The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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?
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