Nietzsche's philosophy as a project of semiotic ontology

The article analyses the semiotic aspects of Nietzsche's teachings. The authors substantiate the thesis that Nietzsche's philosophy presents a project of semiotic ontology based on understanding the will to power as a semiotic process. Post-metaphysical philosophy emerges as a response to the event of a crisis in European metaphysics. The situation of "loss of confidence in metanarratives" provokes the need for a reorientation of philosophical discourse and the search for new conceptual horizons of philosophical thinking, up to the development of a new categorical-conceptual apparatus. The metaphysical categories of substance, phenomenon, existence, transcendence turn out to be inadequate for post-metaphysics. In this situation, Nietzsche was one of the first to search for other perspectives of philosophical thinking. In his teachings, a project of semiotic philosophy is already presented as an alternative to metaphysics. Of course, both the philosophy of language and the theory of the sign were developed even before Nietzsche. But it was primarily a metaphysical philosophy: language was interpreted as a sphere of representation of being. Nietzsche implements a fundamentally different approach: being itself turns out to be only an effect of language, a grammatical phenomenon. The article substantiates the thesis that Nietzsche's speech is not about the rejection of ontology as such, but about the formation of a new ontological paradigm, an ontology of a post-metaphysical type. This is not an ontology of transcendental being, being as a "thing-in-itself", in relation to which everything sensuously perceived acts as a sign, a "phenomenon." Nietzsche presented a draft ontology of the sign itself. The philosopher understands meaning as a permanent process of meaning formation, not as a representation of a transcendental substance. In Nietzsche's philosophy, signification is not a representation of the will to power, hypostatized in the manner of Schopenhauer's metaphysics. The very process of signifying is nothing more than the will to power. The will to power, understood as a process of meaning and interpretation, meaning formation, is not something fixed, established once and for all. The will to power as a semiotic process is a permanent formation, a continuous generation of new meanings and values. The article shows that Nietzsche implements a project of Heraclitean semiotics, proceeding from the ontological premise of understanding meaning formation as a stream that does not know the completion of formation. As a result of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that Nietzsche's orientation towards a hierarchical order of values again allows drawing a parallel between Nietzsche and Plato. At the same time, the article articulates the difference between the semiotic-ontological models: Plato proceeds from the inner structure of the soul, from the order of eternal ideas, while Nietzsche asserts the will to power as a process of creating higher values and orders of existence. Plato proceeds from the transcendent signified to be represented; for Nietzsche, the will to power itself is a semiotic process.