meaning from our old books, they will squeeze the blood from these dead men, and bring us their vital essence.
This is no different, it may be suggested, from translation, from the corrected, updated edition, rewritten for the modern audience. Certainly I do not read Greek. But there is a link, a thread through the labyrinth. The translator is credited, named, may have written, may even be alive to interview about their choices. Our new tools cut that thread. They translate, they interpret, they can speak in the current vernacular. How can this do anything but help readers to understand what may be ancient and challenging books?
But there is the river that is Heraclitus and his words, and there is the river that is the AI summary. The one has an enduring character. The other does not, and cannot, for it is a probabilistic rendition of the former. Much like Schrodinger’s celebrated cat, it has no determinate state until queried. This might seem like a convenience, but it conceals an educational threat that is likely to increase with every subsequent generation.
If a child is raised on AI summaries, this will change their relationship to reading. A book will no longer be a statement of human thought, but a probability distribution, and these probabilities will be subject to government and corporate policy. The past, in the sense of being a historical series of definite experiences, may disintegrate, or be overwritten. Here, however, there may be a new, and rather odd value in the Great Books. They may come to represent a time when human thought remained in conversation with its remote past, and enjoyed the continuity of literary culture. They may come to represent the human experience before it was mediated by probability engines.
I do not know the effects of a civilisational reliance on simulated intelligence. I am certain, however, that we must preserve the memory of the time before this experiment began. We must preserve definite and authoritative statements of human thought from that time, not so much for ourselves, but for our children’s children. Though Heraclitus stood for the river, and an endless torrent of change, still he wrote. He believed, I think this shows, that others could partake of his thought, and so enrich their understanding, their experience. Perhaps few authors in the Great Books fully agree on any point, but here they can meet, and we can stand with them. I believe we can honour this precious agreement by reading, and writing, and speaking for ourselves.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Chinnapong
