knowledge is about seeking to make the unfamiliar familiar, reducing the alien character of the pure event and thereby increasing our sense of control. “There is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant thinks. One is surprised, one is disturbed, one desires something familiar to hold on to” (WP, 297). The drive to causality is the drive to transform something unfamiliar into something familiar, a motivation that lends itself to a psychological analysis and genealogy by Nietzsche: “A psychological explanation of this error.— Tracing something unfamiliar back to something familiar alleviates us, calms us, pacifies us, and in addition provides a feeling of power. The unfamiliar brings with it danger, unrest, and care—our first instinct is to do away with these painful conditions. First principle: some explanation is better than none” (TI, 33). What is considered “true” is most often what makes us feel good, and the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one considers it true: “Proof of pleasure (‘strength’) as criterion of truth” (TI, 33). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche further characterizes this making-familiar of knowledge. In paragraph 355, for instance, entitled “The origin of our concept of ‘knowledge,’” Nietzsche asks: “What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something strange is to be reduced to something familiar” (GS, 300). Even in the philosophical tradition, Nietzsche insists, knowledge is a factor of appropriation of the unknown, that is, the unfamiliar. “And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home” (GS, 300). What could drive such a quest? Clearly no longer in this context some disinterested concern for knowledge as objective truth about things in themselves. Rather, a fear before the alien and uncanny character of the pure event. “Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?” (GS, 300–301).
Causality is a fiction created out of fear. “Thus, the drive to find causes is conditioned and aroused by the feeling of fear” (TI, 34). The question “why,” the leading question of the principle of reason, is born out of that fear. The cause alleviates that fear. A proof of this is that the cause given is always something familiar, something we already know, so that “the new, the unexperienced, the alien, is excluded as a cause” (TI, 34). And the “fact that something already familiar, something we have experienced, something inscribed in memory is posited as the cause, is the first consequence of this need” (TI, 34, trans. slightly modified). What matters in the position of a causality is to suppress the feeling of the strange, that is, the eventfulness of the event as ungrounded. This is why another motif in the tradition that has served to suppress the groundlessness of the event is that of the subject, a subjectum or ground. It will also be necessary to deconstruct the notion of the subject in order to think the event in its eventfulness.
The Event without Subject
One of the constitutive errors of the metaphysical tradition’s reliance on causality is the imposition of causes on every existence, on every event, as their substratum: causality is the alleged substrate of the event. The belief in causality involves the belief in the subject. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche stresses the fictitious nature of the ego, which is only a word: “And as for the ‘I’! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has completely and utterly ceased to think, to feel, and to will!” (TI, 32). Nietzsche recalls that these concepts are products of our invention; “There are simply no mental causes at all! . . . We have invented a world of causes, a world of will . . . we have constituted the ego as a cause” (TI, 32). Events are constructed as actions; actions, constructed as deed, are distinguished from doers. A doer is then constructed as subject: an agent distinct from the act is invented. All happening “was a doing, all doing the effect of a willing; for it, the world became a multitude of doers, a doer (a ‘subject’) was imputed to everything that happened” (TI, 32). This belongs to the prejudices of reason, which “sees actors and actions everywhere” (TI, 20), which “believes in the will as an absolute cause,” which believes in the “I,” and so on. Ultimately, an ontology of causation is enforced everywhere, by which “being is thought into things everywhere as a cause, is imputed to things” (TI, 20). Nietzsche insists that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming,” that the doer “is merely a fiction added to the deed.”12 In paragraph 17 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche analyses the supposition of a subject under thinking and denounces it as a fiction. There is a threefold belief: that motives are the antecedents of an act; that thoughts are caused; and that the I is such a cause. First, in a quasi-phenomenological observation, describing a “small terse fact,” Nietzsche notes that a thought does not come from some I-substrate but instead originates from itself, and comes when it comes. “With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish” (BGE, 24). It is false to state that the I is the cause of thinking, or even that the I is in a position of subject. The notion of the “I think” as principle and foundation, as it has been established in modern philosophy since Descartes, is said by Nietzsche to be contrary to the facts: “it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’” (BGE, 24). Even the “it” (in the expression “a thought comes when it wishes”) is misleading, for it might suggest that there is some entity, that is, some substrate, at the basis of thinking. “It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’” (BGE, 24). The notion of an underlying subjectivity is contrary to the facts, an unphenomenological construction.
The alleged “simplicity” of the “I think” is likewise deceiving, a seduction of words. Nietzsche challenges the reliance on the notion of an immediate certainty (the immediacy and evidence of the “I think”). In Beyond Good and Evil (paragraph 16), Nietzsche speaks of the belief of those “harmless self-observers” in the superstition of the “I will” or the “I think,” “as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object” (BGE, 23). However, the very expressions “immediate certainty,” “absolute knowledge,” and “thing in itself” all involve a contradictio in adjecto, a contradiction in terms, since all certainty is constructed, all knowledge is for us and therefore not absolute, and the thing in itself cannot be “in itself” since that would mean absolutely independent from us to the point where we would not even notice it! If one analyzed the process that is expressed in this sentence, ‘I think,’ one would find many claims therein that are impossible to establish or even less prove, “for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is” (BGE, 23). Unlike what Descartes asserted, the “I think” is anything but “simple.” In fact, these “simple truths” are more like decisions, “for if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? In short, the assertion ‘I think’ assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further ‘knowledge,’ it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me” (BGE, 23). Instead of immediate certainties, there are the following questions: “From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of
