Abstract

It is commonplace among Nietzsche scholars to think that Nietzsche maintains a sceptical attitude towards the possibility of self-knowledge. This attitude, which is patent in the late works, could be traced back at least to the period of Human, All Too Human, if not to the unpublished essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense (1973). As much as this picture may be correct, it is incomplete. To see why this is so, one needs to distinguish between different notions of the self and different methodologies. These distinctions will prove to be helpful to examine Nietzsche’s stance towards self-knowledge in Human, All Too Human as well as the pivotal role that genealogy plays in achieving it.