Nietzsche disintossicato: Temi e mitemi sulla verità negli scritti giovanili

Taking as a central text Friedrich Nietzsche’s brief polemic “On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche Disintossicato explores a range of questions in the theory of language and the theory of knowledge to which Nietzsche gives responses that have been very influential in humanistic culture over the last fifty or sixty years. Rather than offer a line-by-line commentary on the argumentation that Nietzsche deploys, the aim is to bring to the surface a sequence of ploys (“mythemes”) and to examine their functioning within the economy of the text. The overall goal of the essay is to resist (“detoxify”) some widespread misapprehensions about the notions of truth and meaning to which Nietzsche’s text gives voice. In particular, Nietzsche puts in play considerations that tend to highlight the alleged inadequacy of language to be a vehicle for the expression of truths. Instead, the title indicates that all we can hope for are “lies in the extramoral sense”, but Nietzsche nowhere explains what this phrase should mean and it is very hard indeed to make much sense of it as the core product of language use.