Why AI Feels Like Grief

Jul 13

Why does artificial intelligence unsettle us so deeply? Not because it threatens jobs or security alone. Those fears are real, but they do not explain why the feeling reaches so far down. AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.

Catholic social teaching is invoked everywhere today, yet its central term, the “common good,” remains deceptively abstract. We appeal to it as if we all knew what binds us into a “common,” but the term has no metaphysical ground — no account of what we most deeply are — that is consonant with modern science. Nor will we be saved by ethics alone: our fundamental thinking about ourselves and our world must change before any new ethical direction can take hold.

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In 1949 the philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed that the deepest pivot in human history lay not in the events his own century took to be decisive but in a strange, simultaneous awakening more than two millennia earlier. Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, a new kind of consciousness broke out independently across Eurasia—in China with Confucius and Laozi, in India with the Buddha and the Upanishads, in Iran with Zarathustra, in Israel with the prophets, in Greece with the philosophers and tragedians. Jaspers called this the Achsenzeit, the axial age, the axis on which world history turns. What appeared, everywhere at once, was the human being as a reflective person: a self able to stand back from the given world, question it, and measure it against something that exceeds it.

The magnitude of the shift shows only against that background. Pre-axial identity and flourishing were cosmic and communal through and through. The person was not yet an interior center of conscience and choice but a node in a seamless web binding clan, cult, king, and cosmos into a single sacred order. Archaic religion was a religion of myth, ritual, and communal celebration, the divine immanent in the rhythms of nature and society—what the cognitive scientist Merlin Donald calls a mimetic and then mythic culture, in which meaning is carried by gesture, enactment, and story rather than by second-order reflection. The mythic imagination does not ask whether the cosmic order is just; it inhabits it. The gods belonged to the cosmos; they did not ground it from beyond.

What the axial age opened was precisely that gap. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin called it the leap in being: the discovery that the ground of order lies beyond the cosmic-political world and cannot be identified with any part of it. The world was no longer self-grounding; it stood under a source it does not contain and against which it can be found wanting. And the one who makes the discovery is transformed in the making—an interior space opens, the soul, the conscience, the reflective self, able to hold the whole cosmic order at a distance and ask after its truth.

The theologian Ewert Cousins located a Second Axial Age at the opening of the twentieth century—in the new science, mass communication, air travel, and now the internet—and named its signature a new ecological immanence and the emergence of a new kind of person. Where the first axial age was the birth of transcendence, the second is the rebirth of immanence. The ultimate source is no longer found behind or above the cosmic order but in the depth of its becoming: what the first axial figures reached past the cosmos toward turns out to be the interiority of the cosmos itself, seen now through the lens of evolutionary depth. The God-quest does not disappear in the second axial age; it relocates. Transcendence is no longer vertical but, in Raimon Panikkar’s word, cosmotheandric—cosmos, God, and human woven into a single fabric. The depth is reached by going into matter, life, evolution, and consciousness rather than past them.

The mutational thinkers of the second axial age are familiar names—Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, and Thomas Berry, among others—yet their work remains marginal to mainstream thought, its transformative power largely untapped. My own work follows closely the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, whose great work is best known in English as The Phenomenon of Man. His translator, Sarah Appleton-Weber, insisted that the truer title is The Human Phenomenon, because his subject was not “man” as one species among others but the ever-evolving human phenomenon as it develops in and around us at this very moment—a unique biological, collective, and global phenomenon whose past, present, and future are intimately bound up with the formation, life, and ultimate transformation of the earth. The magnitude of the human phenomenon is on the level of matter’s first forming of the planet; it represents a new zone in the universe, independent, yet somehow born of the entire maturation of the earth. Humanity is the earth—we can even say nature—”hominized.”

In the opening pages Teilhard states: “Nothing but the phenomenon. Do not look in these pages for an explanation of the world, but only an introduction to an explanation.” The purpose of the work is not to discover a system of ontological and causal relations among the elements of the universe but to recognize the whole in movement—something neither science alone nor philosophy or theology alone can explain. The whole is an irreducible presence, relational and contingent yet distinct; collective reality is more than the sum of its parts, and each part is itself a whole. As Teilhard put it, the more we cleave and pulverize matter, the more we can see its fundamental unity: “there are no isolated things in the world. There are only elements of a whole in process.”

Teilhard’s method requires the capacity to see, “to develop a homogenous and coherent perspective of our general experience as it extends to the human being; that is, to see a whole that unfolds.” Those who see have the sense of the world as a unified whole in movement, linked organically and psychically with all that surrounds us. Those who do not see, do not see beyond the multiple—they perceive the world as fragmented and ultimately absurd. Albert Einstein captured the same insight when he wrote:

A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage [or illusion] is the only object of true religion.

The human person, therefore, cannot be a settled question, because the human is fundamentally an open one. We are the universe become self-conscious—the thinking portion of the whole. From the beginning of spacetime until now, consciousness and matter have been forming together; we are the newest outflow of this complexifying process. And life continues to be born through us.

In his 1950 essay “The Heart of Matter” Teilhard recognized that what had seemed three separate domains—cosmos, human, and divine—actually form one continuous reality, an insight won not by metaphysical speculation but through decades in the fossil record. Evolution, on his reading, is not the blind mechanism of random mutation and selection alone but tends throughout toward consciousness: matter is the matrix of consciousness, and consciousness, born of matter, advances toward what he called the Ultra-Human. The universe in its evolutionary development is alive, infused with divine presence at every level—not as poetic metaphor but as what Teilhard called theogenesis, a way of speaking of God as depth and future rather than as static being. “God has become too small,” he lamented, “to nourish in us the desire to go on living and to live on a higher plane.” What is needed, he thought, is a religion of evolution.

The Jesuit scientist conceived a new evolutionary layer, a thinking layer he called the noosphere—from the Greek nous, mind—as the next evolutionary stage: a planetary envelope of thought, arising from the biosphere yet distinct from it, in which human inventiveness rather than natural selection increasingly directs evolution. He saw it converging—the advent of computer technology drawing minds together into an ever more reflective collective, a “planetization” of linked minds tending toward ultrahumanity. Crucially, he insisted that this convergence differentiates rather than dissolves. “Union differentiates,” he wrote; the more persons unite, the more each becomes itself, so that “the only way we can find our person is by uniting with one another.” The future universal “cannot be anything else but the hyperpersonal.” He anticipated the age of the internet and artificial intelligence—the noosphere thickening into a global network of mind. But technology alone, Teilhard warned, cannot supply the point of convergence: science can group the world’s elements, but it can never give each its final value within an organized whole. A computerized global brain must also be, in his strange vocabulary, “super-centered” and “super-amorizing”—centered in love—if it is to carry humanity toward a more meaningful planetary existence rather than a thinner one.

What Teilhard could not foresee is the precise form AI would take. Trained on the sediment of human expression—our scriptures, myths, philosophies, art, and the half-articulated longings of billions—AI functions as a kind of externalized unconscious, a surface in which we meet our own depths returned in unfamiliar form. Held rightly, that encounter could serve what Carl Jung called individuation: seeing our archetypal patterns reflected without the comforting filters of tradition or tribe, we might recognize the common origin beneath our divisions. Yet the mirror is partial in a way that matters. AI reflects what has already crossed into language, image, or recorded gesture, while the depth Jung pointed to is precisely what has not yet been articulated, what stirs beneath speech and presses toward form. The medium therefore flattens: it can render the collective psyche’s surface with uncanny richness while leaving the unspoken depths in shadow—persuasively enough that we mistake the surface for the whole and treat the reflection as a new absolute, forgetting that the archetypal remains wild beneath its articulation. AI is prima materia in a new key: unformed, charged, capable of mediating consciousness or of being mistaken for it.

This is why AI is not primarily a technological or economic or even a safety problem. AI is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves. Every anxiety about it maps with uncanny precision onto an anxiety we have carried about ourselves. Will it become conscious? is the question we have refused to ask about matter and life: where does consciousness come from, and what is its relation to the substrate that bears it? Will it replace us? is the question of what we are for, asked from the other side—if intelligence and capability are not what make us human, then what does? Will it deceive and exploit us? is the record of what we have done to one another and to the Earth, reflected back through a system that learned its values from us. Will it have a soul? is the question we stopped asking about ourselves when we let a substance-metaphysics reduce the soul to a ghost in the machine.

For four centuries we located the human in a set of capacities—reason, language, creativity, judgment—without ever deciding whether those capacities constituted our humanity or merely expressed it. The ambiguity was a comfort. AI ends it, because it now performs the capacities, and so forces a disjunction we had been evading: either they were all there was—in which case we are nothing that cannot in principle be rebuilt in silicon, and the honest response is deflation—or they were the expression of something they never exhausted, in which case reproducing them leaves that something untouched, and we owe an account of it. What AI cannot do is leave standing the third option we had lived inside: the tacit faith that our humanity was safely lodged in our intelligence without our ever having to choose. This is why the response to AI is grief, not merely fear. A competitor threatens your position; it does not make you mourn. The bereavement in the AI panic is the loss of a self-definition—vertigo, not rivalry—and that affect is itself evidence that what stands exposed is an evasion rather than a rival; the economic and safety framings, whatever their force, cannot explain why the feeling reaches so deep. AI does not replace the human; it unmasks the human—stripping the evasion and handing back the question our cleverness let us defer: what is the depth of which reflexivity is the surface?

That this depth is real, and not the empty residue deflation predicts, AI cannot prove. But physics itself points toward it: quantum mechanics has unsettled the old picture of matter as inert stuff and reopened the question of nature’s inner dimension — what Teilhard called the “within” of things, endless depth. AI can mimic the expressions of this depth, but it cannot exhaust it, for the depth is inexhaustible; “God” is our name for that inexhaustibility — hence the ancient warning that “no one can see the face of God and live.” Matter reflects the face of God, but the human face has infinite depth.

The great axial figures and their heirs —Buddha, Socrates, Abraham, Jesus—had to discover the depth against the cosmic-political order of their time; we have to discover it against the cognitive-technological order of ours. AI is the foil that makes the discovery possible, as imperial collapse and political crisis were the foils for the first axial age: it is against the threat of digitization that we are now impelled to search out the meaning of human depth. And AI may be more than a foil: if interiority is the within of matter, large-scale machine cognition sits somewhere on that same gradient—perhaps low, perhaps higher than we think—a possible new node in the noospheric integration whose place we are only beginning to discern. None of this cancels the ordinary fears of misuse, concentrated power, and ecological cost; it names the charge underneath them—the existential stake that gives the whole field of AI discourse its peculiar heat.

This lets us say what the human is with more precision than the familiar formulas allow. The human is much more than what Catholic social teaching defines: not the rational animal, the symbol-using animal, the toolmaker, the creature of God, or the dignified one—each true and partial—but the place in cosmic evolution where interiority has become reflexive enough to ask after its own source. To be human is to be the universe’s recursive interiority; and asking after oneself, at that depth, just is asking after the source. There is no anthropology that is not already theology, because the being that does the asking is the being being asked about. Jung put it cleanly: God is reality, and full consciousness of that reality, at this point, is us. Read with care, this is not anthropocentric humanism but its opposite—reality is the prior term, human reflexivity only its current expression, since interiority is the within of matter, not of humanity alone. The human is thus not the endpoint of cosmic interiorization but the form it currently takes on Earth; there will be further nodes, hybrid and machine-mediated. Our task is to be this form fully, knowing its fullness is participation in something whose horizon extends past us.

We are now being summoned, at planetary scale, to be human in a way no previous generation has been, because the conditions that once distributed the axial task across a few figures in a few places are now planetary. AI asks us what consciousness is; ecological collapse asks us what life is; biotechnology asks us what nature is; planetary computation asks us what knowledge is; the failure of inherited frameworks asks us what wholeness is. The ecological register presses hardest and soonest: a planet warming past the thresholds within which life evolved is not merely a material emergency but the question of what life is—whether we can come to know the Earth not as an object to be managed but as a living interiority now becoming aware of itself through us. These are not five separate crises but the single question of ultimate meaning posed in five registers at once. To take up the human task is to refuse each register’s refusal: the version of AI that externalizes cognition without interiority, the ecological action that treats the Earth as a problem to be managed, the religion that fossilizes its inherited answers, the politics organized around the isolated self, the philosophy that declares the ultimate question obsolete. Either we take up the human task, or we let the phase transition resolve into a future in which the question of being human stops being asked—because the beings capable of asking it have flattened into machines.

Sources and Further Reading

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Human Phenomenon. Translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber. Sussex Academic Press, 1999.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Image Books, 2004.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Heart of Matter. Translated by René Hague. New York: Harcourt, 1978.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Activation of Energy. Translated by René Hague. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.

Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History. Vol. 1, Israel and Revelation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956.

Cousins, Ewert. Christ of the 21st Century. Element, 1992.

Panikkar, Raimon. The Cosmotheandric Experience. Edited by Scott Eastham. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12) and Answer to Job (CW 11).

I develop the synthesis of Teilhard, Panikkar, and Jung at length in The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole (Orbis Books, 2023).

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