Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Liberal Man

One of the most important eras of Western civilisation was the emergence of liberalism, a philosophy of the Enlightenment on which many ideas taken for granted in the modern West are based. Liberalism as a philosophy sees the human being primarily as a rational being and an autonomous individual. Thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant argued that individuals use reason as their primary faculty to guide their lives, judge moral questions, and organise society. Based on reason, people can make choices for themselves. The political institutions of today were built on rational principles such as rights, contracts and universal laws. Thus, liberalism rests on a specific image of the human being, the rational and autonomous individual.

Since its inception in the 17th and 18th centuries, this understanding of the human being as a rational individual has rarely been questioned, suggesting that most ideologies that emerged after it remained aligned with this view. The recent rise of artificial intelligence allows AI to perform tasks that up to now could only be carried out by humans, such as information and legal analysis, writing texts, language translation and computer code. This is a blow to liberalism and to the civilisation which has championed and absorbed it to the point of seeing liberalism as the natural order. If, according to liberalism, reason is the unique characteristic that sets humans apart from animals, then what happens now that machines are capable of performing that function too? 

This question reveals a philosophical tension  even if people cannot articulate it beyond the common claim that “AI will take my job”. Liberalism places human reason at the centre of its political anthropology and it is through reason that concepts such as individual freedom began to emerge. Now artificial intelligence starts to blur this boundary and liberalism appears to struggle to respond to it. What comes after artificial intelligence? Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans may eventually become obsolete, reduced to performing trivial activities such as entertainment. This reveals a potential flaw in liberalism. A civilisation that until recently prided itself on, and elevated reason above all other human qualities now finds itself confronted with machines that can simulate that faculty outside the human mind.

Before the Enlightenment, humans were understood in an entirely different way. Man was a rational animal, as Aristotle had proclaimed, but humans were also seen as participants in a communal, cultural, and symbolic world that was shaped by myth, tradition, and religion. Life was not only about reason but also about being embedded in stories, rituals, and inherited patterns of meaning. In Ancient Greece, poetry, myth, and philosophy were often not separate disciplines or domains but part of a shared cultural framework through which people understood their place in the world. The Iliad and the Odyssey are good examples of this combination of poetry, myth, philosophy, and religion, as the gods themselves appear in the stories. Medieval Christian Europe understood man not only as rational but also as created in the image of God and therefore as possessing a spiritual dimension that transcended purely material or intellectual functions.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene introduced the concept of the meme. Today the word often refers to internet jokes or viral trends. However, Dawkins initially defined a meme as a unit of cultural transmission. It can be anything from well-known melodies, slogans, fashion trends, jokes, ideas, or even stories. Moreover, the evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Joseph Henrich argues that cultural ideas survive and spread because they help societies endure and reproduce, even if individuals do not fully understand why. This cultural knowledge is passed on through narratives and stories—memes —that have the additional effect of giving people meaning to their lives. People naturally understand their lives as narratives. Even ordinary actions, such as going to the supermarket, are understood as parts of a larger story. This is how cultures transmit knowledge, through stories. Some of those stories persist across generations and millennia in different civilisations but in similar forms.

This persistence and similarity across cultures led the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to propose the idea of archetypes. Archetypes are symbolic patterns expressed through characters in stories deriving from what he called the collective unconscious, a layer of the human psyche containing inherited symbolic patterns. These archetypes—expressed through some of the most enduring cultural memes—appear in myths and religions across cultures, but each has its own localised form that makes it meaningful to the culture that created it. 

One such archetype is the Trickster, symbolising chaos, intelligence, deception, and disruption. In Nordic mythology, the Trickster appears as Loki the trickster god and as the god Hermes in Greek mythology. Hermes was also known as Hermes Dolios (Δόλιος), “the cunning one,” or Polytropos (Πολύτροπος), meaning versatile. The stories of Loki and Hermes are not identical, as each culture gives its own interpretation of the archetype, yet their myths contain strikingly similar themes. Another archetype is the Lover, exemplified by the Norse goddess of love Freya and the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.

One of the most important archetypes, however, is that of the Great Mother, exemplified in Greek mythology by Demeter and her daughter Persephone, and in Norse mythology by Frigg and her son Baldr. In Christianity, the Great Mother archetype is exemplified by Mary, the mother of Jesus. Baldr, Frigg’s son, starts having dreams of his own death, Frigg becomes terrified and tries to protect her son. She travels throughout the Norse world seeking promises from all things that nothing will harm Baldr, but the mistletoe is overlooked. Baldr is eventually killed by an arrow or spear made from mistletoe. Frigg and the other gods beg for Baldr to be returned and the goddess of the underworld agrees if every being in the world cries for him. Everyone does, except for Loki,  and thus Baldr remains in the underworld until Ragnarök—the Norse interpretation of the end of the world—when Baldr will come back into the world and renew it. In the Greek version, Persephone is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, to be his queen. Demeter, her mother, becomes devastated and begins searching the world for her daughter. In her grief she prevents crops from growing, causing widespread famine. Eventually the other gods of Olympus intervene and a compromise is reached. Persephone may come back to the world of light for a part of the year, but because she ate pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she must return to Hades for the rest of the year. When Persephone is in the underworld, the world enters autumn and winter, signifying Demeter’s grief in the absence of her daughter, and when Persephone returns to the upper world, spring comes and life renews again with crops being harvested. In Christianity, Jesus is executed by crucifixion, and Mary witnesses the death of her son. Jesus is buried and then resurrects. The resurrection symbolises redemption and spiritual renewal. In all three stories, the theme of renewal is central, even though each culture tells the story in its own way. The Great Mother archetype, here embodied by Demeter, Frigg, and Mary, symbolises the biological reality of fertility and the importance of procreation through their children.

The Romanian historian and philosopher of comparative religion Mircea Eliade, in his work The Sacred and the Profane, argued that societies before liberal modernity were organised around a distinction between two modes of being, the sacred and the profane. The sacred referred to moments, places, and stories that revealed a deeper reality, while the profane was about the routines of everyday life. Places such as temples and mountains—such as Mount Olympus in Greek mythology—were believed to be points where that deeper reality entered the world in a symbolic form and were therefore considered divine. Eliade called this hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred in the world. These places were often seen as the symbolic centres of the world from which other stories and sacred places derived meaning. Reenacting rituals and festivals every year,  Eliade believed, gave people the opportunity to participate in those symbolic stories that encoded deeper truths and connect with generations of ancestors who had celebrated them centuries earlier. In this way these stories echoed through time, allowing communities to renew the cosmic order those stories represented and start again from a beginning, through cyclical sacred time. This re-enactment and its effects Eliade described as the eternal return. Myths and rituals were therefore not merely traditions but ways of re-entering sacred time. 

Artificial intelligence and liberalism, with their emphasis on reason and calculation, exemplify what Eliade would call life in profane time: a condition dominated by mundane routines that may produce a yearning for meaning that can only be fulfilled by entering sacred time. Thus, if one is to take the human being as he was understood before the Enlightenment, he was not, above all, a rational individual but rather a participant in a symbolic and sacred world that was structured poetically through myth, sacred places, and rituals through which meaning was created.

Artificial intelligence now simulates many reasoning tasks. This challenges the Enlightenment idea that reason is the exclusive domain of humans. This may allow an older understanding of what it means to be human to re-emerge. 

Machines might become more intelligent over time, but they do not create, inhabit, or experience myths, rituals, traditions, or symbolic worlds formed through cultural narratives nor can they assign meaning or determine where things belong within the cultural narratives through which communities understand their past and shape their future. Signs of such a re-emergence are already visible in Europe and in the U.S. where people show a renewed interest in Christianity and are even reviving older European pre-Christian traditions. Thus, AI might not make humans obsolete or useless but rather spark a renewed reflection on what makes humans unique.