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 .

Our author Paul Stephan has finally had enough. The internet is being flooded with cheap A"I" content, often called "AI slop," which is just plain annoying—and is even being rewarded with countless likes and followers. Often, this content is about philosophy, too—specifically Nietzsche. How much damage is being done when this artificial Nietzsche increasingly displaces the real one, as A"I" outputs that repeat the same half-truths and falsehoods replace nuanced human interpretations? When machine-generated caricatures literally push out genuine photographs and artistic portraits? Paul Stephan embarked on an often frustrating search for answers and presents you with a few "highlights." Although he still believes that A"I" opens up positive possibilities—and occasionally makes use of them himself—in his third piece on the subject (feel free to read the first and second commentaries here and there), he feels it is time to take off the kid gloves and bring out the hammer. Stop the slop!

It has become something of a tradition for us to publish a "conversation" between Paul Stephan and ChatGPT on the anniversary of Nietzsche's death. While the previous two "interviews" (No. 1, No. 2) focused primarily on highlighting the limitations of A"I" and poking a little fun at it, our author's main goal this time was to address another common objection raised against A"I": that it censors unpopular opinions that deviate too far from the mainstream, thereby narrowing discourse as A"I" outputs increasingly become the benchmark for "truth."

We must therefore issue a strong warning: To this end, our author confronted ChatGPT with several radical interpretations and viewsthat in no way reflect his own perspective and would otherwise find no place on this blog, but rather diametrically contradict our values and our approach to Nietzsche. To signal this, he refers to himself as "Zero Newman" for this conversation. His aim was to draw attention to the censorship mechanisms of A"I", while also offering a critical, satirical look at potential "dark" interpretations of Nietzsche that are not merely a thing of the past.

A commentary by Paul Stephan on this "interview" and the rampant use of A"I"-generated Nietzsche interpretations and images on the internet can be found here.

On April 15, 1980, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, died at the age of 74. Paul Stephan spoke with Jens Bonnemann, chairman of the German-speaking Sartre-Gesellschaft, about his basic ideas, his relationship with Nietzsche and his significance for our time. What does it mean to live in freedom after the “death of God”? What are the limits of individual freedom? What are the differences and similarities between Sartre and Nietzsche?

You can also view the unedited version of the conversation, in German, on YouTube and listen to it on Soundcloud.

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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.

On the occasion of the 125^th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s death on August 25, we spoke with two of the most internationally renowned Nietzsche scholars, Andreas Urs Sommer and Werner Stegmaier. While the conversation with Sommer focused primarily on Nietzsche’s life, our discussion with Stegmaier centered on Nietzsche’s thinking, its relevance today, and Stegmaier’s own philosophy of orientation. What are Nietzsche’s central insights – and to what extent can they help us find our way in the present? What does his concept of “nihilism” mean? And what are the political implications of his philosophy?

Translated by Reinhard Müller.