The Enlightenment and the Fate of Intelligence

We are leaving behind our Enlightenment legacy and have no idea what the consequences will be.

The Enlightenment was not a historical period but a wager on the future: by pursuing better explanations for how things work, we could indefinitely improve the human condition — not alone, but together, in a shared life none of us gets to opt out of without the wager quietly failing.

We are living through a crisis in this orientation to the future at the exact moment artificial intelligence enters history. Without the Enlightenment's confidence that intelligence can be made to answer to a broad-based improvement of the human condition, AI narratives are left to make up their own stories. Oscillating between apocalyptic fear and utopian promise, the future feels like something that will happen to us rather than something we still have a hand in shaping.

Such an age risks becoming unintelligent — the abdication of the search for possibility. Unintelligence treats time as not having a future.

Time as Practice asks: what kind of selves, and what kind of shared life, do we need to cultivate to reorient intelligence to a better human condition?

Here you'll find experiments in thinking, organized around a few themes:

Intelligence: on the deep history of this capacity and its shaping of time

Computation: on what happens when technical intelligence outruns discernment at planetary scale

Rejuvenation: on the historical work of catching values up to newly acquired power

Rhythms, on the discernment tradition itself — ancient and Christian practices still capable of doing this work today.

Nothing here aims at final answers. Everything is part of a longer practice of learning how to move with a time that is deeply out of joint.

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The History of Intelligence

Intelligence is not a fixed possession that something has or it doesn’t. It is an evolving and expanding capacity to turn fate and necessity into the possibility of a better condition. Intelligence, therefore, has a history.

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What does it mean to call our era ‘unintelligent’?

The paradox is that AI enters history promising an expansion of intelligence just as our collective ability to imagine a future beyond the present seems to be collapsing. We have become extraordinarily capable of optimization, but increasingly uncertain about what we are optimizing toward.Intelligence, I suggest, is not merely the ability to produce better outcomes. It is the ability to transform what appears to be fate into possibility.

What does AI have to do with the Enlightenment?

AI arrives at the moment when our confidence in the future is weakening. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great wager that intelligence could transform necessity into possibility—that we could collectively create a better future. Artificial intelligence is the newest expression of that wager. But without a shared orientation toward the future, intelligence risks becoming acceleration without direction.

Where is intelligence? From Foedera Fati to Foedera Naturae

A philosophical exploration of intelligence through Lucretius’ De rerum natura, examining the clinamen, volition, contingency, and the transformation from fate (foedera fati) to nature (foedera naturae). Intelligence is understood not as a fixed property of minds or machines, but as the Universe’s adaptive capacity to turn necessity into possibility.

Stoic Assent, Emotion, and Reason: Intelligence as Elbow Room Within Necessity

Assent names the capacity to find some elbow room in the causal chain set off by the trigger. I am not a cylinder; I do not have necessity programmed into me beyond the necessity of experiencing the trigger. What I do with the triggering cause downstream requires my assent—consciously granted or not.

Map of telegraph lines spanning the globe in the late nineteenth century

Our Computable World

How has computation become a force that shapes contemporary experience.

For readers interested in technology, heterochronic tempos, and how modern infrastructures rewrite time.

Read Computation

Blurred image of tightrope walker between buildings

Rejuvenation & Orientation

How to stay alive and adaptive in a world moving faster than our inherited frameworks.

For readers interested in fragility, democracy, and the tempos of renewal.

Read Rejuvenation

Close-up of an antique pocket watch with Roman numerals, showing the time as 2:54.

Ancient Rhythms, Modern Time

What ancient philosophy and the Enlightenment reveal about our own moment.

For readers curious about the problem of modernity’s shifting temporal scales.

Read Rhythms

Essential Essays

These essays are a good place to start with understanding how our new Enlightenment is transforming human experience.

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Inventing Behavior After the Neolithic: Michel Serres and the Moral Problem of Auto-Evolution

This essay introduces Michel Serres’ late philosophy by emphasizing its moral core rather than its metaphysics. Drawing on The Incandescent and le Grand Récit, it explores auto-evolution, violence, and the challenge of inventing moral orientation after the Neolithic age.

The Return of Fate

The more we have sought to bring nature’s processes under our control, the more we live within a lack of control.

Living with Our Intelligence

Reflections on how ill-prepared our traditional moralities are for the world in which we live. The speed and spread of computational power is forcing a revaluation of values that we are not equipped to handle.