1. The Anthropological Implication of a Digital Transformational Era 

In the face of life’s limitations, such as death and suffering, a person maintains a consciousness of finitude. And this consciousness of finitude is the other side of the person’s transcendental intentionality. This is because, even as a person becomes aware of a finitude, he is simultaneously moving toward transcendence such that, by the time he is in a state of transcendental intentionality, he is already conscious of his limitations. Thus, these perspectives represent distinct facets of the same event.

But the problem of human existence is that situations can be both paradoxical and ambiguous. As such, the coexistence of ‘finitude consciousness and transcendental intentionality’ is at the root of human existential anxiety. Therefore, the fundamental human desire is focused on the possession of certainty and stability overcoming a paradoxical and ambiguous situation. Of course, this ‘situation’ refers to the existential structure of human’s self-understanding in a particular era, not a specific circumstance. 

In particular, since modern times, this desire toward the possession of certainty and stability has been primarily been expressed at the epistemological level, and from this perspective, the current era of digital transformation can be characterized as one in which the desire manifests itself at the informational level. 

In fact, with the advent of AI, humans seem to expect a great diversion to overcome the limitations of their intelligence that we have not been able to do for a long time. So, with the help of AI as a machine that thinks for us, or in place of us, Human of our time anticipate breakthroughs in our limitations. 

For this to happen, however, there is an important premise that needs to be established: Our lives, and all the realms of thought that spring from our lives with everything recorded in it, must be completely digitized, a system I call ‘total digitization’. Only then, can AI work in full force in the newly established digital ecosystem.  

I think this is the ideal of liberation we dream of in our era of digital transformation. If the first and second industrial revolutions dreamed of liberation from physical labor through machines that work on behalf of humans, the third and fourth industrial revolutions are aiming for liberation from mental labor through AI that can think on behalf of humans.

Of course, there is always a popular dystopian antipathy about machines that think. That’s because, the development of AI gives people a sense that not only will it complement human thought labor but it may even replace humans themselves. 

But that doesn’t mean we must prohibit these advances in AI It’s not proper, and it’ll anyways be inevitable to stop. This is because the tide of digital transformation is born out of a natural human desire for liberation through the possession of certainty and stability in the informational level. So our task is to rather help those desires flow in a better direction. Such a desire is simply the sign of a deeper human existential strive for true liberty. So, our purpose is to critically reflect on the phenomena of our time. (rather than oppose them), to find “the wisdom to orchestrate the pace and path of these natural currents of desire to liberation” (like a river finding its way to the sea, naturally) so that they benefit people and the living world.

2. The controversy around digital humanities 

I think that the phenomenon of text digitization that is taking place in various parts of the world today is primarily for the sake of human liberty, but there are also signs to the contrary, and existential questions about the very nature of human beings are constantly being raised in the process.

At its core, why is that? To delve out this question, I want to illuminate the essence of the debate within the ‘digital humanities’. 

The definition of digital humanities varies from scholar to scholar, but in the side of its proponents, it is broadly defined as the humanities that emerged along the lines of ‘Humanities Computing’ and ‘Cultural Informatics’, and is now increasingly defined as “humanities practiced in the digital environment and society“. Given that the humanities are the discipline that studies the humanity of human beings, we must continue to perform such tasks even in the context of new media, and since the era of digital transformation is an irreversible paradigm shift, the humanities cannot and should not avoid it.

There is, however, also an equally strong argument and resistance that digital humanities are not humanities. In the opposing side, digital humanities are not humanities at all, but merely “derivatives and imitations of the humanities“. Digital humanities is rather considered a “part of computer science” or at best as “a narrow area within the humanities that uses digital technologies”. Scholars in this position are concerned about “digital imperialists” who want to digitize everything, and argue that it should “remain an initiative and a secondary option, and not be hyped as if it were the future vision and paradigm of the humanities.

They argue that the transition to digital technology “replaces the human with the mechanical,” “reverses the relationship between humans and tools,” and opens up the possibility of a future in which humans are subordinated to the tools they create, and “triggers fears of the realm beyond human perception and visibility.” 

3. Scientism at the heart of the digital humanities controversy 

Through the digital humanities controversy, we can also identify both expectations and resistances to the text digitization today.

Interestingly, both sides have expectations for or against the digital humanities, depending on their position on the nature of the humanities amid a massive paradigm shift driven by technological advancements. In other words, the variances in position on desire of scientism expressed by the digital transformation manifests either in favor of or in opposition to the digital humanities.

Simply put, in the current tide of digital transformation, where the modern desire of scientism takes place at the level of information, the difference between the two positions is whether to “recognize its inevitability and conduct an inclusive humanities within it” or to “conduct an exclusive humanities, where such attempts are antithetical to the pursuit of the humanities”.

So, what is scientism? Let’s look at this to get to the heart of the matter.    

A common definition of scientism is “a view that advocates the unrestricted, exclusive, or superior status of science in the pursuit of knowledge of the world and its practical applications, based on an evaluation of the achievements or methods of science.” 

However, this definition obscures the implications of our discussion. Therefore, if we redefine scientism according to Bernard Lonergan’s cognitive theory, we can define it in the following three ways.

First, scientism is a methodological reductionist bias that authorizes the monopoly of science over human activity in the search for fact, meaning and value. While “science” is not a content in and of itself, but rather a structure and movement of thought in the search for fact, meaning and value, scientism’s monopolization of the areas destroys the religious search for holiness, the artistic search for beauty, the moral search for goodness, and the philosophical search for truth, and opens the door to a world of meaninglessness and nothingness.

Second, scientism is a materialistic reductionist bias that cuts off the transcendental flow of human beings by overlooking the scientific spirit and reducing it to outward scientific activity alone. In the true sense, “science-ness” encompasses not only the outward activity of the subject’s inquiry into the objects it encounters and grasps, but also the transcendentally oriented conscious activity of the scientific spirit itself, which experiences, understands, judges, and decides. In this, human consciousness is a dynamic activity that encompasses the transition from exteriority to interiority and then to transcendence. However, by reducing this scientific spirit to an outward activity, scientism interrupts the natural transcendental flow of the human spirit and distorts the true path of life.

Third, scientism is an epistemological reductionist bias that materializes subject-object interactive relations as intentional events. In the intentional action of consciousness, objects come into being as “intended,” and subjects as “intending,” and the being-in-question becomes a psychological event. Scientism, however, objectifies existence: it fixes the relationship between subject and object as asymmetrical and one-sided, and it objectifies a human being and the world he encounters by losing the eventfulness of existence.

Using this definition of scientism, we can see that the two positions on the digital humanities discussed before are not so much about the digitization of texts per se, or the practice of the humanities in digital environments, as they are about their own responses to a major modern bias and desires: scientism.

The opposition to the digital humanities, in its fierce opposition to the methodological reductionism of scientism, claims the purity of the humanities, but by failing to distinguish between the spirit of science and the outward practice of science, and it forgets the role of the humanities in liberating human beings.

Further, a position that sees the tide of total digitization of texts as inevitable and accepts the role of the humanities in it, even as it accepts the role of the humanities to serve true humanity in the new age environment, runs the risk of the humanities being absorbed by scientism and lost in the massive digital transformation. 

As such, I would like to propose that the role of critical digital humanities is especially important today. 

4. The role of critical digital humanities 

According to Lonergan’s theory of cognition, in the cognitive operations of human consciousness, The spirit of science : method is “a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results.”

For Lonergan, the spirit of science is not only “the outward activity of the subject’s inquiry into the objects it encounters and captures,” but also “the transcendentally oriented conscious activity of human beings experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding,” a “natural dynamic of the human spirit that flows from the outward to the inward and from the inward to the transcendent.

And within that dynamic, the four Precepts – “Be attentive” when experiencing, “Be intelligent” when understanding, “Be reasonable” when judging, and “Be responsible” when deciding – are intrinsically structured and function as norms of authenticity that a person achieves in self-transcendence.

Critical digital humanities, then, would be the practice of authentically inquiring into the four precepts in all our experiences, understandings, judgments, and decisions in the digital environment. Specifically, it can be presented in the three areas of scientistic bias mentioned before.

These “critical” tasks can be thus summarized as follows.

First, there is a task of realizing that the current desire of scientism to overcome the anxiety of the ambiguity of human life at the informational level can actually undermine the path to freedom that it seems to promise at the tangible level. And by critically reflecting on scientism, there is also a task of restoring science to its rightful place as a precious human gift and a method of seeking facts and values. This can begin by carefully distinguishing between the spirit of science as “the dynamism of the human spirit in its quest to approach ultimate reality, the pursuit of human inquiry in the face of reality,” science as “the domain of human outward action or inquiry based on the spirit of science,” and scientism as “the dominant bias of our time that asserts the exclusive uniqueness or superiority of science as a particular philosophical position that has nothing to do with science as science.”

Second, there is an important task to critically reflect on the reductionist biases of scientism, to recognize the scientific methodology as an outer manifestation of the scientific spirit in its mutuality with the inner spirit, and to always rediscover the “transcendental consciousness of humanity” in the face of digital texts. Relying on the transcendentalistic precepts of being attentive, intelligent, rational, and responsible, this means recognizing that the transcendentalistic consciousness of human beings is always at work in every process of text digitization and subsequent reverse-digitization, and providing a critical perspective for the pursuit of authenticity at every step.

Third, there is a task of raising awareness of the historicity of texts and restoring the personality of digitally objectified texts so that text digitization does not become mired in epistemological reductionism and objectify texts. Of course, this is related to the second task. The materialistic reductionist fixation eventually leads to the objectified consciousness that the product of text digitization can exist in reality independent of human personality. It also leads to a situation in human consciousness where texts are deprived of their relational and generative association with the “embodied human spirit” in the dominant scientistic bias of the current era and are objectified as if they were a separate substance. However, from the perspective of the historicity and dynamism of the human spirit, the relational and generative connection between the human spirit and the textual product can never be disconnected, regardless of the textuality. Ethically speaking, no textual product can be separated from human responsibility. There is no text that is free from personality, there is only a human being who is fleeing from his or her responsibility.

In conclusion, the role of critical digital humanities will be to ensure that the tide of digital transformation, which is nominally undertaken for the sake of human liberation, does not derail into anti-humanity, anti-liberation, and fulfills its original purpose. In particular, we must strive to ensure that the benefits of ‘cognitive automation’, which will occur in almost all areas of society in a post-total digitization world, do not lead to “a monopoly of consciousness” that controls and directs the flow of untrained human consciousness. In other words, the role of critical digital humanities in promoting the positive aspects of liberating us from “the drudgery of thought” and hastening our steps towards “more advanced creativity” while avoiding “the loss of textual personality in inauthenticity” and the “danger of blind following of cognitive automation by scientism” that drives it is crucial. If we overlook these issues, we may later result in significant social upheaval and wasteful expenditures. Therefore, from now on, surely critical digital humanities must begin its work to restore the personality of all texts and prevent them from losing their authenticity.