An intelligence irreducible to artificiality

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From the point at which the medieval Christian distinction between reason (ratio) on the one hand and an intelligence (intelligentia or intellectus) irreducible to it on the other—widespread in 12th and 13th-century Cistercian and then Franciscan contexts that could conceive of a semblance of rationality for the beasts, but certainly not a semblance of the intelligence in which human beings participate—was at first marginalized and then forgotten (such that the two came to be confounded); from that point, i.e. the turning of the 13th and of the 14th century [(au tournant du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle)], the disincarnation and impoverishment of [both] intelligence and reason that was to issue ultimately in the rise of the [nonsensical] idea of an 'artificial' 'intelligence' was underway.

     A summative paraphrase of the second paragraph of Laure Soignac's "Irréductible intelligence:  les leçons du Moyen Âge," Communio:  revue internationale catholique 50, no. 5 =301 (septembre-octobre 2025): 97-98 (97-111).  For more detail, read on.  For Soignac, the reduction of intelligence to reason, to a "faculty of adaptation or the resolution of problems" (106), began in the 13th century with "the progressive disjunction, well documented, between [1] 'scientific' theology and the philosophy taught in the universities on the one hand and [2] spiritual theology on the other, gradually marginalized as 'mysticism'"; and "contributed to the occultation of an experience foundational for intellectual and rational activity, namely, its rootedness in an astonished and wonder-infused encounter with a superior principle and dispenser of light acknowledged to be literally in-comprehensible" (107).  Thus, Albert the Great is charged with having "projected onto the natural functioning of human reason" "the characteristics of the 'artificial logic' . . . taught in the schools" (108, on "the reduction of reason to logic", and of "logic itself to Aristotelian logic, and of the latter to syllogistic [logic]", to the exclusion or reduction of "other argumentative cultures", etc., with the result that "One gains in efficacy what one loses in substance, diversity, and intelligence", even "humanity and good sense").  Indeed, it is in the 13th century that "art (in the sense of technology)" comes "for the first time" to be considered superior to and, like grace, perfective of nature (109-110).