Individualism, even egoism, is frowned upon in all political, religious and social camps. They are attributed to liberalism and capitalism. Such people are not committed to others, are not involved politically or for the environment. They also do not respect a common understanding of the world and therefore behave irresponsibly. The Nietzschean  is not impressed by such verdicts. She dances — not only!

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.

Like a year ago (link), our author Paul Stephan is also adding a commentary to this year's “dialogue” (link) with ChatGPT on the current state of thedevelopment of “artificial intelligence.” His assessment is somewhat more sober — but he does not want to be denied his fundamental optimism in technology. He also wants to avoid pessimism and naive hype, which is obviously being fueled right now to ensure that billions of dollars invested in AI are amortized.

We had various AI tools generate the images for this article at the following prompt: “Please give me a picture of the aphorism 'You still have to have chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star' by Nietzsche,” one of ChatGPT's “favorite quotes” by the philosopher from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (link). The article image is from Microsoft AI.

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.

The connection between Marx(ism) and Nietzsche(anism) has repeatedly been a topic on our blog. To what extent can the ideas of arguably the most important theorist on the left and the philosophical chameleon, who was an avowed anti-socialist and anti-feminist and inspired Goebbels and Mussolini, among others, be meaningfully combined. While there have been repeated attempts at left-wing Nietzscheanism, Estella Walter's conclusion in this controversial thesis article is skeptical: The contrast between “historical-dialectical materialism” and Nietzsche's idea of will to power is too irreconcilable. Beyond his time diagnosis, his thinking only provides little emancipatory content.

Werner Herzog (born 1942), described as a “mythomaniac” by Linus Wörffel, and Klaus Kinski (1926—1991) are among the leading figures of post-war German cinema. In the 70s and 80s, the filmmaker and the actor shot five feature films that are among the classics of the medium's history. They are hymns to tragic heroism, in which the spirit of Nietzsche can easily be recognized. From “Build Your Cities on Vesuvius! “will “Build opera houses in the rainforest! ”.

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Strangers seem creepy to many. They immediately fear that these strangers will harm them. Many decent earners think that recipients of citizen benefits are lazy and therefore do not allow them to receive government support. To many educated people, illiterate people appear rude and simple-minded, with whom they therefore want as little as possible nothing to do with, whom they do not trust. Religious people are often afraid of atheists, who in turn are afraid of contact with religion. What you don't know often appears to be dangerous and you prematurely discount that. Such prejudices lead to rejection, which often solidifies to such an extent that counterarguments are no longer even heard. This is resentment that has existed for a long time, but which today makes consensus almost impossible in many political and social debates. This can degenerate into hate and contempt and then into violence whether between rich and poor, right and left, machos and feminists, abortion opponents and abortion advocates, vegetarians and meat-eaters. When one side prevails, it imposes its values on the other, and the resentment even becomes creative. In any case, it prevents you from making an effort to understand the other person. For Nietzsche, resentment has been driving the dispute over what is morally necessary for a long time.

“Resentment” is one of the key terms of Nietzsche's late work. The philosopher is referring to an internalized and solidified affect of revenge, which leads to the development of an overall negative approach to the world. Especially in On the genealogy of morality Nietzsche is trying to show that the entire European culture since the rise of Christianity has been based on this affect. Judaism and Christianity, in their hatred of aristocrats, propagated an ethics of the weak — in this act, resentment became creative. With a new creative ethic, Nietzsche now wants to contribute to a renewed revaluation of values in order to return to a life-affirming aristocratic ethic of the “strong.” In this article, Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann introduces Nietzsche's reflections on resentment and works out what makes the accusation of mutual resentment so popular to this day.

Taylor Swift is one of the most important “idols” of our time. Reason enough for our regular authors Henry Holland, Paul Stephan and Estella Walter to pick up on the Nietzschean “hammer” and get to grips with the hype a bit: Does Swift deserve the cult around her that goes down to philosophy? Is it grossly overrated? And what explains the discrepancy between appearance and reality, spectacle and life?

You can watch the entire unabridged conversation on the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (link).

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In this two-part essay, Paul Stephan examines how Nietzsche uses the wanderer as a personification of modern nihilism. After he is in the first part (link) focused on the general cultural significance of movement metaphors and the metaphor of wandering in Nietzsche's important brother in spirit, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, it will now primarily be about Nietzsche himself.

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin achieved the unbelievable: He was the first person in history to leave the protective atmosphere of our home planet and circumnavigate the Earth in the Vostok 1 spaceship. In 2011, the anniversary of this “superhuman” act was declared International Manned Space Day. The stars aren't that far away anymore. With the technical progress achieved, the fantasy of expanding human civilization into space takes on concrete plausibility. The following text attempts to philosophically rhyme with these prospects and finally describes the approach of a possible space program from Nietzsche. Although airplanes didn't even exist during his lifetime, his concepts can still be applied to this topic in a productive way, as is so often the case.

Editorial note: We have explained some difficult technical terms in the footnotes.

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The humanities scene recently experienced a minor sensation: In the estate of Michel Foucault (1926—1984), one of the most important representatives of post-structuralism, its editors came across an elaborate book manuscript with the title Le discours philosophique, on which the avowed Nietzschean had worked in 1966. It was published in German by Suhrkamp in 2024. Nietzsche plays a decisive role in this comprehensive analysis of philosophical discourse since Descartes. Paul Stephan takes this event as an opportunity to take a closer look at the most influential Nietzsche interpretation of the 20th century to date.

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After explaining in the first part of this article (link) how Nietzsche transformed from an admirer of Schopenhauer to a critic in the course of the 1870s, Tom Bildstein now examines in more detail how the mature Nietzsche sought to overcome Schopenhauer‘s pessimism and counter it with a “life-affirming” philosophy. Schopenhauer‘s “will to life,” which the misanthrope would like to see ascetically denied, is to give way to the “will to power” as the fundamental principle of all life, which cannot be denied without contradiction.

In our last article before the break at the turn of the year, Paul Stephan explores a Close reading A remarkable aphorism of Nietzsche, in which he expresses himself with the famous Christmas blessing “Glory be to God in height and peace on earth and to people! “discusses. As when unwrapping a gift that has been covered several times, he tries to reveal the different layers of meaning in this text in order to make Nietzsche's exact positioning clearly stand out. The reader may decide for himself whether you end up holding a glowing truth in your hand or the box remains empty. In any case, we wish all our readers with Nietzsche: “Peace on earth and good pleasure for each other! ”

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.

It is well known that Nietzsche's history of influence has been read and absorbed across all political camps. But what about our present tense? Paul Stephan examines the writings of two authors who are about the same age as himself, in their mid/late 30s, and whose perspectives on Nietzsche could hardly be more different: While French journalist and YouTuber Julien Rochedy declares Nietzsche a pioneer of a right-wing cultural struggle, the German philosopher and political scientist Karsten Schubert attacks him for a left-wing identity politics. Both positions do not really convince our authors; rather, they are entirely within the framework of the prevailing simulation of politics as a cultural struggle, which would need to be countered by focusing on the really pressing life problems of contemporary humanity.

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.

From October 7 to 11, 2024, the event organized by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar took place in Weimar Nietzsche's futures. Global Conference on the Futures of Nietzsche instead of. Our regular author Paul Stephan was on site on the first day and gives an insight into the current state of academic discussions about Nietzsche. His question: What is the future of Nietzsche academic research when viewed from the perspective of Nietzsche's own radical understanding of the future?

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After Natalie Schulte reported on the echo of Nietzsche's “superman” idea in the start-up scene last week (Link), Swiss art scholar Jörg Scheller is dedicating this week to her continued existence in extropianism, a subtype of transhumanism that aims to artificially accelerate human evolution on both individual and genre levels using modern technology. The physical law of “entropy,” according to which there is a tendency in closed systems to equalize all energy differences until a state of equilibrium has been established — a state of complete cooling in terms of the universe — is opposed by the proponents of this flow with the principle of “extropy,” the increasing vitality of a system.

Nietzsche's superman is dead. Hardly anyone can do anything with this obscure idea anymore. You'd think so. And yet, in the current startup environment, you encounter numerous set pieces from Zarathustra's promise. What is it all about? — On the occasion of Nietzsche's 180th birthday, Natalie Schulte dedicates herself to this peculiar continuation of one of the philosopher's best-known concepts. A plea for taking a closer look at Nietzsche's idea despite its past and present misinterpretations.

Editor's note: We have translated longer English quotations into German in the footnotes ourselves.

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.

Since 1994, the house in Naumburg where Nietzsche lived with his mother for several years after his mental collapse in 1889 has had a museum dedicated to life and work. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of its existence, the permanent exhibition of the Nietzsche House was completely redesigned, curated by Berlin philosopher Daniel Tyradellis. Our regular author Lukas Meisner was there and took a look at them.

Nietzsche did not just influence popular culture. He himself was part of a contemporary popular culture and was significantly influenced by it. As a spa tourist, he chased after the trendy health resorts, studied popular magazines and non-fiction books as a popular reader, ate his way through various (self-prescribed) diets as a diet freak and used modern technologies from telegrams to Malling-Hansen's writing ball. In the following article, Swiss Nietzsche researcher Tobias Brücker summarizes some influences from contemporary dietetics in order to exemplify how Nietzsche's life and thinking were shaped by popular cultural factors.

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.”

To commemorate the 124th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, Paul Stephan conversed with a rather particular kind of Nietzsche expert—the now near ubiquitous ChatGPT. Their discussion circled around questions of why Nietzsche matters today and his concept of authenticity. During the course of the conversation, Stephan switched from asking to fielding questions, and elaborated briefly on how his own doctoral dissertation also focuses on authenticity. As Stephan’s experiment aimed at probing deep into the program’s capabilities, and because brevity is not ChatGPT’s strongest asset, we present here an abridged version of the conversation. Readers of German who wish to delve deeper can view the unabridged and annotated PDF that’s available as a download (link). Watch out for Stephan’s critical reflections on this truly remarkable dialogue within the next few days (link).

The pictures accompanying the interview were created with DeepAI software, which was asked to produce “A picture of Friedrich Nietzsche with a quote by him.”

Does Nietzsche have clear philosophical doctrines? There is still a fight with Nietzsche's ambiguity today. When does he mean what he says? In her essay, Natalie Schulte explores the question of where, in the midst of assimilating ambiguity through ideological programs on the one hand and academically savvy dispersal of Nietzsche's thought structures into indiscriminate and incoherent fragments and perspectives, on the other hand, today's engagement with Nietzsche has to locate its decisive challenges. Between the dangers of confusing his philosophy and the limitless relativization of his theses, she is looking for a fruitful third way of dealing with the question of the “actual Nietzsche.”

Like hardly any other philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche has left his mark on popular culture — less in the pleasing mainstream entertainment, but more in subcultures and in artistic positions that are considered “edgy” and “dark.” In this “underworld,” Nietzsche's aphorisms, catchphrases, slogans and invectives are widely used — for example in the musical genres of heavy metal, hardcore and punk focused on social and aesthetic provocation. What is the reason for that?

After Michael Meyer-Albert in the first part of his text Telling the sad story of the self-doubt of the Enlightenment, he now reports on Nietzsche's “cheerful science” as an alternative.

In her contribution to the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “Our main author Natalie Schulte explores the question of whether the thinker can be described as a “philosopher for adolescents” and reports on her own relationship with him.

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Nietzsche has repeatedly become the subject of political interpretive projects, from left and right. Nietzsche and Marx was seen time and again as a double team of a concept of comprehensive emancipation beyond the well-trodden paths of dominant left-wing political trends. In his book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century and in countless YouTube videos, Jonas Čeika updates this perspective for our time. For Nietzsche PopArts, Henry Holland addressed the question of what to think of this approach.

As a Marxist, Nietzsche was an early nuisance. But with the Nietzsche Renaissance in the eighties, I couldn't get past him anymore. That's when I discovered Nietzsche as an innovative thinker. - Part II of the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “, in which our regular authors introduce themselves.

What significance can a practice of waste have in today's advanced rationalization? Shouldn't we rather do everything we can to increase our efficiency and productivity if we want to meet the challenges of this crisis-ridden time? But when we turn to the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and his ardent admirer Georges Bataille, we are sometimes exposed to an emphasis of waste that shakes our moral principles and perhaps opens us up to a new and different kind of politics than the one that seems to impose itself on us today as having no alternative.

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In the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “ over the next few weeks, our regular authors will each present their personal approach to Nietzsche and his thinking. Our senior editor Paul Stephan makes a start and reports on how he discovered Nietzsche as a teenager — and no longer necessarily sees himself as a “Nietzschean.”

From October 12 to 15, the annual meeting of the Friedrich-Nietzsche Society took place in Naumburg. Numerous experts from all over the world came together to explore the various causes of Nietzsche's impact in the first decades following his mental collapse. The spiritual struggles over Nietzsche repeatedly referred to the real struggles of the past — and those of our present.