Part 13

Simple, transparent, not in contradiction with himself, lasting, remaining always the same to himself, free from faults, sudden changes, dissimulation, and form: such a man conceives a world of Being as "God" in His own image.

In order that truthfulness may be possible, the whole sphere in which man moves must be very tidy, small, and respectable: the advantage in every respect must be with the truthful one.--Lies, tricks, dissimulations, must cause astonishment.

544.

"Dissimulation" increases in accordance with the rising order of rank among organic beings. In the inorganic world it seems to be entirely absent. There power opposes power quite roughly --ruse begins in the organic world; plants are already masters of it. The greatest men, such as Cæsar and Napoleon (see Stendhal's remark concerning him), as also the higher races (the Italians), the Greeks (Odysseus); the most supreme cunning, belongs to the very essence of the elevation of man. ... The problem of the actor. My Dionysian ideal.... The optics of all the organic functions, of all the strongest vital instincts: the power which will have error in all life; error as the very first principle of thought itself. Before "thought" is possible, "fancy" must first have done its work; the picturing of identical cases, of the seemingness of identity, is more primeval than the cognition of identity.

(h) Against Causality.

545.

I believe in absolute space as the basis of force, and I believe the latter to be limited and formed. Time, eternal. But space and time as things in themselves do not exist. "Changes" are only appearances (or mere processes of our senses to us); if we set recurrence, however regular, between them, nothing is proved beyond the fact that it has always happened so. The feeling that post hoc is propter hoc, is easily explained as the result of a misunderstanding, it is comprehensible. But appearances cannot be "causes"!

546.

The interpretation of a phenomenon, either as an action or as the endurance of an action (that is to say, every action involves the suffering of it), amounts to this: every change, every differentiation, presupposes the existence of an agent and somebody acted upon, who is "altered."

547.

Psychological history of the concept subject. The body, the thing, the "whole," which is visualised by the eye, awakens the thought of distinguishing between an action and an agent; the idea that the agent is the cause of the action, after having been repeatedly refined, at length left the "subject" over.

548.

Our absurd habit of regarding a mere mnemonic sign or abbreviated formula as an independent being, and ultimately as a cause; as, for instance, when we say of lightning that it flashes, even the little word "I." A sort of double-sight in seeing which makes sight a cause of seeing in itself: this was the feat in the invention of the "subject" of the "ego."

549.

"Subject," "object," "attribute"--these distinctions have been made, and are now used like schemes to cover all apparent facts. The false fundamental observation is this, that I believe it is I who does something, who suffers something, who "has" something, who "has" a quality.

550.

In every judgment lies the whole faith in subject, attribute, or cause and effect (in the form of an assumption that every effect is the result of activity, and that all activity presupposes an agent), and even this last belief is only an isolated case of the first, so that faith remains as the most fundamental belief! there are such things as subjects, everything that happens is related attributively to a subject of some sort.

I notice something, and try to discover the reason of it: originally this was, I look for an intention behind it, and, above all, I look for one who has an intention, for a subject, an agent: every phenomenon is an action, formerly intentions were seen behind all phenomena, this is our oldest habit. Has the animal also this habit? As a living organism, is it not also compelled to interpret things through itself. The question why? is always a question concerning the causa finalis, and the general "purpose" of things. We have no sign of the "sense of the efficient cause"; in this respect Hume is quite right, habit (but not only that of the individual) allows us to expect that a certain process, frequently observed, will follow upon another, but nothing more! That which gives us such an extraordinarily firm faith in causality, is not the rough habit of observing the sequence of processes, but our inability to interpret a phenomenon otherwise than as the result of design. It is the belief in living and thinking things, as the only agents of causation; it is the belief in will, in design--the belief that all phenomena are actions, and that all actions presuppose an agent; it is the belief in the "subject." Is not this belief in the concepts subject and object an arrant absurdity?

Question: Is the design the cause of a phenomenon? Or is that also illusion? Is it not the phenomenon itself?

551.

A criticism of the concept "cause."--We have absolutely no experience concerning cause, viewed psychologically we derive the whole concept from the subjective conviction, that we ourselves are causes--that is to say, that the arm moves.... But that is an error. We distinguish ourselves, the agents, from the action, and everywhere we make use of this scheme--we try to discover an agent behind every phenomenon. What have we done? We have misunderstood a feeling of power, tension, resistance, a muscular feeling, which is already the beginning of the action, and posited it as a cause; or we have understood the will to do this or that, as a cause, because the action follows it. There is no such thing as "Cause," in those few cases in which it seemed to be given, and in which we projected it out of ourselves in order to understand a phenomenon, it has been shown to be an illusion. Our understanding of a phenomenon consisted in our inventing a subject who was responsible for something happening, and for the manner in which it happened. In our concept "cause" we have embraced our feeling of will, our feeling of "freedom," our feeling of responsibility and our design to do an action: causa efficiens and causa finalis are fundamentally one.

We believed that an effect was explained when we could point to a state in which it was inherent. As a matter of fact, we invent all causes according to the scheme of the effect: the latter is known to us.... On the other hand, we are not in a position to say of any particular thing how it will "act." The thing, the subject the will, the design--all inherent in the conception "cause." We try to discover things in order to explain why something has changed. Even the "atom" is one of these fanciful inventions like the "thing" and the "primitive subject."...

At last we understand that things--consequently also atoms--effect nothing: because they are non-existent; and that the concept causality is quite! useless. Out of a necessary sequence of states, the latter's causal relationship does not follow (that would be equivalent to extending their active principle from 1 to 2, to 3, to 4, to 5). There is no such thing as a cause or an effect. From the standpoint of language we do not know how to rid ourselves of them. But that does not matter. If I imagine muscle separated from its "effects," I have denied it....

In short: a phenomenon is neither effected nor capable of effecting. Causa is a faculty to effect something, superadded fancifully to what happens....

The interpretation of causality is an illusion.... A "thing" is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by means of a concept, an image. As a matter of fact, science has robbed the concept causality of all meaning, and has reserved it merely as an allegorical formula, which has made it a matter of indifference whether cause or effect be put on this side or on that. It is asserted that in two complex states (centres of force) the quantities of energy remain constant.

The calculability of a phenomenon does not lie in the fact that a rule is observed, or that a necessity is obeyed, or that we have projected a law of causality into every phenomenon: it lies in the recurrence of "identical cases."

There is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant would have us believe. We are aghast, we feel insecure, we will have something familiar, which can be relied upon.... As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified. The so-called instinct of causality is nothing more than the fear of the unfamiliar, and the attempt at finding something in it which is already known.--It is not a search for causes, but for the familiar.

552.