The critique of knowledge through language in Nietzsche

Abstract

Nietzsche’s texts On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense and Description of Ancient Rhetoric belong to his period of intellectual production (between 1872 and 1875 as Lacoue- Labarthe has pointed out) in which he experimented in using elements of rhetorical analysis to explain the process of knowledge through language.  On the one hand, rhetoric became a theoretical resource to analyze language, beginning from the activity of the body itself, that is, the activity of instincts.  On the other hand, rhetoric facilitates the act of questioning of the statue of language that is presented as true, either in science or in philosophy, given that one considers language as originally tropic or figurative.  The interest of studying the fragments and essays of this period lies in that the critics of the language of metaphysical thought that appear in Nietzsche´s later works refer to his research of this period, even when he no longer uses the vocabulary of rhetoric.