It might sound like a Monty Python sketch updated for 2026: Artificial Intelligence vs. German philosophers. The question to be settled is what it means to be human in an age when AI becomes more intelligent than we are.
The German philosopher in this case is Rudiger Safranski, who has written a treatise (not yet published in English) titled “Die vierte Krankung,” which translates roughly to the “fourth blow.”
Safranski is alluding to an essay written by Sigmund Freud in 1917, in which the father of psychoanalysis stipulated that “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe Krankungen” from the advance of science. Krankung means something between blow, affront and humiliation.
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