9 - “We Hyperboreans”

Summary

This chapter looks at some of the elements in Nietzsche's own writings that might provide the basis for a Nietzschean topography. It presents a sketch of some of the implications of such topography. The idea of a contemporary exploration of the topographic elements in Nietzsche's thought will immediately bring to mind David Krell and Donald Bates's work in their volume The Good European a work that might be thought to undertake just such a topography through its documenting of Nietzsche's principal work sites in text and photograph. Nietzsche's emphasis on the value of movement, and of walking, can be understood, as it is in both Thoreau and Rousseau, as having a genuine philosophical significance. The landscape that appear to be a thoroughly idiosyncratic and individual one, a landscape that belongs to Nietzsche's inner life except that the very distinction between inner and outer is itself brought into question.