An integral part of the annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society is the “Lectio Nietzscheana Naumburgensis”, at which a particularly deserving researcher once again talks in detail about the topic of the congress on the last day and concludes succinctly. Last time, this special honor was bestowed on Werner Stegmaier, the long-time editor of the important trade journal Nietzsche studies and author of numerous groundbreaking monographs on Nietzsche's philosophy. The theme of the conference, which took place from 16 to 19 October, was “Nietzsche's Technologies” (Emma Schunack reported).

Thankfully, Werner Stegmaier allowed us to publish this presentation in full length. In it, he addresses the topic of the Congress from an unexpected perspective. This is not about what is commonly understood as “technologies” — machines, cyborgs, or automata — but about Nietzsche's thinking and rhetorical techniques. What methods did Nietzsche use to write in such a way that his work to this day not only convinces but also inspires new generations of readers? And what is to be said of them? He compares Nietzsche's techniques with those of two other important modernist thinkers, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). In his opinion, all three philosophers say goodbye to the classical techniques of conceptual philosophizing founded in antiquity and explore radically new ones in order to try out a new form of philosophizing in the age of “nihilism.” A monotonous, metaphysical understanding of rationality is replaced by plural, perspective thinking, which must necessarily use completely different techniques. The article creates a fundamentally new framework for understanding Nietzsche's thinking and philosophical context.

This essay, which we awarded first place in this year's Kingfisher Award for Radical Essay Writing (link), examines Nietzsche's question of the “barbarians” in a contemporary context and analyses how his philosophy is being politically exploited today. Against this background, the text shows how hustle culture, platform capitalism and neo-reactionary ideologies have been economizing the ”will to power“  and have become a new form of subtle barbarism: an internal decomposition of cultural depth through market logic, technocratic myths, and performative nihilism. Nietzsche's thinking, however, can be used precisely to describe these tendencies in their genealogy, to unmask their immanent nihilism, and to present an (over-)humane alternative to them.

A year ago, our author Paul Stephan conducted a small “dialogue” on the 124th anniversary of Nietzsche's death with ChatGPT to see to what extent the much-hyped program is suitable for discussing complex philosophical questions (link). Paul Stephan now fed it, for the 125th, with some of the same, partly changed questions. Has it improved? Judge for yourself.

What follows, is a very abbreviated excerpt of the conversation. The full commented “dialogue” can be found here [link].

The article image was created by ChatGPT itself when asked to generate a picture of this chat. The other pictures were created again by the software DeepAI based on the prompt: “A picture of Friedrich Nietzsche with a quote by him.”

Read also our author's philosophical commentary on this “talk” (Link).

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Note: A lot of the weirdness of this encounter is lost in the subsequent automated translation. Thus, it's also a part of this experiment on the “philosophical capabilities” of AI. Check the original if you want to get everything.

Paul Stephan talked to Jenny Kellner and Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann about the interpretation of one of the most important Nietzsche interpreters of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897—1962). The French writer, sociologist and philosopher defended the ambiguity of Nietzsche's philosophy against its National Socialist appropriation and thus became a central source of postmodernism. Based on Dionysian mythology, he wanted to develop a new concept of sovereignty that transcends the traditional understanding of responsible subjectivity, and criticized modern capitalist rationality in the name of an “economy of waste.” With all this, he provides important impulses for a better understanding of our present tense.