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 .

More and more professional athletes are openly embracing their religious faith – and some even cite Nietzsche as a source of ideological motivation. What is behind the Nietzsche worship among some athletes? Is Nietzsche really suitable as a motivator for physical training? And: Is the well-known atheist Nietzsche a better coach than God?

Throughout his life, Nietzsche was a great critic of nationalism. The burgeoning German national sentiment, in particular, was anathema to him, and he wrote scathing remarks about his home country, such as "definition of the Germanic: obedience and long legs..."¹. At the same time, nationalists and patriots of all stripes count among his fans. How can one be a Nietzschean and a (German) nationalist? What exactly is "nationalism," and is it possible to give this term a positive meaning?

Paul Stephan discussed these delicate topics, which are gaining increasing relevance given the successes of nationalist parties worldwide, in written form with YouTuber, Nietzsche expert, and nationalism researcher Michael Drescher, also known as PhrasenDrescher.

Additionally, they continued this dialogue verbally on YouTube – feel free to check out the result here (or as an audio-only version on SoundCloud).

The filmmaker, writer, lawyer, and philosopher Alexander Kluge, born in 1932, died on March 25. Kluge, who became known to a large audience not least through his films and his artistic television interviews, was repeatedly inspired by Nietzsche. In his diverse work, he not only dedicated himself decisively to him, but also followed a profoundly Nietzschean, perspectivist approach throughout his life. That should be reason enough to dedicate an obituary to him on our blog, which art historian and curator Barbara Straka thankfully wrote for us.

Nietzsche certainly did not have any children and is also not particularly friendly about the subject of fatherhood in his work. For him, the free spirit is a childless man; raising children is the task of women. At the same time, he repeatedly uses the child as a metaphor for the liberated spirit, as an anticipation of the Übermensch. Is he perhaps able to inspire today's fathers after all? And can you be a father and a Nietzschean at the same time? Henry Holland and Paul Stephan, both fathers, discussed this question.

We also published the complete, unabridged discussion on the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (Part 1, part 2).

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“Keep a stiff upper lip,” they say in England when you want to call on your interlocutor to persevere in the face of danger and to maintain an upright posture. Advice that is certainly often helpful. Such a stoic position must be sought all the more as an academic outsider who, on the one hand, sets himself apart from the scientific mainstream, but on the other hand is also dependent on his recognition. Nietzsche himself, but also many of his admirers, found himself in such a delicate situation. Based on several such outsider figures (in addition to Nietzsche himself, such as Julius Langbehn and Paul de Lagarde), Christian Saehrendt develops a typology of the (perhaps not always quite so) “brilliant isolation” of academic nonconformism.

Kafka and Nietzsche are united by their confrontation with the state and bureaucracy. Deleuze & Guattari, whose works are based on both, develop an apolitical response to the fatal political situation, namely transformations after Kafka, an expansion of themselves to Nietzsche, which can be understood as escape lines from a patronizing society.

Vitalii Mudrakov is one of Ukraine's leading Nietzsche experts. Due to the war, he and his family currently live in Germany. Paul Stephan talked to him in detail about some aspects of the rich Ukrainian reception of Nietzsche in the context of the country's independent cultural history, which has often been ignored. It shows that Nietzsche's liberal thinking repeatedly inspired central protagonists of Ukrainian culture in their struggle for an independent nation free from Habsburg, Tsarist or Soviet foreign rule — and today again the struggle for their own self-assertion in the face of the Russian invasion.

Цю статтю перекладено українською мовою. Переклад можна знайти тут.

The late Nietzsche repeatedly imagines himself as a descendant of Polish nobles. It is not just a personal whim, but also says something about Nietzsche's philosophical positioning: For him, Poland is a kind of “anti-nation,” a people of “big individuals” — and last but not least, the Polish noble republic is the political utopia of a radical democratic community, which, precisely in its failure, corresponds to his idea of “aristocratic radicalism.” Paul Stephan goes in this Long Read explores the deeper meaning of this topic in Nietzsche and questions his transfiguration of the old Rzeczpospolita: From a political point of view, this is not as desirable a model as Nietzsche suggests. Jean-Jacques Rousseau continues to lead in this regard Considerations on the Government of Poland from 1772.

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Tutaj znajdą Państwo tłumaczenie artykułu na język polski, wykonane przez Olimpię Smoleńską.

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