

Materialist metaphysics, as practiced by Spinoza, Nietzsche, or Deleuze and Guattari, has proven incapable of accounting for fundamental moral convictions. Nietzsche is at least radical enough to acknowledge this incommensurability and draw the corresponding conclusions. If one is unwilling to accept this, the only remaining path is to adopt the "view from eternity" alongside metaphysics: from that vantage point, one can only unconditionally affirm a groundless reality. Perhaps, however, the more promising answer is that of Emmanuel Levinas: his materialism allows morality to emerge from the encounter with the Other, and in doing so, he almost incidentally shatters the unity of metaphysics that even such radical thinkers as Deleuze and Guattari still took for granted.


Perhaps it is Nietzsche's main philosophical achievement that he described thinking as a process that happens in person. For him, reflection is a cooperative tension of body and mind. The mind is grounded in the nervous cosmopolitanism of the body. Nietzsche's conversion of Christianity: The flesh becomes word. This shows thinking in gestures. The following is intended to provide a sketch which indicates the main types of these reflexive gestures. This is intended to illustrate what it means when Nietzsche repeatedly describes himself as a wanderer. An intellectual tour that leads from standing and sitting as basic modes of traditional philosophy to walking, (out) wandering and halcyonic flying as Nietzsche's alternative modes of liberated thought and life.