By Annie Frost (SF28) | February 13, 2026

Philosophers have long been preoccupied with the tension between appearance and truth—a concern with the disparity between aesthetics and reality that prompts Socrates to banish poets from the Kallipolis in Plato’s Republic. Recent graduate Antonio Fox (SF25) challenges this dichotomy in his prize-winning senior essay on Friedrich Nietzsche’s reconciliation of appearance and truth in The Gay Science.

Fox was a co-winner of the annual Richard D. Weigle essay prize for his paper, titled “Faith in the Art of Experimentation: An Interpretation of The Gay Science,” along with Lia McGrath (SF25), who wrote on Gödel and set theory. He offers an interpretation of four aphorisms from Nietzsche’s 1882 book, arguing that they provide a method of reconciliation between art and truth through the life of the experimenter.

The desire to engage with both art and philosophy is what drew Fox to St. John’s College in the first place. He began reading some of the classics, including Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, while a high school student in Colorado. Fox candidly admits that his interest in the classics partly came from an adolescent desire to be pretentious. Very quickly, however, he became immersed in the books for their own sake and found himself gravitating toward German thinkers, including Kafka, Rilke, and Nietzsche. He began teaching himself German during his senior year to gain a deeper access to their ideas.

Philosophical writers—and, conversely, poetic philosophers—have always had a pull for Fox. Starting in high school, he appreciated Heidegger as a poetic thinker and his willingness to relate art and philosophy, enough so that he considered writing his senior essay on one of Heidegger&rsquos works instead of one of Nietzsche’s. “I’ve had an enduring interest in exploring the relation philosophy has to art, in terms of both art as a philosophical device, and how works of art can be experienced as philosophical entities or sources of philosophical reflection,” he says. For Fox, this also means engaging in philosophical ways of understanding a work of art without necessarily treating the work as philosophical itself.

Despite this appreciation, Fox turned to Nietzsche for his senior essay topic after beginning to write on Heidegger. He partly attributes this shift to the way in which Nietzsche, in a more explicit manner, considers the possibility that philosophers themselves ought to be artists in their activity of philosophizing.

Yet the choice to write on Nietzsche also came from what Fox describes as a personal need: “He&rsquos a thinker who speaks to the human condition in a way that is far more raw,” he says. “At that point in my intellectual career and my personal life, I needed a thinker who could really speak to what it means to be a human and find meaning as a human being. Nietzsche has so much passion, and I needed a thinker of passion.”

This same passion and candor is what initially moved Fox when he read The Gay Science for the first time in high school—what he describes as Nietzsche’s brutal honesty regarding the ways we delude ourselves as humans and submit to illusion in efforts to cope.

When Fox returned to the text in his senior year at St. John’s, he came to it with an eye toward what Nietzsche says about the tension between seeming and being, and accordingly selected aphorisms he thinks yield a resolution between these two concepts through the art of experimentation. He presents the reader with meticulous examinations of each of the aphorisms, while paying care and attention to the poetic subtleties and playfulness present in Nietzsche’s original German. The passages he selected repeatedly show what he calls “Nietzsches turning towards our intimate human experiences as a source for philosophical speculation.”

Fox explains the importance of this method: “For Nietzsche, appearance takes on a sort of personal bent that distinguishes itself from other philosophers’ analysis of the concept of appearance. In my paper, I really tried to explore that; appearance has to do with our tendency to error, which is an innately human thing.”

Fox emphasizes how this approach toward the intelligibility of appearances sets Nietzsche apart from other philosophers. “Unlike a thinker like Kant, who is going to have recourse to some kind of static body of categories that’s going to inform our ability to perceive any appearance, Nietzsche seems to turn to just these personal ethical developments in the history of humanity that determine our receptivity and our interaction with appearances. I really felt moved by that type of analysis.”

Fox’s selected aphorisms are full of embodied examples of encounters with appearances. One passage rejects the idea that appearance could be nothing more than a “dead mask,” and instead calls appearance “the active and living itself.” Another one that plays an important role in Fox’s analysis paints the truth-seeker as a lucid dreamer awake in a dream.

Following a thorough analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the history of truth and the hidden pitfalls of the scientific pursuit of truth, he writes about the essential step of embracing appearances after having once rejected them. According to Fox, art, to Nietzsche, the “cult of the untrue,” is a counterforce to science, the “cult of the true.” The philosopher must eventually become an artist—not in the traditional sense of the word, but as one whose art is what Nietzsche calls “good will to appearances.” Thus, the figure of the experimenter is born. 

“If I can try and give it in miniature,” Fox summarizes, “the experimenter, for Nietzsche, is this figure who willingly submits himself to the full gamut of appearances that the world has to offer, in a way that is kind of naive and almost childlike—and also in a way where they're easily seduced or brought under the influence of these appearances—all while maintaining a sort of kernel of lucidity whereby they can apprehend themselves in the act of being seduced by these appearances.”

This lucidity recalls the image of someone awake in a dream, who must continue dreaming despite the knowledge that the surrounding world is only appearance, but is then able to access truth through experience: “Lucidity is harmonized with illusion, or appearance or error, in order to produce an experiment that yields what Nietzsche would call the embodiment of truth. But the embodiment of truth is predicated on actually embracing the error of appearances.”

These appearances extend far beyond the physical to include philosophical schools of thought; Fox explains how seeking to live like Nietzsche’s experimenter fits into his encounter with philosophy as a student: “What really resonates from my personal experience is that here at St John's we read all these different philosophical thinkers, many of whom disagree with each other—sometimes they exaggerate their disagreements, but a lot of them do strongly disagree with each other—and we want to be able to appreciate each one of them, maybe, hopefully.”

This attitude of experimentation is conducive to one's ability to fully engage with and appreciate different thinkers by allowing oneself to be swept up in their thought—even if just for a moment—and to then catch oneself in the act of being seduced. This type of engagement with philosophy means constant transformation as the philosopher encounters and embraces different appearances, all the while maintaining the “kernel of lucidity” that prevents them from ossifying into a single role or school of thought.

Fox’s essay heavily focuses on science and art as institutions of truth and appearance, and the Program’s senior year lab readings were especially relevant to Nietzsche’s ideas of the evolution of science as the institution of truth, as well as the problems that arise in scientific pursuits. He cites philosopher and ethicist Hans Jonas and works such as Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? as examples of considering the elimination of subjectivism, especially regarding developments in theoretical physics: “These thinkers talk about a necessary move that scientists made around the twentieth century, but also before, of eliminating subjectivism, of taking the subject out of the picture when talking about the natural sciences. I think that’s something that really resonates with what Nietzsche talks about, in terms of honesty sort of atrophying to the point where it tries to almost pull itself off of its own throne.”

St. John’s provided Fox with more than the opportunity to personally engage with a variety of works on a deep level: His interest in philosophy and literature remained a solo endeavor before arriving in Santa Fe, and being surrounded by other students who shared his interests was overwhelming at first, and then humbling. He soon found that it was the perfect place to be:“You’re able to develop your interests in so much more enduring and deep ways because you’re able to have conversations that involve someone else who’s thinking just as hard as you are about a subject, or about some niche philosophical question, and that just lends itself to growth.”

Fox, who plans on pursuing a PhD in philosophy, is committed to continuing his research on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other post-Kantian thinkers. Two especially enticing areas of study for him are Heidegger and Nietzsche’s works in connection with the philosophy of art and ancient Greek philosophy.