Nicholas Low

Nicholas E Low received his PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2023. He is currently an affiliate at the CSWR, and a research fellow at the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. His work seeks to illuminate the religious and theological imaginary animating the tradition known as “continental philosophy,” focused especially on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and its reception in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first book, Nietzsche, Dionysus, and Deification of Life, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2026, treats the motif of Dionysian deification in Nietzsche’s writing, questioning how contemporary definitions of the concepts of both philosophy and religion have obscured the reception of Nietzsche’s thought, and arguing that Nietzsche’s project is best understood as an exemplary pursuit of deification. 

His current project traces the emergence of a distinctly modern vision of “Nature” in European romanticism and vitalism, through philosophical anthropology and into American Transcendentalism and post-Nietzschean philosophy. The project inquires both into the historical conditions under which a peculiar vision of humanity's place within nature arises and investigates contemporary cultural sites where it is being either openly or subtly inhabited. He has written recently on how Nietzschean philosophy interacts with environmentalism, theories of ontological entanglement, techno-futurist visions of the superhuman, and Transcendentalism.