Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "The Closest One"

Friedrich Nietzsche was no fan of Cartesianism or rationalism, with its attempt to view oneself and all of reality objectively with the tools of pure reason alone. This critique of Cartesian self-transparency is evident in Nietzsche’s short poem “The Closest One” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 30):

30. The Closest One

The closest one from me I bar:
Away and up with him, and far!
How else could he become my star?

Recall that René Descartes held that our selves, in the sense of our minds as what he called a “thinking thing” (res extensa), is the most well-known feature of our experience, the self-knowledge of our own existence and nature, though our own first-person introspection, being the foundation upon which one should place all other forms of knowledge—the very hallmark of epistemic certainty (cf. Meditations on First Philosophy).

Nietzsche turns this Cartesian self-reflectiveness upside-down in “The Closest One” by placing the self—”the closest one from me” as he calls it in the first line, with a backhanded reference to Cartesianism—not near to but rather far away from himself. Rather than being something already whole and completed, the “self” for Nietzsche is something far way from us, projected into the future, placed on a pedestal in one’s own hopes, dreams, and ambitions, something still to achieve instead of something already achieved, less a matter of “being” and more a matter of “becoming” what we hope to become and might yet be.

How else could we achieve our own dreams, Nietzsche claims implicitly, if we do not place ourselves on a pedestal, far in the future and far away from us in the present, as something to aim for—”my star” as Nietzsche calls it in the third line of “The Closest One”—as an archer aims for his or her target? Thus, when we aim and project ourselves into the future, we are aiming for ourselves, the realization of our own individual potential that we ourselves have chosen with our own freedom of the will, and with our artistic and authentically subjective vision for our own lives—our very own individually determined North Star in the form of our future selves to guide our way and help us set our sails along our journey.

Descartes makes it sound as if the self is something fixed and waiting to be discovered through pure reason, whereas Nietzsche takes the self to be in flux, not a metaphysical concept but more of a psychological projection into the future, a foreshadowing of Heidegger’s Dasein (cf. Being and Time) projecting ourselves into the future and imagining our own possibilities and potentiality. Instead of building a quasi-metaphysics around this futurity as Heidegger does, however, Nietzsche’s concept of the self is neither metaphysical nor mystical but something grounded entirely in our species-specific and in our own individual desires for our lives in a thoroughly naturalistic way.

There is a danger in placing oneself, or rather one’s future self, on a pedestal of hopes, ambitions, and future visions of one’s own life—the danger of living so much in the future that one forgets to be fully present and fully alive in the present. Nietzsche isn’t advocating escapism—the avoidance of the present by dwelling only on the future. Instead, Nietzsche thinks that it’s up to each of us to decide for ourselves what that future might be and to take the necessary steps to make our subjective visions of future reality and our future selves a reality in the present, moment by moment, a theme expressed quite clearly in another of his short poems, “Upward” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 16):

16. Upward

‘How do I best get to the top of this hill?’
’Climb it, don’t think it, and maybe you will.’

For Nietzsche, Cartesian self-reflectiveness is the very antithesis of what it takes to become the future self that you envision. Achieving one’s goals takes action and an incessant hunger—a genuine and insatiable appetite—for the things that one does not yet have, the parts of your future self that you have placed on the pedestal of the future because they are not yet actualized in the present.

But if you don’t yet have a vision of your future self towards which to aim, because you have not taken the time to think about your own future authentically and in your deepest hopes, dreams, wants, and needs, then you are shooting in the dark, like an archer aiming for the faintest sliver of a new moon while blindfolded, in the debilitating darkness, with one hand tied behind your back. That is, you will never achieve your goal; you will never become the best version of yourself that you might one day have become if only you had taken the time to really get to know yourself, not through Cartesian introspection but through existential projection—the artistic creation of your own future self as the end-goal and final destination of the roadmap of your present wanderings.