This text was written in January 2014. I’ve recovered it yesterday and thought it was good enough to post here.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What does it mean to be right? And what about being wrong? Something is right when it is true, and something is wrong when it is false.
But from the point of view of truth, the plot thickens, because everything man says is in fact wrong, since it is necessarily a falsification of the flux. This is what Nietzsche shows us in his On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. Everything man grasps through his senses is already a falsification of the truth, so everything we build upon this small yet already false structure must necessarily be also false. There is no doubt about this last proposition. So, to make a long story short, let me give you an example: in math we say 1+1=2 is true. But the numbers “1” and “2” themselves are already falsifications of the truth, since the concepts from which we derived them were arrived at through our “unreliable” senses: We saw “two” oranges and created the concept of number afterwards. But in reality there is no such thing as number. Consider also that there are no two equal things in this universe, yet it was by assuming that the oranges were equal that we arrived at the number “2” (i.e. we created a concept by taking for granted that something false was actually true).
So, what does this all mean to us? If, then, 1+1=2 is false, why do we nonetheless say it is “true” or “right”? We say 1+1=2 is “right” because we have defined it as “true”, because we have made it “true”. It’s the same when I say Donald Trump is American, instead of Brazilian. We have agreed that people born on the country we agreed to name the United States of America are American, but of course these designations were all invented, i.e. made up, by us. The massive false structure of concepts we have managed to build inside our heads throughout our history, although built upon a false base, has managed to stay consistent and coherent throughout whole millennia. This massive structure is what we have called “knowledge” and it’s with this knowledge that man became the most powerful being on Earth. Who cares if it is all, ultimately, false? Aren’t we flying in airplanes, using cellphones and, in short, shaping our immediate surroundings according to our wishes? Haven’t we gotten more powerful exactly because of this fantastical structure called “knowledge”?
We did, and it’s for this reason that, in order to further complexify and build upon our massive structure “knowledge” (i.e. in our quest for more power), we need the designations “right” and “wrong”. “Right” is then, to conclude this reasoning, whatever is consistent with all the stuff that our structure “knowledge” is made of (the stuff being relations of false data that we’ve defined as true, as we’ve seen); “wrong” whatever is not consistent with this structure. The words “right” and “wrong” are then extremely useful, since they allow me to negate stupidities being spouted at me with just a couple of symbols slapped together, thereby saving me the trouble of writing entire essays just to communicate to someone that what he is saying is stupid.
The Stillest 