Werner Stegmaier

After receiving his graduate degree (Staatsexamen) in philosophy, German studies, and Latin philology, he earned his doctorate in philosophy under the supervision of Karl Ulmer and Josef Simon in 1974 at the University of Tübingen. He taught for a few years at upper level high schools (Gymnasium) and at the University of Stuttgart. He became research assistant of Josef Simon at the University of Bonn, where he defended his habilitation on Philosophie der Fluktuanz. Dilthey und Nietzsche. In his inaugural address, he dealt with Immanuel Kant’s treatise What Does It Mean To Orient Oneself in Thinking?, on the basis of which he later developed his Philosophy of Orientation. After serving as an interim professor in Berlin, he went to Greifswald, where he still lives today. Stegmaier founded the North- and East-European Forum for Philosophy, which connected philosophy departments around the Baltic Sea. It organized annual summer schools and supported the philosophical reorientation in countries formerly controlled by the Soviet Union in a project “Empirical Research on Philosophy,” supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. From 1997 until 2017, Stegmaier was the chief editor of the journal Nietzsche-Studien. International Yearbook for Nietzsche Research as well as of the Monographs and Texts of Nietzsche Research (both published by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston). He organized numerous academic conferences about Nietzsche’s philosophy, the philosophy of orientation, the philosophies of signs and time, the philosophical currentness of the Jewish tradition, and the thinking of Nietzsche and Niklas Luhmann. The philosophy of orientation has spread into the science of sport, linguistics, musicology, psychotherapy, architecture, and theology.

Werner Stegmaier (born 19 July 1946 in Ludwigsburg) is a German philosopher. He was the founding director of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Greifswald after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the German reunification. From 1994 until 2011, he was chair of philosophy with a focus on practical philosophy. His main field of research is the philosophy of orientation. He first published it in the German Philosophie der Orientierung (2008); its English translation has been published as What is Orientation? A Philosophical Investigation (2019). To promote the ideas of this philosophical approach, the Hodges Foundation for Philosophical Orientation was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2018. His second major field of research is Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Both areas of research are integrated in his Nietzsche meets Luhmann. Orientierung im Nihilismus (2016).

In Nietzsche research, where he has earned an immense influence, Stegmaier has gained prominence by claiming that the famous doctrines of the overman (Übermensch) and the eternal recurrence of the same and of the will to power (which Nietzsche puts into the mouth of his Zarathustra, the protagonist of his famous poem), are all “anti-doctrines,” i.e. doctrines that undermine the very assumption of any existing universals; their anti-doctrinal character is where, according to Stegmaier, they find their unity. With what he calls ‘contextual interpretation,’ i.e. understanding Nietzsche’s philosophical content within the context of his forms of writing, Stegmaier established a methodic paradigm for Nietzsche studies, which he himself comprehensively exemplifies in his interpretation of the 5th book of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. This paradigm has gained great attention in Nietzsche research. In his most recent works, he has shown in numerous contributions how Nietzsche’s foundational distinctions in philosophy can, in connection with Luhmann’s sociological systems theory, further be developed in the 21st century.