From Zu Schopenhauer to Human, all too human: metaphysical and epistemological continuities and discontinuities in Nietzsche’s early Nachlass
Nietzsche; Metaphysics; Epistemology; Transcendental idealism; Naturalism.
Starting from the premise that Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments possess interpretive relevance insofar as they can be taken as a parameter for locating the emergence of fundamental concepts, tracing their respective transformations, and thereby contributing to the clarification of the author’s philosophical positions, this dissertation investigates the hypothesis that, already in the earliest reflections recorded in the set of notes entitled Zu Schopenhauer, certain metaphysical and epistemological positions are sketched out — more precisely: (a) the thing in itself is configured as a metaphysical postulate that is, in principle, inapprehensible and unverifiable, insofar as we do not possess secure cognitive criteria that would allow us to access, confirm, or refute it; (b) all knowledge of what we call the world is, ultimately, the product of a perception that is constructed and conditioned by our psychophysiological organization; and (c) all discourse about this world remains irremediably confined to an imagistic and figurative domain and is, for that very reason, incapable of corresponding to an objective reality — which continues, though under new inflections, up to the publication of Human, All Too Human. To this end, the dissertation proposes to reconstruct, within the subterranean labyrinth of Nietzsche’s early Nachlass, a theoretical trajectory that, with relatively few detours, leads to the period of his transformation into a “free spirit”, bringing out the aspects that allow this shift to be understood not as an absolute rupture but as a process of development and deepening of questions already present in his earliest notes.