“Of necessity,” he writes in the Genealogy, “we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each one is the farthest away from himself’—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not ‘knowers.’” Perfect self-knowledge is methodologically impossible—a dog in hot pursuit of his bobbed tail—but Nietzsche’s Genealogy entreats readers to look back long enough to understand what they might become.
