I found this little aside in Being a Character by Christopher Bollas really illuminating. The notion that ‘spirit’ persisted as a concept because of an indifference to real investigation of the inner experience through which it manifests, immediately made think of the indifference to the ontology of LLMs which Milan Sturmer and I explore at length in The Platform Learns To Speak. From pg 63:
Spirit is, however, a word that opens itself to many ideas, lending itself, by its very polysemy, to a kind of mystification. Indeed, Derrida reminds us that the overusage of this word in the nineteenth century, its incantatory presence surrounding the interrogation of the nature of thought and being, eventually marked “a lack of interest, an indifference, a remarkable lack of need … for the question of the Being of the entity that we are” (19). Use of the word “spirit” indicated an indifference to the investigation of thought itself, and were this to be the fate of the entry of spirit in my discourse, it would be a sad folly indeed. Is it possible to resist the pendulum force of intellectual passions that perverts the use value of any idea? Is it possible for spirit to enter into the language of psychoanalysis without falling in love with its suggestive power? Or will it herald the movement of a neosurrealist romanticism in which the ungraspable, the seeming essence of experience, displaces the effort to dissect, to deconstruct, indeed to despiritualize?
We remain on the surface of things when we lack interest to go deeper. We content ourselves with superficial names when we’re satisfied to remain at a distance from the object, gazing at it in a detached way rather than seeking to really inspect it. We can do better than this, particularly in the digital social sciences.
Mark Carrigan 