Verità, linguaggio e conoscenza nel giovane Nietzsche: una rilettura critica di Verità e menzogna in senso extramorale

This paper aims to analyse Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873), in which the philosopher develops a radical reflection on language, the construction of concepts and the nature of truth. The essay remained unpublished during Nietzsche’s lifetime; it was only published posthumously in 1896 by Fritz Koegel, based on the manuscript preserved amongst the author’s posthu- mous fragments. This circumstance contributed to its long-standing status as a marginal text, almost a transitional document. However, following the studies by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, which restored its structural significance within Nietzsche’s intellectual trajectory, Truth and Lie has been recognised as a decisive turning point for understanding the genesis of the thought of genealogy and perspectivism. Through a historical-philological approach, we aim to reconstruct the cultural context of its composition, the influence of his philological training, and its posthumous reception. The analysis that follows will demonstrate how, in this work, Nietzsche develops a genealogy of knowledge and language that subverts the Western metaphysical tradition, inaugurating a new way of understanding truth as a historical and perspectival construction. We shall the- refore demonstrate how this essay constitutes an epistemological and linguistic laboratory in which Nietzsche anticipates insights of extraordinary modernity, highlighting that truth is a metaphorical and social construct, language a vital artefact, and knowledge an interpretative and perspectival process.