November 28, 2025

Re: "Kierkegaard’s Spirituality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence; or, What Does ‘the Single Individual’ Have to Do with ChatGPT?”

Earlier this year, the Søren Kierkegaard Society invited me to give a paper at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion, which was held in Boston in 2025. I was assigned to a session entitled “Whence the Lily? Wither the Bird? A Panel on Kierkegaard’s Spirituality.” In and of itself, this placement might suggest a talk on Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings or, more broadly, on contemplative prayer. And, to be clear, those and other related topics would have been apropos. But I decided to take a different direction—one that moves away from the proverbial lilies and birds (Matthew 6:26-34) and instead wrestles with spirituality in the postmodern-transhumanist context of artificial intelligence and digital chatbots.

Officially, the name of my AAR presentation was “What Does ‘the Single Individual’ Have to Do with ChatGPT?” Kierkegaard’s Spirituality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” On November 22, we gathered on the seventh floor of the Westin Copley Place in downtown Boston. It was a cold, rainy Saturday morning, but, thankfully, I managed to snag a large coffee on my walk over without getting too wet! I arrived a little after 8:30 A.M., snapped a couple of quick pictures (see below), and met my co-panelists Carl Hughes of Texas Lutheran University and Frances Maughan-Brown of the College of Holy Cross. Both would give excellent papers, and this would prove to be a very worthwhile event.

Indeed, with that in mind, I have decided to publish my talk here on Just FYI. Notably, I have returned to the paper’s working title: “Kierkegaard’s Spirituality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence; or, What Does ‘the Single Individual’ Have to Do with ChatGPT?” Not only do I prefer the Melvillian ring of this appellation, but, more to the point, the present essay is meant to adduce my original vision in its entirety. AAR papers are, by design, short and impressionistic. And while this post by no means exhausts the significance of the topic at hand, it is significantly longer than my presentation in Boston. In a nutshell: this is the paper that, ceteris paribus, I would’ve liked to have given at the AAR.

---

“Kierkegaard’s Spirituality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence; or, What Does ‘the Single Individual’ Have to Do with ChatGPT?”

Christopher B. Barnett

Introduction

What does Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of “the Single Individual” (den Enkelte) have to do with the generative artificial chatbot known as ChatGPT? After pondering this matter for a while, I had an idea: why not just ask ChatGPT? So I ventured over to chatgpt.com, posed the question, and within seconds the digital software spit out an answer, noting that the two parties make for a surprising juxtaposition. “Kierkegaard’s idea of the ‘single individual’ and ChatGPT may seem worlds apart,” the chatbot begins, “[because] one [is] rooted in 19th-century existentialism, the other in 21st-century AI, but the contrast and potential connection raise interesting philosophical and practical questions.”^[1]

This was an impressive start, but ChatGPT was just getting warmed up. Like an undergraduate student cramming dense philosophical and theological concepts into a PowerPoint, ChatGPT provided a number of bullet-pointed responses to my inquiry—too many, in fact, to catalog here. Still, a few are worth highlighting. First, while conceding (perhaps a bit too understatedly) that Kierkegaard “might view ChatGPT with suspicion,” the chatbot adds that the user of generative AI need not treat it as an enemy of “genuine inwardness.”^[2] On the contrary, it can serve as “a paradoxical prompt for deeper solitude and self-examination.”^[3] This appears to be a bold claim. After all, the majority of people will use ChatGPT to gather as much information as possible in as little time as possible. In this mode, they will rely on a “fundamentally impersonal” product of “data aggregation and statistical patterning” to align their existential choices with the digital herd. As ChatGPT perspicaciously puts it, “Kierkegaard warned of the ‘public’ and the ‘crowd’ as forces that dilute individuality. Social media, algorithms, and now AI all contribute to that massification.”^[4]

Yet, as noted, ChatGPT does not think this outcome is inevitable. Despite its potential pitfalls, AI can also help the individual “resist” the crowd, provided that she elects to use it “to question, to explore, [and] to confront uncomfortable truths.”^[5] In this way, ChatGPT can prompt one to “think through personal or existential matters,” and it can facilitate inter- and intrapersonal conversation by revealing the “values, doubts, or fears” that must be confronted in life.^[6] Indeed, in a statement of unexpected chutzpah, ChatGPT even went so far as to compare itself to Kierkegaard’s philosophical exemplar Socrates, pointing out that it is capable of ironically and provocatively stirring the individual to embrace a deeper and more authentic sense of self: “ChatGPT [can become] a kind of Socratic foil—not a teacher of truth, but a stimulus for individual reflection.”^[7]

So, if ChatGPT is right, the relation between Kierkegaard’s den Enkelte and AI chatbots is fundamentally instrumental. There is not an essential conflict between the two; it is simply a matter of how the individual uses the technology in question. The goal of this paper is to argue to the contrary, and it will proceed in two overarching ways. First, it will contend that technological instrumentalism is empirically and philosophically inadequate, insofar as it fails to account for how tools shape both personal worldviews and sociopolitical systems. On this account, the individual cannot handle a tool such as ChatGPT with perfect neutrality, because she is already implicated in the power structures served and propagated by AI chatbots. ChatGPT may compare itself to Socrates, but its parent company OpenAI currently enjoys a valuation of 500 billion dollars. This hardly resembles the standpoint of “infinite absolute negativity” that Kierkegaard famously identified with Socratic dialectic. Second, and following from the previous point, this paper will argue that ChatGPT’s tendencies toward abstraction, “massification,” and efficiency pose the latest, and perhaps the greatest, threat to den Enkelte. Individual resistance, then, is necessary. The question is: how? In conclusion, it will be suggested that two aspects of Kierkegaard’s spirituality provide a significant, if not exhaustive, answer to this question—a defense of the individual on the one hand, and a concrete theological commitment to imitate Christ on the other hand.

ChatGPT and the Trouble with Technological Instrumentalism

Automated machines have long fascinated and incited human beings. In his classic 1776 text The Wealth of Nations, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-90) predicted that mechanization would lead to an economic windfall, increasing productivity with “labor-saving equipment” and thereby setting “in motion a virtuous cycle” of industrial growth and financial gain.^[8] Yet, less than 50 years after The Wealth of Nations appeared, voices of anger and dissent railed against the new mechanical order—indeed, in Smith’s own backyard. On March 11, 1811, a crowd of roughly one thousand souls packed Old Market Square in Nottingham, England, protesting the living and working conditions of the city’s laborers. They also “took aim at another pressing trend—automation.”^[9] Led by the former framework knitter Gravener Henson (1785-1852), who would go on to seek parliamentary regulation of the textile industry, the protesters argued that “merchants and entrepreneurs were using machines and children to take over their work [and] to increase their own profit.”^[10] Tempers rose throughout the day and into the night. Finally, a group of workers “covered their faces with black masks”^[11] and entered a nearby factory, where they smashed 60 machines to pieces with a blacksmith’s hammer.

This was the beginning of the so-called Luddite Rebellion, which came to a bloody end in June 1817, when an uprising in Derbyshire was put down and its leaders either beheaded or exiled. Nevertheless, from Bohemianism to the Unabomber, the tension raised by automated machines has never truly abated. Since the Industrial Revolution, people have wrestled with how to understand and to respond to machine technology. Indeed, for every Luddite who has called for “broken machines,” there have been others who trace the problem to “broken people.” In his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” the great Irish novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) argues that capitalism has created needless poverty and, with it, needless preoccupation with sociopolitical causes. If only people would uses machines properly, movements such as Luddism would have no reason to exist. Why should anyone, after all, worry about job losses when the destiny of humanity is to no longer work? As Wilde sums it up, “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”^[12] If people were to agree that “cultivated leisure” is the true “aim of man,” and if people were to deploy machines with this goal rightly in mind, then the “future of machinery” would beget a society in which human beings would be freed to make or to contemplate “beautiful things” while “machinery [would] be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.”^[13]

What seems to unite the machine-breaking of Luddism on the one hand, and the libertarian anarchism of Wilde on the other, is the assumption that technology in general, and machines in particular, are nothing more than tools “ready to serve the purposes of their users.”^[14] On this reading, technology does not require or even recommend particular attitudes or judgments; it is value free or, simply, “neutral.” This is a longstanding and, indeed, “common sense”^[15] view of technology. As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) once put it, “The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.”^[16] Following from this view are a handful of presuppositions. First, it is assumed that technology is objectively indifferent to the ends that it can achieve. A hammer can be used to build a deck, or it can be used to hit people. The goals and values of the person in question determine how the tool is utilized. Second, technological neutrality is understood to be acontextual and thus apolitical. Hammers have proven useful in any number of historical and social environments, whether in thirteenth-century France or in twentieth-century Soviet Union. Third, and with that in mind, technology is thought to be neutral in the same way that the mathematical constant of pi is thought to be neutral. It is always and everywhere the case that hammers are good for impacting other objects; this is a universal truth of reason “based on verifiable causal propositions.”^[17] Fourth, and finally, technological neutrality is identified with normative “standards of measurement.”^[18] It is never the case that hammers are assessed based on their capacity for, say, spreading peanut butter; the “very same norm of efficiency” is applied to all hammers across all contexts.

As the American philosopher Andrew Feenberg (1943-) has noted, to adopt a standpoint of “technological neutrality” is to register a fundamental commitment to technology as such. Even if preexisting ethical or religious values were to limit the extent to which one utilizes a given technology—for example, an individual may decline to purchase a gun or to use barrier contraception—such a choice would not be opposed to technology’s raison d’être, which is to achieve practical goals in an economical, efficient, and reproducible way. The proponent of technological neutrality can accept that there may be “trade-offs”^[19] in the adoption of certain technologies; what he cannot accept is an ostensibly irrational resistance to technological progress and the continual evolution of technical means.

Not all philosophies of technology, however, favor this instrumentalist point of view. Arguably the earliest responses to technology—for example, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) or the Ancient Greek myths about Icarus or Prometheus—suggest that technology can “easily turn against the human by severing it”^[20] from eternal truth. This distrust was not entirely theological in nature. In Plato’s philosophical dialogue Phaedo, Socrates cautions that science and technology can propagate “cosmological and moral confusion.”^[21] Likewise, in his Memorabilia, Xenophon relays the Socratic insight that “orators and businessmen and inventors” need to be restrained by philosophy’s fundamental interest in “life and morality and things good and bad.”^[22] This early wariness about technology has not abated in modernity. In his 1814 long poem The Excursion, William Wordsworth laments the “outrage done to nature” by modern industry, ultimately concluding:

How insecure, how baseless in itself,

Is the Philosophy whose sway depends

On mere material instruments; – how weak

Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped

By virtue.^[23]

This “critical uneasiness”^[24] with technology would trickle down to later thinkers, ranging from Kierkegaard to Martin Heidegger to Jacques Ellul. For these thinkers, technology is not a neutral factum of human life but a “self-creative act” that, even while making “possible a new material freedom,” nevertheless undermines “social affection” and etiolates human imagination.^[25] Moreover, as Christopher Nolan vividly represents in his 2023 film Oppenheimer, there is even a sense that technological development is akin to a godlike mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a project of alluring sublimity and terrifying consequence.

The tension between instrumentalist and critical perspectives on technology is longstanding and pertinacious. Indeed, it is already present in debates about AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. In an April 2025 essay issued by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI is nothing more than “normal technology.”^[26] As they explain:

To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI…. The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs.^[27]

The word “tool” here is key. It indicates the inherent instrumentality of AI as well as the standard assumption that AI, like other technologies, can be managed by competent actors. Besides, as Oxford philosopher Toby Ord argues in a January 2025 paper,^[28] it may be that the cost of AI ultimately outstrips its usefulness. AI is a flashy tool—who doesn’t like asking ChatGPT to write hip-hop lyrics about Kantian philosophy?—but like any instrument it must demonstrate cost-effectiveness. So far, Ord argues, it does not appear that the progress of AI technology will match the resources being poured into it. Why, then, should people fear AI when it may go the way of payphones and VCRs?

Of course, not everyone agrees. In a June 2024 article, AI researcher (and former OpenAI employee) Leopold Aschenbrenner predicts that, by 2027, AI models will be able to effectively mimic the cognitive faculties of human beings, learning various tasks and growing along the way. This evolutionary capaciousness is typically referred to as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). Aschenbrenner puts it this way:

We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.^[29]

Lest Aschenbrenner be dismissed as anomalous, it is worth underlining that AI Impacts, a nonprofit research organization, has surveyed the world’s leading AI scholars and discovered that nearly half of them believe that AI could lead to the extinction of the human species.^[30] It would appear, then, that the instrumental neutrality of ChatGPT and other forms of AI is dubious. For some, AI is substantively oriented towards the destruction of human creativity, intellectuality, and spirituality—no matter the intentions of its user.

So, which side is right? This is a multifaceted question, which, needless to say, cannot be decided in a space such as this one. Nevertheless, vis-à-vis AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, it remains the case that technological instrumentalism is insufficiently nuanced. That is to say, while the user of ChatGPT can employ the software in any number of ways (from looking up Christmas cookie recipes to, in a tragic, real-life example,^[31] asking for tips on how to write a suicide note), it is always and everywhere the case that ChatGPT is a for-profit technology that generates revenue by providing instantaneous access to abstract, disincarnate information. Thus it is hardly “neutral,” as if it emerged without particular ends. No, ChatGPT wants something. If nothing else, it wants your time and your money.

After all, the more one utilizes ChatGPT, the more likely one is to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus, which links the customer with “advanced intelligence and agents.”^[32] Priced at $19.99 per month—and not to be confused with the $200 per month charge for ChatGPT Pro—ChatGPT Plus is a smarter, faster, and deeper AI model, capable of “leveling up productivity and creativity.”^[33] This is a winsome phrase, but it is also freighted with assumptions. In his classic study The Technological Society (La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, 1954), Jacques Ellul distinguishes between “technique” and technology. The former, he argues, is responsible for integrating the latter into every facet of human life. That is to say, technique is not an external object (like a laptop or a sewing machine) but an internal logic, which fosters “a kind of social development that is rational, intelligent, and conscious.”^[34] It is technique that “leads to mechanization” and, in turn, applies it “to all domains hitherto foreign to the machine.”^[35] Even in relation to scientific theory—a relation that Ellul concedes is fraught with ambiguity—technique has managed to assume a dominant position. To cite an immediately pertinent example: few people care about how chatbots work; they only want to know if they will make their lives easier or their work more efficient. “As soon as a discovery is made,” Ellul observes, “a concrete application is sought. Capital becomes interested, or the state, and the discovery enters the public domain before anyone has had a chance to reckon all the consequences or to recognize its full import.”^[36]

Thus the claim that ChatGPT levels up productivity and creativity is not tendered on accident; rather, it appeals to the modern presupposition that productivity and creativity are best realized in and through the technical logic of the machine. Moreover, since all rational persons presumably agree with this logic, selling ChatGPT should not be hard—and, indeed, it has not been. In July 2025, it was announced that OpenAI is generating $1 billion per month, and, even though the company is not yet operating at a profit, it has lined up investors to contribute an additional $30 billion in funding.^[37] As of October 2025, OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation “reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology,”^[38] at least partly because shareholders trust the underlying business model. People want to be more productive and more creative in a highly efficient manner; these are the summa bona of a technological society. And since this logic cannot be resisted, AI cannot be resisted. It will be popular, and profitable, whether we like it or not.

For Ellul, however, this is actually the problem. When the “technical process” becomes automatic, when everything can be doubted except technology, then humanity has arrived at a stage of “technical automatism.”^[39]Activities that once were considered forms of art or charity are now rendered subservient to technique. Electoral campaigns now prioritize sociological surveys and political microtargeting; church outreach now depends on social media algorithms and marketing promotions. The problem is not necessarily that such things are unhelpful or immoral; it is that they are inevitable. As Ellul puts it: “Inside the technical circle, the choice among methods, mechanism, organizations, and formulas is carried out automatically. Man is stripped of his faculty of choice and he is satisfied.”^[40] The “creativity” afforded by technologies such as ChatGPT is thus expressed only within the confines of the technical paradigm, much in the way that a pet goldfish is free to move about the tank provided by its owner.

Of course, such limitations would be liberating if everything could be understood and appropriated in technological terms. From poetry to prayer, certain activities seem to fall “off the grid” of mechanization. And yet, Ellul argues, they will not survive as alternatives to technique: “Technical activity automatically eliminates every nontechnical activity or transforms it into technical activity.”^[41] Predictably, then, poetry has declined as a “cultural force” in Western life, as Dana Gioia famously put it,^[42] and prayer has been integrated into the category of “mindfulness” on the iPhone’s health informatics app. ChatGPT is simply another sign that technical automatism is not only alive and well, but nearing its zenith.

How will this situation end? According to Ellul, the technical drive for “efficient ordering”^[43] hurls humanity towards an inexorable violence, precisely because technique cuts through the messy ambiguity of human feeling and meaning and demands a concrete application of operational principles. It is this “monistic”^[44] logic that seeps into each and every aspect of human life and thus cannot help but end in coercion. As Ellul puts it, “Every industry, every technique, however humane its intentions, has military value.”^[45] Of course, this is exactly what AI doomers such as Aschenbrenner fear. The ostensible neutrality of an application like ChatGPT belies an underlying and intensifying unfreedom, which, in the end, will not augment human ingenuity but, rather, jettison it. In its quest for universal systems of logic and method, modernity has culminated in the apotheosis of the machine and, quite possibly, in the liquidation of the human. Indeed, if this trajectory is to be diverted or, at least, resisted, people need to recapture a sense of the irreducibility of each and every human being and to confront existential alternatives to the looming AI world. In these ways, Kierkegaard may prove a timely resource in the years to come.

A Kierkegaardian Response to ChatGPT

At the outset of this paper, it was suggested that Kierkegaard’s spirituality provides two significant responses to the problems posed by ChatGPT and others forms of AI. The first is a commitment to, and a defense of, the human person. Although a capacious topic, which cannot be treated in full here, the concept of “the individual” is one of the linchpins of the Dane’s philosophy. Kierkegaard uses two terms for “individual.” The first is Individ, which is cognate with the Latin individuum; the second is Enkelt, often styled den Enkelte (“the single individual”), which is derived from the Middle Low German enkel and related to the extant German word einzeln (“single”) and the Danish enkel (“simple”). Kierkegaard uses Individ roughly 300 times in his authorship, Enkelt and Enkelte over 2,000 times. The sheer frequency of these words suggests that “the individual” is among Kierkegaard’s most important concepts, though the reasons why are complex.

It is worth noting at the outset that Kierkegaard’s “individualism,” if it can be called that, should not be conflated with the economic individualism promoted by classical liberals such as Adam Smith. Smith’s “individual” is naturally self-interested, and his egoism redounds to the common good by way of a providential “invisible hand.”^[46] In contrast, Kierkegaard’s den Enkelte is a spanner in the works of the sociopolitical establishment and, above all, an exception to modernity’s march towards commercial growth and technological homogenization. In other words, Smith views the individual as homo economicus, Kierkegaard as homo spiritualis. The former achieves happiness through material prosperity, the latter through spiritual deepening and the love of God and neighbor.

Implicit in this Kierkegaardian anthropology is a rejection of objectivity as the sole or even as the principal means of assessing existential worth. For Kierkegaard, it is not about how much you know; it is about who you are. This standpoint starts with Christian teaching on creation. As the origin of all things, God wills the existence of each and every individual person, no matter how dissimilar in a quantitative sense. The priest in Austria, the migrant worker in El Salvador, the financier in Singapore—each person is equal in the eyes of God and equally accountable before God. Though this assumption shares affinities with some of modernity’s most notable political movements—liberalism and Marxism in particular—Kierkegaard’s “individual” is neither a political nor an economic unit. For him, equality is not a function of voting rights, property rights, or technological wherewithal. It is a presupposition of God’s creative activity. Hence, in opposing modernity’s obsession with objectivity, Kierkegaard takes the side of the flesh-and-blood subject, who has been willed by God into being and thus bears the ineradicable spark of divine love.

ChatGPT, however, takes a different point of departure. In July 2025, OpenAI published a mission statement entitled “Intellectual Freedom by Design,”^[47] which argues that ChatGPT promotes free inquiry precisely insofar as it is “objective by default.”^[48] ChatGPT assumes, in other words, that there is no “single answer” to “competing political, cultural, or ideological viewpoints.”^[49] In fact, it explicitly associates the “usefulness” of AI with a systemic commitment to “neutrality.”^[50] In helping “users explore multiple perspectives,” ChatGPT refuses to endorse a “particular worldview.”^[51] At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, ChatGPT wants to be “customizable.”^[52]The person who uses it—especially the one who pays to use it—is able to “personalize” the chatbot’s settings.^[53] What this means, in effect, is that ChatGPT “doesn’t change the facts” based on the individual who uses it; it only “tailor[s] how those facts are communicated.”^[54] It indulges the subject in order to make a modernist emphasis on objectivity more palatable.

If, on the odd evening, a person uses ChatGPT to look up recipes for dirty martinis, the chatbot’s emphasis on “objectivity” is not unwelcome. However, from a Kierkegaardian point of view, problems arise when ChatGPT is used precisely as “Intellectual Freedom by Design” suggests. In matters of existential concern, the de facto exploration of “multiple perspectives” is bound to result in what Kierkegaard terms Reflexion. As Kierkegaard sees it, “reflection” is the ordinary condition of modern Western society, whereby individual immediacy and passion are bracketed in favor of objective verification and social conformity. In Kierkegaard’s day, this mindset was largely fostered in and through the press, but it clearly and, indeed, even more urgently applies to the print media’s twenty-first century progeny—the Internet, social media, and now AI. When individual devotion and action are subordinated to the dictates of a detached, impersonal authority, ethico-religious ideals cannot get off the ground. The one seeking objective certainty must always await more information, must always ask another question, must always defer a meaningful decision with a view to social acceptability.

In his 1846 book A Literary Review, Kierkegaard calls this process “leveling” (Nivelleringen or Nivelleren). In the age of popular media, he argues, social cohesiveness is obtained not by making people better but by making them all the same—indeed, by reducing them to the same level (“leveling”). It does not matter if the mechanism is public opinion or a disembodied chatbot, leveling emerges whenever abstract knowledge is used to compel the individual to comply with objective opinion. For that reason, the individual who resists the undertow of leveling and thus distances herself from objectivity is certain to face pressure to conform. The alternative, however, is the overthrow of ethico-religious ideality and the tyranny of disincarnate reason. Consequently, Kierkegaard intended his authorship to help the individual stand firm against leveling and, in turn, to become the singular person whom God wants her to be.

In fact, many of his writings, especially those in the genre of discourse, are explicitly dedicated to the individual. As Kierkegaard writes in the Preface to Four Upbuilding Discourses of 1844, “[This book] seeks that single individual (hiin Enkelte) whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, in order to pay him a visit, indeed, to stay with him, because one goes to the person one loves.”^[55] Later, in an appendix to the posthumously published The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard included a two-part essay entitled “Den Enkelte.” It begins with a distinction between politics (Politik) and religion, before moving on to an analysis of the individual, the latter of which, Kierkegaard observes, is the antithesis of “fantastic social categories” and, instead, “is the first condition of all religiousness.”^[56] Hence, while modern society is moving in the direction of impersonal data and collectivist identities, religion must continue to insist on the primacy of den Enkelte, which “from the Christian point of view…is the decisive category.”^[57] Such, indeed, was Kierkegaard’s mission as an author: “The single individual is the category through which, in a religious sense, the age, history, the human race must go. And the one who stood at Thermopylae was not so secure as I, who have stood, in order at least to bring about an awareness of it, at this narrow pass, the single individual.”^[58]

Thus it goes without saying that, in the age of ChatGPT, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on den Enkelte is both timely and essential—the former because it directly addresses the depersonalized objectivization characteristic of modern society, the latter because it attempts to deal with this problem at its most fundamental level. Already in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807), doubtless one of the landmark texts of German Idealism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) states that he intends to transmute philosophy into science: “The true shape in which truth exists,” Hegel notes, “can only be the scientific system of such truth.”^[59] The goal of das System, in other words, is nothing less than the intelligibility of all things. Famously, Kierkegaard was one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of Hegelian thinking. Particularly in the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler, 1846), Kierkegaard reminds his readers that a purely “objective” point of view is available to God alone, precisely because no created thing (and that, doubtless, would include ChatGPT) is capable of transcending the finite conditions of its own existence. Moreover, to the extent that a putatively objective system is accessible, it is bound to prioritize information over passion and, for that reason, to diminish or even extinguish human desire. This exchange may lead to better outcomes in certain domains of life (dirty martinis!), but it is noxious to ethico-religious ideals, which emerge from an intricate nexus of concerns, feelings, and hopes.

This point leads to a second way that Kierkegaard’s spirituality might address the “Chatbot Era.” Again and again, for Kierkegaard, the manifold dangers of the modern world can be traced back to a proclivity for abstraction, reductionism, systematization, and groupthink. And yet, these are the very qualities that ChatGPT harnesses; it is the latest, and arguably the greatest, application of das System. Of course, none of this would have surprised Kierkegaard, who consistently and passionately advocated for a return to actuality and ideality, relationality and singularity. Indeed, it is telling that, even in the domain of spirituality, Kierkegaard’s most famous contribution is a recovery and reinterpretation of the concrete ideal of imitatio Christi. Drawing explicitly on works such as the fifteenth-century devotional manual De Imitatione Christi, written by the Augustinian cleric Thomas à Kempis (ca. 1380-1471), Kierkegaard recommended the imitation of Christ as a counterbalance to mass society in all of its forms. In late works such as The Moment (Øieblikket, 1855), Kierkegaard drew a sharp distinction between the individual who follows Christ unto death and those who hide among the numbers of the Danish state church. In prior texts such as A Literary Review and Practice in Christianity(Indøvelse i Christendom, 1850), he used Christological concepts such as “unrecognizability” (Ukjendeligheden) to chart an existential alternative to media-driven, post-truth society. In both cases, Kierkegaard insisted that the one who witnesses to Christ has to do so in imitation of Christ, since one cannot imitate Christ in abstracto or en masse. Thus Kierkegaard’s retrieval of the imitatio motif does not merely indicate his fondness for a certain strand of mystical and Pietist literature. Nor is it merely (or even mostly) a “corrective” to the Lutheran emphasis on sola gratia. Rather, the imitation of Christ is the spiritual practice best suited to address the various depredations of the modern age.

Conclusion

In the first decades of the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) wrote a series of works that were meant to address a number of contemporaneous philosophical and religious movements, from Manichean dualism to Pelagian moralism. In works such as Confessions (Confessiones, ca. 400 CE), Augustine’s portrayal of a self riven by “sin, doubt, [and] confusion” and yet “caught up into grace and into God”^[60] served as an antidote to age’s celebration of spiritual champions. Centuries later, an English anchoress named Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-1416) wrote down a series of visions or “shewings” that she once received during a life-threatening illness. The result was a book known as Revelations of Divine Love, which, amid the so-called “Black Death” pandemic of that era, delivered “a message of optimism based on the certainty of being loved by God and of being protected by his Providence.”^[61] Different times, it seems, call for different spiritualities.

And so it is today. The age of technological systems and AI chatbots necessitates a spiritual ballast—one that Kierkegaard is uniquely situated to provide. Long before ChatGPT, Kierkegaard understood that modern technologies were not neutral tools, indifferent to human utilization, but calculative apparatuses designed to lure human beings into the objective, depersonalized Geist of the times. Thus his twin emphases on “the single individual” and imitatio Christi were calibrated precisely to respond to this setting; they are not antique or twee pieties but modes of sociopolitical resistance.

So use ChatGPT to get ready for your next half marathon; use it the next time you want to make cocktails for your friends. Yet, as Kierkegaard reminds us, never forget you are a “single individual,” called to a beatitude that transcends human efficiency and profitability. For no matter ChatGPT’s future, whether apocalyptic or mundane, it can never prepare human beings for a world beyond das System.

---

^[1] Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, accessed July 18, 2025,

https://chatgpt.com/?model=auto.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 22.

^[9] Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023), 60.

^[10] Ibid., 61.

^[11] Ibid., 63.

^[12] Quoted in Carr, The Glass Cage, 25.

^[13] Quoted in ibid.

^[14] Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), loc. 79. Kindle.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1995), 312.

^[17] Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, loc. 96. Kindle.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Carl Mitcham, “Three Ways of Being-With Technology,” in Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, 2^ndedition, edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 524.

^[21] Ibid.

^[22] Quoted in ibid., 525.

^[23] Quoted in ibid., 531.

^[24] Ibid., 554.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, “AI as Normal Technology: An alternative to the vision of AI as a potential superintelligence,” Knight First Amendment Institute, April 15, 2025, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Toby Ord, “The Scaling Paradox,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.tobyord.com/writing/the-scaling-paradox.

^[29] Leopold Aschenbrenner, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” accessed September 21, 2024, https://situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/situationalawareness.pdf.

^[30] See, e.g., David Wallace-Wells, “A.I. May Be Just Kind of Ordinary,” The New York Times, August 20, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/opinion/ai-technology-chatgpt.html.

^[31] See, e.g., Rhitu Chatterjee, “Their teenage sons died by suicide. Now, they are sounding an alarm about AI chatbots,” NPR, September 19, 2025, https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545749/ai-chatbots-safety-openai-meta-characterai-teens-suicide.

^[32] ChatGPT, “Pricing,” accessed September 29, 2025, https://chatgpt.com/pricing/.

^[33] Ibid.

^[34] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 6.

^[35] Ibid.

^[36] Ibid., 8.

^[37] Reuters, “OpenAI Hits $12 Billion in Annualized Revenue, The Information Reports,” July 30, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annualized-revenue-information-reports-2025-07-31/.

^[38] Matt O’Brien, “OpenAI Now Worth $500 Billion, Possibly Making It the World’s Most Valuable Startup,” October 2, 2025, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-now-worth-500-billion-195534705.html.

^[39] Ellul, The Technological Society, 81.

^[40] Ibid.

^[41] Ibid.

^[42] See, e.g., Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays On Poetry and Culture (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1992).

^[43] Ellul, The Technological Society, 109.

^[44] Ibid.

^[45] Ibid.

^[46] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 485.

^[47] OpenAI, “Intellectual Freedom by Design,” July 15, 2025, https://openai.com/global-affairs/intellectual-freedom-by-design/.

^[48] Ibid.

^[49] Ibid.

^[50] Ibid.

^[51] Ibid.

^[52] Ibid.

^[53] Ibid.

^[54] Ibid.

^[55] SKS 5, 289.

^[56] SKS 16, 97.

^[57] SKS 16, 101.

^[58] SKS 16, 98.

^[59] G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Preface, §5.

^[60] Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross, 2^nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1990), 92.

^[61] Pope Benedict XVI, “General Audience,” December 1, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20210301164258/http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101201.html.