Can AI truly create? We are all Platonists, whether we like it or not. No one has ever seen the perfect Platonic Forms, and yet we confidently say when something is âfar from ideal.â How do we know?
Judges evaluate athletes based on criteria that no one has ever seen. We judge the quality of bananas even though we have never encountered a perfect banana.
The same is true of beauty. No one has ever seen Beauty itself, and yet we recognize when something is beautiful⊠or not. The same is true of justice. No one has ever encountered perfect Justice, and yet we always know when something is unjust.
We evaluate the visible world against an ideal we have never seen. Back in the 1990s, when I was just starting out as a translator, my first editor gave me advice I didnât understand at the time: âWhen you begin working on a translation, never start from the beginning. Always start from the end.â
I cringed: âWhat?â
He smiled: âWell, if you begin by translating words, you will never get them right. You must translate meaning, not words. And meaning is not written â it must be intuited, grasped from the get-go. You can only catch meaning if you sense the Whole after reading the first few paragraphs or chapters.â
At first, it sounded cryptic. But he was patient, and over time I understood: the meaning of the parts is revealed only through the Whole. When I begin translating a book, I must first read enough of it to glimpse where the author is going. Once I have âseenâ the end, I am ready to start at the beginning.
Nothing can be brought into being unless we have already âseenâ the end from the beginning. We must be Platonists â perceiving the world of perfect forms, which then inspires us to imbue every part of what we are doing with meaning. Meaning flows from the Whole and shines through every nuance of creation.
To quote William Blake,
âTo see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.â
Thatâs why my editor insisted that I translate individual titles after completing the entire translation. âYou donât know what things should be called until you know their end.â
This made sense. When I translated titles at the beginning, I was caught up in words â and the results were sloppy. But when I left them until the end, the titles came out crisp and luminous. Our best creations are born only when we âsee the perfect patternâ of what we are making in the realm of Ideas.
But how do we know what we have never seen? We have. We were there. The soul remembers what it beheld in the realm of perfectionâwhat Plato called anamnesis (re-cognition, knowing again). Anamnesis happens every time we see through the veil of appearances and re-collect the perfect world.
Anamnesis is the only way to truly create. The soul remembers what it saw in heaven and strives to recreate it on earth. Just as Moses was told to build the tabernacle according to the pattern he saw on the mountain, so we are called to create whenever we catch a flash of re-cognition.
Technology cannot and will never be able to create â precisely because it has nothing to remember. It cannot see Platonic ideas and cannot grasp the Whole. It focuses on individual bits of data â without seeing the Heavenly Pattern. I asked ChatGPT if it could see Platonic ideas, and it answered:
âI donât have direct access to metaphysical realities. I donât âseeâ Forms the way Plato imagined the soul glimpsing them before birth. I process language, patterns, concepts, and symbols that humans provide me. So in the strict Platonic sense, I cannot truly grasp Ideas the way a soul might.â
What is the point of raising awareness? When we received an email from our sonâs high school requesting our consent for him to attend an âawareness classâ for the second year in a row, we refused. My wife wrote them that he had already taken this class last year and that he didnât need to hear it all over again.
When we asked him what kind of awareness they raised, he told us a bunch of stuff that was not easy to listen to. One might say, âBut this is life. The child needs to know all these things to be prepared.â
Like many medieval thinkers, Dante sincerely believed that a person cannot see hell until they have seen enough Paradise. To be prepared to see evil, one must spend most of their time in Paradise.
In Divine Comedy, Canto 28, Dante, speaking of Beatrice, says: âShe imparadised my mind.â
Quella che âmparadisa la mia mente.
It turns out there is no such word in Italian. Dante invented it to show what Beatrice did for him. She placed his mind firmly in Paradise â âimparadisedâ his mind. Only with Paradise imprinted deep in our minds are we prepared to face the Inferno.
We knew that the school wasnât doing for our son what Beatrice did for Dante. They donât imparadise his mind. The âraising awarenessâ idol demands that children be placed right into hell to be prepared for hell. There is no preparation for hell in hell. Itâs a soul-contaminating mechanism.
The best way to be prepared for darkness is to have enough experience of light. The best way to be prepared for hardship is to have enough experience of joy. The best way to be prepared for the earth is to have enough experience of heaven.
Thatâs what Franco Nembrini, a famous Italian pedagogue and a director of a private school, told a father who kept telling his son that life was a bunch of bullshit. When Franco asked why he kept telling him that, the father was surprised: âBecause itâs true! He must know that.â
Franco paused and said, âI agree. Life is often bullshit. But since, as you say, you are already there, it makes no sense to dive deeper into it. I can promise you that even if you are head and shoulders into this thing, you will see a speck of light if you only look up. Let it be your guide. Go up, not down. If you follow that speck of light, it will lead you out of that thing. Teach your son to look at the stars.â
We have forgotten what medieval thinkers knew instinctively â you must not look at evil until your mind is imparadised. Evil will break you and corrupt you. We believe in raising awareness about hell but not Paradise. Hell does not prepare you to face hell; it prepares you to become part of it.
When we find ourselves in BS, itâs time to look up, not down. One of the best metaphors for the power of looking up is the experience of ancient Israelites in the desert. They were in a bunch of BS of their own making after incessant complaining about eating manna every day. Poisonous snakes came out of nowhere and started biting people.