What does the most radical thinker of modernity have to do with cycling? Officially nothing: Nietzsche was a passionate hiker, and bicycles were conspicuously absent from his biography. Yet, his philosophy brilliantly anticipated the bicycle.

From the Buddhist Kala-Chakra up to Zarathustra's vision of the "self-rolling wheel," this essay embarks on a fascinating quest. It shows why the bicycle is far more than a mere means of transport: It is a philosophical instrument that teaches us the dynamic balance of life and makes the "Eternal Recurrence of the Same" palpable in the wind. An invitation to set thought in motion.

From the hedge-fund billions that bankroll Nigel Farage, and tie that funding to evangelical expansionism, to Nietzsche’s fulminating assault on Christianity as a “slave revolt”: this essay tracks the troubling way religion has reappeared at the heart of British public life. Arriving in London with walking boots, a rucksack, and a philosopher’s skepticism, the author follows the money, theology, and street culture surrounding charismatic Christianity and its seemingly unappeasable growth. At the centre stands Sir Paul Marshall: billionaire financier, Christian media mogul, and embodiment of a faith that feels entitled to reach for elite power.

But this is more than merely an unveiling of the knot that binds together wealth and religion. It is also a confrontation with Nietzsche’s deepest historical claim: that Christianity triumphed because the so-called weak learned to moralize against the strong. Wandering through churches, cafés, and city streets, the essay asks whether contemporary evangelical London represents a new form of that revolt—or its complete inversion.

Part I explores the rise of influential evangelical networks in modern Britain and their uneasy alliance with finance capitalism. Part II, which will appear shortly, returns to the first Christians themselves.

This article is a follow-up to Henry Holland’s account of hiking through Glasgow’s Muslim Southside (part I, part II).

Forests are trending. And this is by no means contradictory to another, even larger trend of our time: digitalization. In this article, Mandus Craiss demonstrates that the forest is a network. Digitalization also occurs in a network-like manner; both phenomena are therefore characteristic of postmodernism.  

In the first part of the article, the forest is characterized as a non-centralized and thus typically postmodern natural phenomenon. The second part defines "postmodernity" and discusses the extent to which this epochal concept is still, or once again, relevant – a discourse whose very early roots can be traced back to Nietzsche. Finally, the third part explains how the network aspect of postmodernity manifests itself and how the human-forest relationship has evolved recently.

This article is part of our special series this year "the forest as a livelihood".

Nietzsche's philosophy is regarded as an act of self-liberation — but even the superman remained powerless against his own family. This essay highlights the pathological tension between the lonely thinker and the “canaille” relatives, mother Franziska Nietzsche and sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. While the philosopher (de)constructs “woman in itself” as flat, independent and mindless in his writings, he also has stockings stuffed and sausage boxes sent from Naumburg. An essay about the deepest objection to eternal return: one's own kinship.

This is the second part of a small series for this year's Mother's Day. In first part Henry Holland wrote about Franziska Nietzsche's life with a particular focus on her time before Nietzsche and her last years.

On the one hand, Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian helps to understand the development of the rock music of the Rolling Stones both internally and externally. On the other hand, Nietzsche's philosophy is reflected in many places in their songs. But above all, it is also illuminated by the Stones, and their songs show what Nietzsche is thinking — an Apollonian act. If Nietzsche is aesthetically oriented towards intoxication, then you can also learn from the Stones how to receive Nietzsche's poetry in a Dionysian way. It is therefore not just about understanding the Stones with Nietzsche, but vice versa: with the Nietzsche Stones.

An audiovisual version of this article with clips of the quoted songs can be found on the YouTube channel of the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy and on Soundcloud.

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After Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann has already dealt with Nietzsche's concept of resentment in two articles on this blog (here and there), he now addresses the question of how it can be applied to the current social situation.

His thesis: The current political landscape is characterized by many divisions based on resentment. They are due to the weaknesses of their own arguments. This is how critics are defamed as “corona” or “climate deniers.” The objections are often branded as conspiracy theories. You can't ask 'Cui bono?' anymore. Or you break off contact without comment to protect yourself. This is not only in line with Nietzsche's understanding of resentment in many places, precisely because he himself is not free from it, but is looking for ways out of it.

“What is the topicality of Nietzsche's analysis and critique of 'resentment'?“ is also the question of this year's Kingfisher Award for Radical Essay Writing, in which you can once again win up to 750 Swiss francs. The closing date for entries is August 25. The complete tender text can be found here.

If you'd rather listen to the article, you can find an audiovisual version on the Halcyonic Association YouTube channel, read by the author himself (link) and a listening-online version on Soundcloud (link).

Nietzsche was repeatedly elevated to a figurehead by right-wing theorists and politicians. From Mussolini and Hitler to the AfD — Nietzsche is repeatedly seized when it comes to confronting modern society with a radical reactionary alternative. Nietzsche was particularly fascinating to intellectual right-wingers, such as authors like Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, who formed a cultural prelude to the advent of National Socialism in the 1920s, even though they later partially distanced themselves from it. People also often talk about the “Conservative Revolution”¹.

What do these authors draw from Nietzsche and to what extent do they read him one-sidedly and overlook other potentials in his work? Our author Paul Stephan spoke about this with philosopher Robert Hugo Ziegler.

Transhumanists believe that artificial intelligence is used to capture the real world. It wasn't just Nietzsche who presented this as nonsense. Moral programs are entered into the AI. With Nietzsche, this prolongs hostile morality. And Nietzsche would have already questioned the fact that AI helps people. Instead, people must submit to AI. With Nietzsche, they can evade their power.

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?

The almost complete Freiburg Nietzsche commentary has now become an indispensable tool for Nietzsche research. In meticulous detail work, the authors compiled useful information on almost all aspects of Nietzsche's works (history of origin, sources, allusions, receptions, interpretations...) and commented on them passage by passage, sometimes sentence by sentence and word by word. Almost all of the volumes published so far are available free of charge on the de Gruyter Verlag website (link). Even laymen will find a real treasure trove of background information and explanations here. The three leading employees of the project — its long-time manager Andreas Urs Sommer, Katharina Grätz and Sebastian Kaufmann — took the opportunity to dedicate this year's annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society to the topic of “Commenting on Nietzsche.” They were not only looking back, but also looking ahead.

A fruitful method within philosophy can be addressed seemingly minor, everyday topics. For example, the relationship between thinking and architecture, as this text is based on the newly published book Nietzsche's architecture of the discerning By Stephen Griek tried to show. With Nietzsche in mind, according to Michael Meyer-Albert, protecting a dwelling — both literally and figuratively — from the chaos of reality is essential for a successful world relationship. He neglects this in Greek's post-modern approach, which aims at maximum openness and wants to replace clear spatial structures with diffuse nomadic networks. Architecture as an art of non-violent rooting thus becomes unthinkable; the “house of appearance” that supports human existence collapses.

On the anniversary of Nietzsche's death, Paul Stephan conducted a detailed interview with the ChatGPT program on this blog to test the program's performance when it comes to profound philosophical questions (link). This is followed by a critical reflection of this experiment.

The images for this interview were, unless otherwise marked, with the software DeePai created. The instructions for the article image were “Nietzsche and ChatGPT,” the instructions for the images in the article “ChatGPT talks about Nietzsche.”

After discussing Jonas Čeika's book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle and bis YouTube channel (CCK Philosophy) (link), Henry Holland interviewed the American about the blockages of academic philosophy, Nietzsche's relevance as a thinker on the “guideline of the body,” and about tensions between his claim as an anti-philosopher and his social position.