"The Ontological Status of Style in Hegel's Phenomenology" (Idealistic Studies, Vol. XIII, No. 1, January 1983) initiates a coherent speculative research program that is advanced further in subsequent articles and which culminates in my book Metaphysics to Metafictions: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the End of Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1998). In "The Ontological Status of Style," the notorious difficulty of Hegel's philosophical style is shown to be a constitutive element in a dynamic process that imposes on the reader the task of taking an active role in construing a meaning occasioned by Hegel's text. The hermeneutic rigor demanded by an ultimately unreducible obscurity places limits on all interpretive projects that would supplant Hegel's own pregnant ambiguity with glosses intended to render the "meaning" more accessible. Significantly, the opening dialectic of the Phenomenology thematizes this very problem, and the first section of the paper provides a reading of Hegel's early "linguistic turn." I go on to argue that "By recognizing meaning as essentially active, as the result of a process together with that process, language emerges as much more than a representational framework: language is the element of a living truth, a dynamic presence to the world."
This attention to a philosophical text's refusal of meaning as a gesture that is itself performatively meaningful is naturally only made keener as the paradigms shift from Hegel to Nietzsche. Accordingly, "Same As It Ever Was: Plagiarism, Forgery, and the Meaning of Eternal Return" (Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 6, Autumn 1993) explores the problematics of repetition—one of the key topoi of postmodernism—in and through an interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return. Superimposed upon Zarathustra's dogmatic imperative to be original and self-created is the performative use of an empty idea, an ill-explained but much acclaimed improbable hypothetical which no one but Zarathustra himself dare think. If the eternal return of the same is the "central idea" in Nietzsche's thought, as Nietzsche himself describes it, this is because it has no dogmatic content! And its lesson is a function of its contentlessness: if Zarathustra has anything to teach, it is that the pupil must learn to surpass ("overcome"?) the teacher: "One repays a teacher badly if one remains nothing but a pupil. Do as I do. Thus you also learn from me. Only the doer learns. Thus spoke Zarathustra." The eternal return is the most effective way to teach this lesson because it is empty of any communicable content; all those who try to speak it, even when they use the same words Zarathustra himself had used, are repudiated as "buffoons and barrel organs"—mechanical reproducers of someone else's music not unlike hurdy gurdy machines; or else they are like asses, mindlessly mouthing what sounds like a formula of Zarathustrian affirmation: "I-A," the braying of a jackass—"Yeah-Yuh," in Kaufmann's clever translation. So Nietzsche's "central idea" is designed to resist the reader, to throw the reader back on his or her own resources, to compel originality by providing nothing to copy or repeat.
But ironically, it is precisely "eternal return" that thematizes—or rather, performs—this compulsion! In fact, the "book of eternal return," as Nietzsche described Thus Spoke Zarathustra, begins with a repetition: the first paragraph of Zarathustra's Prologue is identical (except for the obscuring of a single name) with the final section of The Gay Science. So it is startling to find that this chiasmus, this vertiginous juxtaposition of imperative and impossibility, is performed by Nietzsche's corpus in another compelling way as well: the first text associated with his name is a plagiarism, while the last is the very mirror image of this, a forgery! "Same As It Ever Was" reveals, for the first time in print, the details of the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche's plagiarism of an essay on Hölderlin, this originary act of derivative repetition being curiously balanced by My Sister and I—a truly "original" book which pretends not to be, a forgery purportedly penned by Nietzsche during the first year after the onset of his final breakdown. Taking stock of these curious coincidences, "Same As It Ever Was" concludes with reflections on the middle course which the creator must attempt to travel between the Scylla of pseudonymity and the Charibdis of anonymity.
"Unreading Nietzsche: Nazi Piracy, Pyrrhic Irony, and the Postmodern Turn" (New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 1, Nos. 1 & 2, Fall/Winter 1996) carries further an examination of the consequences for Nietzsche scholarship and for postmodern creative activity generally of the interpretation already initiated in "Same As It Ever Was." Given the centrality of eternal return for any understanding of Nietzsche's thought, and given also the potential for abuse of his apparent "ideas" when appropriation is unchecked by any attention to his rhetorical evasions, I apply the disappropriative implications of Nietzsche's highly unusual deployment of eternal return to the project of Nietzsche interpretation itself. Focusing first on two of the more extravagant of the fascist "misreaders," Gabriele D'Annuncio and Ernst Jünger, I show how such appropriations depend on an active refusal of the rhetorical dimension of Nietzsche's texts—a strategy employed, in fact, by many of the "Nietzsche scholars" who deign to address the matter of their master's unfortunate political incarnations in this century. But then, taking this politically (and supposedly intellectually) "correct" hermeneutic strategy seriously, I go on to show how an interpretive indeterminacy results that must threaten any coherent interpretation. Again, eternal return emerges as the most radical and revealing of Nietzsche's dispossessive strategies, and its application casts even (or especially) the Nietzsche faithful, like Kaufmann and Schacht, in the questionable roles of buffoons and barrel organs. "Unreading Nietzsche" concludes with suggestions about the epistemological status of repetition for a culture—what Hillel Schwartz calls "the culture of the copy"—that has gone as far as it can in the direction of expressive experiment, having already reached the nihilism of the blank canvas and the soundless musical composition in the same generation that saw the Holocaust. Recognizing now that creation is recreation, and proposing a reinvestment of past forms with creative energies chastened by irony, a way beyond absence and silence begins to take shape out of the aporetic mists.
Metaphysics to Metafictions: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the End of Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1998) frames and grounds this coherent project, at once situating the dynamics of "modern" and "postmodern" in the context of the great paradigm shift from absolute idealism to nihilism while also providing forward-looking speculative suggestions concerning the positive possibilities opened up by the dissolution of traditional philosophy.
Through close readings and interpretive reflections, Metaphysics to Metafictions examines decisive dialectics in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that enable and constitute the grandiose claims characteristic of German idealist metaphysics, in order to come to terms with the "transvaluation" of philosophical ambitions inaugurated by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Hegel leaves a problematic legacy to subsequent philosophers, claiming to have achieved comprehensive wisdom in "absolute knowing"; Nietzsche responds by undermining the authority of the philosopher. Metaphysical questions are re-formulated and resolved in narratives self-consciously mediated by irony: they become "metafictions," philosophic imperatives that expressly acknowledge their own createdness and call into question their universality.
An interpretation of the Phenomenology is developed in the process that shows how narrative structures, which Hegel disavows, are skillfully manipulated nevertheless. Chapters provide analyses of the sense-certainty, lordship and bondage and absolute knowing dialectics in order to reveal the "epi-logical" structure and ontotheological heterodoxy of Hegel's final synthesis as formal and historical anticipations of an anti-metaphysical "nihilism" such as Nietzsche explores. Specifically, the repetition of "Gnostic" ontotheological ideas transcribed into a conceptual language at the very heart of Hegel's absolute threatens its necessary uniqueness--the insidious effects of which drives the Nietzschean counter-legacy. The penultimate chapter, then, examines Nietzsche's post-apocalyptic and anti-Hegelian perspectivism. Focusing on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the most complete account of my new interpretation of "eternal return" is developed in light of the problematic character of repetition intrinsic to the narrative structure of metaphysical illumination: Nietzsche's project, unlike the metaphysics of Hegel, proposes to serve philosophy not as a uniquely true source of doctrine, but rather as an exemplary experiment in metafiction. Finally, the Conclusion briefly examines some of the postmodern effects of this intellectual history and its consequences for the theoretical discourse of philosophy--whose end (in the sense of a telos) was reached in Hegel, only to have its end (in the sense of death or destruction) proclaimed by Nietzsche.
My most recent publication—"Our Minds, Our Selves: Mind, Meaning, and Machines"—arose out of concerns about claims currently being made for artificial intelligence. In a fashion that advances or applies the view developed in my very first published philosophical essay on Hegel, and continues my engagement with the performative strategies employed by Nietzsche in his idea of eternal return, I argue that the products of "Large Language Models" like ChatGPT are not what they appear to be. Although computers evidently can, because they already do, produce coherent essays, fictions, poems and various other sorts of meaningful texts, as well as amusing jokes, compelling artworks, musical compositions, and more—in short, although computers seem already capable of generating the sorts of creative artworks that are the hallmarks of human culture—it is not merely the production of such artifacts, but also their reception, that is the locus of their value, that constitutes them as "art": as meaningful or funny or beautiful. Value, I argue, is a function of sentience; it is unthinkable without the context of the experience of pleasure and pain. Moreover, the dynamic of production and reception is possible only within an intersubjective community of sentient, embodied minds—something Hegel analyzes in the "Lordship and Bondage dialectic" as necessarily "spiritual," not merely material.
A parallel project is advanced in a new essay about the status of individuated mind, examined through reflections occasioned by the Borges story "The Library of Babel." Entitled "The Dialectics of Babel: Realism, Idealism, and the Paradox of Creation," the essay explores the essential differences between the meaningful discourse of any sort of literature and the accidental, only apparently meaningful strings of signifiers that are the output of text generation algorithms, from Ramon Llull's thirteenth century "thinking machine" to the latest LLMs. Borges' fictional library describes such a hypothesis in a very pure form, and philosophical reflection on its functioning and limitations helps to situate human consciousness as a phenomenon precariously situated between absence and presence, between nothingness and the infinite.
Finally, a few other projects are either already completed and published (e.g., comments on Lebbeus Woods' architectural experiments in "The State of Things") or underway. Among the latter is a book-length work that grew out of the concluding chapter of Metaphysics to Metafictions. Having shown how credulity in the pronouncements of traditional metaphysics is threatened by hidden structures of repetition which become thematically explicit in Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, and how the initial incredulity of "passive nihilism" must evolve—has evolved—into new forms of ironized affirmation, the question of what grounds our right to believe receives an answer. It is a culturally and historically informed answer, a sophisticated "postmodern" rejoinder to the crisis of late modernity. But what such high theory overlooks is all too obvious to a more practical gaze. In the wake of philosophy's deconstruction of theology, there is little real understanding and much resentment; moreover, traditional learning is widely regarded as irrelevant to contemporary concerns even as regressions to theoretically untenable fundamentalisms influence political agendas that are themselves crucial determining factors in the shaping of contemporary concerns. While those at the vanguard of culture may articulate their claims with self-conscious irony, such rhetorical qualification only weakens the persuasive power of those claims when they must compete with dogmatisms whose naivety goes mostly unnoticed. In short, the postmodern condition is vulnerable to fanaticism, whose belief structure it is therefore imperative to understand. The working title of this new book is accordingly Fanaticism: An Epistemology of Passion. It was begun under the auspices of a faculty fellowship at Princeton that began in the fall of 2001—just weeks before the Twin Towers came down. That project seemed accidentally urgent at the time, but has since been eclipsed by more "traditional" pursuits—although the "post-truth politics" of our current moment may bring a new and ill wind to those slackened sails.
The most important of these traditional pursuits will be my career capstone: a new book, titled God, the Soul, and the Limits of Knowledge: Foundations of Metaphysics and Epistemology in Plato, Descartes and Kant. Already a long manuscript, more than half of this new text concerns Kant's epistemology and its legacy, and provides a careful interpretive commentary on the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, supported by parallel analyses of arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason. Most of my research for the past decade has been on Kant, whose insights have long seemed to me the most fundamental for any philosophical understanding of our experience of the world in the history of the discipline, and of continuing relevance even in light of developments in contemporary physics to an extent not generally appreciated.