A fixed feature at the annual conference of the Nietzsche Gesellschaft [Nietzsche Society] conference is the Lectio Nietzscheana Naumburgensis: a particularly distinguished scholar delivering an extended lecture on the conference theme on the final day, thereby providing a pointed conclusion. The most recent conference in October 2025 awarded this special honor to Werner Stegmaier to recognize his long tenure as editor of the influential Nietzsche-Studien [Nietzsche Studies] and his authorship of numerous seminal monographs on Nietzsche’s philosophy. Running from October 16-19, 2025, the conference focused the theme “Nietzsche’s Technologies,” as Emma Schunack reported.

Generously granting his permission to publish his lecture in full and in this translation, Stegmaier takes on the conference theme from an unexpected perspective. Rather than examining what is commonly understood as “technologies”—machines, cyborgs, or automata—he explores instead Nietzsche’s philosophical techniques, both intellectual and rhetorical. Weighing up the original and idiosyncratic methods Nietzsche deployed while writing, Stegmaier reflects on how best to interpret and assess them. How were they able to enthuse and win over successive generations of readers? What can we learn from these today?

Comparing Nietzsche’s techniques with those of two other modern philosophical giants, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Stegmaier retraces all three philosophers’ break with the classical and conceptually oriented techniques of thinking inherited from antiquity, and their discoveries of radical and experimental means of developing philosophy in the age of “nihilism.” Replacing a one-dimensional, metaphysical understanding of rationality, these means cultivate a plural, perspectival mode of thought that necessarily relies on entirely different techniques. Situating Nietzsche’s methods within these broader developments in intellectual history, the Lectio establishes an utterly new framework for understanding his thought and its place within modern philosophy.

Translated by Henry Holland.

In addition to hiking, dancing is one of the most prominent soldiers in Nietzsche's “moving [m] army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms.” Based on Nietzsche's reflections on the art of movement, Jonas Pohler explores the paramount importance that it plays in our present day. Is the effect of dance primarily sexual? What does dance have to do with technology? What symbolism is the dancing gesture able to convey?

Perhaps it is Nietzsche's main philosophical achievement that he described thinking as a process that happens in person. For him, reflection is a cooperative tension of body and mind. The mind is grounded in the nervous cosmopolitanism of the body. Nietzsche's conversion of Christianity: The flesh becomes word. This shows thinking in gestures. The following is intended to provide a sketch which indicates the main types of these reflexive gestures. This is intended to illustrate what it means when Nietzsche repeatedly describes himself as a wanderer. An intellectual tour that leads from standing and sitting as basic modes of traditional philosophy to walking, (out) wandering and halcyonic flying as Nietzsche's alternative modes of liberated thought and life.