«So viel Misstrauen, so viel Philosophie». Nietzsche lettore di filosofia

The first part of this paper discusses the relationship between mistrust and philosophy in Nietzsche’s thinking, taking mainly into consideration some motives of “The Gay Science”. All radical attitudes reveal according to Nietzsche a moral and metaphysical background: they bear within themselves the claim of the human being to take hold of the world or at least of one’s experience. Instead, the combination of wisdom and insanity that characterizes the “gay science” fosters an openness to the world and an openness to experience. This openness requires a transformation of philosophy and of truth themselves in which the meditation on art plays a decisive role. The second part of the paper focuses on the notion of slow reading, discussed by Nietzsche in the “Preface” to Daybreak. There is nothing more difficult, according to Nietzsche (and Goethe), than learning to read slowly; as in the experience of philology, reading is not an activity characterized by a one-way direction, but a back-and-forth, a two-way proceeding which also allows to discover the double meanings of the text. Nevertheless, in order not to get lost, philology teaches us also to deliver ourselves to the rhythm of a text, as in a dance move, as in a Lento. Against a mere rhetoric of reading, philology is needed as the poetics of the philosophical text.