The following interview between Werner Stegmaier and Paul Stephan was originally published by the Halkyonische Assoziation für Radikale Philosophie on Nietzsche POParts in October 2025, where you can find also the German original. We gratefully acknowledge Paul Stephan for permission to republish it on our website.
On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s death on August 25, we spoke with two of the most internationally renowned Nietzsche scholars, Andreas Urs Sommer and Werner Stegmaier. While the conversation with Sommer focused primarily on Nietzsche’s life, our discussion with Stegmaier centered on Nietzsche’s thinking, its relevance today, and Stegmaier’s own philosophy of orientation. What are Nietzsche’s central insights – and to what extent can they help us find our way in the present? What does his concept of “nihilism” mean? And what are the political implications of his philosophy?
Translated by Reinhard G. Mueller.
I. Nietzsche and Nihilism
Paul Stephan: Dear Professor Stegmaier, it is no exaggeration to describe you as one of the leading authorities on Nietzschean philosophy. In addition to numerous essays, you have authored a remarkably accessible introduction to the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (Junius). You have published a comprehensive interpretation of the important fifth book of The Gay Science (Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie [Nietzsche’s Liberation of Philosophy], 2011), the study Orientation im Nihilismus. Luhmann Meets Nietzsche (2016), a freely accessible collection of essays entitled Europa im Geisterkrieg. Studien zu Nietzsche ([Europe in a Spiritual War: Studies on Nietzsche] 2018), and an interpretation of Nietzsche’s literary Nachlass (Nietzsche an der Arbeit [Nietzsche at Work], 2022) – to mention only some of your most significant works. In addition, you have edited numerous anthologies. Finally, you served for eighteen years as editor-in-chief of the journal Nietzsche-Studien and of the series Monographien und Texte der Nietzsche-Forschung.
Looking back on the many years you have spent “engaging” with Nietzsche – if that word is not an understatement – what would you say is his central insight? What is the essential lesson that can and should be learned from reading Nietzsche’s writings, which, as you yourself note in the introduction to your aforementioned introduction, are easy to read yet difficult to understand?
Werner Stegmaier: Nietzsche’s most courageous and central insight, it seems to me, was that nihilism – according to which even the seemingly highest values and all absolute certainties prove to be meaningless – is a “normal state,” as he once titled a lengthy note on the subject, emphasizing it with double underlining.[1] There is, accordingly, nothing to be “overcome,” as Martin Heidegger in particular believed. In Nietzsche’s view, the nihilism of Christianity and metaphysics who did not esteem the values truly worth living overcame itself by cultivating a sense of truth through its ascetic ideal that ultimately turned against itself and rendered all values hostile to life untrustworthy. This insight had an enormously liberating effect. With the “revaluation of all values” that now stood before humanity, Nietzsche held that people had to decide for themselves which values they wished to affirm; and in philosophy, provided one had the courage, it became possible to begin anew in every respect, both in content and in form. In this sense, we still draw on this insight today.
PS: Nietzsche undoubtedly understands nihilism as a great opportunity – as a necessary transitional stage in the emergence of a new culture. But does he not also regard it as a danger, as a loss of orientation in a world that no longer offers any objective points of reference? I am thinking here of what is perhaps his most famous aphorism, no. 125 in The Gay Science.
WS: Yes, Nietzsche has a “madman,” in the sense of a lunatic, cry out: “Where is God? I will tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers!” At the same time, however, he also has him ask:
But how did we do this? How were we able to drink the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us?”
This madman employs spatial metaphors to evoke a state of radical and complete disorientation – an infinite void in which there is nothing left to hold on to. At the beginning of Book V of The Gay Science, which Friedrich Nietzsche added five years later, he returns to what he calls the “greatest recent event – that ‘God is dead,’” specifying that “belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable.” He then sketches, as you suggest, a “long, dense succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval” that now lies ahead with nihilism – a “deep darkness and an eclipse of the sun the like of which has probably never before existed on earth.”[2]
A little later, in his famous Lenzerheide note, where Nietzsche attempts to survey and systematize his assessment of nihilism, he adds that a “will to destruction” and “self-destruction” would emerge, through which those who had lost guidance and orientation would “breed their own executioners.”[3] It is not difficult, from a later perspective, to think here of the Germans and Russians and their ’leaders’ Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. For Nietzsche himself, who may have sensed something of this but could not, of course, have foreseen it, nihilism was only a “crisis” that would purify and lead to fundamentally new social conditions.
For philosophers like Nietzsche, however, this crisis would also bring “a new kind and barely describable type of light, happiness, relief, amusement, encouragement, dawn.” It would fill him with profound “gratitude” that “the horizon seems clear again,” that “every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again,” and that “the sea, our sea” lies open once more. For Nietzsche, philosophy did not stand above world events as a mere theory; it was directly involved in them, just as every form of orientation is involved in them, because it always takes a standpoint within events and also influences them. Nietzsche believed that philosophy could set new goals and open new paths for world events – and his philosophy may indeed have done so.
PS: What new goals and paths do you have in mind?
WS: Nietzsche set them very high. He assumed that nihilism would liberate European humanity to a higher level of development, freeing it from the shackles of the ascetic ideals of Christianity so that it could unfold its real and powerful potential anew. This does not mean – as some contemporary transhumanists believe – that everyone should become superhuman.[4] Rather, one should not assume that humanity has already reached its goal by fulfilling those ideals, or that the “final,” now definitively established human being can simply rest content in that achievement. According to a famous formulation by Friedrich Nietzsche, the human being is “as yet undetermined animal,”[5] one that cannot help but continue to develop and that, owing to its extraordinary intellectual capacities, does so far more rapidly than other animals.
For Nietzsche, however, this development can only take place through evolution, through ongoing interplay and struggle between individuals. Evolution, in his view, produces an enormous wealth of variants, while higher development depends on particularly “successful cases.” These remain exceptions, but they can scarcely emerge as long as everyone – still guided by the old principle of being “equal before God” – is supposed to be as equal as possible in every respect and therefore treated as such. As a result, “the type ‘human being’” is fixed “at a lowly level,” and the major problems that now arise – above all, creating “better conditions for the emergence of people, for their nourishment, upbringing, instruction”; managing “the earth in economic terms as a whole”; weighing “the powers of humanity generally against one another and put them to work”[6] – cannot be addressed in a promising way.
Instead, Nietzsche argued that “the isolated, original cultures of individual peoples”[7] would have to be overcome and that a knowledge of the conditions of culture, surpassing all previous levels as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals,[8] would have to be attained – one that encompasses the entire earth. To this end, Europe, which Nietzsche still saw as occupying a leading role, would first have to be united, and the Jews[9] would have to be granted a pioneering position. For such a “conscious universal rule” of the earth,[10] “higher humans” would be required – figures endowed with superior orientation, capable of setting new goals for the world as a whole.
Nietzsche may have had in mind a volatile and erratic world politician such as Wilhelm II, but he could not yet foresee the global environmental destruction brought about by industrialization, the danger of nuclear world wars, or the extreme distribution of wealth with which we are confronted today, among many other global problems. Against this background, “the former morality, namely Kant’s, demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men,” appears to Nietzsche as a “very naive thing” – “as though everyone could simply know, without further reflection, which course of action would benefit humanity as a whole, and which actions were therefore desirable at all.”
In articulating these views, Nietzsche often employed a language that was later contaminated by the Nazi Party, and he sharpened it aggressively the less people wished to listen to him. This, however, should not obscure the extent of his foresight.
II. Nietzsche’s Politics
PS: I see a close connection between this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Marxism. There is also a remarkable passage in Ecce Homo in which Friedrich Nietzsche summarizes his program as follows:
My task, preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-examination, a great noon when it will look back and look out, when it will escape from the domination of chance and priests and, for the first time, pose the question ‘why?’, the question ‘what for?’ as a whole –, this task follows necessarily from the insight that humanity has not put itself on the correct path, that it has absolutely no divine governance, that instead, the instinct of negation, of corruption, the decadence-instinct, has been seductively at work, and precisely under humanity’s holiest value concepts.[11]
One might even think of the United Nations in this context. The difference, however, is that Nietzsche does not conceive of such a “conscious universal rule” as democratic in the strict sense. Perhaps this is simply realistic, insofar as comprehensive social and cultural reforms must be initiated by relatively small avant-gardes. Despite its own claims, Marxism – in its concrete historical implementation – was, ironically, closer to Nietzsche than to Marx in this respect; and the United Nations, too, is often perceived as elitist and “aloof.” Do you think that, in light of the numerous fundamental problems confronting humanity today, we should be more open to this “elitist” model of social transformation? Or could a radical transformation be more democratic than Nietzsche himself suggests?
WS: The truly outstanding passage from Ecce Homo describes once again, using the concepts of Dawn, which it deals with, what Nietzsche later would later call “nihilism”: the necessity of a complete reorientation of philosophy after the metaphysical-Christian-priestly supreme values have proven to be fundamentally unfounded. Humanity must now recognize that no higher power sets its goals; rather, it must set its own goals if it does not wish to drift aimlessly. Instead of “nihilism,” Nietzsche ultimately prefers the term décadence, borrowed from French: disappointed by the old sources of meaning, one perceives only decay and confines oneself to negation. This condition persists to this day. Yet it was metaphysics and Christianity that had already denied life in a concealed manner, by setting supposedly “higher” values against those that were actually worth living for, thereby denying or at least disparaging them.
Philosophers, Nietzsche adds in the same passage, have often been “hidden priests.” They constructed a “salvation of the soul” out of contempt for the body and its healthy “egoism.” Today, however, strong counter-movements are emerging. Nietzsche does indeed speak here – this should not be concealed – of the “degeneration of the whole, of humanity,” but without, as later occurred under the Nazi Party, linking this diagnosis to biological racism; Nietzsche would have categorically rejected Nazi ideology. Even in his own time, he positioned himself clearly as anti-nationalist, anti-socialist, and anti-anti-Semite.
Nietzsche hardly took notice of Marxism; he does not even mention Karl Marx by name (nor did Marx mention Nietzsche). Had he engaged more closely with Marx, he might have recognized in him a courageous new goal for humanity in the “struggle against the morality of self-denial,” which Nietzsche himself also waged – this is how the aphorism cited earlier concludes. Both thinkers spoke of “alienation,” and both could draw on Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted Christianity as a morality of alienation: everything good in human beings is projected onto God and God’s son, while everything negative remains with humanity itself.
Marx, however – and here Nietzsche would have dissented – understood the development of European humanity as a self-perpetuating process predetermined by the conditions of production in emerging industrial society, ultimately culminating in the revolution of the proletariat. For Nietzsche, this would have amounted to yet another form of external determination. He recognized that, with respect to the major problems facing humanity that we have discussed, even within democracy – which he regarded as “irresistible”[12] – it would be impossible to dispense with leaders possessing superior orientation skills, though not domineering and selfish autocrats, across all domains of life. Elites may and indeed must emerge over time, but this can occur through democratic processes of selection. “Elitist” has since become a polemical term; “elite,” likewise borrowed from French in the eighteenth century, originally meant a “selection of the best.” Whenever such individuals – in aristocracy, the military, business, or banking – solidify into closed castes, for example through targeted marriage policies, and permanently occupy positions of power, they appear “aloof.” Yet this, too, has increasingly been rendered obsolete, with democracy effectively countering such developments.
Today, one no longer needs to emerge from an elite caste in order to offer humanity new ideas for a prudent and far-sighted orientation toward its future – ideas that must, moreover, first prevail through democratic processes. Friedrich Nietzsche himself occasionally toyed with elitist models, for instance when he turned to the Indian Laws of Manu, with its “noble values everywhere” and its “saying yes to life.”[13] Yet even for Nietzsche, such sources primarily served as stimuli for reflection rather than as blueprints for social order.
If nihilism is understood as a normal state, then an “experimental morality” is just as necessary as an “experimental philosophy”[14] – and this over “many centuries.”[15] What proves itself in this process is eventually codified in norms, values, and laws and, where useful, also attributed to revelations, so that people can adhere to it for a time; it is at this point that the “priests” once again enter the picture. By contrast, Nietzsche maintains that “the most thoughtful people, being the strongest, find their happiness where other people would find their downfall: in labyrinths”– that is, precisely where others can no longer orient themselves – “in harshness towards themselves and towards others, in trials; they take pleasure in self-overcoming: asceticism is their nature, requirement, instinct.” Today, one might describe this less provocatively as an increased confidence in one’s own superior orientation that can also be conveyed to others.
Nietzsche tentatively grants such figures additional “rights” and “privileges” on the basis of their greater “responsibility” – a position that is no longer acceptable from a contemporary perspective, at least insofar as legal privileges are concerned, having been superseded by the democratic procedures that have since become established. Ideas, and those who advocate them, must remain competitive if they are to prevail. Effective governance – especially in matters of great importance, which is now expected and demanded almost everywhere – has not thereby become any easier. Yet decisions reached in this way can find broader approval and, as a result, be implemented more sustainably.
III. The Philosophy of Orientation
PS: This might be a good point to turn to your own thinking, which for some time now has revolved around the concept of “orientation.” In 2008, you published the comprehensive work Philosophie der Orientierung, and since then numerous further publications on this concept have appeared. The idea has been received so positively that, in 2019, the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation was established in the United States. On its website, English-language introductions to the philosophy of orientation are available for free download, with the aim of popularizing and discussing this approach. Would you like to outline what this project means for you and to what extent you see Friedrich Nietzsche as a pioneer of this new philosophy?
WS: Gladly. Above, I have already attempted to understand Nietzsche’s philosophy in terms of orientation. As I have said, nihilism meant for him a profound and scarcely bearable disorientation of all European-educated humanity once faith in Christianity and metaphysics was lost. The response was that everyone sought to “overcome” nihilism and, in one way or another, which meant for them to return to absolute certainties of the old kind. By contrast, I have always experienced Nietzsche’s philosophy as liberating, leading toward a fundamentally new philosophical orientation that accepts nihilism as a “normal state.”
Over time, I saw ever more clearly that the concepts of the great philosophical tradition were no longer adequate for such a reorientation. After intensive engagement with Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger, I devoted my dissertation to the fundamental concept of metaphysics, the concept of ‘substance.’[16] It showed that, along its path from Aristotle through René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Kant himself, “substance” loses the meaning of a fixed and absolutely certain being and becomes instead a mere category whose function is to provide a foothold in Heraclitean becoming – yet only a temporary foothold that shifts over time. I later described this as “fluctuance” and wrote my habilitation thesis on Wilhelm Dilthey and Nietzsche, in whose work this fluctuance appears in different ways.[17]
If we consider the evolution of human beings, and then of humanity in its history, we now expect that all concepts – including those of philosophy – are and must remain in constant flux if they are to keep pace with changing conditions. Nietzsche repeatedly insisted on this with formulations such as: “The form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ is even more so.”[18] On the basis of the compilation The Will to Power, which Nietzsche’s embittered sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had assembled by Peter Gast very profitably after her brother’s death, Heidegger stylized Nietzsche’s philosophy into a new metaphysics of the will to power, intending to push all previous metaphysics to its extreme and thereby bring it to an end. This interpretation has since proven to be misguided. It had a disastrous global impact on the understanding of Nietzsche. It served Heidegger in reserving for himself a “different beginning” in Western philosophy. He attempted this by returning to the question of the “meaning of being,” which he regarded as the original and essential question of philosophy, and which in his later work he transformed into a kind of listening to the belonging of human existence to an indeterminate “bying.” What practical consequences were to follow from this, however, remains unclear to this day. For Heidegger himself, it was compatible with a deep affirmation of National Socialism and with a radical critique of technology that today appears deeply troubling.
If nihilism names a profound disorientation, then perhaps it is best to begin precisely there – and then with the concept of orientation itself. Since Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant introduced the concept into philosophy some 250 years ago (a comparatively short period when set against the nearly 2,500-year history of the concept of substance) in the context of a religious-philosophical dispute, it has steadily gained currency and entered everyday usage. Only in philosophy did it initially fail to take firm hold. Friedrich Nietzsche was familiar with the term but made little use of it; Ludwig Wittgenstein employed it more frequently; Martin Heidegger began to address it in his early work Being and Time; and Karl Jaspers soon reduced it again to the orientation of philosophy in and through the sciences.
If the concept of orientation is now ubiquitous – and therefore indispensable – this is because we are compelled to reorient ourselves, more or less constantly, in ever-new situations. We no longer possess absolute certainties, only footholds. There is far more involved in how we orient ourselves, with our limited resources, within an infinitely complex reality than one might initially assume – yet nothing metaphysical, only something more intricate. This holds for astronomy, physics, and biology just as much as for everyday communication, politics, law, journalism, and other domains. It becomes especially evident in criminalistics, on which so many television evenings thrive: it is always compelling to see what emerges beyond the first impression. Philosophically speaking, we have only clues or footholds (Anhaltspunkte) everywhere for what we call “being,” “reality,” or “truth” – provisional points to which we adhere for the time being and until further notice.
For all of us, it is becoming increasingly clear that we orient ourselves from particular standpoints, within limited horizons and perspectives, and with limited capacities for orientation. All orientation is therefore ultimately individual. We must come to terms with this, and we are evidently capable of doing so. We can no longer rely on a pre-given being, but must begin with the orientation that is possible for us within our world. Nor can we rely on a reason that is identical for everyone, as was still assumed till two centuries ago. Instead, we must examine how what we call “reasonable” is constituted in our mutual orientation toward one another in communication – and this can take very different forms.
What we observe in order to orient ourselves is recorded in signs and interpreted through languages, which themselves can be interpreted differently in different situations and from different perspectives. As the later Wittgenstein succinctly observed, we can never know with certainty what another person means by their signs, nor even what we ourselves mean by our own.[19] All orientation therefore entails the possibility of disorientation. Today, we must assume this – and we do so by allowing leeway for understanding within our own orientation and in our orientation toward one another, including in philosophy. Nietzsche already pointed in this direction in Beyond Good and Evil (no. 27).
The concepts of earlier theories of knowledge, decision-making, and action are of little help here. If we wish to understand how we understand the world and one another, we truly must begin anew. This must first be done descriptively; and since reference to a “beyond” has proven untenable, it no longer requires the elevated pathos of preaching in which philosophers have so often indulged. Philosophy becomes convincing only when it remains close to everyday experience. Following the later Wittgenstein, I therefore try to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use,”[20] while still preserving the level of conceptual refinement that philosophy has achieved over its millennia-long history.
The beginning of philosophizing, it seems, lies simply in finding oneself disoriented, whether in a minor or a profound sense, if one is unfamiliar with one’s surroundings, unable to find one’s way, or despairing of the meaning of life and seeks to escape this condition of disorientation. That alone suffices. What one then discovers are footholds for which there are always alternatives, so that one maintains a certain distance from them, holds onto them only provisionally, and thereby remains free in relation to them. Temporary orientation might thus be understood as the meaning of the big question of Being and Time, a meaning that can be applied to everyday life.
This orientation toward time certainly involves philosophers “providing orientation,” including ethics, through which they attempt to make the world better than it appears to them at a given moment. Yet this, too, always occurs from particular perspectives and for a limited duration; here as well, plausible alternatives are always available. What remains of the nihilism articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche is the persistently unsettling awareness that things could always be otherwise or seen differently from different points of view. We always have to be attentive to the possibility of other perspectives.
We constantly require orientation, because we have to master ever new situations with which we are insufficiently familiar. Nowhere this is more evident than in the global crises that are now confronting us. In the United States, people have traditionally been more self-confident. Yet, in Germany too, as I am currently observing, an increasing number of people, in their personal lives, in their professions, in the scholarship they pursue, and also in their philosophizing, are learning to trust in this new beginning with orientation itself – without which nothing is possible anywhere. I appreciate it.
IV. Philosophers’ Hiding Places
PS: Thank you very much for this comprehensive account of your own approach, which, we hope, will find a wide resonance. Naturally, your remarks would invite many further questions – but perhaps we can reserve those for another occasion. Instead, I would like to conclude this exchange with a rather different question. Friedrich Nietzsche is a thinker who, not least because of his vivid and engaging style, appeals to a broad readership like few others. Many readers feel personally addressed by him, not only on an intellectual but also on an emotional level. If I may therefore address not only the philosopher but also the person Werner Stegmaier, drawing on a lifetime of experience: is there a passage in Nietzsche that has touched you particularly deeply, perhaps even shaped your own personal development, and that you would be willing to share with us?
WS: Yes, there is such a passage, and I would be happy to share it with you at the close of our conversation, for which I thank you very much. It concerns what Nietzsche calls the “philosopher’s claim to wisdom,” and it should be read with a certain irony. Nietzsche was only forty-three years old when he published it, whereas I am now approaching eighty. In Book V of The Gay Science (no. 359), which I hold in particularly high regard, he writes that the claim to wisdom – that is, to a philosophical teaching imbued with rich life experience – is …
a hiding place in which the philosopher saves himself owing to his weariness, age, growing cold, hardening – as a prudence of that instinct which the animals have before death – they go off alone, become silent, choose solitude, crawl into caves, become wise. . . What? Wisdom as a hiding place in which the philosopher hides himself from – spirit?
Footnotes
[1] Nachlass, 1887, 9[35]. At another location in his Nachlass (1887, 9[60]), he says: “Nihilism as normal phenomenon.” Here too, the “as normal phenomenon” was added later by him.
[2] The Gay Science, no. 343. Transl. by Josefine Nauckhoff.
[3] See Nachlass 1887, 5[71]. Our transl.
[4] Editor’s note: See also the article “Seht, ich lehre euch den Transhumanisten” by Jörg Scheller.
[5] Beyond Good and Evil, no. 62. Transl. by Adrian Del Caro.
[6] Human, All Too Human I, no. 24. Transl. by Gary Handwerk.
[7] Ibid., see also Human, All Too Human I, no. 23.
[8] Human, All Too Human I, no. 25.
[9] See Beyond Good and Evil, no. 251.
[10] Human, All Too Human I, no. 25. Transl. by R. J. Hollingdale.
[11] Ecce Homo, Daybreak 2. Transl. by Judith Norman.
[12] Human, All Too Human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, no. 275. Transl. by R. J. Hollingdale.
[13] The Anti-Christ, no. 56 & 57. Transl. by Judith Norman.
[14] Nachlass 1888, 16[32].
[15] The Anti-Christ, no. 57. Transl. by Judith Norman.
[16] Substanz: Grundbegriff der Metaphysik (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1977).
[17] Philosophie der Fluktuanz: Dilthey und Nietzsche (Göttingen, 1992).
[18] On the Genealogy of Morality II, no. 12. Transl. by Adrian Del Caro.
[19] See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §504.
[20] Ibid., §116. Transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte.
Werner Stegmaier, born on July 19, 1946, in Ludwigsburg, served as Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Greifswald from 1994 to 2011. From 1999 to 2017, he was the editor-in-chief of Nietzsche-Studien. Internationales Jahrbuch für die Nietzsche-Forschung, the leading international journal for Nietzsche scholarship, as well as of the influential series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung. He has published numerous monographs and edited volumes on Nietzsche’s philosophy and on philosophy more broadly. Among his major works are Philosophie der Orientierung (Philosophy of Orientation, 2008), Nietzsche zur Einführung (An Introduction to Nietzsche, 2011), Luhmann meets Nietzsche. Orientierung im Nihilismus (Orientation in Nihilism, 2016), and most recently Wittgensteins Orientierung. Techniken der Vergewisserung (Wittgenstein’s Orientation: Techniques of Assuring Oneself, 2025). The further development of the philosophy of orientation, which he founded, constitutes the central focus of his current work.