Maurice Blondel on Artificial Intelligence and Divine Action: The Insufficiency of Technical Work

Confronted with generative artificial intelligence, a lot of secular humanism defends the worth of the human person by naming capacities that machines are said to lack, a strategy Leif Weatherby calls remainder humanism. The ground so defended shrinks with every advance, but the deeper fault is that the strategy misdescribes what it defends. This article brings Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of action, largely absent from philosophical discussion of emerging technology, to bear on that anthropological problem, proceeding by Blondel’s own method of immanence: it begins from what is given in the experience of acting and asks only afterward what must be true of reality for that experience to be what it is. It argues that artificial intelligence is an instance of what Blondel calls the volonté voulue, the willed will, a determinate object of a willing whose reach it can never equal, and that the disproportion between the two leaves technical work permanently open to a completion it cannot itself supply. It is that opening, and not the artifact, in which divine action is located, and so located it is no rival to the work. The classical distinction between immanent and transitive action, which Blondel takes up in his own idiom, supplies the positive account the subtractive strategy lacks: what is proper to the person is not a residue of competences but an acting that perfects the agent and cannot be transferred to any product. Blondel’s analysis of superstitious action then supplies a better account of the remainder than the contemporary debate possesses. The disproportion is not a defect to be engineered away but the permanent condition of technical work.