original experience to which it owes its origin” so that “we obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual” (OTL, 85). This negation of life through concepts takes place precisely as the concept also embraces and includes within it “countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal” (OTL, 83). Each concept “arises from the equation of unequal things” (OTL, 83), abstracting from the differential uniqueness of experience. In fact, as Nietzsche emphasizes, “one leaf is never totally the same as another,” which is another way of saying that the concept “leaf,” as any concept, does not exist and only has an imaginary existence. The greatest paradox, of course, is that such a nonexistent notion is then taken to be what is most real! Nietzsche points to this paradox when he notes that “the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exist in nature the ‘leaf’: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model” (OTL, 83). A concept kills and mummifies metaphorical life, and it has been philosophers’ “idiosyncrasy” to essentialize, dehistoricize, and eternalize metaphorical life. These abstractions—concepts—are ways for humans to secure a stable “conventional” construct of reality on the basis of a forgetting of the primal unstable and creative metaphoricity of life; they are like the hardening, petrification, or congealing of life. “Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency” (OTL, 86).
Any concept is a construct, an invention, a fiction, what Nietzsche calls an “error.” By “error,” of course, Nietzsche does not mean a falsehood or untruth that could be corrected: rather, it points to the fictitious nature of any concept whatsoever. Nietzsche’s critique does not consist in denouncing the falsity of a concept or a judgment: rather, it is to expose the lie as lie. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.”5 Conceptuality, along with the “fictions of logic,” rest for Nietzsche on assumptions “with which nothing in the real world corresponds” (HH, 16), as, for instance, the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the thing, causality or the I-cause, free will, agency, intention and accountability, and so on. These categories, which have become idols of worship and belief in the Western tradition (along with the other prejudices of reason that force us “to posit unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, thinghood, being,” making us “entangled in error, forced into error” [TI, 20]), are exposed as fictions by way of a deconstructing genealogy that will consist in dismantling idealistic fictions in order to uncover the processes—the events—at play within them. Each time, Nietzsche will attempt to reveal the events that subtend our conceptual fictions. Now, two fundamental errors stand in the way of letting the event come forth in its eventfulness: the reliance on causality and the belief in the subject.
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
