In her major work The Life of the Mind, Arendt builds upon Nietzsche’s understanding of the will to power as interpretation. Rather than following Kant’s conception of free will, she argues that through the will, something new enters the world with every newborn human being—a notion that resembles Zarathustra’s demand that the Übermensch should invent new values. Arendt also agrees with Nietzsche’s assertion that the "‘true world’" is a "fable," for Arendt because modern sciences possess no ultimate truths—a fact they themselves acknowledged around 1900, but which they now refuse to recognize. Thus, as heretics of science, Nietzsche and Arendt belong to the ranks of the "evil" philosophers.

Arendt lived from 1906 to 1975 and is considered one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. The daughter of secular Jews, she studied in the 1920s in Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg under such influential philosophers as Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger. As a young student, she was briefly involved with the latter. In 1933, she was forced to emigrate, and from 1941 she lived in the USA, where she began teaching at various universities in 1953. This unorthodox intellectual is best known for her critique of totalitarianism and her communicative concept of the political.

Her 120th birthday provides sufficient reason to take a closer look at the intellectual relationship between Nietzsche and Arendt.

You can listen to and watch a version of this text, read by the author himself and supplemented with original audio clips of Arendt, on YouTube and Soundcloud .

Nietzsche questions truth as an adequate understanding of the world. This implies there is no longer a true world, as modern sciences assume. Radical constructivism, emerging in biology, which posits that living beings perceive their environment only as their internal structures allow, confirms Nietzsche's analyses and, consequently, postmodern philosophy, where truth is also considered merely a construction and not an objective grasp of something. From this, it follows not only that the world can be interpreted in various ways, but also that there is no single, uniquely correct truth and, therefore, no single correct way of life.

If you prefer to watch or listen to this article, read by the author himself in German, you can also find it on YouTube and Soundcloud.

The humanities scene recently experienced a minor sensation: In the estate of Michel Foucault (1926—1984), one of the most important representatives of post-structuralism, its editors came across an elaborate book manuscript with the title Le discours philosophique, on which the avowed Nietzschean had worked in 1966. It was published in German by Suhrkamp in 2024. Nietzsche plays a decisive role in this comprehensive analysis of philosophical discourse since Descartes. Paul Stephan takes this event as an opportunity to take a closer look at the most influential Nietzsche interpretation of the 20th century to date.

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In her contribution to the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “Our main author Natalie Schulte explores the question of whether the thinker can be described as a “philosopher for adolescents” and reports on her own relationship with him.

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As a Marxist, Nietzsche was an early nuisance. But with the Nietzsche Renaissance in the eighties, I couldn't get past him anymore. That's when I discovered Nietzsche as an innovative thinker. - Part II of the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “, in which our regular authors introduce themselves.