There is an obvious relationship between the new writing technology and the new kind of intelligence, which comes to change the structure of the human mind (psyche). In his latest book, “The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion,” Sigmund Freud seems to intuit that the Israelites at the time of Moses invented the alphabet, and writes, “Among the precepts of the Mosaic religion is found one that is more important than one recognizes at first glance. It is the prohibition against making images of God, the imposition of worshiping a God whom no one can see. (…) when this prohibition was accepted, it had to exert a profound effect. It means in fact to postpone sensory perception to so-called abstract representation, a triumph of spirituality over sensibility, strictly speaking a pulsional renunciation with the necessary psychological consequences.”
This is a mutation at the mental level but at the same time a departure from previous, image-based writing techniques, as Freud further writes, “If they were subject to the prohibition that affected images, they had a reason to abandon the ideographic writing of hieroglyphics, adapting its written signs to express a new language.”
With the alphabet comes the conscious, the conscious self but also Freud’s Super-Ego, the part of the psyche that is formed through internalizing the rules and ideals of the outside world, particularly that of parents and society. It serves as the “moral conscience.”
In other words, we see the emergence of the concept of the soul (Psyche, hence psychology) as it is understood in Western culture.
“Man found himself conditioned in general to recognize ‘spiritual’ powers, that is, such that they could not be grasped with the senses, especially with sight (…). At the same time there was the discovery of the soul as the spiritual principle of the individual man.” And again, “Religion, which began with the prohibition of making an image of God, evolves more and more over the centuries into a religion of drive renunciation.”
Today, with Artificial Intelligence, we may be facing a transition of the same magnitude.
Is the age of the alphabet, with its dominant forms of expression and thought for three millennia, waning to lead our psyche into a new, unknown world?
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