The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.