Abstract

In this essay, we would like to question the recovery and inversion of Terence's formula "I am the closest to myself", in Nietzsche's terms: "Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernst (Each one is to himself the farthest)", found in the first paragraph of the Preface to the Genealogy of Morals. Taking into account the context in which it appears, we propose below a commentary of this paragraph alongside an interpretation of this formula. We would like to question the way Nietzsche relates this formula to the difficulty of acquiring self-knowledge, on which the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals insists. Does this sentence according to which "Each one is to himself the farthest" mean that a knowledge of oneself by oneself would be a futile exercise and that others would necessarily know us better than ourselves, such that the detour by otherness would constitute an obligatory passage for self-knowledge? But Nietzsche tells us from the outset that this Delphic ideal has never been achieved because the exercise has never been really attempted in the first place. Is it then that the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals indeed tries to prevent any self-knowledge (because it would be possible to know everything but the self), or, is there not another more interesting way to understand this formula according to which we are the most distant to ourselves? We would like to show two things in this regard: firstly, that Nietzsche does not prohibit self-knowledge here, but invites us to think about it differently; and secondly, that the formula according to which "everyone is the furthest away from himself" can also be understood as an injunction to keep the self always at a distance. The two dimensions are then linked, since we maintain that self-knowledge in the classical sense can and must be positively replaced in Nietzsche by an interpretation of the self, and that this interpretation must never be thought of as an undertaking to grasp the self once and for all, which would amount to reifying it by taking it out of becoming.