Forgetfulness as a will to power. the principle of economy in the epistemology of F. Nietzsche

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to compare the epistemology elaborated by Friedrich Nietzsche with the epistemology elaborated by the positivists of the 19th century, especially Herbert Spencer and Ernst Mach. The theme running through this comparison is the different use that these authors make of the principle of economy applied to epistemology. The aim of the comparison is to appreciate in what sense nineteenth-century epistemology is reworked when it comes into contact with Nietzsche's hypothesis of the will to power, following the publication of Beyond Good and Evil. Once the way in which Nietzsche reformulate this epistemology has been elucidated, what will interest us will be to see in what sense the theoretical displacement operated by the principle of economy produces in Nietzsche's thought an inversion and re-evaluation of the concepts of "memory" and "forgetting" as applied to the theory of knowledge.