The Wanderer’s Promise: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the “Nearest Things”

Abstract

Abstract In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the first part of the essay I contextualise Nietzsche’s concerns with “the closest things of all” in the “free spirit” period (1878–1882) and raise the question of how knowledge of them is possible. This idea is developed in the second part of the paper in relation to the claim that dominant (Platonic/Christian) habits of thought impede our understanding of the body. In the third section, I suggest that Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurean thinking in this period enables us to situate the nearest things within the political aesthetics of a transfigured physis. In the final section, I examine how Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on eternal return provide a less-well known locus for his philosophy of the nearest things, one which suggests that to “incorporate” eternal return we need to become “good neighbours” to what is close.