Powerlessness and Freedom of Choice

Nietzsche seems to be setting up an important but subtle binary between human’s ultimate powerlessness over reality and their ability to choose that serves as the base binary for his piece. He begins “On Truth and Lying” by placing humans in the overall perspective of the universe, portraying us as infinitesimally small, short-lived, and insignificant. Comparing “pitiful” and “arbitrary” humans to seemingly everlasting nature demonstrates how little of an impact we have on life in the universal sense. Rather than writing that “humans died,” he writes in his fable that “clever animals had to die”; not even being clever could stop us from what we had to do, from our death. We are ultimately powerless over life. At the same time, he expresses how we utilize this powerlessness to create possibility: truth, knowledge. When Nietzsche claims that “unless [man] wants to settle for truth [in other forms], he will perpetually exchange truths for illusions,” he argues that man chooses --for “settles for” implies choice--this deceptive idea of truth. Ironically, the idea of powerlessness reappears in the word “perpetually;” man becomes trapped in this choice he has made to create man’s truth. At the same time, due to his physical shortcomings as compared to animals and nature, man is forced to lead a life of intellect, knowledge, and thus truth—that is, if he wants to exist.
Nietzsche uses this binary to set up his provocative definition of truth, the most overt purpose of this literature. In order for truth to be the conventional utilization of “customary metaphors,” truth must be something that is created, invented like a metaphor, rather than something that just “is.” Invention requires an inventor, a tool, a faculty or capability (i.e. the skill to use the tool), and a motive. He provides these through the binary (respectively): man, intellect or knowledge, the power to choose any perception or believe any deception (i.e. the skill to manipulate knowledge), and powerlessness over life. 

This definition of truth is a dangerous one; he is challenging a fundamental assumption of the human race, for the idea of truth is something we base our lives on, and to say it, beneath all its layers, is really a sort of lie, is shaking the foundations of the readers and forcing them to question the one thing that really is quite unquestionable. He is suggesting that, hidden behind our conventional definitions and unquestionable truths or whatever we create, life is perhaps meaningless.
Perhaps he introduces the binary of powerlessness versus choice to offer what he believes is the result of acknowledging this illusion of truth: freedom.

If I have said anything ridiculous, interesting, or outraging, please comment…that would make my day.
Taylor