“Everyone is Furthest from Himself”: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Recovery and Inversion of Terence’s Formula “I Am the Closest to Myself”

Abstract

This essay examines Nietzsche’s inversion of Terence’s formula “I am the closest to myself” into “Everyone is furthest from himself [Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste]” (GM, Preface 1). In a contextual reading, I am going to ask how Nietzsche relates this formula to the difficulty of acquiring self-knowledge, as emphasized at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morality. First, I argue that Nietzsche does not prohibit self-knowledge, but instead invites us to think about it differently; and second, I will show that the formula according to which “everyone is furthest from himself” can also be understood as an injunction to keep the self always at a distance. I will link these two aspects by arguing that Nietzsche replaces self-knowledge in the classical sense by an interpretation of the self, and that this interpretation must never be thought of as an undertaking that seeks to reify their self. Nietzsche urges us to make ourselves into creative projects, even this will entail fiction and illusion.