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.

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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