Featured Essays
Key Themes
History of Intelligence
AI sets in motion a new chapter in the history of intelligence’s confrontation with fate and necessity. Telling the stories of its twists and turns will broaden our upstanding of what intelligence has been and can be.
Computational Power
These essays examine how digital systems reshape experience, agency, and the unfolding of time. This is not a moral complaint; it is an examination of possibilities.
Rejuvenation
Modernity is not defined by the loss of meaning, but by the expansion of human self-assertion—the long effort of our genus to shape contingency, redirect fate, and assume responsibility for outcomes once attributed to nature or the gods.
Reading Nietzsche in the Age of AI
This essay reads Nietzsche's "sovereign individual" in The Genealogy of Morality, Essay II, within the history of intelligence: the paradoxical capacity, bred through memory and suffering, to separate contingency from necessity and redirect fate toward imagined futures. It closes by suggesting that in an age of AI, this capacity — which Nietzsche saw nature incubating in humans — might now extend into other vehicles, like computational machines.
Dogged by Automatism
I’ve asked Claude to interview me based on various essays that I’ve written. It’s an interesting experiment in reversing the relationship of the prompt. Instead of me prompting Claude, I’ve asked Claude to read specific essays and ask me questions that help complicate and clarify my thinking. I present the result here with minor edits for clarity.
Creative Evolution
What is intelligence? Not simply accuracy. Not merely survival. Intelligence is the adaptable and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibility.
What Is Intelligence?
If intelligence is the ability to predict and influence the future, as Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues, then Nietzsche saw its deeper dynamic long ago. In Zarathustra, the will to truth becomes a will to power—the creative drive that makes the world intelligible so that it might bend and behave. From Babylonian astronomy to artificial intelligence, our growing computational power continues this movement, expanding humanity’s capacity to shape time itself.
Purpose, Attention, Discernment
Purpose is unavoidable. It is the water in which we swim. But when purpose hardens into inflexible ends, it risks tyranny. Drawing on Nietzsche and Bataille, this essay explores how discernment keeps purpose open—how freedom must be renewed within the eternal return of time.
Practice: Ressentiment Check
Ressentiment is not a psychological weakness or a moral flaw. It is a signal that judgment has outrun discernment. This practice offers a way to notice when critique hardens into condemnation, suspend withdrawal that feels like moral clarity, and reopen ethical engagement in a world moving faster than inherited values can keep pace.
Juvenescence - Robert Pogue Harrison
An essay on the experience of heterochronic time in our turbulent age. Harrison offers his characteristically unique take on heterchronic time and humanity’s ability to remain youthful while we age.
New Gods for a New Time
The Enlightenment pushed God and gods to the sidelines, but as our time continues to evolve, are we letting them back in?
Bataille, Religion, Experience
What is to become of religion in our time? In this essay, I descend into Bataille’s speculations on the contingent birth of consciousness out of the ‘water in water’ of pure experience.
Ressentiment Unbound
Nietzsche treated ressentiment as a consolation for a desire for vengeance that is too weak to act. But what happens when it finds itself in power? In this essay, I explore the consequences of empowered ressentiment on the woke left.
His Name is John
A reading of Luke’s account of the naming of John the Baptist.
Reading the Iliad: Mênis and the Moral Compass
Descending into Achilles passive mēnis in the Iliad leads to a better understanding of the birth of our democratic moral compass.
Reading the Iliad: Wisdom and Violence
The first of an ongoing re-engagement with the Iliad. Here we have an untimely meditation that holds up the mirror of violence to a culture desparately in need of alternatives to vendettas.
Reading Zarathustra: The Three Metamorphoses
The three metamorphoses Zarathustra describes in his first speech after the prologue moves us beyond any knee-jerk philosophical and religious musings of ‘being and becoming’. The vision presented here is far more sophisticated.
Reading Zarathustra: The Speeches of Zarathustra
The second installment of my series of Reading Zarathustra. This focuses on the problem of teaching, discipleship, truth telling, and companionship in ‘The Speeches of Zarathustra’ from Book I.
Reading Zarathustra: Prologue
The first in a commentary series on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This post covers Zarathustra’s Prologue.
Time Out of Joint
How do we compose time?
Aphorisms on the in-Between Part I
Zarathustra’s Middle Path
