The Event without Cause
As we saw, for Nietzsche a concept is an imaginary entity. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes the claim that, over “immense periods of time,” the intellect “produced nothing but errors”6 and that such a concept as that of causality, that is, the duality of cause and effect, “probably never exists” (GS, 172). In fact, cause and effect are not in the least properties of things, but interpretations. They are to be taken as useful instruments, but not for explanation: “one should use ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication—not for explanation.”7 There is no causality as some objective order or lawfulness. Rather, cause and effect are fictions that we have invented. “It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself,’ we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically” (BGE, 29). Nietzsche emphasizes the artificial character of cause and effect “explanation,” stressing how one separates in the flux of life “two separate things,” cause and effect, whereas there is but “a manifold one-after-another.” Nietzsche sees the flux of becoming whereas metaphysical rationalist thought invented a causal order, that is, the abstraction of a cause distinguished from the effect. However, causality does not exist: “Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it” (GS, 173). Ultimately for Nietzsche, the cause and effect structure is a construct concealing the manifold continuum of life, an artificial construct that we impose on the flux of life. “The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment—would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality” (GS, 173).
This critique of causality is pursued in “The Four Great Errors” in Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche shows that the belief in the fictions of consciousness or the ego as “internal fact” rests upon the belief in the will as an efficient cause. Of all these myths regarding such internal facts, Nietzsche singles out the belief in the will as cause, “Of these three ‘internal facts’ which seemed to vouch for causality, the first and most convincing is the ‘fact’ of will as cause” (TI, 32), the so-called internal causality. Causality, and in particular the inner causality of the will, is for Nietzsche a pure invention: “In every age we have believed that we know what a cause is: but where did we get our knowledge, or more precisely, our belief that we have knowledge about this? From the realm of the famous ‘internal facts,’ none of which has up to now proved to be factual” (TI, 31). Ultimately, the issue for Nietzsche is “whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will” (BGE, 48). In fact, he claims, “Today we don’t believe any word of all that anymore” (TI, 32). The will is not the cause of the event, but an epiphenomenon, a mere superficial accompaniment. “The ‘internal world’ is full of optical illusions and mirages: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, so it no longer explains anything either—it just accompanies events, and it can even be absent” (TI, 32). The will loses its role as motive to become a surface phenomenon, an accompanying thought: “The so-called ‘motive’: another error. Just a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accessory to the act, which conceals the antecedentia of an act rather than representing them” (TI, 32). A similar inversion as that of the belief in causality is at play in our belief in the will as cause. Nietzsche explains that we believe ourselves to be “causal in the act of willing; there, at least, we thought that we were catching causality in the act” (TI, 31). As will be covered, the belief in the will gives us the certainty that we are the cause of our actions, giving rise to our belief in the subject.
This position of a cause is an error in several senses. There is first the error, the confusion, or the inversion of cause and effect. In the opening lines of “The Fours Great Errors,” Nietzsche insists, “There is no error more dangerous than confusing the effect with the cause” (TI, 30), an inversion that is of course the symptom of a more fateful inversion, that of values with respect to life, an inversion that condemns and negates life. This confusion of cause and effect, which Nietzsche calls “the genuine corruption of reason,” and one of “humanity’s oldest and most contemporary customs,” historically bears the name of religion and morality: “Every statement formulated by religion and morality contains it” (TI, 30). The error lies in the denial of the material basis of life and the idealization of an abstract principle, constructed after the fact, and mistakenly and retroactively posited as cause and origin. The inversion of cause and effect reflects the inversion of material existence into an ideality, an inversion that Nietzsche in turn would precisely seek to invert. Based on such inversion and abstraction, causality is made to play the role of the foundation of events. How does this happen? Through the imaginary position of a cause beneath the event, through the retroactive imputing of such cause to the event. Of course, and I will return to this question shortly, one needs to bear in mind that the doer as such is also a fiction and that in fact the very opposition between a doer and a deed is an error. This error itself rests upon what appears here as a retroactive attribution of a cause to an event by way of an inversion of temporality.
The error of causality pertains to this phenomenon of a retroactive assigning of the cause to the event, which Nietzsche describes as an inversion of temporality, an Umkehrung der Zeit. The focus of Nietzsche’s analysis bears on the peculiar temporality of cause assigning and the reversal of temporality that takes place in the process of an a posteriori imputation of a cause. Nietzsche calls this phenomenon the error of “false causality,” once again pointing to the invention of an imaginary causality to give an account of the event. This delusion lies in the retroactive assigning of a cause, presenting the paradoxical temporality of an after-the-fact (re)construction that is then posited as having existed before the event. “I’ll begin with dreams: a particular sensation, for instance, a sensation due to a distant cannon shot, has a cause imputed to it [untergeschoben] afterwards [nachträglich]” (TI, 32–33). Once the cause has been introduced, after the event, then, it is then said to exist prior to the event, an occurrence that has now been given an intelligibility: “In the meantime, the sensation persists in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the drive to find causes allows it to come into the foreground—not as an accident anymore, but as ‘meaning’” (TI, 33). As Nietzsche explains, the sensation then becomes part of “a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the protagonist.” Everyone knows the experience in a dream when the dreamer hears a sound that then becomes included in the narrative in a causal way. What was first a sheer event, perceived outside any causal network, is then integrated in the dream and reconstructed as causal origin in the narration. The event has been reconstructed and is now said to be happening according to causality (one recalls here Kant’s analogies of experience, in which it is “deduced transcendentally” that events occur according to the law of causality). Of course, the cause was produced after the fact and then reinjected as that from which the event occurred. “The cannon shot shows up in a causal way, and time seems to flow backward. What comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details that flash by like lightning; the shot follows. . . . What has happened? The representations generated by a certain state of affairs were misunderstood as the cause of this state of affairs” (TI, 33).
Now, one must invert this inversion of temporality and posit that the event happens before the cause.