The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
666.
For ages we have always ascribed the value of an action, of a character, of an existence, to the _intention,_ to the _purpose_ for which it was done, acted, or lived: this primeval idiosyncrasy of taste ultimately takes a dangerous turn provided the lack of intention and purpose in all phenomena comes ever more to the front in consciousness. With it a general depreciation of all values seems to be preparing: "All is without sense."--This melancholy phrase means: "All sense lies in the intention, and if the intention is absolutely lacking, then sense must be lacking too." In conformity with this valuation, people were forced to place the value of life in a a life after death, or in the progressive development of ideas, or of mankind, or of the people, or of man to superman; but in this way the _progressus in infinitum_ of purpose had been reached: it was ultimately necessary to find one's self a place in the process of the world (perhaps with the disdæmonistic outlook, it was a process which led to nonentity).
In regard to this point, "_purpose_" needs a somewhat more severe criticism: it ought to be recognised that an action _is never caused by a purpose;_ that an object and the means thereto are interpretations, by means of which certain points in a phenomena are selected and accentuated, at the cost of other, more numerous, points, that every time something is done for a purpose, something fundamentally different, and yet other things happen; that in regard to the action done with a purpose, the case is the same as with the so-called purposefulness of the heat which is radiated from the sun: the greater part of the total sum is squandered; a portion of it, which is scarcely worth reckoning, has a "purpose," has "sense"; that an "end" with its "means" is an absurdly indefinite description, which indeed may be able to command as a precept, as "will," but presupposes a system of obedient and trained instruments, which, in the place of the indefinite, puts forward a host of determined entities _(i.e._ we imagine a system of _clever_ but narrow intellects who postulate end and means, in order to be able to grant our only known "end," the rôle of the "cause of an action,"--a proceeding to which we have no right: it is tantamount to solving a problem by placing its solution in an inaccessible world which we cannot observe).
Finally, why could not an "end" be merely an _accompanying feature_ in the series of changes among the active forces which bring about the action--a pale stenographic symbol stretched in consciousness beforehand, and which serves as a guide to what happens, even as a symbol of what happens, _not_ as its cause?--But in this way we criticise _will_ itself: is it not an illusion to regard that which enters consciousness as will-power, as a cause? Are not all conscious phenomena only final phenomena--the lost links in a chain, but apparently conditioning one another in their sequence within the plane of consciousness? This might be an illusion.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.