"Truth is always a delusion"
About this Quote
Aphorism as provocation, it pries open the complacency of certainty. Calling truth a delusion aims less to abolish truth than to expose how human beings manufacture it. Facts never arrive naked; they are filtered through language, stitched into narratives, sanctioned by institutions, and fortified by desire and fear. What we call truth, in this view, is a necessary fiction that organizes chaos into something livable, and that necessity makes it powerful, dangerous, and always suspect.
Friedrich Durrenmatt worked in the ruins of postwar Europe, where the grand certainties of ideology, nation, and progress had collapsed. His plays and prose return repeatedly to the instability of knowledge and the grotesque mismatch between human schemes and an unruly world. In The Physicists, brilliant scientists hide in an asylum, recognizing that scientific truth, once released into politics and commerce, becomes monstrous. In The Visit, an entire community persuades itself that killing one of their own is justice, proving how easily social consensus remolds morality into a plausible, even pious, delusion. His crime stories mock the detective’s faith in rational reconstruction; The Pledge famously ends with a meticulously reasoned plan shipwrecked on accident and chance.
To call truth a delusion also carries a self-scorching irony: if that statement is true, it too is a delusion. Durrenmatt thrives on that contradiction. The point is not nihilism but vigilance. Once we accept that every truth arrives as a constructed lens, we gain humility. Scientific models become tools rather than idols, legal verdicts pragmatic closures rather than eternal judgments, historical accounts contested drafts rather than final scripts. The danger is fanaticism, the urge to harden a provisional insight into a dogma that justifies anything. The task, then, is ethical: keep questioning the stories that sustain us, use them, revise them, and resist the moment they demand blind faith.
Friedrich Durrenmatt worked in the ruins of postwar Europe, where the grand certainties of ideology, nation, and progress had collapsed. His plays and prose return repeatedly to the instability of knowledge and the grotesque mismatch between human schemes and an unruly world. In The Physicists, brilliant scientists hide in an asylum, recognizing that scientific truth, once released into politics and commerce, becomes monstrous. In The Visit, an entire community persuades itself that killing one of their own is justice, proving how easily social consensus remolds morality into a plausible, even pious, delusion. His crime stories mock the detective’s faith in rational reconstruction; The Pledge famously ends with a meticulously reasoned plan shipwrecked on accident and chance.
To call truth a delusion also carries a self-scorching irony: if that statement is true, it too is a delusion. Durrenmatt thrives on that contradiction. The point is not nihilism but vigilance. Once we accept that every truth arrives as a constructed lens, we gain humility. Scientific models become tools rather than idols, legal verdicts pragmatic closures rather than eternal judgments, historical accounts contested drafts rather than final scripts. The danger is fanaticism, the urge to harden a provisional insight into a dogma that justifies anything. The task, then, is ethical: keep questioning the stories that sustain us, use them, revise them, and resist the moment they demand blind faith.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
More Quotes by Friedrich
Add to List
