545 (1885)
I believe in absolute space as the substratum of force: the latter limits and forms. Time eternal. But space and time do not exist in themselves. “Changes” are only appearances (or sense processes for us); if we posit the recurrence of these, however regular, nothing is established thereby except this simple fact, that it has always happened thus. The feeling that post hoc is propter hoc can easily be shown to be a misunderstanding; it is comprehensible. But appearances cannot be “causes”!
546 (1885-1886)
The interpretation of an event as either an act or the suffering of an act (—thus every act a becoming-other, presupposes an author and someone upon who “change” is effected.
547 (1885-1886)
Psychological history of the concept “subject.” The body, the thing, the “whole” construed by the eye, awaken the distinction between a deed and a doer; the doer, the cause of the deed, conceived ever more subtly, finally left behind the “subject.”
548 (1885-1886)
Our bad habit of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning “it flashes.” Or the little word “I.” To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the “subject,” the “I”!
549 (1885)
“Subject”, “object”, “attribute"—these distinctions are fabricated and are now imposed as a schematism upon all the apparent facts. The fundamental false observation is that I believe it is I who does something, suffer something, “have” something, “have” a quality.
550 (1885-1886)
In every judgment there resides the entire, full, profound belief in subject and attribute, or in cause and effect (that is, as the assertion that every effect is an activity and that every activity presupposes an agent); and this latter belief is only a special case of the former, so there remains as the fundamental belief the belief that there are subjects, that everything that happens is related attributively to some subject.
I notice something and seek a reason for it; this means originally: I seek an intention in it, and above all someone who has intentions, a subject, a doer: every event a deed—formerly One saw intentions in all events, this is our oldest habit. Do animals also possess it? As living beings, must they not also rely on interpretations based on themselves?—
The question “why?” is always a question after the causa finalis’ after the “what for?” We have no “sense for the causa efficiens”: here Hume was right; habit (but not only that of the individual!) makes us expect that a certain often-observed occurrence will follow another: nothing more! That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force—in will, in intention—it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?
Question: is intention the cause of an event? Or is that also illusion?
Is it not the event itself?
551 (March-June 1888)
Critique of the concept “cause”.- We have absolutely no experience of a cause; psychologically considered, we derive the entire concept from the subjective conviction that we are causes, namely, that the arm moves—But that is an error. We separate ourselves, the doers, from the deed, and we make use of this pattern everywhere—we seek a doer for every event. What is it we have done? We have misunderstood the feeling of strength, tension, resistance, a muscular feeling that is already the beginning of the act, as the cause, or we have taken the will to do this or that for a cause because the action follows upon it—cause, i.e.,-
There is no such thing as “cause”; some cases in which it seemed to be given us, and in which we have projected it out of ourselves in order to understand an event, have been shown to be self-deceptions. Our “understanding of an event” has consisted in our inventing a subject which was made responsible for something that happens and for how it happens. We have combined our feeling of will, our feeling of “freedom,” our feeling of responsibility and our intention to perform an act, into the concept “cause”: causa efficiens and causa finalis are fundamentally one.
We believed that an effect was explained when a condition was detected in which the effect was already inherent. In fact, we invent all causes after the schema of the effect: the latter is known to us—Conversely, we are not in a position to predict of any thing what it will “effect.” The thing, the subject, will, intention—all inherent in the conception “cause.” We search for things in order to explain why something has changed. Even the atom is this kind of super-added “thing” and “primitive subject"—
At length we grasp that things—consequently atoms, too— effect nothing: because they do not exist at all—that the concept of causality is completely useless.— A necessary sequence of states does not imply a causal relationship between them (—that would mean making their effective capacity leap from 1 to 2, to 3, to 4, to 5). There are neither causes nor effects. Linguistically we do not know how to rid ourselves of them. But that does not matter. If I think of the muscle apart from its “effects”, I negate it—
In summa: an event is neither effected nor does it effect. Causa is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events—
Interpretation by causality a deception—A “thing” is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by a concept, an image. In fact, science has emptied the concept causality of its content and retained it as a formula of an equation, in which it has become at bottom a matter of indifference on which side cause is placed and on which side effect. It is asserted that in two complex states (constellations of force) the quanta of force remain constant.
The calculability of an event does not reside in the fact that a rule is adhered to, or that a necessity is obeyed, or that a law of causality has been projected by us into every event: it resides in the recurrence of “identical cases”.
There is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant thinks. One is surprised, one is disturbed, one desires something familiar to hold on to—As soon as we are shown something old in the new’ we are calmed. The supposed instinct for causality is only fear of the unfamiliar and the attempt to discover something familiar in it—a search, not for causes, but for the familiar.
552 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Against determinism and teleology.— From the fact that something ensues regularly and ensues calculably, it does not follow that it ensues necessarily. That a quantum of force determines and conducts itself in every particular case in one way and manner does not make it into an “unfree will.” “Mechanical necessity” is not a fact: it is we who first interpreted it into events. We have interpreted the formulatable character of events as the consequence of a necessity that rules over events. But from the fact that I do a certain thing, it by no means follows that I am compelled to do it. Compulsion in things certainly cannot be demonstrated: the rule proves only that one and the same event is not another event as well. Only because we have introduced subjects, “doers,” into things does it appear that all events are the consequences of compulsion exerted upon subjects—exerted by whom? again by a “doer.” Cause and effect—a dangerous concept so long as one thinks of something that causes and something upon which an effect is produced.
a. Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.
b. When one has grasped that the “subject” is not something that creates effects, but only a fiction, much follows.
It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things and projected them into the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then belief also disappears in effective things, in reciprocation, cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things.
There also disappears, of course, the world of effective atoms: the assumption of which always depended on the supposition that one needed subjects.
At last, the “thing-in-itself” also disappears, because this is fundamentally the conception of a “subject-in-itself.” But we have grasped that the subject is a fiction. The antithesis “thing-in-itself” and “appearance” is untenable; with that, however, the concept “appearance” also disappears.
c. If we give up the effective subject, we also give up the object upon which effects are produced. Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes—e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event (rest—motion, firm—loose: opposites that do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites—and falsely transfer it to things).
d. If we give up the concept “subject” and “object,” then also the concept “substance"—and as a consequence also the various modifications of it, e.g., “matter,” “spirit,” and other hypothetical entities, “the eternity and immutability of matter,” etc. We have got rid of materiality.
From the standpoint of morality, the world is false. But to the extent that morality itself is a part of this world, morality is false.
Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable, an abolition of the false character of things, a reinterpretation of it into beings. “Truth” is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end—introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining—not a becoming conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the “will to power.”
Life is founded upon the premise of a belief in enduring and regularly recurring things; the more powerful life is, the wider must be the knowable world to which we, as it were, attribute being. Logicizing, rationalizing, systematizing as expedients of life.
Man projects his drive to truth, his “goal” in a certain sense outside himself as a world that has being, as a metaphysical world, as a “thing-in-itself,” as a world already in existence. His needs as creator invent the world upon which he works, anticipate it; this anticipation (this “belief” in truth) is his support.
All events, all motion, all becoming, as a determination, degrees and relations of force, as a struggle—
As soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for our being thus and thus, etc. (God, nature), and therefore attribute to him the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming. We then have someone who wants to achieve something through us and with us.
The “’welfare of the individual” is just as imaginary as the “welfare of the species”: the former is not sacrificed to the latter, species viewed from a distance is just as transient as the individual. “Preservation of the species” is only a consequence of the growth of the species, i.e., the. overcoming of the species on the road to a stronger type.
[Theses.] That the apparent “purposiveness” ("that purposiveness which endlessly surpasses all the arts of man") is merely the consequence of the will to power manifest in all events; that becoming stronger involves an ordering process which looks like a sketchy purposiveness; that apparent ends are not intentional but, as soon as dominion is established over a lesser power and the latter operates as a function of the greater power, an order of rank, of organization is bound to produce the appearance of an order of means and ends.
Against apparent “necessity”: —this is only an expression for the fact that a force is not also something else.
Against apparent “purposiveness”: —the latter only an expression for an order of spheres of power and their interplay.